Ayaan Hirsi Ali

File:Ayaan hirsi ali parliament.jpg

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born Ayaan Hirsi Magan 13 November 1969 ) is a Dutch feminist and former politician. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, Ali was a member of the Tweede Kamer (the Lower House of the Netherlands) for the VVD from January 30 2003 until May 16, 2006. She is a prominent and often controversial author, film maker and critic of Islam. Although she has received a Dutch passport in the past, Dutch Minister of Immigration Rita Verdonk declared on May 15, 2006 that Hirsi Ali's Dutch citizenship was invalid and, unless proved otherwise, she would lose her status as a citizen within six weeks. Hirsi Ali had already suggested she may move to the United States after she was subjected to a court injunction evicting her from her home, after her neighbors sued on grounds that her presence exposed them to the risk of a terroristic attack, although the police had testified in court that it was one of the safest places in the country due to the many personnel they had assigned there.

In 2002, Hirsi Ali admitted that she had lied about her name, her age, and the manner in which she came to the Netherlands. According to the newspaper Volkskrant, Hirsi Ali now plans to move to the U.S. and "start working for the conservative American Enterprise Institute in September after reaching a deal with U.S. authorities about her security."

Hirsi Ali has had to maintain a high level of security due to threats against her life for voicing views critical to certain aspects of Islam. For example, her film Submission, directed by Theo van Gogh, made her one of the targets of the Hofstad Network.

Biography

Youth

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia into the Majeerteen sub-clan of the Darod clan. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was an opponent of Siyad Barre, the president of Somalia. Although her father, who had studied in Italy and the United States, was opposed to female genital cutting, a Somali tradition, when Hirsi Ali was five years old her grandmother had the procedure performed on her while her father was abroad.

When she was six, her family left the country for Saudi Arabia, later moving to Ethiopia and then to Kenya, where the family obtained political asylum. In Kenya she attended the English-language Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi under sponsorship of the UNHCR, where, for a brief period she received guest lessons from a fundamentalist teacher called Aziza. Following the invasion by the secular nation of Iraq of the Islamic republic of Iran, she sympathised with Iran, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a head-scarf together with her school uniform. After secondary school she attended a secretarial course at the Valley College in Nairobi (near Yaya center) for one year.

Pre-political career

In 1992 Hirsi Ali fled to the Netherlands, there is considerable unclarity about the events leading up to her applying for asylum, because Hirsi Ali has made it public that she lied when she sought asylum.

In 1992, Hirsi Ali's father is said to have arranged for her to marry a distant cousin who lived in Canada. Her family however has denied this. In 1992, after living in Kenya for eleven years she traveled to family in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany. After a brief stay in Germany, she decided to go to the Netherlands, instead of Canada.

Once in the Netherlands, she requested political asylum and received a residence permit. It is not known on which grounds she received political asylum. Technically, since her first stop had been in Germany, she should have applied for asylum there. In the Netherlands she gave a different date of birth and different name to the Dutch immigration authorities. Until May 2006 she was known in the West by the assumed name Hirsi Ali instead of her real name, Hirsi Magan. On the advice of her aunt she told the immigration authorities that she had come straight from Somalia, instead of Kenya where she had been living for eleven years. In Somalia there was a serious famine at that time and a civil war leading to the Operation Restore Hope by the United States. Due to these circumstances asylum seekers from Somalia were routinely granted asylum on humanitarian grounds. Hirsi Ali received a residence permit within three weeks of her arrival in the Netherlands.

After receiving asylum, she held various short-term jobs, ranging from cleaning to mail sorting. During this time she took courses in Dutch and a one-year course in Social Work. Following her initial studies, she studied political science at the University of Leiden until 2000. Between 1995 and 2001, she worked as an independent interpreter and translator, working primarily for the National Migration Service. While working for the NMS, she had access to inside knowledge of the workings of the Dutch immigration system. She was heavily critical of the way the Dutch system handled asylum seekers, favoring highly educated applicants over less educated ones .

