“You don’t speak up at first,” she told us. “First you leave and you find a place of safety. It’s only after that experience that it occurred to me to speak up about anything.”
is a human rights activist, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, the founder of the AHA Foundation, and the host of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. She is also the best-selling author of a number of books, including “Infidel,” “Nomad,” “Heretic,” and, “Prey.” Her latest initiative is Courage Media, which describes itself as a space for courageous conversations.Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
04:36 Conformity and its consequences
09:03 Islam and free speech
16:38 Immigration and the clash of civilizations
26:03 Censorship and decline in higher education
34:14 Cost of criticism and finding one’s voice
37:20 Hope for the future
43:58 Outro
Show notes:
“Submission.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh (2004)
Brandeis Change.org petition. (2014)
“When you use AI to replace every mention of ‘our democracy’ with ‘our bureaucracy,’ everything starts making a lot more sense.” Bill D’Agnostico via X (2024)
Editor's note: This abridged transcript highlights key discussions from the podcast. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Please reference the full unedited transcript for direct quotes.
Hirsi Ali’s courage in the face of death threats
NICO PERRINO, HOST: It’s comparably easy for someone like me to defend free speech when I haven’t had to face the death threats, or the loss of relationships with friends or family, or colleagues who were murdered. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about those challenges. Theo van Gogh, who was your colleague who worked with you on the film “Submission,” was shot eight times, first from a distance and then at short range. And the killer left a note that said, “Ayaan is next.” That is you.
You see what happened with Salman Rushdie with the fatwa in 1989. He thought he was safe. He would get into New York City taxi cabs with Muslim drivers and went about his life, and then he shows up at an arts festival to speak and someone comes out of the audience and stabs him. Flemming Rose with the Muhammed cartoons, the Jyllands-Posten controversy from 2005, Charlie Hebdo where you have a whole newsroom murdered. This is the cost that some people pay for criticizing Islam. What does that mean to you personally?
AYAAN HIRSI ALI, GUEST: It hasn’t been easy. It was absolutely awful actually after Salman Rushdie got attacked. It really did get under my skin, and I was terrified. And I can say looking back, just as you were describing, when Theo van Gogh was being shot, as the event itself was unfolding, as he fired the first shot and he was on his bicycle and the killer followed him, Theo was saying, “Can’t we talk about this?”
There was a lot of commentary right after Theo was killed in Holland, in the Netherlands, where that’s exactly how the Dutch approach life and conflict. “Can’t we talk about it? Why can’t we talk about it? Do we really have to shoot one another?” And I think again it has become increasingly the same in America where sometimes we’re faced with these implacable, relentless threats, people who want to take your life or take your country, and we sit back and say, “Can’t we talk about it?”
And so, I think the way to cope with it, and having done this for a number of years, is number one to avoid what I did, which was I lived in denial so it doesn’t affect me, which in fact it’s affected me very, very much. You have to try and remain mentally sane.
For me, what has worked now is faith. I’ve announced not so long ago that I’ve become a Christian, and I find a great deal of comfort and safety in that. So, I’m not constantly thinking about the threats, and I don’t feel the burden of guilt that I felt towards Theo’s death. I feel much better about those sorts of things. But it’s a huge toll on your mental health, if I can put it that way.
What I also find empowering is not to give in or to give up, and to just continue to speak out and speak up as long as the threat is there. There’s something even calming about that, that you know they can’t frighten you into silence. And that I know as long as I’m alive and I’m speaking about it, I hope I’m giving others reason and courage to do exactly the same.
A culture of conformity
PERRINO: Growing up in a culture of conformity like the one that you did in Somalia and then you moved kind of all over, you were in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, do people fully appreciate the level of conformity that was in those cultures, or was it like a fish in water?
HIRSI ALI: It’s largely a fish in water, but because we are human beings, we tend to rebel and we tend to disagree. And so, I think one way of not conforming was by sneaking things, by telling lies, by doing what you wanted to do, but as long as you are not caught, that was great. But then that puts you in a state of terror because what if you were caught? So, that was one way of not conforming.
