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Ayaan Hirsi Ali

105 quotes

“It is not only the prohibition against criticizing the Quran and the Prophet that closes the Muslim mind, and not only the life-long socialization of learning by rote. It is also the continuous construction of conspiracy theories about enemies of Islam who are determined to destroy the one, true religion. The chief enemy is the Jew.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I reflect back on this particular strand of anti-Semitism, I see three distinct features. The first is demographic power: increase the number of people who believe that Jews are their enemies. The second is to use Islam as a vehicle to promote anti-Semitism. The third is psychological: present the Muslim as an underdog fighting a powerful and ruthless enemy.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence. Muslim children all over the world are taught the way I was: taught with violence, taught to perpetuate violence, taught to wish for violence against the infidel, the Jew, the American Satan. I belong to a small group of lucky people who have escaped the permanent closure of my mind through education.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century and produced its greatest works in the eighteenth, is based on critical reasoning. It employs facts instead of faith, evidence instead of tradition. Morality in this worldview is determined by human beings, not by an outside force.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is exactly how minds are opened: through honest, frank dialogue. Tears may be shed, but not blood.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. Yet when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenment thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy. Muhammad says my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Muslim women face not just oppression but violent death, why aren’t the feminists out protesting these abusers?”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When slavery divided their nation, American feminists grasped the immorality of the arguments used by the slaveholders. They denounced slavery, but they took their reasoning one step further to also indict the values that justify the treatment of women as property. It is ironic that many educated Muslim women are so well able to condemn the principles used by foreign imperialists a century ago to dominate colonized countries but shy away from addressing the moral framework that underpins injustices against their own Muslim sisters.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Virginity is the obsession, the neurosis of Islam.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that honor killings can occur in Texas, New York, and Georgia makes the virtual silence of Western feminists on this subject all the more bizarre and deplorable.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the more pressing business is what feminists can do to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ignoring the problem means abandoning the next victims to their fate; even worse, it means abandoning the core values that sustain Western society.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe the honor-and-shame culture can be discarded. To think otherwise is to define Muslims as as incapable of growth and adaptation, and I can’t think of anything more pejorative and racist.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The liberation of women is like a vast, unfinished house. The west wing is fairly complete…. Go to the east wing, however, and what you find is worse than unfinished.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is my dream. But frankly, I do not know if Western feminists have the courage or clarity of vision to help me realize it.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contempt for women is inscribed in the works of Saint Paul.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I’m told to be careful not to impose Western values on people who don’t want them, I beg to differ. I was not born in the West and I did not grow up in the West. But the delight of being able once I came to the West to let my imagination run free, the pleasure of choosing whom I want to associate with, the joy of reading what I want, and the thrill of being in control of my life—in short, my freedom—is something I feel intensely as I manage to extricate myself from all the shackles and obstacles that my bloodline and my religion imposed. I am not the only one who feels and thinks this.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A mosque is an island of gender apartheid.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beware of zealots of any flavor. Beware of proselytizers of religious utopias. And beware of professors who confuse teaching students how to think with teaching them what to think.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]utrage and clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution", The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2020)
“What the media also do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution", The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2020)
“I came to the U.S. in 2006, having lived in the Netherlands since 1992. Like most immigrants, I came with a confidence that in America I would be judged on my merits rather than on the basis of racial or sexual prejudice. There’s a reason the U.S. remains, as it has long been, the destination of choice for would-be migrants. We know that there is almost no difference in the unemployment rate for foreign-born and native-born workers—unlike in the European Union.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution", The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2020)
“Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now have to meet on Zoom.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution", The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2020)
“The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing it’s simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to discredit its author.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution", The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2020)
“[D]ebate the challenges we confront—not with outrage, but with the kind of critical thinking we Americans were once famous for, which takes self-criticism as the first step toward finding solutions.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution" The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2020)
“What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Biden’s most heartless betrayal (August 18, 2021)
“One truth must be spoken without hesitation. Islamist extremism isn’t merely another grievance-driven movement. It is an existential threat to Western society and to the values that sustain it. It rejects pluralism, despises freedom of conscience, and targets Jews and Christians precisely because those traditions stand for limits on power and the dignity of the individual. History shows this pattern clearly. Where such extremism is tolerated, minorities suffer first, and the wider society follows.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Intifada Comes to Australia (December 14, 2025)
