A Conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Do you believe that Islam is a danger to the West, and, if so, what do you deem the severity of its current danger?

I believe that Islam is two things in one. One it’s a religion. It has the attributes of a religion—the praying, the fasting, the belief in a transcendent, transcendental power. So, it’s a faith, but there is a much more important and more consequential characteristic of Islam, which is the political, and political Islam is a danger to the West. It’s a danger to the world, because the key component of political Islam is that, in order to worship God and in order to fulfill God’s commands, it’s not enough to pray and to fast and to pay charity, and all those religious aspects of it. You have to wage holy war against unbelievers, and bring the world under the dominion of Islam. And even if that costs the lives of Muslims, even if that costs and sows chaos, even it leads to wars, it’s all worth the sacrifice. And because that seed of political Islam, with that component of holy war, has not been fully challenged, Islam remains a threat to the world.

But, before I finish, I also want to say for political Islam and any other kinds of destructive ideas to be an actual threat to the west, the West has to be in a place of decline and demoralization. And I find that to be ultimately more of a threat: that the West has lost confidence in her own foundational principles, and in her own ideas and ideals. And that’s why political Islam today is a threat when it wasn’t a threat, say, 100 years ago. In fact, Islam—political Islam—felt threatened and was threatened by the West, and so that’s my sort of two cents on that question.

How much of the Muslim Brotherhood’s goals have been achieved, and are those goals on schedule?

So I think it’s important for your audience to know what the Muslim Brotherhood is, and, more importantly, to know who Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was.

He established the movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1928 as a reaction. And he wasn’t alone. There were others who, in the Muslim world at that time, felt the same way. The Muslim world was ascendant from the time the Prophet went to Madinah in the seventh century, all the way to the—shall we say—roughly the end of the eighteenth century, and then it begins to decline. The West becomes ascendant, and Muslim empires are invaded and colonized by the West. And, at the time, contemporary Muslim leaders responded in different ways. One way was to copy the West and to say, “Well, we concede they have defeated us” in the territories that mattered at the time, and that was military, science, technology, forms of government. “Right, and we have to become like them. We’ve got to copy them. The Empire is gone. We have to understand and accept the notion of nation states,” etc. A very clear example of a Muslim leader who followed and who went down that path is Mustafa Atatürk. He established a secular Turkey and put in place a military that would stop it ever from becoming Islamist. But that’s a story for a different time.

But there were others, and Hassan al-Banna is a very prominent one of those who concluded that “No,” the way forward was not to copy the West. It’s the opposite. It was to go back to the “fruits” of Islam, what made Islam great in the first place. And so we have to take away layers of history, layers of moderation, which he thought of not as moderation but as the seeds for decline. And so he went to this incredibly—what we in the West call—radical or fundamentalist or puritanical Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement was the vehicle for establishing a vanguard, a place to launch that idea of his to bring back Islam as the dominant force in world affairs.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not just a local Egyptian project, but it was an international, global project. And it was two-faced. It had the face of, you know, addressing local Egyptian problems—poverty, lack of education, lack of other resources, and, of course, addressing tyranny, which is, unfortunately, what a lot of post-Islamic nation states stand out to be: they became tyrannical, authoritarian governments. And so, when Hassan al-Banna and those whom he inspired were addressing the issues of tyranny, authoritarianism, human dignity, lack of charity, great poverty, all of these things were real issues, but the remedy he was proposing was the one of political Islam. Islam has to come to power and take over political power, and those issues would be addressed, but it wouldn’t be enough for the Muslim Brotherhood to take political power and address what ails Muslims—it had to dominate the entire world. And, over time, it spread and spread far and wide and away from Egypt and its Middle Eastern locales. It started to come to the West, and I think one of the first organizations it started was the Muslim Students’ Association, here in in the United States.

But it wasn’t limited to the United States. It did the same thing all across Europe, Indonesia. I was a 14-year-old teenager, 15-year-old teenager, when I first encountered branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and its teachings. If you look at all the pan-nationalist or global Islamist movements, I would say, in 2024, the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization and a movement is the most successful. It’s even more successful than the Islamist-led projects by the Islamist government of Iran. And the Islamist government of Iran is using state power, which is it means it has infinitely more resources than a tiny movement that was founded by a low-level junior teacher. And yet the Muslim Brotherhood is, I would say, much more formidable than the Iranian Shi‘ah project to spread Islam and destroy the state of Israel.