Political career

After earning her masters in political science, Hirsi Ali became a fellow at the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, a scientific institute linked to the social-democratic PvdA, of which Leiden University Professor Ruud Koole was steward. Inspired by the Atheist Manifesto (Atheistisch Manifest) of Leiden philosopher Herman Philipse, she renounced Islam and became an atheist. During this period she began to formulate her critique on Islamic culture, which she put to words in a book De Zoontjesfabriek ("The Son Factory"). After the publication of this book, she received the first threats on her life.

In November 2002 she switched to the conservative VVD party, which offered her a position in parliament. She criticized the PvdA for being blind to the negative effects of immigration from Islamic countries. Hirsi Ali was an assistant of the VVD parliamentary party between November 2002 and January 2003. Because of the escalating threats to her life, Hirsi Ali began to receive permanent police protection.

In January 2003 she was elected to the Tweede Kamer. She received a large number of preference votes.

Because of her statements about the Islamic prophet Muhammad in a Trouw interview, a discrimination complaint was filed against Hirsi Ali on April 24, 2003. The Prosecutor's office decided not to prosecute her, because her critique did "not put forth any conclusions in respect to Muslims and their worth as a group is not denied.".

Hirsi Ali wrote the script for Submission , a short, low-budget film directed by Theo van Gogh. The film criticized the treatment of women in Islamic society. It showed women, one of whom was dressed in a semi-transparent burqa, with texts from the Qur'an projected on their bodies. The texts referred to the subordinate role of women. In addition to writing the script, Hirsi Ali also provided the voice-over. The release of the film sparked much controversy, as well as violent reaction, when radical Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri gunned down Van Gogh in an Amsterdam street on November 2, 2004. A letter pinned to Van Gogh's body with a knife was primarily a death threat to Hirsi Ali.

Earlier that year, the group "The Hague Connection" produced and distributed the rap song Hirsi Ali Dis on the internet. The lyrics of this song included violent threats against Hirsi Ali's life. The rappers were prosecuted under Article 121 of the Dutch criminal code, because they hindered the execution of Hirsi Ali's tasks as politician. In 2005 the rappers were sentenced to community service and a suspended prison sentence .

After the incident, Hirsi Ali went into hiding in the Netherlands, and even spent some time in New York, a situation which lasted until January 18, 2005, when she returned to parliament. On February 18, 2005, she revealed the location of herself and her colleague Geert Wilders, who had also been in hiding. She demanded a normal, secured house, which she was granted one week later.

On November 16, 2005, Hirsi Ali reported being seriously threatened by the Imam Scheich Fawaz. This Imam, who worked in a mosque in The Hague, announced on the internet that Hirsi Ali would be "blown away by the wind of changing times" and that she could anticipate "the curse of Allah".

In January 2006, Hirsi Ali used her acceptance speech for the Reader's Digest "European of the Year" award to urge action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and to say that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be taken at his word in wanting to organize a conference to investigate objective evidence of the Holocaust. "Before I came to Europe, I'd never heard of the Holocaust. That is the case with millions of people in the Middle East. Such a conference should be able to convince many people away from their denial of the genocide against the Jews." She also said that "so-called Western values" of freedom and justice are universal; that Europe has done far better than most areas of the world at providing justice, because it has guaranteed the freedom of thought and debate that are required for critical self-examination; and that communities cannot reform themselves unless "scrupulous investigation of every former and current doctrine is possible."

In March 2006 a letter she co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

On April 27 a Dutch judge ruled that Hirsi Ali had to leave her house - a highly secured secret address in the Netherlands. Her neighbors had complained that living next to her was an unacceptable security risk for them.

May 2006 events

In May 2006 the Dutch television program "Zembla" revisited the fact that in her asylum request, Hirsi Ali lied about her real name, her age and the country she arrived from. She had informed the public about these facts as early as September 2002 in an interview in the political magazine HP/De Tijd. Media speculation arose that she could lose her Dutch Citizenship because of this 'identity fraud', rendering her ineligible for Parliament. In a first reaction Minister Rita Verdonk said she would not look into the matter, but after Member of Parliament Hilbrand Nawijn insisted, she declared that she would investigate Hirsi Ali's naturalisation process. This investigation took three days. The findings were that Hirsi Ali never received Dutch citizenship after all, because she lied about her name and date of birth. She stated that she was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in 1967, but she is actually Ayaan Hirsi Magan, born in 1969. Therefore the Dutch government's position is that Hirsi Ali's Dutch citizenship is invalid and declared null and void. She does however still have her residency permit, which was granted in 1992. It is unlikely that her permit will be taken away from her.

