Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an intellectual heavyweight. She is a New York Times bestselling author, has served in the Dutch parliament, and is friends with Richard Dawkins.
She also was once Muslim. She wore a burka, proselytized for Islam, and followed the direction of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, she changed her mind and became an atheist, and that well-publicized change in perspective came with death threats and the need for around-the-clock security. Now, she’s written a bombshell testimony, “Why I am now a Christian.”
What convinced her that Islam wasn’t true, and what, in turn, convinced her that atheism wasn’t true either?
Earlier this month, Ali spoke onstage alongside Richard Dawkins at the inaugural Dissident Dialogues conference in New York City, during which she gave more personal remarks about her faith journey that have since been shared widely online.
Ali was born a Muslim in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969 and spent much of her childhood in Ethiopia and Kenya. In 1992, she fled an arranged marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she went on to became a member of the Dutch House of Representatives.
These events coincided with the 9/11 terror attacks, which presented another time of choosing for Ali, whose commitment to Islam had begun to waver.
“They had done it [9/11] in the name of my religion, Islam,” she explained in her UnHerd op-ed. Ali had publicly condemned the attacks but also reflected, “If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me?”
It was at this time that she came across Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture, “Why I Am Not a Christian.” She explained:
When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.
Here was her escape from the radical Islam of her upbringing—a religion that never satisfied and that had also caused her much suffering as a woman.
Soon, she found herself in the company of the New Atheists:
The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.
During and after her time in politics, Ali began pursuing one of her great passions: feminist activism. In 2004, she collaborated on the film Submission, critiquing women’s treatment in Islam. Ali relocated to the United States in 2007, where she continued her advocacy for women’s rights and secularism through her books Infidel (2006) and Heretic (2015).
Grateful for the freedom and safety she now enjoyed in the West, Ali came to identify three powerful forces that were aligning against a civilization she now loved: the authoritarianism of regimes like China and Russia, global Islamism, and woke ideology. Human tools were not enough to push back the tide of these threats, Ali reasoned:
We can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “’the rules-based liberal international order’. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Reading Dominion by Tom Holland also highlighted for Ali that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.” She reflected:
Freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.
For Ali, there were also personal benefits to faith: “I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”
Besides mentioning that she was learning a little more about Christianity every Sunday at church, Ayaan Hirsi Ali kept her essay largely focused on politics and the big picture. Which is why her more recent remarks in New York are so striking.
Responding to Richard Dawkins’ protests against Christianity, Ali said, “I know you very well. We’ve been friends for a long time. In fact, in some ways, I think of you as a mentor.”
She nevertheless explained that she could no longer share Dawkins view that “there is nothing.”
“What has happened to me is that I think I have accepted there is something,” she added—“a powerful entity, for me, the God that turned me around.” Christianity, Ali went on,
no longer sounds nonsensical. It makes a great deal of sense. And not only does it make a great deal of sense, it’s also layered with the wisdom of millennia. And so, like you, I did mock faith in general and probably Christianity in particular. But I don’t do that anymore. … I think I’ve come down to my knees to say that those people who have always had faith have something that we who lost faith don’t have.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s is a remarkable journey by a remarkable woman who has seen the world from more perspectives than the average person, and who has suffered more than the average person, too.
Maybe, just maybe, in Ali’s journey are seeds of hope for other wandering Westerners, too.
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Image credit: “Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Gage Skidmore” on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
