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Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. The daughter of a political opponent of the
Somali dictatorship, Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up surrounded by her family in exile.
Her traditional Muslim upbringing continued from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, then
to Ethiopia and Kenya.
As a young child, she was subjected to female genital mutilation,
where she was “cleansed” with the aid of a pair of large scissors wielded by a
local clansman. Unlike many children born at that time in Somalia, she had the
good fortune to receive an education in local schools. As she grew into a young woman, she embraced
Islam and strove to live as a devout Muslim.
She admired the budding movement of the Muslim Brotherhood and supported
the fatwah against Salman Rushdie. She covered
herself with the hidjab and attended
Quran classes. But increasingly she
found herself asking questions for which she had no easy answer. One day, while
listening to a sermon on the many ways women should be obedient to their
husbands, she couldn’t resist asking, “Must our husbands obey us too?”
In 1992, Ayaan was married off by her father in a ceremony
which she refused to attend to a distant cousin who lived in Canada. In order to escape this marriage, she fled to
the Netherlands where she was given asylum, and in time citizenship. In her early years in Holland she worked in
factories and as a maid. She quickly
learned Dutch, and while attending the University of Leiden she worked as a
translator for Somali immigrants. During
this time she saw first-hand the inconsistencies between liberal, Western society
and tribal, Muslim cultures, and the challenges of integration for Muslim immigrant
groups in the West.
After earning her M.A. in political science, Ayaan worked as
a researcher for the Wiardi
Beckman Foundation in Amsterdam. She then
served as an elected member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006.
While in parliament, she focused on furthering the integration of
non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of women
in Dutch Muslim society. She campaigned to raise awareness of violence
against women, including honor killings and female genital mutilation,
practices that had followed the immigrants into Holland and which were, at the
time, largely ignored by the Dutch legal system. In her three years in government, she found
her voice as an advocate for women’s rights and an “enlightened
Islam”, earning her both fame and infamy in her adopted country.
In 2004 Ayaan gained international attention following the
murder of Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh had
directed her short film Submission,
a film about the oppression of women under Islam. The assassin, a radical Muslim, left a death
threat for her pinned to van Gogh’s chest.
In 2006, Ayaan had to resign from parliament in the wake of
a political scandal surrounding her application for asylum status in Holland.
Ever since she had entered Dutch politics, Ayaan had always been open about the
fact that she not been accurate on her application form for asylum. (Ayaan had
claimed that she was coming directly from war-torn Somalia. Fleeing an arranged
marriage was not and is still not considered valid grounds for asylum in
Holland). The then Dutch minister for Immigration, Rita Verdonk, decided that
she would revoke Ayaan’s Dutch citizenship, arguing that Ayaan had mislead the
authorities in 1992. However, after much political and public debate, and
Ayaan’s resignation from Parliament, the Dutch authorities confirmed that Ayaan
was indeed a Dutch citizen, leading to the subsequent fall of the Dutch
government of the time.
Currently a
resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, Ayaan
researches the relationship between the West and Islam, women’s rights in
Islam, and violence against women propagated in the name of religious and
cultural arguments.
Ayaan lives with round-the-clock protection. Her willingness
to speak out and her abandonment of the Muslim faith have made her a target for
violence by Islamic extremists. Disowned
by her father, she has few ties left with her family. Threatened time and again
with death, this courageous woman refuses to be silenced.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was named one of Time
magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2005, one of the Glamour
Heroes of 2005 and Reader’s Digest’s European of the Year for 2005. She
has published a collection of essays The
Caged Virgin (2006), a memoir Infidel
(2007) and has written and delivered many speeches and articles addressing her
subjects of interest, including the importance of freedom of speech and the
defense of the principles of the Enlightenment, the need to reform Islam, the
rights of Muslim women.
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