Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a lecturer, scholar, and advocate for the rights of women and the reform of Islam. Infidel details her journey from one of the poorest countries in Africa with little power over how her life would unfold, to her escape from an arranged marriage, to her rise in politics in Europe and scholarship in North America, to the reasons why she now has full-time bodyguards.

Before Ayaan was a member of the Dutch parliament, before she worked on a short film that led to her friend Theo van Gogh’s slaughter for criticizing Islam, before she had a lecture circuit that extended across the globe, she was born the daughter of a modest but proud Somali mother and the granddaughter of a nomad who’d spent most of her life wandering the deserts.

When Ayaan was two, her father was thrown in jail for his involvement in resistance efforts against the Somali government. Ayaan wouldn’t see her father until they moved to Saudi Arabia years later. Her mother was often away visiting her father in prison or working with other clansmen to procure goods through the black market that weren’t provided in government rations.

Ayaan’s mother and grandmother grew up as nomads, traversing the desert in search of water and pastures for their animals. Life for nomads like Ayaan’s grandmother would have been much the same if she’d lived during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Whether the Italians or the British colonized her country didn’t matter out in the desert. The first time Ayaan’s grandmother saw a white man, she thought his skin had been burned off.

Ayaan’s mother left the nomad life while still a teenager, but not before learning how to build fences, construct temporary huts that could be collapsed and set back up again in a new location, care for the animals, and avoid strange men from other groups. Suspicion was a virtue. If a girl is careless and a man deflowers her, she carries the shame. It would be better for her to be dead than survive a rape, because the shame would tarnish not just her, but her father, brothers, uncles, and male cousins. In marriage, a woman is to be barri—loyal and servile, eager to please her husband.

Unlike her grandmother’s home, the house Ayaan grew up in could not be bundled up and stacked on a camel’s back. It was concrete. There was running water and electricity. There was a dirt road leading to the house. She and her siblings passed the time climbing the tree in the backyard and avoiding their grandmother’s lectures and swats.

Her grandmother insisted that Ayaan and her siblings learn the names of everyone in their lineage going back eight centuries. She told numerous stories that always captivated them—and sometimes horrified them. The moral underpinning every story was the importance of preserving the honor of family and clan. Heritage was everything. Family was everything. Honor was everything.

Ayaan’s mother preferred to keep her daughters close to her, to guard them from injury and iniquity. She did not want to send them to school, but the husband was for it and that settled matters. Though he was in jail, his word still carried weight. Ayaan began attending a madrassa, a school where instruction in the Quran is the primary emphasis. 

In many Islamic countries in Africa and the Middle East, female circumcision is viewed as a way to maintain purity. It involves scraping away the tissue that is most excitable in intercourse and sewing up the opening in such a way that urine can exit but nothing can enter until marriage. The scar tissue forms around the stitching to create a barrier that is difficult to reopen. A similarly barbaric practice is carried out on some boys.

Not all Muslims practice this, and there are some non-Muslims who do. But everyday about 6,000 little Muslim girls have their genitals cut, or excised. It happens to just about every girl in Somalia, and is legitimized on religious grounds. Muslim clerics don’t condemn it. Girls who don’t get cut are considered more vulnerable to demon possession, more likely to fornicate, and become prostitutes.

One girl at the school, about eight years old, was mercilessly teased and bullied. Her classmates told her she was filthy and impure because she had a clitoris. The teacher didn’t intervene and he’d occasionally insult her as well. One day Ayaan received similar insults. A week later, Ayaan’s grandmother made arrangements to remove her grandchildren’s filthy parts.

Ayaan’s father, who had studied at Columbia University in New York City, considered the practice savage and did not want his daughters excised. Her mother had also expressly forbidden her children being cut, but their grandmother's desire to honor custom won out over honoring her daughter’s wishes. With the father in jail, the grandmother simply waited until a time when the mother was away on an extended trip and began to make arrangements for the surgery. Though usually cantankerous, Ayaan remembers her grandmother was unnervingly kind in the days leading up to the operations. She discovered why the day a group of aunts and a strange man bearing scissors came into the house.

The brother was first, then Ayaan, then her sister. It was excruciating and traumatic. Ayaan’s sister Haweya was never the same after the impromptu operation. Once they stopped the bleeding and sewed the sisters up, the party left. Each girl’s legs were bond so that the stitching would not come undone. They were untied only to use the bathroom, which brought back the pain all over again. It took weeks to recover.

When their mother returned, she knew what had happened. Mother and grandmother had a row like Ayaan had never seen. In the end, the grandmother ended the discussion by threatening to leave, which would have left the mother with no one to take care of the kids.

Ayaan was about eight when her grandmother woke her and siblings before dawn. Their father had escaped from prison with the help of a guard from the same clan, and had made his way to Saudi Arabia. He had found work there, and the rest of his family was to join him.

When they arrived in Saudi Arabia, their father was not there to greet them as they’d anticipated. Without a man as a chaperone, Ayaan’s mother could not leave the airport. They sat despondent in the airport until a Somali man from their clan offered them assistance and led them out of the airport and found them a taxi.

