Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Threat to the West

>> Andrew Roberts: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an activist, author, and one of the world's bravest and most outspoken advocates for free speech. Ayaan, in your extraordinary autobiography, Infidel, you described your upbringing and life in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. History seems to have played an important part of that.

At the age of five, you're expected to recall 300 years of your family tree. How much of your identity when you were growing up depended on the past?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I would say pretty much 100% as you can you say the clan line. I'm not just an individual. I'm the daughter of the son, the daughter of Hersey, who's the son of Ali.

Ali was later in his life called Magan because he was a conqueror and it was an honorific name. And in the Somali now, in the way I was told he was a conqueror, but I think in modern English, you would probably call him a raider.

>> Andrew Roberts: Not a protector that's the other word that you use, I think, in the book is that.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah, conqueror, so it's a long explanation. It is he who protects those he conquers. Now, of course, we're all going to laugh and say, don't conquer them in the first place, but that was, that was the honorific name, and that's Magan, and then the son of Isa, Gulad, Ali wise and so on.

And that is each generation goes back but that's your identity card. Your bloodline is your identity card. And born in 1969, Somalia became independent of Britain and Italy in 1960. And very soon there is a coup, as is in many African countries, and things start to fall apart.

And that's where the bloodline comes in because that identity card, that's what is a genetic passport of yours. That's really what protects you. It is the people who helped my mother get us out of Somalia and escaping to Saudi Arabia of the bloodline. And the man who helped my father escape from prison in Saudi Arabia was of the bloodline.

We call each other distant cousins. We don't even use the word distant. We use in other to mean anyone who's related to you on your father's side and in up to anyone who's related to you on your mother's side. And so that's how the bloodline works, and that's how history works. And I think what you call racism is what we would call clannism.

>> Andrew Roberts: So what are the strengths and weaknesses of that approach to the past, would you say?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, it's in a small setting when the whole world is your enemy. It works during the Old Testament years, but in 2025 it doesn't work. And it didn't work in ever since modernity came to Africa and to all into the Middle east and to all these other places, the clan system simply doesn't work as it should. And the reason why the nation state Somalia never succeeded is because people were more loyal to their clans than they are to the nation states.

And, they didn't feel, I think now that I'm married to a British man, sometimes I do sense, how my husband sometimes bristles when people think that he's English and he says, no, I'm not English, I'm Scottish. So that resonates.

>> Andrew Roberts: You can say that again. He says it the entire time.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yes, but you see, in the current British setting, it's all very friendly and it's a lot of banter and people laugh about it. But when I was growing up, there was no laughing about it. People were really hostile to one another. And in 1991, when Somalia collapsed, these clans were slaughtering one another.

So one day you're married to each other's clans, you are trading with one another, your neighbors, you are living, relatively speaking, peacefully next to one another. And the next time you're literally slaughtering one another. And so that is, I would say the clan system or the tribal system is just by definition genocidal because there's zero sum mentality of.

If there's talk about resources like energy or water or money or the means of production in the way the clan thinks about it's either ours or yours. There is no gray area very often they do have settings where these clans have elders and the elders meet with the other elders and so on and so forth.

And sometimes the peace can be kept for quite a long time. There are some large that look after some smaller clients in exchange for something.

>> Andrew Roberts: Your own campaigning life is concentrated in the areas of women's rights, forced marriage, child marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor killing. Where are we on those issues now compared to when you started campaigning on them earlier in your life?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So I started campaigning in 2001 rights right around that time. And I was very hopeful that we would move away from these. Everything that you listed there is the tribal way of doing things. Female gender mutilation is the tribal method by which girls are held virgins until they're married off.

And honor killings, it's the same. The honor and shame code is code of conduct that governs the clan and tribe life. And so I was very optimistic 24 years ago that the people like me who come from, these backgrounds from tribal life and from very religious Muslim backgrounds.

And from other third World countries that when they come to Europe and America, when they come to the west, they would shed these practices and this mentality. And when you ask me the question now, so where are we now two decades on, I'll say unfortunately it's the other way around.

We're backsliding. We have now got ghettos all over Europe where the immigrant communities have replicated the environments that they fled. And not just, I'm not talking about the city center of Mogadishu or Nairobi or Riyadh Njidda. I'm talking about the rural areas. If you've read Infidel, there's this distinction we make in Somali between me and Magalo.

