Why shouldn’t we talk about Ayaan Hirsi Ali? It’s interesting to see how many people want to shut down any discussion. Why is this black, Somalian (by birth, if not now), ex-Muslim woman not a voice worth listening to? Why are some people suggesting it’s bigoted to even think about what she’s saying?
She probably knows more about Islam than most of the people presenting her as some kind of “alt-right” mouthpiece here, seeing as she was born into a Muslim family, brought up Muslim, has lived in more than one Muslim majority country, and attended a Muslim school.
It’s quite striking how the voices of ex-Muslims never seem to be listened to by those who think of themselves as progressive.
If someone left a fundamentalist Christian sect that they’d been brought up in, with very similar attitudes and values to those in much of the Islamic world, I think you would listen to them and respect their achievement in leaving that sect and their family behind, the courage it took to do that. You might be interested in hearing their story, their experiences, and their criticisms of that sect. You would not have any investment in defending that sect, or its practices.
But if someone leaves Islam - something that’s arguably even harder, given the penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, the fatwas, the reality of being part of an ethnic minority if in the west - and they want to talk about the problems they found with their former religion/community, they’re just “alt-right”, and you can just dismiss them as “having an axe to grind”?
It’s bizzarre, this urge to present her as some kind of frothing racist Islamophobe. Why can’t you even listen to her, talk about her, explain exactly what it is about what she says that’s so awful? Because if you do think she’s so awful, you presumably base that on specific things she’s said, right? What exactly are those things? What are you scared will happen if her voice isn’t suitably suppressed?