Why do you think the murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture of Jews (children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly)—let alone that of women and children under Islam in general—elicit so little pity amongst so many in Europe and America, especially Western feminists?

That’s a very, very broad question, and it is the question of our time. But I think that speaks to the decline of the West and a lack of self-confidence; the emergence of a self-loathing narrative of the West, where the West fixates on things that Western civilization got wrong but eventually corrected. If you look at the reflection on American history, we no longer teach what’s great about America; we only teach the things that America got wrong. 1776 has to be replaced by 1619. If you look across the Atlantic, Britain and other European countries—because race there doesn’t really stick—it’s easy to accuse Americans of racism, but it’s different in Europe. So they’ve started to revive anti-colonial narratives. And if you look at these anti-colonial and anti-slavery narratives that are advanced by Western-born ideologues—socialism, Marxism, Leninism—these are ideas that were born in the West and spread in the West and beyond the West into other places. 

But this self-loathing is coming from American universities and the Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is delighted. The Muslim Brotherhood is exploiting this. And the Muslim Brotherhood is therefore able—if you look at this, the so-called “Red-Green Alliance”—the Council on American-Islamic Relations is able to convince their “red” counterparts that if they actually detest colonialism, as they say they do, then they must recognize that Israel is a white European settler state. Israel is the oppressor, and then violence, therefore, is wholly justified, and the victim victimized: a narrative that is the core foundation of what we call “wokeism” is applied to that conflict between Israel and the Arabs, and the Arabs in Gaza and in the “West Bank.” And so, from a narrative perspective, the young people who were indoctrinated with this wokeism have no inoculation, I would say, against the potent ideology of Hassan al-Banna and of Islamism. 

Everything that a young, shall we say, 21-year-old student in America can throw at an Islamist is thrown back right at them. You know, take the sexual violence of October 7—the way the women, the girls, even babies, were subjected to the most gruesome sexual violence—and you would think that every Western feminist organization, every Western man and woman would simply say, “Let’s just agree on that one and condemn that wholeheartedly. No, ‘buts,’ no ‘ifs.’” That can’t happen because we are saturated in this narrative that we have something to atone for. We have to atone for our sins of slavery, segregation, and colonization, for stealing land from the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia and New Zealand—that we are guilty of genocide, and so we’re guilty of racism. We have to atone, atone, atone. And so when these bad ideas come along, I think we’ve made ourselves vulnerable, dangerously so, to these ideas; to da‘wah, to the spread of radical Islam, through narratives, through non-violent means.

To me, I think we are losing. We’re losing the narratives game. We are no longer responding to these in the realm of ideas with the simple assertion of our ideas of human dignity and due process and curiosity and human freedom—that life matters more than destruction and death. We’re not responding confidently, and so we are. We’re allowing ourselves to be bamboozled and our young people bamboozled into letting them get away with these horrendous crimes against humanity. We are being told that we have to side with Hamas, the perpetrators of October 7, over the teeny, tiny state that’s been in existential crisis from the time of its inception.

Do you think the way the left expresses its support for Islam and the Palestinians racist because it insists on judging them by an infantilizing, bottom-drawer standard?

It is racist without question; and it’s racist again if you dig and drill through into this wokeist ideology of victim and victimizer. “People of color” cannot be victimized as they’re always the victims. The oppressor is the white man. What does it tell you? First of all, just think about “victim and victimizer” and “oppressor and oppressed.” For me, these words denote strength, and the assumption is people of color can never be strong. They can never be strong enough to oppress. It’s a factual lie. We know from human history, and we know all across the country where people, white people, have never set foot that people of color have been oppressing people of color. Black people have oppressed black people. I come from Somalia. We had a period of 20 years of rule by a tyrant who’s of my clan, and he had massacred hundreds of thousands of Somalis, and then we descended into civil war, and it was Somalis killing Somalis. And the same goes for everywhere. Syrians killing Syrian; Iraqis killing Iraqis; Arabs killing Arabs; Muslims killing Muslims.

The history of oppressor and oppressed is just human history. And if you take a small slice of it at one point where, yes, there were white people involved in oppressing not just people of color but also other whites, and you tell only that little bit without context, without anything, and you leave out the parts where there were hundreds of thousands and millions of white people who objected to these types of oppression—in fact, created societies that are stable, prosperous, and amazing—then what you get, I think, is this racist narrative: a truly racist narrative with the assumption that people of color are always victims. And if you then narrow it down to what’s going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians, then the Palestinians can never be held responsible for anything they do. They cannot be held responsible for taking women and children and using them as civilian shields, knowing that they’re going to be killed, knowing that the bombs will fall on them.

