Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, grew up in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, became a member of the Dutch parliament, and collaborated with the filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a short film about the treatment of women under Islam. Ever since Van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch Islamist on an Amsterdam street in 2004, with a death threat addressed to her pinned to his chest with a knife, she has lived under security protection.
She is the author of several books, among them Infidel, her memoir, and Heretic, in which she argued that Islam requires a reformation from within if it is to be compatible with liberal democratic civilization. For twenty years she was among the world’s most prominent atheists—not merely in her personal convictions but in her public arguments, which held that reason and individual freedom were incompatible with religious submission of any kind.
In November of 2023, she announced that she had become a Christian.
That announcement, and the essay she wrote explaining it, raised one of the most searching questions in contemporary intellectual life: what does a civilization require in order to defend itself, and can secular liberalism supply it?
This week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins the Tikvah Podcast to discuss her diagnosis of what political Islam is doing to Europe and to America—a diagnosis that has only sharpened since October 7—and her argument that the assault on Jews and Jewish life is not merely a Jewish problem but a leading indicator of a broader civilizational vulnerability.
This conversation was recorded live before members of the Tikvah Society in New York City. If you’d like information about joining the Tikvah Society, write to us at society@tikvah.org and we’ll get right back to you.
This week’s episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.