Europe’s Loss, America’s Gain

THOSE who know the Muslim world have long maintained that the necessary reforms will occur only when women are no longer willing to put up with the injustices that its culture and customs do to them. Comes the hour, comes the woman. Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she was born in Somalia in 1969. In person she is graceful and soft-spoken, determined but not combative. In the language spoken in Somalia, Ayaan means “lucky,” and her adventures and pitfalls have elements of a fairy tale in which our heroine has the courage and the intellect to take her life into her own hands and set an example for others to follow. For one thing, she is challenging Muslims to find a modern definition of themselves; and for another, she recently brought down the Dutch government.

Somalia is an almost exclusively Sunni Muslim country, though divided into clans and sub-clans constantly at war with one another over “land, women, horses, and water,” as she puts it. In her childhood, the country was in the grip of Mohamed Siad Barre, a typical Third World dictator ruling with the secret police, a self-proclaimed Communist and therefore supported by the Soviet Union. Throughout her childhood, her father was away from home, in exile conspiring with

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

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THOSE who know the Muslim world have long maintained that the necessary reforms will occur only when women are no longer willing to put up with the injustices that its culture and customs do to them. Comes the hour, comes the woman. Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she was born in Somalia in 1969. In person she is graceful and soft-spoken, determined but not combative. In the language spoken in Somalia, Ayaan means “lucky,” and her adventures and pitfalls have elements of a fairy tale in which our heroine has the courage and the intellect to take her life into her own hands and set an example for others to follow. For one thing, she is challenging Muslims to find a modern definition of themselves; and for another, she recently brought down the Dutch government.

Somalia is an almost exclusively Sunni Muslim country, though divided into clans and sub-clans constantly at war with one another over “land, women, horses, and water,” as she puts it. In her childhood, the country was in the grip of Mohamed Siad Barre, a typical Third World dictator ruling with the secret police, a self-proclaimed Communist and therefore supported by the Soviet Union. Throughout her childhood, her father was away from home, in exile conspiring with