They are not held responsible for programming young children with suicidal ideas of martyrdom. They cannot be held responsible for refusing absolutely every single serious attempt at peace with the Israelis. They can’t be held responsible for what happened on October 7. It all has to be done by someone else. And so, you know, it’s racism of the worst kind, because the assumption is they’ll never meet the standards. See, Israel is constantly told, “You know, maybe it’s justified that Israel ought to defend herself against what happened on October 7, but then she has to meet these incredibly high standards.” So, the standards for Israel are higher and higher and higher all the time—and why? Because the assumption is, whether you like it or not, they are superior because they can’t meet these standards. Whereas Arabs and Palestinians—well, every time they pull out of the peace process, what does it tell you? Should we hold them accountable? Do we think that they, too, are endowed with reason and with intelligence? What does it say about what you are saying about the Arabs? What are you saying about the Palestinians when you keep making excuses for them?

They get a state Gaza, Hamas wins elections with the support of an overwhelming majority of the people who live in Gaza, and they govern like tyrants. They’re not held accountable. They kill their own people and subjugate them and imprison them. They are not held accountable. They take the resources the international community gives them to build a state, and, instead, they build tunnels and they buy rockets because they are so obsessed with destroying Israel, which is considered an enemy, rather than feeding and educating their own people and caring about the lives of their own people. They get away with it. They’re never held accountable. So there is no standard whatsoever to which the Palestinians are held at all for any length of time that can bring about a state of peace; and that, to me, is the purest of racism that we’ve ever seen.

It is racism against Palestinians. It’s racism against the children of Gaza. The children of Gaza deserve better. They deserve better leadership. And if the children of Gaza—every day, we are told, in wall-to-wall coverage, that’s why they’re flying these flags and why they’re out there protesting—the question is, if you really—if we really—care about Palestinian children and the children of Gaza and the West Bank, then you should be protesting for a better leadership. You should be protesting for the demise of Hamas, because it’s Hamas that keeps putting them in this situation over and over and over again. But that’s, of course, not going to happen, because, right now, the reintroduction of racism and tribalism is the human and Western collective madness that we’re riding on. It’s the collective madness of our time.

Can Israel actually trust any of the Arab countries which signed or say they want to sign peace agreements? If Iran just disappeared tomorrow, would they revert back to business as usual?

My advice to Israel, both the government and the people, is “trust but verify.” That’s a quote from Ronald Reagan. Yes, it’s true that some of the most important Arab countries have come ’round to accepting that Israel is here to stay, and they want to take it one point further and say “We want normalization along economic and maybe even security lines.”

Now, the logical conclusion of that is obviously to settle this—shall we call it the “Palestinian question”? And I think that Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others, except Qatar—even Egypt—would like this normalization process to go on and to be concluded in ways that bring peace and security for the Arab side of the equation and the Muslim side of the equation, but also on the Jewish side. Actions speak louder than words. The UAE has demonstrated that she wants friendship by allowing synagogues, I suppose, even churches: allowing openly to recognize Israel and trade with Israel and that’s a good thing. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who is obviously in a much trickier position, has also expressed his desire for this normalization process. Egypt, Jordan—behind closed doors—you hear this desire for normalization, the recognition of Israel, the emphasis on what we have in common. More importantly, from the people of Iran, not the regime of Iran. It’s pretty obvious that the people of Iran feel no hostility towards Jews in general or Israel in particular, and that, in fact, many of them are actually supporters of Israel, and they come out openly, and they say it when they know that their own government is not going to lock them up and torture them and kill them and throw them off tall buildings.

But, yeah, going forward, I think we have to go back to where you started this conversation. With the Muslim Brotherhood. And that is taking us back to the realm of ideas: the idea of political Islam. As long as that idea is alive, and as long as that idea is followed by large numbers of people, as is the case today, then Israel and Jews, wherever they are, are not safe from that idea, because baked into that idea is the destruction of Israel, and that’s the destruction of Jews.

