Ayaan Hirsi Ali: podcast appearances and interviews

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lady Ferguson, was born Ayaan Hirsi Magan on November 13, 1969, in the Somali Democratic Republic. She is a Somali-born Dutch-American writer, activist, conservative thinker, and former politician. Her early life included experiencing female genital mutilation organized by her grandmother, and her family moved across various countries in Africa and the Middle East. She received political asylum in the Netherlands at age 23 and acquired Dutch citizenship five years later. In her early 30s, Hirsi Ali renounced her childhood religious beliefs, identifying as an atheist, and became involved in Dutch centre-right politics as a member of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. She was elected to the lower house of the States General of the Netherlands in 2003. During her time in parliament, she collaborated on the film Submission with Theo van Gogh, which addressed women's oppression under fundamentalist Islamic law and was critical of the Muslim canon. The film's controversy and the subsequent murder of Van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri led Hirsi Ali into hiding and heightened her criticism of Islam. In 2005, she was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine. Later moving to the United States, she joined the American Enterprise Institute, becoming a prominent writer, activist, and public intellectual. Her bestselling books include Infidel, Nomad, and Heretic. In 2023, she announced her conversion to Christianity. She is married to historian Niall Ferguson, and the couple raises their sons in the United States, where she became a citizen in 2013.