If you openly rebelled, that was swiftly put down, but there’s also a hierarchy of power at play. Another way I think of not conforming was to become an enforcer yourself. You would loudly pretend that you are more righteous than anyone else, and then you become a source of fear. People are afraid of you. This is mostly used amongst men and real physical aggression. If you are bigger and stronger than your brothers and your cousins and the rest of the clan, you can then impose your will on them. That’s another way of rebelling is through tyranny.
Everything I’m telling you about that society is just not conducive to honesty, to stability, to trust. People are afraid of one another, they don’t trust one another, and therefore they’re not productive. They don’t collaborate effectively to realize what should be their common goal.
Islam and freedom of speech
PERRINO: One of the things that I’ve heard argued recently is that Islam weaponized freedom of speech, association, and religion to conquer Western countries. So, the very freedoms that we take for granted or that we celebrate or that make us Western are also the freedoms that could be weaponized by those that want to destroy those freedoms. What do you make of that?
HIRSI ALI: Muslims as individuals are different. But Islam is one religion, and it’s an expansive religion. If you’re a true Muslim, you are required to not just practice Islam yourself but to enforce the practice of Islam within your family, your society, and then to expand it, to bring it to others. Organizations and movements like the Muslim Brotherhood seek to practice Islam using that interpretation of Islam, which is the political and military interpretation of Islam. When they come to the West and they start establishing organizations and chapters, Islamic centers, universities, mosques, what they seek to do is to Islamize the society that they have come to because they see that as a religious obligation.
Now, the West is not familiar with Islam in that way. I mean, the West obviously had wars with Islam and they studied Islam, but to have large minorities of Muslims come and settle in the West, that’s a very recent phenomenon. I think there is this literal clash of civilizations where Westerners are saying, “You have freedom of religion here and freedom of association. Why don’t you enjoy it and become just like us?” and they are saying, “Well, hang on a minute. You have become secular, and sometimes you’ve become antireligious, and we have the good news for you. Why don’t you become Islam? We want to Islamize you.” Are you talking past one another at this stage?
And I think if you have Western nation states today experiencing this, sometimes the phrase “post nation state” is used. I don’t want to use it after this election because I think there’s plenty of healthy national identity still alive. But globalization is a fact, and there are non-Islamic, very Western forces that think that they benefit from globalization. Then you have these pseudo-communists coming back who think that Westernization states should be punished for things they did in the past for all sorts of inequalities. And then beside that you have the Islamists who want to destroy the Western nation states and replace it with sharia law. I think that cocktail produces a threat to the core of Western nation states.
PERRINO: The question becomes what do you do about it? You could approach it in two or more ways. You could allow those who want to destroy the Western nation state from within to speak freely, or you can censor them.
HIRSI ALI: I think you start with the question, “What sort of society do we want to live in?” And then you answer that question with, “What sorts of incentives do we want to encourage, and what sorts of forces do we want to bring to the surface?” We want political freedom, we want economic prosperity, we want a constitution. And again, we started with this freedom of conscience where you protect the First Amendment. In America, we also have the Second Amendment, and we have a whole slew of rules and regulations, or rules actually − or principles actually, not rules. It’s more like principles the country is founded on, and you want to protect those.
Speaking out against injustices
PERRINO: You grew up in a culture of conformity. What was the moment where you decided, “I need to speak up?”
HIRSI ALI: The real speaking up and speaking out against these things for me happened only after 9/11/2001. I had graduated from university in the Netherlands, I had actually lived in the Netherlands for a little over 10 years, and I had learned the vocabulary of speaking out and I had developed some confidence that what I had to say as an individual mattered. So, that was the speaking out of it.
Before the speaking out was the rebellion. It was me running away. It was my father deciding, “This is the man you’re going to marry.” And after that decision, sending me off to join him in Canada and me constantly thinking about also, “I’m going to live like my mother. I’m going to live the life of my mother.” Not just my mother, but all these other women whose suffering I saw up close and personal. “Could there be a different way?” That question popped into my head and me thinking, “Yes, I could run away.” And I ran away.
