Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins the She Thinks podcast this week for our International Women’s Day episode. We discuss the social, economic, and political achievements of women and the challenges that so many still face across the globe. She shares her own story of speaking up for women and the backlash she’s received, why she thinks Islamists and Wokests have more in common than you’d think, and whether or not concerns for women’s safety are impacted by our changing culture.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a 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 Muslim women. She has written several books including Infidel (2007), Nomad: from Islam to America, a Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015), and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, is now available. Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University, and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. She received her Master’s degree in Political Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Transcript
Beverly:
She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and I’m honored that Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins us for our International Women’s Day episode. I couldn’t think of a better person to speak to the social, economic, and political achievements of women and the challenges that so many still face across the globe.
She’ll share her own story of speaking up for women and the backlash she’s received, why she thinks Islamists and wokeists, those ascribing to woke ideology, have more in common than you’d think, and whether or not concerns for women’s safety are impacted by our changing culture.
But before we bring her on, a little bit more about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a 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 Muslim women.
She has written several books, including Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, and her new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights is now available. Ayaan, it is a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Ayaan:
Beverly, thank you very much for having me.
Beverly:
I thought we would just start by talking a little bit about your background. Reading your bio, you have accomplished so much. You’re a scholar, you’re an author, you’re a former politician. Can you give us some background as to how you got to where you are?
Ayaan:
Well, where should I start? I think my autobiography, Infidel, has the exact details of my entire background, but I’ll just start by saying I was born in Somalia in 1969. My father was engaged in the politics of Somalia and he was imprisoned and fled Somalia, and my mother was able to take myself, my sister, and my brother, we were very little, I was about seven or eight years old, and sneak us out of the country.
We lived in Saudi Arabia for a year, and then we moved again and moved to Ethiopia for another year and a half. And by 1980, we got to Kenya, where I spent about 10 to 11 years. And in 1992, I was 22 years old, and the reason for me to leave Kenya was my father had found a husband for me and married me off. This husband has been lived in Canada, so I had to join him, and for me to join him, I had had the necessary immigration paperwork, which my father decided was way too slow to process in Kenya, so he reached out to an extended family member in Germany, and I was sent there to Germany, this in July of 1992.
That member of our family, I called him an uncle, that uncle would help me with the paperwork to get me to Canada. But instead of going to Canada, I took the train from Germany to the Netherlands and I asked for asylum. And I was granted asylum about a month and a week later.
From there I assimilate it into Dutch society, learned the Dutch language, went on to become an interpreter, translator, from Somali to Dutch, Dutch to Somali, studied political science at the University of Leiden, and then right after 9/11 I got involved in the debate around 9/11, Islam, and so on.
But the think tank what they really wanted me to do was talk to them about assimilation. In the Netherlands, that’s called integration. And they said, “Well, you were here for about 10 years and you are fully assimilated. How did you do that? Can you help us figure this out?” And that was my gateway. This is around 2000, 2001, 2002. My way into the debate on women and women’s rights and advancing the position of women. So my answer to that question was if you want Muslim women and other time we’re talking about communities who came to the Netherlands as guest workers from countries like Morocco and Turkey mainly, and then later, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, people who came as asylum seekers, and most of those immigrants came from Muslim countries or Muslim majority countries, and so the question was, “Why is it taking them so long to integrate?”
My answer was, “It’s because the girls and the women are treated very differently from Dutch girls and women.” Muslim girls, many of them were pulled out of school. They were forced into marriages they didn’t want. They never got an opportunity to become independent individuals who were able to finish their education, get jobs, or advance their careers, and choose their mates, and that in turn had the unintended consequences of these young women having children that they actually weren’t equipped to take care of in a modern society like Dutch society. And that contributes then to the lagging behind of entire communities. And at the time I didn’t realize that that was controversial, but it was controversial, and there was a backlash.
Beverly:
I want to talk a little bit about the backlash. I’m assuming there was a backlash from your family because you went against their wishes to go to Canada and marry the man that your father had picked out for you. What was your family’s response to you and what was the Muslim response in the Netherlands to you? The fact that you were there on your own, making a way for yourself as a Muslim woman, how did they treat you?
Ayaan:
Those are two very different questions. The first has to do with… It’s on a personal level, my relationship with my own family. My own family, my father, made it very clear that by running away, defying him, defying our norms and values and religious beliefs that I was guilty in his eyes of violating the honor of our family in a deep way. And he gave me an ultimatum, “You go straight back to your husband now, or I will have no relationship with you and I will curse you and you will go to hell.” I have to say to you, on a personal level obviously that kind of rejection was deeply painful.
Beverly:
Of course.
Ayaan:
But I did stick with my decision. I wrote my father a letter explaining to him why I made that decision and why I was going to stick to it. that I loved him very much, and our family, but that I had chosen this path as a grownup and I wanted to go my own way.
That relationship between my family and myself got worse because I didn’t only comment on women and the position of Muslim women, why we are left behind when it comes to freedom, our careers, and so on, but I also commented on what happened in 9/11/2001 with the [inaudible 00:08:48] men who attacked the United States, the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and later on there was the plane that was on its way to the White House that didn’t make it thank God.
