A clear eyed Christian
by Campbell Campbell-Jack, A Grain of Sand:
What happens when the world’s most renowned Muslim apostate and leading New Atheist confesses she has become a Christian? Rejoicing and praise to God? Yes, but tempered by a cold shower of scepticism.
The Background Born in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali lived in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia before settling as a teenager in Kenya. Radicalised by a charismatic Saudi-funded teacher she became a devout Muslim who lived ‘by the Book, for the Book’. A member of the militant Muslim Brotherhood when ‘The Satanic Verses’ was published, she endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and took part in a public book-burning. Faced with a forced marriage she fled to the Netherlands as a refugee. She enrolled at Leiden University and graduated with an MSc in political science.
Bin Laden’s use of the Koran to justify the 9/11 attacks caused Hirsi Ali to question and then reject Islam. Eventually, thinking that all religions are the same, she became an atheist and quickly became a leading figure in the New Atheism movement of the 2000s. In 2003 she became a MP in the Dutch parliament. As a prominent critic of Islam she lived under police protection. When Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist, the killer left a note threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali pinned to van Gogh’s chest by a knife.
Following a parliamentary storm over her asylum claim and threats to removed her Dutch citizenship, she relocated to the US. The New Atheist movement, dominated by white males from post-Christian Western culture, welcomed the black, Africa-born woman as a global icon. Christopher Hitchens described her as ‘the most prominent public intellectual to come out of Africa’.
The New Christian Then everything changed. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London last month Hirsi Ali announced that she had been converted, this time from atheism to Christianity. She proclaimed her new faith saying, ‘Today I am proudly of Judeo-Christian religion.’ This has caused some to ask: Is she an actual Christian or is she seeing Christianity as a cultural weapon with which to combat Islam?