You don’t speak up first. First you leave and you find a place of safety. And it’s only after that experience − and in the years that I was in the Netherlands, before I even spoke up, it occurred to me to speak up about anything. By the way, I thought my life in Holland was so idealist that there was nothing to speak up about.
But I was a translator/ interpreter. So, I was translating for women who were being commanded by their men who still lived in these households where they had to conform, and they were completely helpless. They were subjected to violence and told, “Cover yourself up. You can’t do this,” forced into marriage, and being circumcised as they call it but it’s really genital mutilation.
And it is all of that that made me think this is injustice that’s happening in the countries where these families fled to from the repression and from the poverty and from the arbitrariness of violence in those places. And now here they are, they’re in Holland, they have all of this stuff, and they continue to oppress girls. And there’s part of me that felt an obligation that I should say something to the Dutch and tell them, “This is how girls and women are treated.”
And at that time, Dutch society was very keen to encourage the assimilation of their Muslim minorities, and they found me highly assimilating. So, they said, “Can you help us?” And the first thing I said was, “Emancipate these girls and these women. If they’re emancipated and they’re free to choose who they want to marry, and they’re free to finish their education, and free to become individuals, they’ll be assimilated and they’ll be just like everyone else.” And I didn’t realize that even that was controversial at that time. It just seemed like common sense.
Has freedom of speech gotten better or worse in the past decade?
PERRINO: As someone who confronted and recognized this latest wave of censorship on college campuses earlier than most, what do you make of it? Have things gotten better recently?
HIRSI ALI: They’ve gotten a lot worse. In hindsight, I think we were all too apathetic. We should have reacted to it in 2014, maybe even earlier. There are some people who are older than me who say this has been going on since the 1960s. This postmodernist, Marxist, Maoist ideological virus that’s in American universities, it’s an anti-American force. It hates everything about America. It accuses America of being racist and slaveholding and misogynists, and it’s homegrown.
And what happened to me in 2014 was that the Muslim Student Association at Brandeis organized this cancellation attempt that succeeded, they worked together with the leftist organizations. It was just around that time that demands for trigger warnings were beginning, and before that, demands to decolonize the curriculum and to decolonize the classics especially. Some people have taken this story as far back as when Jesse Jackson was shouting his slogans that Western civilization had to go, “Yo-ho-ho, Western civilization must go,” or something similar.
These things were not taken seriously, and now you have this unholy alliance between these woke people and then you have the Islamists, and together they are saying − it started with individuals like me. If you look at the complaints they had against me, it was that my very presence on the grounds of Brandeis’ campus would distress young students. I genuinely thought it was so silly and so unserious that no one was going to indulge this, and then it was indulged.
Initially, all the anger was directed at the president of the university, but that particular incident was defined as, “Here’s a small minority. They’re Muslim. They’re going through a lot.” It was the years after 9/11. There were terrorist activities and they were complaining about islamophobia. So, there was this tendency of, “Let’s tolerate that.” I think what we missed was that this was riding on a wave of this woke intolerance, and now the two of them have combined. The unholy red/green alliance has generated I think the ruining of the hearts and minds of at least one generation.
You saw what happened in the spring of this year at Columbia and Penn, at Harvard, where masses and masses of students came out in protest against Israel’s war on Hamas, and they sided with Hamas. They were waving Palestinian flags, they were shouting “from the river to the sea.” A lot of these slogans they were shouting were genocidal, they were calling for the elimination of Israel, but also for the elimination of all Jewish people, and that’s where we are now. How do we address those situations? What do we do about these students who have been brainwashed to hate their own country and to hate themselves? And what do we do about the growing entrenched force of Islamists that are advancing steadily and not so slowly anymore?
I remember in the spring in Michigan that an Islamist felt confident enough to, I don’t know if he was on a balcony or out of a window, but to shout, “Death to America. Death to America.” And he was overlooking a mass of people waving these flags and shouting these slogans. So, that’s where we are now. And the questions we have to ask ourselves are, “How is it that our education system from K-12, and especially our universities, has become so rotten? And where are the grownups, and who is overseeing this? Who should we hold responsible? And can we turn this back?”
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