My comment on that was that the men who acted the way they did, did it out of religious conviction and not because of American foreign policy or the Israelian/Palestinian question, these were all side issues. But the main issue, I said, was jihad. And that also, on a personal level, made my family extremely angry.
Then I did another thing, which was I declared myself an atheist, said, “I don’t believe in God and the Prophet Muhammad. I’m leaving Islam.” And that not only upset my family, but it also upset the wider Muslim community. And a consequence of that was the threats to my life. So that is all on the personal level.
On my work level, generating these papers, essays, interviews, articles, appearing on television and saying that there are issues within Islam when it comes to the relationship between men and women, when it comes to the concept of jihad, in other words, the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, when it comes to Jewish communities, Jewish people, that Islamic teachings, these were problematic in the 21st century, I would say that upset the Muslim community in the Netherlands in a way that the Dutch had never seen before.
I was compared, I would say unjustly, to Salman Rushdie, because in 1989, when Salman Rushdie wrote his book on satanic verses, he was a novelist and his only desire was to write a novel and entertain people through it. He wasn’t taking any concepts of Islam on at that time. But the treatment I received, the kind of backlash that I got from the Muslim community, was comparable in the sense that I was accused of blasphemy, I was accused of being hostile to Islam, and hence all the death threats.
That type of backlash didn’t surprise me. What surprised me, and still does, is the reaction from so many on the left who are not Muslim, and, in fact, in many ways, not religious, they aren’t even Christian, and that reaction and the rejection coming from them, that was very interesting.
Beverly:
I want to dig into that a little bit more. What did that reaction look like? I know that you were also comparing wokeists, those who are woke with woke ideology, to radical Islamists. You wrote a Wall Street Journal piece in September that was entitled, What Islamics and Wokeists have in common. You say adherence of both pursue ideological purity and refuse to engage in debate and demand submission. So what did you experience from the progressive left? And I find it shocking too why they would have an issue with this.
Ayaan:
Well, so in the early days, this is between, let’s say 2001 to when I came to the United States in 2006, wasn’t my first time in the US but when I moved here, we didn’t really use the phrase progressive, we just had left and right, and center-left, center-right, far left, far right. Those are the terms that are used in the Netherlands. And the center-left was of the opinion that if… I’m trying to choose my words very, very carefully.
Beverly:
Of course.
Ayaan:
I think the term woke didn’t exist back then. If it did, it hadn’t come to us. Also, we use the term progressive. The prevailing concept was called multiculturalism. And the philosophy of multiculturalism is that you should not judge cultures because all cultures have in the good things and bad things, and if you belong to one culture you should not judge another. But clearly, if you are European, because Europeans have been guilty of colonialism, they’ve been guilty of Holocaust, and they have engaged in slavery, so given that history, they had no standing whatsoever to be judgmental towards other cultures and religions.
I thought they would rally to my side when I said, “If you want to integrate Muslim minorities into Dutch society, you have to address the value system that’s keeping the women behind, the value system that promotes jihad, or Holy War, against infidels, the value system that is now driving present-day anti-Semitism and homophobia. You’ve got to address these value systems.”
I think I frightened the philosophy of multiculturalism out of their wits because that’s precisely what they did not want to do. So all they did was just focus on social-economic variables. Say, these people are the victims of poverty and if only we can pull them into the middle classes and give them jobs and they make money and they’re comfortable, then all of these issues will just go away.
But when it comes to social-cultural issues values, religion, that sort of thing, we just don’t go there. That is, in a nutshell, the application of the philosophy of multiculturalism to the question of integrating immigrants with a different value system.
Beverly:
I do want to talk a little bit about just the achievements of women as well and any progress that you have seen in your work. You do have a foundation, you do speak on behalf of women, and have been for years. Can you tell us, have you seen any movement, especially when it comes to those in the Muslim religion, those in that culture, have you seen women maybe in certain countries receive more rights?
Ayaan:
Yes, I have. I’ve seen the struggle in countries that are Muslim or Islamic or a majority of the population is Muslim. The struggle within those countries and inside those countries like Iran, like Saudi Arabia, like Egypt, Pakistan, the women’s organizations and women’s movements, women’s activism on a local level, they are fighting for things that we take for granted in the West. They take fighting for basic rights, such as the right to dress as they please, the right to drive in the case of Saudi Arabia, the right to take a job, the right not to have a male guardian, the right to choose who they wanted to marry. These are very, very basic rights, things that we take for granted in America, in parts of Europe.
I say in my new book, maybe we can’t take those things for granted any longer because men coming from those societies where they hold women in contempt and women are subordinate to men, when men from those countries come to places like Europe, some of them continue to hold that contempt for women and behave in ways that to European women are new and shocking, but to Muslim women from Muslim countries are not.
I think that is where… Earlier on, we talked about progressivism and woke and wokeism, now that the conversation has moved on from, and in this case, I’m talking about Europe, the conversation has moved away a little bit from how immigrant women and Muslim women are treated by their own male relatives and it has moved to immigrant men sexually abusing native local white European women. Now, you get this… Remember I talked to you about the philosophy of multiculturalism?
