Ayaan Hirsi Ali Speaks Bravely and Freely about Islam

Last month’s IMPACT Symposium brought a relatively unknown but highly influential contemporary figure to campus. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born former Dutch MP, spoke on the first night of the annual series, which had the theme this year of “Middle East vs. West.” This theme could very well have been designed with Hirsi Ali specifically in mind; the former Muslim speaks and writes about the incompatibility that exists between Western liberal society and the restrictive culture of Islam, particularly in areas that implement or attempt to implement sharia law.

Before her speech, I was able to sit down with Hirsi Ali in an informal press setting, albeit surrounded by two unsmiling bodyguards. I discovered a calm and modest woman, reluctant to stand behind a podium in lieu of the opportunity to sit with the two student journalists that had understood the opportunity such a press conference afforded. In a quiet and indeterminate accent, Hirsi Ali spoke in superb English to great length about whichever subject I brought up. As eager as I was to hear the story I had come to known over the past few months in the subject’s own words, she seemed just as eager to understand how much a college student in Nashville knew of her story.

Hers is that of inhabitants of a forgotten era of bravery. As she explained later in the evening to an audience largely ignorant of her story, Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and was raised a devout Muslim. She lived in several places throughout her childhood before her father married her to a distant cousin from Canada in 1992. While en route to Canada, Hirsi Ali, in a desperate attempt to escape a life she had begun to question, forewent the plane trip from Germany and hopped aboard a train to Amsterdam, where she applied for asylum. She worked many jobs and attended school at Leiden University until 2000.

While she had always questioned her Muslim faith, the events of September 11 and her subsequent reading of criticisms of Islam caused Hirsi Ali to renounce her religion and proclaim herself an atheist by 2002. She began to cultivate an audience with speeches and writings about the danger of radical Islam to the West, particularly targeting immigration policy in the Netherlands. It was at this time that Hirsi Ali began receiving death threats. She was elected to Dutch Parliament and served until her resignation in 2006 amidst a citizenship scandal.

In 2004, Hirsi Ali released a 10-minute movie with Dutch film director Theo van Gogh titled Submission (a literal English translation of the word “Islam”) that told the story of four abused Muslim women while displaying verses from the Quran on the body of a naked woman. The movie outraged Muslims in the Netherlands, and van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim student that same year. Pinned to his nearly-decapitated body was a note from the murderer with a direct threat to Hirsi Ali, who went into hiding thereafter. The Dutch government paid for her security for some time, but eventually Hirsi Ali was forced to emigrate to the United States, where she published Infidel, her memoirs, and began working for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. She is under constant security protection and the location of her home in unknown, though it was known that she had moved back to the Netherlands for some time in late 2007.

Living under the constant threat on her life, Hirsi Ali continues to work for AEI and speak out against Islam as a political and religious movement, which she believes is antagonistic to Western ideas of liberty and individualism.

Hirsi Ali’s views on Islam as a thought movement are unique and engaging. She explained to me that Islam, as defined by the Quran and the hadith (the written record of statements and commands made by the prophet Muhammad), posits the world as a struggle between “believers and non-believers.” The Quran is the source of all knowledge, and thus Muslims are commanded by their faith to look only to this holy book for knowledge of the world. The book, in turn, commands submission to the will of Allah for believers and non-believers alike. These characteristics of Islam, Hirsi Ali argues, place in direct opposition to the ideas of personal liberty in the West because stunts the growth of the human mind.

In her speech, Hirsi Ali defined Islam as “a doctrine, a belief system, and even a political ideology,” intending to separate the faith from the believers in her criticism. She reaffirmed that all Muslims are individual human beings who have the basic human right to “choose what their religion means to them.” The main thrust of her argument for the radical reformation of Islam is its identity as a collectivist ideology devalues Muslims as individual human beings by requiring complete submission. Hirsi Ali argues that a movement with such requirements cannot exist within a realm of freedom, like the West, and so it must destroy that freedom in order to survive. This is an inherent characteristic of Islam, and unless it is reformed from within much in the same way Christianity examined itself as an entity in an increasingly rational society, the tensions between East and West in this sense will only escalate.

It’s a compelling argument, but not one without strong opposition from American Muslims and liberals alike. Hirsi Ali received a number of questions from Muslim Vanderbilt students criticizing various parts of her argument. The first of such questions pondered why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world if there are so many problems with the religion.

In her deliberate manner, Hirsi Ali rejected the fallacy, explaining that a doctrine “can be wrong and it can grow. So the fact that it grows and many people are embracing it does not make it…a philosophy or a doctrine that is condonable or acceptable.” She invoked the example of Nazism as a political doctrine that gained a great following in Germany and elsewhere in the 1930’s, concluding “that doesn’t make Nazism right.” One would have to agree with Hirsi Ali’s assumption that Islam as a movement is political in nature, but the logic certainly follows.

Another question from a self-professed American Muslim was concerned with the “attacks” Hirsi Ali had made on his religion and its prophet Muhammad, saying these were unfair because he himself had never, for instance, been disrespectful to his mother. In a distinction that she found herself making many more times that night, Hirsi Ali explained that “critical reflection on existing dogmas is not equal to an attack.” She continued, “For those of us born into Islam, if, like followers of other faiths, we stand up and we look at our religion and we say…there are some things [about Islam] that violate human rights, there are some things that make our own people become stagnant in their minds. That is not equal to an attack; that’s called critical reflection.”

Hirsi Ali continued to respond to her critics in the audience this way, with a measured explanation of distinguishing criticism from attack, or Muslims from Islam. The litany of questions from disgruntled Muslims did not deter her from expressing her opinions from an incendiary point of view. Throughout her explanation was the focus on the individual as superior to the collective. The thoughtful student might have walked out of the Student Life Center with a completely new view on the threat of radical Islam with a real-life account straight from the metaphorical horse’s mouth. The frightening thought is that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, speaking her rational mind, walked out still under a very real death threat from radical followers of a radical faith. An infidel, indeed.

Check out video of Ali's complete speech at Right-Wing Vitriol, the Torch staff blog.