Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-Dutch-American writer, political activist, and former Dutch parliamentarian whose 2007 memoir Infidel became one of the most-iconic American post-9/11 political-memoir books and made her one of the figures of early-21st-century Western criticism of political Islam. She was born Ayaan Hirsi Magan on November 13, 1969, in Mogadishu, Somalia, into a politically active Somali family — her father Hirsi Magan Isse was a prominent Somali opposition political figure who was imprisoned during her childhood.

Her early childhood was shaped by the 1969 Siad Barre coup and the family's subsequent political exile to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and finally Kenya. She was subjected to female genital mutilation at age five and grew up in increasingly Islamist-religious household environments. Her 1992 escape from an arranged marriage to a Canadian-Somali cousin produced her relocation to the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992. She learned Dutch within months and earned a Master's degree in political science from the Leiden University.

Her public visibility came through her post-9/11 op-ed and TV commentary work for Dutch newspapers. The August 2004 ten-minute film Submission — co-produced by Hirsi Ali and Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh — exposed her to Islamist threats. Iconic van Gogh was assassinated on November 2, 2004 in Amsterdam by an Dutch-Moroccan Islamist, with the killer attaching a five-page death threat against Hirsi Ali to van Gogh's body with a knife. Hirsi Ali went into protective hiding for the next several years.

She served in the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006 representing the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Her 2006 relocation to the United States and her 2007 American Enterprise Institute fellowship made her one of the American conservative-think-tank political figures. The 2007 memoir Infidel became one of the American bestselling memoirs of 2007 and was followed by the 2010 Nomad and the 2015 Heretic. She has been with British historian Niall Ferguson since 2011, and the couple has two children.

Her name Ayaan is from the Arabic Ayyān meaning "gift of God" or from the Sanskrit ayāna meaning "path." Ayaan has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2010s.