From Muslim, to Atheist, to Christian - The Brilliant Ayaan Hirsi Ali reveals her journey

 

One of the great heroes of the Truth, just got even greater:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why I Am Now a Christian I was born a Muslim in Somalia. Then I became an atheist. But secular tools alone can’t equip us for civilizational war. AYAAN HIRSI ALI NOV 14 ∙ GUEST POST (Photo by Christian Marquardt/Getty Images) Bari Weiss:  One of the biggest stories of the past few days didn’t happen in Washington or Gaza or Tehran, but was an invisible change that happened inside the heart and mind of one woman: Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan is many things: she is a refugee from Somalia, where she was the victim of female genital mutilation; she was a Dutch politician whose criticism of Islam, the religion she was raised in, led to death threats.  Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on Submission, a film about Islam, was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam. The killer left a note stabbed into his body warning that Ayaan would be next.  A normal person would have shut up. But Ayaan is not normal. She wrote a memoir, Infidel. She became a mother. She became an American. And she never, ever quieted her voice.  It is for all of these reasons and many more that Ayaan is one of the great heroes of our time. She has also been, since the early 2000s, among the most prominent atheists in the world. Or at least she was until late last week, when she announced in the pages of UnHerd that she has converted to Christianity.  The Egyptian intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour wrote in reaction to the news that “Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s announcement of embracing Christianity is one of the biggest pivotal moments culturally since 9/11 and I don’t know how many people actually realize that. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam. Not just is she saying that she is not certain about that promise anymore, she is saying she isn’t even certain about the promise of the future the New Atheists could afford themselves. Mansour continued: “As Western elites ditched Ayaan for the Islamists, Ayaan turned to the ancient fort of Christianity for a last escape.” Ayaan’s decision to convert prompts a series of very big questions that go to the heart of the challenges facing the West at present: Can religion be justified on pragmatic grounds, or does it require sincere faith? Is an increasingly secular West doomed to lose the civilizational war we find ourselves in? Can Christianity actually serve as a unifying force in that fight? And if religion won’t unite us, what else might? For today, we wanted to share her essay with you. And we are grateful to our friends at UnHerd for allowing us to reprint it. —BW  Click on the sentence below to go to Bari Weiss' blog to read the brilliant column by Ayaan Hirsi Ali... In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” ================================================