Guardian Interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Surprised To Find Multiculturalism Crumbling In The Face Of Radical Islam

A little over two years ago, a second-generation Dutch Moroccan by the name of Mohammed Bouyeri sent a letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Aside from the destruction of Holland and Europe, Bouyeri called for the death of Hirsi Ali, whom he described as a ‘fundamentalist unbeliever’ and a ‘soldier of evil’. His macabre method of delivering the correspondence was to impale the note in the chest of the filmmaker and outspoken maverick, Theo van Gogh, having already shot him eight times and cut his throat through to the spine. Van Gogh had made a short film with Hirsi Ali called Submission 1, in which lines from the Koran, detailing a man’s right to beat his wife, were superimposed on the body of an actress portraying a victim of domestic violence.

The murder took place in broad daylight during the morning rush hour in a busy Amsterdam high street. Though the letter was addressed to Hirsi Ali, it was intended for a wider audience. Its message, while incoherent and rambling, was shockingly simple: say the wrong thing about Islam and nowhere is safe for you. It was medieval justice meted out in one of the most liberal and modern cities in the world. The killer, it turned out, was part of a cell linked to a fundamentalist network that stretched across Europe…

Last year Hirsi Ali, the most assimilated of all Dutch immigrants, was rejected by her adopted homeland twice over. Residents in her apartment block gained a court ruling, under European Human Rights law, stipulating that her presence placed her neighbours at risk, and she was duly evicted. At the same time a TV documentary alleged the MP had provided false information on her original asylum application. Hirsi Ali had admitted as much many times in interviews but nonetheless a minister in her own party decided to revoke her citizenship…

Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a ‘slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist’. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.