Beverly:
Yes.
Ayaan:
Now we are using the philosophy derived from wokeism, critical race theory, critical justice theory, to say the act of sexual misconduct and violence is bad, but we cannot tie this to the value systems of the men and where they originate from. And this time it’s the woke philosophy or the wokeist ideology, that is being used to deprive women of their rights. And in this case, it’s really not just immigrant women, it’s all women.
Beverly:
I think the changing culture is leading to women being less safe, not just in countries where we know women don’t have the same rights, but like you were saying in Europe, and I would even say in America. There is the Equality Act, which passed the House of Congress earlier this month, or earlier in February, and there are concerns about what that’s going to mean. When you see things like the Equality Act, what comes to mind as far as women’s rights?
Ayaan:
I mean, as soon as you said that, I started to think of Abigail Shrier’s book that is on the topic of… It zooms in on the whole transgender debate if there is a debate at all. The book is called, I think it’s called Irreversible Damage.
Beverly:
Yeah. I think it’s The Transgender Craze Among our Girls or something like that. We had her on the podcast and then she was fantastic.
Ayaan:
That is the story, or part of the story, of what is happening to women and the erosion of women’s rights as we know them in the West, where we are presented with these zero-sum challenges. I am perfectly okay with lifting up transgender people and promoting their freedom and their dignity and their equality. I’m all for that. And I think people who want to deprive of those things are absolutely wrong and should be treated like any other bigots in the world. But I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I don’t think that promoting the rights of transgender people should be used to take rights away from women and children, and that is one of the things that Abigail Shrier talks about.
In today’s conversations about equity and equality when it comes to women’s rights, I see a lot of that. I see this as zero-sum and this matrix of intersectionality that comes out of this woke ideology that women, keep pushing us down the ladder to the point where J.K. Rowling had to come out and say, “We’re not even called women anymore, we are called people who menstruate,” as they go on dicing society into groups and categories.
She had that huge backlash, and Abigail Shrier had that huge backlash, and I’m going through it myself now. But I think we have to hold strong and, in many ways, expose these, whether it’s the philosophy of socialism and moral relativism in Europe or wokeism here in America. I think as women, we now have to face this new challenge of depriving us of the rights that we fought so hard to achieve.
I see that I’m with you on that, that here lies a potential threat to rights and privileges that, I think, in America and Europe we took for granted.
Beverly:
My final question for you is, this podcast listens to people in different countries, not just in the United States. If there is a woman listening to this who is in an abusive situation, somebody who maybe she’s a Muslim and is married to somebody she did not choose to and does not treat her with dignity and respect, or somebody who just is in a bad relationship, what encouragement would you give to that woman who listens to your story and finds what you did brave? Because it is. And know that you put everything on the line, your safety, your family, everything. What would you say to a woman who wants to escape their rights being violated?
Ayaan:
My personal experience was I could see the contrast between staying in the situation where I was subservient and I had no control over my life, and I knew that staying in it entailed a certain outcome. I always give my mother as an example. And then in my own mind, I had the contrast of what good things happened to me if I left that situation.
I think in that sense, every woman in an abusive situation, every woman in a situation that she doesn’t want to be, will have to make that calculation, and then when the opportunity presents… First of all, you look for an opportunity to get out, and when you find that opportunity, I urge you to get out.
But here’s a caveat. In 1992, 1993, when I decided to leave, I was caught. My husband, the man I was married to, came to Holland and he found me. He found me in an asylum seeker center. And I went to the woman who was working, one of the women, the staff members who were working at the center, and I told her, “I’m busted. They have found me. I have to go with him now.” And she told me, “You don’t. You don’t have to go with him. I will call the police and if you don’t want to go, the police will make sure that you don’t.”
When I say a caveat, in 2021 I don’t know if the police in any country will help the woman in trouble, or if the police will side with the family and the clan and their value system. That is why I established the AHA Foundation [inaudible 00:25:34]. And that foundation focuses, zooms in on, exactly these issues. Women who are forced against their will into marriages they don’t want, who are pulled out of school. And that is a resource. And there are such organizations that exist all over the place, and I would direct women to go resources there are that can help them get out find help, and stay out and thrive once you’re out.
Beverly:
What is that website? How can people find that?
Ayaan:
It’s on the internet, it’s called theahafoundation.org. So, T-H-E-A-H-A foundation, all one word, dot org.
Beverly:
Wonderful. People should go there. And I also want to remind people again, you do have a new book out. It is called Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of women’s rights. People should pick it up.
But I just want to say, Ayaan, it’s been a pleasure to have you on She Thinks to hear your story and to hear the bravery that you had. And we thank you for all you’re doing for women and trying to protect their rights and get the rights if they don’t currently have them. We know that you have put your own life in danger to do so and we’re so honored to have you on the program today.
Ayaan:
Thank you very much, Beverly. Thank you so much for having me.
Beverly:
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