Introducing Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan was born in Somalia in 1969 and raised in a moderate Islamic family. Her father left Somalia as a political refugee, eventually settling the family in Kenya in 1980.

Ayaan attended an English-speaking private girl’s school. But she also came under the influence of teachers who radicalised students under the influence of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and she began wearing a hijab.

Fleeing an arranged marriage, Ayaan ended up living in the Netherlands in 1992. She was granted political asylum. She attended university and worked as an interpreter supporting other Somali women who were victims of abuse.

September 11, 2001, marked the end of transition and a turning point for Ayaan. Her progressive Western education and her experience with the abuse of females in side Islam, confounded by the actions of Osama Bin Laden, caused her to denounce her Islamic faith.

In 2003 she successfully ran for elections in the Dutch parliament on the platform of overlooked rights for female Muslims. In 2004, she worked with Theo van Gogh on a film documenting the mistreatment of Islamic females. Theo was murdered, and a death threat to Ayaan was stabbed to his chest. Ayaan had to live in hiding.

During her rise in Dutch prominence, Ayaan befriended Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and became the foremost female New Atheist. Her disdain for the evils of religion is understandable. From 2006 onwards, Ayaan has mostly lived in the US.

In November of 2023, Ayaan announced that she had converted to Christianity. She believes there are four dominant worldviews vying for ascendency. In her opinion, Islam and authoritarianism (as in China and Russia) are evils we need to stop. The other two options are Christianity and Western woke-ism.

For Ayaan, atheist woke-ism is an insufficient worldview to combat evil. In its origin, it is a reactive idea against the notion of a sovereign God, and instead champions human freedom. Only in Christianity do we find the raft of ideas, values, and institutions we need to “safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity”, she writes.[1]

Only in Christianity do we find a meaningful unifying story that secures freedom, opposes evil, and promotes greater good. And so Ayaan now describes herself as a lapsed atheist.

[1] Ali, ‘Why I am now a Christian’ on unherd.com

By Rev. David Rietveld