“The man, who was probably an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan, picked up a pair of scissors. With the other hand, he caught hold of the place between my legs and started tweaking it, like Grandma milking a goat. "There it is, the kintir," one of the women said. Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement. "It's just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, it's almost finished." When the sewing was finished, he cut the thread off with his teeth.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Saudi Arabia, everything bad was the fault of the Jews. When the air conditioner broke or suddenly the tap stopped running, the Saudi women next door used to say the Jews did it. The children next door were taught to pray for the health of their parents and the destruction of the Jews. Later, when we went to school, our teachers lamented at length all the evil things Jews had done and planned to do against Muslims. When they were gossiping, the women next door used to say, "She's ugly, she's disobedient, she's a whore--she's sleeping with a Jew." Jews were like djinns, I decided. I had never met a Jew. (Neither had these Saudis.)”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On September 16, 1978, there was an eclipse of the moon in Riyadh. Late one afternoon it became visible: a dark shadow moving slowly across the face of the pale moon in the darkening blue sky. There was a frantic knocking on the door. When I opened it, our neighbor asked if we were safe. He said it was the Day of Judgement, when the Quran says the sun will rise from the west and the seas will flood, when all the dead will rise and Allah's angels will weigh our sins and virtue, expediting the good to Paradise and the bad to Hell. Though it was barely twilight, the muezzin suddenly called for prayer--not one mosque calling carefully after another, as they usually did, but all the mosques clamoring all at once, all over the city. There was shouting across the neighborhood. When I looked outside I saw people praying in the street.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[In Ethiopia,] Abeh enrolled all three of us in school, which was taught in Amharic. We spoke only Somali and Arabic, so everything was completely foreign again for a little while. It wasn't until I could communicate that I came to a startling realization: the little girls in school with me were not Muslims. They said they were Kiristaan, Christian, which in Saudi Arabia had been a hideous playground insult, meaning impure. I went bewildered to my mother, who confirmed it. Ethiopians were kufr, the very sound of the word was scornful. They drank alcohol and they didn't wash properly. They were despicable.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Numbers were a mystery to me. I was so far behind. It was only in Nairobi, at age ten, that I figured out anything at all about the way time is calculated: minutes, hours, years. In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o'clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili.) The months, the days--everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary school did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times. Grandma never learned to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions -- she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband and chosen my father--but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope. Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, although she can't have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent; and she was always depressed.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The “problem family”—people like my relatives—will become more and more common unless Western democracies understand better how to the newcomers into our societies: how to turn them into citizens. I see three main barriers to this process of integration, none of them peculiar to my family. The first is Islam’s treatment of women…. The second obstacle, which may seem trivial to some Western readers, is the difficulty many immigrants from Muslim countries have in dealing with money. Islamic attitudes toward credit and debt and the lack of education of Muslim women about financial matters means that most new immigrants arrive in the West wholly unprepared for the bewildering range of opportunities and obligations presented by a modern consumer society. The third obstacle is the socialization of the Muslim mind. All Muslims are reared to believe the Muhammad, the founder of their religion, was perfectly virtuous and that the moral strictures he left behind should never be questioned. The Quran, as “revealed” to Muhammad, is considered infallible: it is the true word of Allah, and all its commands must be obeyed without question. This makes Muslims vulnerable to indoctrination in a way that followers of other faiths are not. Moreover, the violence that is endemic in so many Muslim societies, ranging from domestic violence to the incessant celebration of holy war, adds to the difficulty of turning people from that world into Western citizens. I can sum up the three obstacles to the integration of my own family in three words: sex, money, and violence.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe there are three institutions in Western society that could ease the transition into Western citizenship of these millions of nomads from the tribal cultures they are leaving. They are institutions that can compete with the agents of jihad for the hearts and minds of Muslims. The first is public education. The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century gave birth to schools and universities run on the principles of critical thinking. Education was aimed at helping the masses emancipate themselves from poverty, superstition, and tyranny through the development of their cognitive abilities.…This public education was geared toward grooming citizens, not preserving the separateness of tribe, the sanctity of the faith, or whatever happened to be the prejudice of the day.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The second institution that can and must do more is the feminist movement. Western feminists should take on the plight of the Muslim woman and make it their own cause. Their aim should be to help the Muslim woman find her voice. Western feminists have a wealth of experience and resources at their disposal. There are three goals they must aspire to in helping their Muslim sisters. The first is to ensure that Muslim girls are free to complete their education; the second is to help them gain ownership of their own bodies and therefore their sexuality; and the third is to make sure that Muslim women have the opportunity not only to enter the workforce but also to stay in it.