Ayaan hirsi ali…first time I’ve heard of her

[Meetmeatthatspecialplace]

Came across a video of her speaking last night
I find what she has to say about Islam very interesting, sensible and…worrying
Any thoughts?
I can’t seem to link 😬

Wow - admiring a feminist advocate against forced marriage and fgm is "Muslim bashing" to some women. How ridiculous.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is incredibly brave. She has continued to fight for women's rights despite her life being in constant danger for years and people around her being murdered. I have huge admiration for her.

I haven't heard of her until now. I'm well educated, watch the news etc... I've never come across her. Judgemental much?

Nasty right wing former partner of a contemporary of mine at Cambridge - Niall Ferguson

Edited - oh they are still together

She thinks Islam is fundamentally incompatible with western values. I don't agree with all her ideas about this but I think she makes some logical points as well as having some personal insights from her experience that are very worth listening to.

I think her underlying worry is that western countries refuse to see the problems with political Islam due to ideological ideas attached to a certain kind of liberalism which she thinks is very naive, and that it will have detrimental effects on society if allowed to continue.

She was a member of the humanist/skeptic/new atheist group for a while, but fairly recently converted to Christianity - Catholicism iirc though I wouldn't swear to that.

She also writes really beautifully and is enjoyable to read in terms of her clarity of expression.

She has provided evidence of being threatened with forced marriage.

As Madeleine Albright said, there is a special place in hell for women who don't support other women.

She's married to him and they have two sons.

I agree,
The last three things you mention:

• That we should come out of the ECHR to stop Muslims entering the UK
• Rioters unjustly jailed
• Starmer is in league with Muslims

Fall into what you could mostly call "opinion/speculation". I mean, she has absolutely no way of knowing whether or not Starmer is in league with Muslims. He is unlikely to have told her. So its not even a question of "veracity" really - she might truly believe it, but its meaningless. Whereas, the experiences she shared of FGM etc are likely to be true because she was literally there (and I have no reason to believe she is lying). So thats a perspective that is more interesting.

Er, I just said this

Explained in a much more eloquent way than I could..!

She had a sort of "conversion experience" as Muslim, in the sense that she went from being a child raised as Muslim to becoming very personally committed and believing very strongly in what she was taught. So she wasn't always lukewarm, she had a rather harsh road to disenchantment.

Ok so are you saying we should support all the right wing views of someone because they have experienced something awful at some point. Surely we can empathise on one level without adopting politics of an individual that are not related to their previous experiences

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?

Completely fine to talk about an interesting character

Thanks for the insight as a Cambridge grad, you've raised the tone immensely.

Exactly this, also surprising women are automatically shutting it down

I find what she has to say about Islam very interesting, sensible and…worrying
Any thoughts?
There's nothing here about what she said, which makes it hard to have any thoughts on it.
I read her autobiography, Infidel, which describes how she became an illegal immigrant and took advantage of the Netherlands asylum and welfare system, including unemployment benefits. Having made good use of the system herself, she doesn't want others to have access to it. She specifically says she doesn't want unemployment benefits for other immigrants
She is beautiful and elegant and clever and articulate and black, and she has first-hand experience of the worst of Somali culture and she is brave enough to talk about it. So she is a very useful tool for the worst of western warmongers, and of she makes a living as such.

Oh, so we can't be helpful if we know someone 🤦‍♀️

No, they’re not. She was to be married off to a Canadian-Somalian her father met at the mosque, who’d come to Somalia to find a wife because the Somali women back in Canada were too westernised and he wanted a more “traditional”, submissive woman, who would “give him six sons”.

Her father had known this man for all of two hours when he offered him his daughter in marriage.

She wanted to claim asylum on that basis, but she wasn’t able to because seeing as arranged/forced marriages are the norm in Somalia, they don’t count as grounds for asylum. So yes, she gamed the system and made up a story of fleeing war (based on her own earlier experiences) in order to escape the fate that otherwise awaited her, of being married to a man she felt absolutely nothing for, who expected her to be a docile brood mare. Who would have expected her to shut her brilliant mind up in a prison of compliant domesticity.

Much like many of the posters on here, apparently.

She was very open about this when she became a public figure in the Netherlands.

It would be interesting to know if the PPs dismissing are doing so because they are Muslim and have a different experience of growing up Muslim, or if they disagree with her on principal because they consider her to be anti-multiculturalism and therefor far right?

If it's the latter, and it's coming from white liberals, how do they square their dismissal of her, a black feminist, with liberalism?

I'm a liberal, feminist white woman, and I think dismissing Ayann because of the men she's associated with, Gert Wilders and her husband, as a few PPs have done, is deeply misogynistic. She has given us real testimony of what life is like for millions of women, and the response from those she criticises is to put a target on her head.

That’s not quite accurate, IMO. She was raised Muslim, her father in particular I think was very committed, and she idolised him, but he wasn’t around for much of her childhood, was in exile for much of it.

When she was teenager, and attending a Muslim girls’ school, she developed a pash (as we used to call it) on one of the young teachers, who was extremely devout and covered herself a great deal more than was the norm in that place (Kenya, I think) at that time. And Ayaan started following suit, and studying the Koran much more assiduously.

It reminded me a lot of what I’ve heard of happening at Cathollic schools: girls developing strong feelings for one of the younger nuns, becoming more devout, studying the Bible more, wishing to be nuns themselves.

So not in any way a conversion. Rather an example of the phenomenon of girls in a very patriarchal, religious culture going through a teenage phase of intense religiosity, usually linked to a charismatic young woman they look up to.

How was it helpful for you to describe her as the nasty right wing wife of someone you went to college with? You didn't give any insight into why being Mrs. Neil Ferguson made her views especially contemptible.

because of the men she's associated with, Gert Wilders and her husband, as a few PPs have done, is deeply misogynistic.

What a load of crock. You can't criticise women for any reason whatsoever or you're deeply misogynistic. Gert Wilders is far right wants remigration and to create an ethnostate. I'll criticise far right pricks as much as I want and you need to look up what misogyny means.

Yes I agree. Guilt by association is ridiculous. Think for yourself instead of dismissing ideas because you (a white middle class person) have decided a black Muslim born woman is not worth listening to because of who else agrees with her on certain issues

The West isn't at war with Somalia, so I don't how you make the leap from Ayann exposing the appalling of treatment of women with being a 'tool for Western war mongers'.

You might be satiring the Daily Mail in mentioning her reliance on benefits in the Neatherlands, but how else is a refugee to live?

I don't agree that Europe should close it's doors to asylum seekers, personally I think that any woman who can get out of Afghanistan should be given asylum, but I don't dismiss what a writer has to say about their lived experience because I don't agree with all of their views.

"because of the men she's associated with, Gert Wilders and her husband, as a few PPs have done, is deeply misogynistic.

What a load of crock. You can't criticise women for any reason whatsoever or you're deeply misogynistic."

Emm no. Criticism of women because of the men they associate with is deeply misogynistic. If you disagree with what she says, argue against it. Don't just slag her off because you don't like her husband