Ayaan Hirsi Ali

About the Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lady Fergusonis a Somali-born Dutch-American writer, activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. At the age of five, following local traditions in Somalia, Ali underwent female genital mutilation organized by her grandmother. Her father–a scholar, intellectual, and a devout Muslim–was against the procedure but could not stop it from happening because he was imprisoned by the Communist government of Somalia at the time. Her family moved across various countries in Africa and the Middle East, and at 23, she received political asylum in the Netherlands, gaining Dutch citizenship five years later. In her early 30s, Hirsi Ali renounced the Islamic faith of her childhood, began identifying as an atheist, and became involved in Dutch centre-right politics, joining the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracyand Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Nowbecame bestsellers. In Heretic, Ali called for reformation of Islam by countering Islamism and supporting reformist Muslims, though previously she had said Islam was beyond reform.

In the United States, Ali has founded an organisation for the defense of women’s rights, the AHA Foundation. She has taken roles at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the American Enterprise Institute, and at Harvard Kennedy School as a senior fellow at the Future of Democracy Project. Since 2021, she has served as a columnist for UnHerd, a British online magazine; since 2022, she has also hosted The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast.

Ali was a central figure in New Atheism since its beginnings. She was strongly associated with the movement, along with Christopher Hitchens, who regarded Ali as “the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa”. Writing in a column in November 2023, Ali announced her conversion to the Christian faith, claiming that in her view the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only answer to the problems of the modern world. She has received several awards, including a free speech award from the centre-right Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Swedish conservative Liberal Party’s Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship. Critics have accused Ali of being Islamophobic or neo-orientalist and question her scholarly credentials “to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world”, saying she promotes the notion of a Western “civilizing mission”. Ali is married to Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson. The couple are raising their sons in the United States, where she became a citizen in 2013.