Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Religion, the Defense of Western Civilization, and the Assault on the Jews
About this episode
Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses her views on political Islam, the defense of Western civilization, and the challenges facing Jewish life today.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, grew up in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, became a member of the Dutch parliament, and collaborated with the filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a short film about the treatment of women under Islam. Ever since Van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch Islamist on an Amsterdam street in 2004, with a death threat addressed to her pinned to his chest with a knife, she has lived under security protection. She is the author of several books, among them Infidel , her memoir, and Heretic , in which she argued that Islam requires a reformation from within if it is to be compatible with liberal democratic civilization. For twenty years she was among the world's most prominent atheists—not merely in her personal convictions but in her public arguments, which held that reason and individual freedom were incompatible with religious submission of any kind. In November of 2023, she announced that she had become a Christian. That announcement, and the essay she wrote explaining it, raised one of the most searching questions in contemporary intellectual life: what does a civilization require in order to…
More episodes of The Tikvah Podcast
- Mike Pence and Eric Cohen on What It Means to Be Endowed with Natural Rights
- Mark Gottlieb and Shilo Brooks on Why Reading Matters
- Ryan McBeth on Why the U.S. Doesn't (Yet) Have a Munitions Crisis
- Tevi Troy on America's National Shabbat
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Tikvah Podcast podcast page.