They discovered there was a coup in Somalia, with rebels attempting to overthrow the  communist government. Their father had been intimately involved in resistance efforts and decided to take a flight to Ethiopia to aid the rebels’ attempt to bring down the Somali regime. He would not join them in Saudi Arabia for some time. Ayaan’s mother felt abandoned and betrayed. Though usually collected, she would beat and scream at her children at the slightest provocation.

When their father did return, it was a joyous reunion with a man they didn’t really know, but their mother never let her father live down his abandoning them in the airport. It was a weapon in her relational arsenal for years.

Everything was a sin in Saudi Arabia. Women couldn’t leave the house without the husband’s permission, and women without a male chaperone would often be ignored by shop owners or jeered at. Ayaan’s mother was routinely subjected to this kind of treatment because her husband was often not around and her son was too young to be considered a chaperone. 

When they lived in Mecca, their mother loved being in the Grand Mosque. People were kind and patient. No one pushed or put others down. It’s settings like these that could lead many Muslims to believe that Islam truly is a religion of peace. 

But outside the mosque, there was great suffering and cruelty. Every Friday after prayer, there were floggings, stonings, dismembering hands, and decapitations. Even as the price of oil was surging during the 1970s, enriching many Saudis, social and legal practices were still medieval.

During her childhood, Ayaan lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. When she was 22 and living in Kenya, her father had made arrangements for her to be married to a Somali man living in Canada. He was from their clan, he was wealthy and established. Ayaan didn't know him at all, and she knew she wanted nothing to do with him.

Still, between preserving family honor and a deep desire to please her father, Ayaan signed the matrimonial paperwork that the Muslim clerics had put together. She was granted a visa to Germany, where she would be staying with members of her family’s clan while the paperwork for entry into Canada was pending.

Her first impressions of Germany were how clean and orderly everything was. The streets had signs; public transportation was pristine and timely. Projects were not half-completed and abandoned like they often were in Somalia. Women walked with confidence and a sense of purpose. She felt anonymous, but there was something comforting about it.

She saw men and women talking together, but as equals. Women didn’t cover their heads or their arms, and some didn’t cover their shoulders. They looked naked compared to the women in Somalia and Saudi. Women here were immodest by Muslim standards, but the earth kept spinning. Chaos had not been unleashed. Men were not immediately tempted into fornication by their immodesty. The men hardly seemed to notice. It was all very normal. No one policed the women, shamed them, or threatened them with hell fire.

The more she saw, the more she realized that a very different life was possible for her than the life her family and clan in Somalia taught her to expect. She had been thinking for months about how she might escape the fate of her arranged marriage. To live an existence that had been determined for her the moment she came into the world as a female, to live without any real decision-making power, sounded miserable and empty.

To cross the Atlantic and settle down with a stranger in Canada, to make her well being dependent on a man who may or may not be good to her—it just seemed like a gamble. Ayaan realized that life could be different. She decided to take a chance. She snuck away to Holland on the pretext of visiting relatives and never returned. Friday, July 24, 1992 was the day she stepped onto an Amsterdam-bound train. It’s also the day she now considers her true “birthday,” because it marked the day she became a person.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was actually born Ayaan Hirsi Magan. She changed her name to avoid her clan or family tracking her down, or other Somali refugees identifying her clan. She also lied about the reason for running away.

Ayaan sought asylum in Holland. She had to participate in an interview with the government, and received free legal counsel beforehand. The attorney discouraged her from using the runaway bride narrative as the main motivation for seeking asylum. By Ayaan’s own admission, there were millions of Muslim women in marriages they’d love to escape, but as the lawyer pointed out, Holland didn’t have space for all of them. The better move was to focus on the Somali civil war that was tearing the country apart.

The interviewer who would approve or deny her plea was kind and friendly, but Ayaan was guarded. She sensed he was trying to make her comfortable enough to draw her out, so that any details that were incoherent would be exposed. She walked away feeling like he’d seen through her, but just a few weeks later she received word that she’d been granted refugee status. Her status entitled her to buy or rent property; she could enroll at a university; she was eligible for free health care; she could become naturalized in five year’s time, which would make her eligible to vote. Voting? Vote for what? How did that work?

The joy was mixed with apprehension. Their clan had members all over Europe, and they were on the hunt. Eventually her father and her husband had her location at the long-stay asylum center. She opened the door and there was her husband with three Somali men in tow. She magically reverted back to the cultural schema she’d grown up with: She became deferential and demure, and asked the men if they’d like some tea. She slipped out to find the social worker, who reminded her that she had rights and that if she did not want to go to Canada with this man, that she could just say so. He could not force her. The police would intervene if he tried to. Ayaan discovered the power of the rule of law that day.

