Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Dutch pronunciation:
[ɑˈjaːn ˈɦirsi ˈaːli] (
listen); full name:
Ayaan Hirsi Magan Isse Guleid Ali Wai’ays Muhammad Ali Umar Osman Mahamud;
Somali:
Ayaan Xirsi Cali;
Arabic: أیان حرسی علی /
ALA-LC:
Ayān Ḥirsī ‘Alī) (born 13 November 1969) is a Somali-Dutch
feminist and
atheist activist, writer and politician who is known for her views
critical of
Islam. She wrote the screenplay for
Theo van Gogh's movie
Submission, after which she and the director both received death threats, and the director was murdered. The daughter of the Somali politician and opposition leader
Hirsi Magan Isse, she is a founder of the women's rights organisation the
AHA Foundation.
[2]
When she was eight, Hirsi Ali's family left Somalia for
Saudi Arabia, then
Ethiopia, and eventually settled in
Kenya. She sought and obtained
political asylum in the
Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the centre of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the
House of Representatives (the
lower house of the
Dutch parliament), representing the
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the
second Balkenende cabinet[3][4] in 2006.
In 2005, she was named by
Time magazine as one of the
100 most influential people in the world.
[5] She has also received several awards, including a free speech award from the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten,
[6] the Swedish
Liberal Party's Democracy Prize,
[7] and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship.
[8] In 2006 she published a memoir. The English translation in 2007 is titled
Infidel.
[9] As of 2013 Hirsi Ali is a
fellow at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a member of the The Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center, and lives in the United States.
[10][11] She is married to British historian and public commentator
Niall Ferguson