And so that’s where I think, when we are having open and honest conversations with leaders of Arab countries, is what are we going talk about. What are we going to do about the idea of political Islam now? For a country like Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the UAE, with authoritarian governments, up to a point, it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we banned the Muslim Brotherhood. Why don’t you ban them?” That’s the most common assertion that I hear when I go to various conferences and seminars and lectures. And, you know, Gulf Arabs talk about all the measures that they have taken to combat the Muslim Brotherhood and their ideas, and Salafism and various denominations of Wahhabi theology. We are open societies. We are liberal societies. We believe in freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, we believe in freedom of speech. And so, for us—and so it’s the same in Israel—it’s very hard for us to simply adopt the attitude of an authoritarian government towards an unwanted ideological movement. But, in the future, I think it’s going to have to be a collaboration between the countries that are the home of Islam—the countries where large numbers of Muslims have migrated to.

So, as long as the idea of political Islam is alive and well, and as long as Muslim leaders—political leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders—are not willing to engage with that idea in the realm of ideas, they will use military force. Hassan al-Banna was killed in Egypt, and many of the other Islamists that adopted his ideas were killed in Egypt. They were killed in Syria. They’re killed in Saudi Arabia. They’re imprisoned and killed in the UAE. But the idea is not dead. And I think this is the same question. When this campaign against Hamas, the military campaign, ends in a military victory, what are we going to do about the idea itself? To my horror, I mean, I’ve been speaking out against this since 2001, and I kept saying and repeat over and over again, “I understand that we are, militarily speaking, superior. I understand that, economically speaking, we have more resources.” But, this idea—Elon Musk called it a “mind virus”—that mind virus, as long as it’s lodged in the hearts and minds of numerous people who want to act on it, then we will run out of resources, and they’ll still be around. You’ve got to treat the mind virus first, and it is there, I think, the resources should be directed both in the West and there in the Middle East.

Some studies and some imams’ sermons show that Islam has an apostasy problem: while birth rates are very high, apostasy rates aren’t far behind, and the conversion rate is very low; do you think Islam is in trouble, that the imams’ fears of an apostasy “avalanche” are justified, and what could this mean for the world?

And this is tied to the question I just finished answering about the mind viruses. Again, because it is ideas and, ultimately, a religion based on fear alone is hard to maintain. So, if you stay within the religion for no other reason than that you are afraid, then the imams and the people who want you to stay in the religion rely only on means of intimidation to enforce the faith. So, of course, they are worried about an avalanche of blasphemy and an avalanche of people abandoning Islam, and it has happened.

And technology—I know we’ve said all sorts of bad things about technology. Lately, we’ve lost faith in social media and so on and so forth, but the new technology of the Internet has democratized the sharing information and knowledge so that it can now happen without the control and filters of, to a large degree, the state, of imams, and other theological enforces outside even of your family. So you are seeing more and more people leaving Islam and going on these websites and forming friendships with ex-Muslims and so on.

I’ve never had so many friends—“Muslim” friends—in my life, and they’re very sincere. And the abandoning of Islam as an idea is just as real. But what it tells me is these leaders, whether they are Western leaders or Arab leaders, who are struggling to fight the mind virus of political Islam should, in fact, not be afraid of fighting the idea on its own merits. It’s an idea, ultimately, that shouts from the rooftops, “We believe in death. You believe in life.” So if we were to go and fight this idea, collectively as Muslims and non-Muslims, we could say to the those who are pushing for political Islam, “There are more people who believe in life than death. You are about death and destruction, and we could win on the basis of the platform of ideas.” They are now winning without using military force.

When the Islamists were using terrorism—when they were forcing people physically, when they were blowing things up—they weren’t winning. They were, in fact, losing believers. ISIS lost Islam more believers than any other movement. So violence did not really reward them. What is rewarding is that they can go and find these young, impressionable, impressionable minds and fill their heads and hearts with these political Islam narratives. And that is where we ought to fight them.

And so I think the two things, those two questions, are tied together. You’ve got to fight this on the level of ideas, and I know that Muslim political leaders will fight them up to a point, but they’re afraid of going to the bottom of the idea, because that’s going to throw them in cognitive dissonance. Because that’s going to force them to take a stand on some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. And so, as long as that is the case, then Israel will need her Iron Dome in Israel. Israel will need to arm herself to the teeth, and maybe Israel and Jews themselves will need to get and engage in this battle of ideas.

You can never rely on others for your own security. You cannot rely on others. History has made that clear to you plenty of times.