On May 16, Hirsi Ali resigned from Parliament after admitting lying on her asylum application. On that day she gave a press conference in which she restated that although she felt it was wrong to be granted asylum under false pretences, the facts had been publicly known since 2002 when they were reported in the media and in one of her publications. In the press conference she also restated that she spoke the truth about the reason for asking asylum which was the threat of forced marriage.

On May 15, 2006, after the broadcast of the "Zembla"-documentary, news stories erupted saying that Hirsi Ali is likely to move to the United States in September 2006. There she will work on her book Shortcut to Enlightenment and work for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Christopher DeMuth (President of the AEI) has confirmed in a letter that recent events in the Netherlands will not affect the appointment. He stated:

Dear Ayaan:

I am writing to offer you an appointment as Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. My colleagues and I have reviewed the research proposal you sent to me last week. We are confident that your work at AEI could make important contributions to urgent issues of politics and social understanding—in particular, to furthering the reconciliation of Muslim teachings with the ideals of individual freedom and responsibility and the “open society.”

We appreciate that your views have been controversial and are likely to remain so; we believe that controversies such as these, when conducted in a spirit of civility and reasoned inquiry, are essential to intellectual progress, and are to be welcomed rather than feared.

In your application and in our recent conversations, you envisioned joining AEI in the autumn. I understand that subsequent political developments in Holland may lead you to wish to accelerate the date of your appointment. If that is the case, I will be happy to work with you to arrange a starting date that accommodates your new circumstances. Let me add that I have been deeply angered by the unfair and partisan attacks that have been leveled against you and have admired your courage and forthrightness in the face of this hounding.

My colleagues and I are looking forward to welcoming you to AEI, and to America.

Yours truly,

Christopher DeMuth

In a reaction, former VVD minister Hans Wiegel stated that her departure "would not be a loss to the VVD and not be a loss to the Tweede Kamer". Wiegel said that Hirsi Ali was a brave woman, but that her opinions were polarizing. Former parliamentary leader of the VVD, Jozias van Aartsen, was more positive about Hirsi Ali, saying that it is "painful for Dutch society and politics that she is leaving the Tweede Kamer".

Hirsi Ali is currently working on a successor to "Submission", which will probably deal with the position of homosexuals in Islam.

Political views

Hirsi Ali's political views are for the most part inspired by her personal change from a fundamentalist Muslim to an atheist. Hirsi Ali is very critical of Islam, and especially of the prophet Muhammad and the position of women in Islam.

Islam

Hirsi Ali (latter found out to be Hirsi “Megan) is very critical of the position of women in Islam and the punishments demanded by Islamic scholars for homosexuality and adultery. This is seen by many Muslims, as Hirsi's attempt to gain popularity and achieve her personal interests. Some Muslim groups question the credibility of her critics, given her history of opportunistic behavior, lies and manipulation of facts such as claiming other name, date of birth, the last country where she lived in and traveled from to Europe (Somalia instead of Kenya), her story concern her marriage....etc.

Circumcision

Hirsi Ali is an opponent of the practice of circumcision for both men and women. Female circumcision is a part of certain cultures in some Islamic countries, including Kenya and Somalia, where she lived, while other cultures consider it contrary to Islam.

Freedom of speech

Hirsi Ali is a proponent of free speech. In a 2006 lecture in Berlin, she defended the right to offend, following the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. She condemned the journalists of those papers and TV channels that did not show their readers the cartoons as being "mediocre of mind" and of trying to hide behind those "noble sounding terms such as 'responsivity' and 'sensitivity'." She praised publishers all over Europe for showing the cartoons and not being afraid of what she interpreted as the intolerance of some Muslims.

Muhammad

Her criticism of the Islamic prophet Muhammad mainly concerns his moral stature. In January 2003 she told the Dutch paper Trouw, "Muhammad is, seen by our Western standards, a perverse man". She referred particularly to the marriage between Muhammad, who was 52 years old, and Aisha, who was nine years old, according to hadith.

