Aayan Hirsi Ali converts to Christianity

Author and social commentator Aayan Hirsi Ali has converted to Christianity.

Over the past 15 years that I have been reading her articles, I had been hoping that day would come.

She had been brought up as a strict Muslim in Somalia and underwent female genital mutilation at the age of five. Her father was a political prisoner in Somalia. After he escaped prison, he moved the family to Saudi Arabia then Ethiopia before settling in Kenya. In 1992, she visited relatives in Germany and escaped an arranged marriage by travelling to the Netherlands. There she claimed political asylum, and the Dutch government quickly granted her a residence permit. She began work as soon as possible and held a number of jobs from the most humble to that of a translator and interpreter. She learned Dutch and earned a Masters degree in Political Science at Leyden University.

In 2003, she was elected to the Dutch parliament and her condemnation of misogyny, particularly the religious sort, became well known. She was well steeped in Western values and thought by that time and received a number of death threats. By 2007, the Dutch government had spent €€3.5 million protecting her. That year, the Foundation for Freedom of Expression was created. It helped to fund not only her personal safety but also that of other dissidents against radicalism.

She moved to the United States in 2007 and received her Green Card that year. She worked in academic circles, lectured in numerous capacities and has written several books. She became a United States citizen in 2013.

In September 2011, she married the Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson. Together, they have two sons.

Currently, in addition to being a columnist for the British site UnHerd, Aayan Hirsi Ali is also a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her new book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.

Her November 13, 2023 article for UnHerd — ‘Why I am now a Christian’ — is well worth reading, as are the comments.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine:

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

She describes how her strict upbringing in every facet of her life and her escape from it made atheism attractive. I won’t excerpt that here, but she ended that description with this:

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

Now relate that to what has been happening since October 7 here in the UK.

She discusses the comfort she found in atheism:

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

She names the global threats that caused her to reappraise her non-belief: the Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin, global Islamism and woke ideology. Yet, no matter how the West tries to oppose these threats:

with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground.

As such, she looked for the uniting factor in Western culture and history:

… we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity …

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

She moves on to spirituality:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

She says that increased secularism will not save the West:

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy …

Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

She concludes by saying that she is still young in the faith:

Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

I was hoping she would say what or who had converted her. Perhaps it was the philosophy and theology from Tom Holland’s Dominion, which she referenced.

However, as several professing Christians noted in the comment section, she omitted discussing her personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Given what she has lived through, perhaps she is reluctant to do so at this time. I look forward to reading more about her conversion story in the years to come. It might not be right away.

I pray for Aayan Hirsi Ali’s journey in faith. May she come to more fully embrace Jesus Christ as Lord of all.

The comments, which are numerous, reveal many different takes on faith and on Christ. Several of the notional Christians commenting appear to imply that Christianity does not demand acceptance of Him as Saviour; just obey the principles — ‘the Golden Rule’ — and you’re in. It is clear that they know very little about what the New Testament actually says.

This is what Christ preached during His three-year earthly ministry: repentence (the turning away from sin), acceptance that the only way to God is through Him — and, as such, obedience to Him in all things. Students of the New Testament and readers of my weekly exegeses on the Gospel passages, particularly this year with Matthew’s account, will know that.

Reading through the comments to Aayan Hirsi Ali’s story, I could not help but think of the Parable of the Ten Virgins, Matthew 25:1-13, the Gospel for this past Sunday. It is yet another of our Lord’s perfect illustrations of what will happen at the Last Judgement.

Christianity is more than a philosophy. It is a faith-filled life based on the free gift of divine grace that makes a belief in Christ possible as we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and eternal life to come. Furthermore, our good works are nothing if they do not come from Him.