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Right now, there are two extremes in Christianity, both of which are a liability to Western civilization. The first consists of those who damn the existence of other groups. They take the Bible literally and reject scientific explanations for the existence of man and nature in the name of “intelligent design.” Such fundamentalist Christian groups invest a lot of time and energy in converting people. But much of what they preach is at odds with the core principles of the Enlightenment. At the other extreme are those who would appease Islam—like the spiritual head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who holds that the implementation of Shari’a in the UK is inevitable. Those who adhere to a moderate, peaceful, reformed Christianity are not as active as the first group or as vocal as the second. They should be.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind sick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires—what small space in your life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We who are born into Islam don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy. (Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the prophet Muhammad elevated it and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live happily, in union. Polygamy creates a context of uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the other wife getting? Who is the favored child? If security, safety, and predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for power.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gone with you is that bloodline, for better for for worse, and gone is the idiot tradition that meant you cherished mares and she-camels more than daughters and granddaughters. When a boy was born into the family you rejoiced. Your eyes twinkled, you smiled, and with a burst of energy you would weave impossible numbers of grass mats to give away as gifts. As you wove you would tell us your warrior legends—about courage, resistance, conquest, and sharaf, sharaf, sharaf. Honor, honor, honor. When we heard news of the birth of a girl in the family you clicked and pouted and sometimes sulked for days. Squatting under the talal tree in Mogadishu, on the huge straw mat, you wove, your fingers orange with henna, working away with your muda needle. You would chase us away and speak of ominous events. Then, when you have been quiet for days, you would tell us endless tragedies of the misfortunes that befall a family of too many girls—gossip, betrayal, bastard children, and a’yb, a’yb, a’yb. Shame, shame, shame.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Grandmother, I have compared the infidels’ morals to those that you taught us, and I must report that they have, in practice, a better outcome for humans than the morals of your forefathers. You taught us the virtues of suspicion and distrust, and Islam taught us to survive by taqqiyah, pretending to be something you are not…. The infidel does not see life as a test, a passage to the hereafter, but as an end and a joy in itself…. Because the infidel trusts and studies new ideas, there is abundance in the infidel lands. In these circumstances of peace, knowledge, and predictability, the birth of a girl is just fine. There is no need to pout and sulk and every reason to celebrate and rejoice. The little girl sits right next to the little boy in school; she gets to play as much as he does; she gets to eat as much as he does; she gets the same care in illness as he does; and when she matures she gets the same opportunity to seek and find a mate as he does…. The bloodline is tired and impotent; adhering to it leads only to violence. It is no strategy for unity and progress…. Grandma, fevers and diseases are not caused by jinn and forefathers rising from the dead to torment us, or by an angry God, but by invisible creatures with names like parasites and bacteria and viruses. The infidel’s medicine works better than ours, because it is based on facts, inquiry, and real knowledge…. Grandmother, I no longer believe in the old ways. The world began changing in your lifetime, and by now the old ways are not useful to me anymore. I love you, and I love some of my memories of Somalia, though not all. But I will not serve the bloodline or Allah any longer. And because the old ways hamper the lives of so many of our people, I will even strive to persuade my fellow nomads to take on the ways of the infidel.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“American liberals appear to be more uncomfortable with my condemning the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives are. Rather than standing up for Western freedoms and against the totalitarian Islamic belief system, many liberals prefer to shuffle their feet and look down at their shoes when faced with questions about cultural differences.… Even though their predecessors had once agitated for the rights of workers, the rights of women, and the rights of blacks, American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam. So Brookings said no to me and the AEI said yes.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I quickly felt that I belonged at the American Enterprise Institute. The week I arrived in Washington I was introduced to a man I had long hoped to meet, Charles Murray, who in 1994 cowrote The Bell Curve. When his book was published I was still a student at the University of Leiden, where it seemed everyone was talking about this horribly racist book that argued that black people were genetically of lower intelligence than white people. I read it, of course, and I found it to be the opposite of racist, a compassionately written book about the urban challenges that confront black people more than white. All black people should read it. When I as introduced to Murray, I couldn’t help thinking that even his head was shaped like a precise bell curve. While we exchanged greetings, I mentioned that I recognized his name from reading his book, at which point he gritted his teeth, no doubt bracing himself for another attack from an offended black person. When I said how great I thought his book was, his smile was so broad and so surprised. We became instant friends.”
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“An element as powerful and potent as a Muslim girl’s virginity also has great commodity value, which means that virginity is above all a man’s business. Daughters are bait for attracting alliances, or they can be reserved for the highest bidder. Power, wealth, and the solidifying of clan relations may hinge on marriage alliances, so raising daughters of quality who are modest and docile is important. Using velocity to ensure their obedience and to warn them against straying is a perfectly legitimate reminder of the law in a system of values in which women have only a little more free will than livestock.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.”
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