Prizes

• In January 2004, Hirsi Ali was awarded the Prize of Liberty by Nova Civitas, a classical liberal thinktank in the Low Countries.

• On November 20, 2004 Ayaan Hirsi Ali was awarded Denmark's Liberal Party’s Freedom Prize (largest party of Denmark and part of the ruling coalition) "for her work to further freedom of speech and the rights of women". Due to threats from Islamic fundamentalists she was not at the time able to receive it personally; however a year later, November 17, 2005, she travelled to Denmark to thank Anders Fogh Rasmussen, leader of Denmark's Liberal Party and prime minister of Denmark, for the prize.

• On February 25, 2005 she was given the Harriet Freezerring by Cisca Dresselhuys, editor of the feminist magazine Opzij, "for her work for the emancipation of Islamic women".

• According to the American Time Magazine of April 18, 2005 she was amongst the 100 Most Influential Persons of the World. The Time 100 She was put in the category "Leaders & Revolutionaries".

• In June 2005, Hirsi Ali was awarded by the Norwegian Political Think Tank, Human Rights Service (HRS) [1], with the annual Prize, This Year's European Bellwether. According to HRS, Hirsi Ali is “beyond a doubt, the leading European politician in the field of integration. (She is) a master at the art of mediating the most difficult issues with insurmountable courage, wisdom, reflectiveness, and clarity [2] * On August 29, 2005, Hirsi Ali was awarded the annual Democracy Prize of the Liberal Party of Sweden "for her courageous work for democracy, human rights and women's rights."

• Hirsi Ali was voted European of the Year for 2006 by the European editors of Reader's Digest magazine. At a ceremony in The Hague on January 23, Hirsi Ali accepted the Reader's Digest award from EU Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes.

• On May 4, 2006, Hirsi Ali accepted the Moral Courage Award from the American Jewish Committee.

• The Norwegian member of parliament Christian Tybring-Gjedde has nominated Hirsi Ali as candidate for Nobel Peace Prize of 2006.

Trivia

• Her first name, Ayaan, means "lucky person" or "luck" in the Somali language.

• Hirsi Ali speaks six languages: English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic and Dutch.

Bibliography

• De Zoontjesfabriek over vrouwen, islam en integratie ("The Son Factory - About Women, Islam and Integration") is a collection of essays and lectures she held before 2002. It also contains an extended interview originally published in Opzij, a feminist magazine. The book specifically focuses on the position of Moslems in the Netherlands.
• The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam is a translation of the Dutch book De Maagdenkooi. It is a collection of Hirsi Ali's essays and lectures from the period 2003–2004, combined with her personal experiences as a translator working for the NMS. The book specifically focuses on the position of women in Islam.

External links

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali Official Website Ayaan Hirsi Ali's official website
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali affairs - Weblog Ayaan Hirsi Ali weblog (English language version)

Interviews

• Interview with Der Spiegel May 14, 2005
• Interview on the Brian Lehrer Show May 05, 2006 WNYC
• Interview with The Guardian May 17, 2005
• Interview with NPR May 5, 2005
• Interview with NPR May 4, 2006 (text includes preface from English translation of "The Caged Virgin")
• Interview with CBS News March 13, 2005
• Interview with the BBC - 23 December 2003
• Interview with the BBC - 24 January 2006
• interview with Dutch TV
• Dutch MP Creates Seismic Waves by Insulting Prophet Muhammad

Artikel

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali Deplores European Political Correctness, De Standaard, January 24, 2006
• Article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on "Islam and Europe's Identity Deficit" in the Brown Journal of World Affairs
• Opinion Piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali "Let's Talk About How To Close The Identity Gap" in the International Herald Tribune, excerpted from the Brown Journal of World Affairs August 23, 2005
• Free and Equal under the Qur'an - an analysis by Havva G Guney-Ruebenacker
• British Muslim Convert and Feminist Yvonne Ridley Talks about Islam She Discusses the Rights and Freedom Islam Gives Women, addresses misconceptions and she Critisises Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Views
• Profile: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, BBC News, May 16, 2006