Within just a few months in Europe, Ayaan had changed. When her husband returned a few days later with the elders of her clan, she chose Western style dress to send a message. It was no small thing to have the highest ranked men of the clan from all over the world come to her little bungalow in a long-stay refugee resettlement center. She observed customary codes that accompanied these kinds of events: staring at their mouths rather than their eyes as they addressed her to convey modesty and respect, and staying quiet and refusing to raise her voice or be insulting. Each of the men spoke in turn, the order determined by their rank. They said she had a day to consider, but Ayaan told them she already knew her answer and that it was “no.”

When pressed for the reason, she said, “It is the will of my soul. The soul cannot be coerced.” The highest ranking elder admired her response—which meant everyone else had to respect it, too.

Back in Kenya, where her mother and siblings settled down after fleeing from Saudi Arabia, the community was now rejecting Ayaan’s mother, accusing her of encouraging and masterminding Ayaan’s escape from her marriage. Ayaan does not regret her decision to run away, but she is sad about the shame her decision brought upon her mother and family.

Ayaan eagerly learned Dutch, studied politics at Leiden University and then joined a think tank as a junior researcher. A number of her opinion pieces were published in Dutch papers. While she strongly preferred the free society that accepted differences and upheld rule of law over a narrower political vision of Sharia law, she still considered herself a Muslim. 

But her faith was severely tested when terrorists, in the name of Allah, hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

After living in Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Kenya, Ayaan knew many Muslims who would have approved of the attack—even if only privately. But Ayaan’s friends and colleagues at the think tank were eager to disabuse Ayaan of the thought that the terrorist attacks had any connection to “true Islam.” This was a fringe group, they insisted, not Islam. The footage of Muslim communities in Europe celebrating were also portrayed as marginal rather than representative.

The political analysis of most Westerners was shallow, as were the write-ups on Osama bin Laden. Political pundits were ready to blame anything—colonialism, capitalism, lack of education, poverty—anything but Islam itself. No one seemed willing to take an honest look at culture and religion and investigate whether there was a connection between Islam and violence.

 The perpetrators and conspirators did not commit these atrocities because they were poor or uneducated. They were highly educated and far from dire financial straits. It wasn’t because they had misread the Quran that they had acted. Osama bin Laden quoted chapter and verse of the Quran and hadith. It was because they had read the Quran and taken the prophet’s injunctions seriously.

Ayaan didn’t want to, but she decided she must read the Quran and the hadith (the sayings and actions of the Prophet) to see for herself. She was afraid of what she might find. To renounce Islam and become an apostate is punishable by death, according to Islam. To even doubt the Quran’s infallibility was blasphemous. 

The truth is that many Muslims are peaceful, but this is in spite of—rather than because of—the system of Islam. Most aren’t aware of everything that the Prophet Muhammad did, said, and commanded. As a rule, the Quran can only be learned and recited in Arabic; so many Muslims memorize it without knowing a word of Arabic. 

Ayaan realized that she could no longer consider herself a Muslim. She rejected her faith and belief in God. She remembers the moment when she looked in the mirror and told herself there was no God. Damnation did not await her for questioning Islam, as imams and family members had told her all her life. It was just nothingness. There were no angels or demons, there was no Allah—it all came as a relief to Ayaan.

Ayaan became outspoken about Islam through her essays and public debates. Her main interest was bringing the vulnerability of Muslim women and the incompatibility of Western and Islamic values to the fore of public consciousness in Holland. She was eventually voted in as a member of the Dutch parliament. She achieved a great deal for Muslim women immigrants. One piece of legislation that she rallied her Liberal Party (right-wing) to support was a Labor Party initiative that would give individual papers to Muslim women immigrating to Holland for marriage. That way, if the husband abused her and she was unsafe, she could strike out on her own in Holland rather than feeling trapped between abuse and returning home to her family, where shame and maybe more violence awaited her.

One friendship that forever changed her trajectory was with Theo van Gogh, a provocative filmmaker and the great-grandnephew of the impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Together they made a film titled Submission. It depicted women questioning Allah about why he condones their being raped, cloistered, beaten, or flogged. They have the Quran’s injunctions that condone their husbands’ behaviors tattooed across their exposed torsos. These cases were to be taken as archetypical, representing the plight of thousands of Muslim women across the world.

Ayaan had already received threats for her public criticism of Islam as violent and backward, but she knew this film would unleash fresh furor from the Muslim community. Theo van Gogh insisted on keeping his name on the film when it was aired. A few months after the film was shown in August of 2004, he was shot multiple times, his throat cut, and his chest pierced with a knife. The knife pinned a note saying that Ayaan was next.

The Dutch government provided heightened security for her, moving her from hotel to hotel across Europe and the United States. She lost citizenship on the grounds that she had lied in her interview in 1997; her landlord evicted her because her neighbors felt unsafe; she eventually resigned from parliament. A think tank in Washington D.C. offered her a job and she accepted, ready to put the debacle behind her as quickly as possible.

To this day, Ayaan continues to receive death threats and her daily movements are coordinated with a security detail. She sees this as the price she is willing to pay to encourage Islamic reform and to advocate for women who feel unable to question Allah or their husbands.