“Ayaan Hirsi Ali”: I Still Have Much to Learn About Christianity

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” an atheist who has converted to Christianity, announced that she still has much to learn about Christianity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in 1969 in Mogadishu, is a political-social activist, feminist, and Dutch-American writer of Somali descent who is known as a vocal atheist. Ayaan gained attention due to her criticism of Islam, advocacy for the rights and independence of Muslim women, active opposition to forced marriage, honor killings, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. She founded the A.H.A. foundation to defend women’s rights.

She was a former member of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy from January 2003 to May 2006 and served in the Dutch Parliament. She is a writer and filmmaker who criticizes Islam, and her film “Submission” provoked the anger of Islamists to the extent that they threatened her with death.

Ayaan Hirsi was once considered a radical Muslim who had even supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie. Later, she joined signatories alongside people like Salman Rushdie of the manifesto “Against the New Totalitarianism,” which warned against Islamism as a danger.

In the past, she found the lack of faith appealing for various reasons and became an atheist, but now she has converted to Christianity for spiritual and civilizational reasons. Ayaan wrote in an article published this week: “I still have much to learn about Christianity. I gain more insight every Sunday at church, but on my long journey through the desert of fear, doubt, and uncertainty, I discovered that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than through Islam or unbelief.”

In an article published on the UnHerd website, the renowned apostate Muslim Hirsi Ali noted that the “Muslim Brotherhood” had a unique ability to transform her and her teenage colleagues into activists, almost overnight.

During intense sessions of prayer and fasting, Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, and her friends were taught to hate Jews and to abstain from indulging in early pleasures, lest they face God’s wrath.

She said that a “free escape” from a life of self-denial and torment offered by atheism made the lack of faith appealing to her for a time. Atheists in her circle, like “Christopher Hitchens” and “Richard Dawkins,” introduced her to a new group of friends who were intelligent individuals.

However, as Hirsi Ali witnessed threats to Western civilization from authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, the rise of global Islamism, and the spread of viral woke ideology, the benefits of atheism for combating modern civilization’s problems seemed insufficient. Hirsi Ali discovered that the solution to this problem was personal adherence to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

She also praised the freedom of conscience and liberty present in Western civilization. Hirsi Ali believes that such freedom is the product of discourse among Jewish and Christian communities.