And Magalo would stand for city, urban, civilized living with A lot of people in one place. Sometimes, it also means sophisticated and sorry, that's Magalo. Magalo is the city and Ni means anything outside of that, and what you perhaps call country pumpkins or crude, coarse, unsophisticated, and so on.

And so it's replications of the MIYI settings occurring in Europe with all the problems for women, immigrant women, Muslim women, but now also spilling over to European women. And I know that you probably have questions about that, but of course what's mind boggling is that the leadership in these European countries allow this to happen.

And not just allow it, but keep on bringing more and more people from those places so that assimilation never really gets a chance.

>> Andrew Roberts: The victory of the Taliban over the US led coalition in Afghanistan in 2021 fits into all of this of course, doesn't it? And that was presumably a tragedy for the causes that you spent much of your life campaigning for.

As far as the people who stayed in Afghanistan were concerned. Where and when do you think the, the west went wrong in that country?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: In Afghanistan?

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah. And obviously, with the regard to leaving Afghanistan, that completely botched operation, when Biden quitted Afghanistan, that was pretty bad.

But do you think, that there were earlier problems?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I think so. I think from the get go when 9, 11, 2001 happened, America had to act. And America at that time had the support of a majority of the world and Bin Laden resigned. And so it made sense to the Bush administration to invade Afghanistan, but wasn't clear what the objectives.

Once we invade, what are we going to do? So America's history is a history of, you know, liberating itself from the colonial power that was Britain. And so they've always been anti colonial and America never really acknowledged the fact that they are empire. And so the question was, all right, we're in Afghanistan now and they've gotten rid of Al Qaeda to a certain point, what do we do next?

And that is when the theories of counterinsurgency were applied, which really was a modern day use of the word colonized. They were going to settle in Afghanistan, and they were going to modernize them and civilize them and so on. It just never happened that way. And I think the problem was the military object were contaminated with the competing ideological, the prevalent ideological sensibilities of America in the early 2000s and so on.

You know, we are not an empire, we're not a colonial power. We are going to get these people, haul them out of the 7th century into the 21st century, but we're going to do it on their terms. That didn't work. It didn't work in Afghanistan. It didn't work in Iraq.

It's not going to work anywhere else. But in the meantime, women in Afghanistan, and actually men too, were given the hope that America was there for them and that America would shield them against the Taliban fanatics and against a comeback of Al Qaeda. And for a long time, things went well for, relatively speaking, better than things were for the women of Afghanistan and those men in Afghanistan who wanted to move on.

But there were very high levels of corruption, and that wasn't counted because we were pretending we weren't colonizing them, and so we couldn't hold anyone accountable. And every cynic from everywhere came, and there were lots and lots of exploitations. I think our dear friend McMaster can tell this story better than anyone else.

The story of the corruption and what we got wrong. But what we got wrong, in my view, was that we gave all these women the hope that things would be better. And I think if we had stayed a little longer, at least long enough for a generation of men from Afghanistan to adopt the view that women are equal to men and that they have their own rights and they deserve respect and that your society will stay backward if you keep half the population backward.

If a generation of men from Afghanistan had adopted that worldview, things might have looked better. And so when Biden came to power, it was just a few months into his presidency. I have no clue what went into his head, because as you remember, Covid was still ongoing and had devastated not just the American economy, but the world economy.

And so I don't know why he prioritized that, but he left very suddenly and in the most shambolic, shameful way ever. And he let down the Americans, because we spent a lot of blood and treasure there. We have nothing to show for it. We also left a lot of equipment and a lot of money for the people who are in power now, which is the Taliban.

And the Taliban did what the Taliban do and what members of the Muslim Brotherhood do. The Taliban, in their ideology, they're very much in-sync with the Muslim Brotherhood. They did what they always do, which is lie in your infidel face and say, we're going to be. Everything is going to be fine.

We're going to adhere to human rights and so on. But as soon as the Americans left, they put the women back in burqas, put them back in house arrest, closed the schools, removed women's sports, and now they have all the money, and the power to enforce it. So it's a very tragic end.

>> Andrew Roberts: You subtitled your 2010 book Nomad with the words, A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations, which was presumably a reference to Samuel Huntington's classic 1996 book. Much of Huntington's thesis, it was founded on history, but his view of the past has been vigorously rejected by liberal and leftist and Muslim scholars and writers.

Do you think Huntington's theory still holds water?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, absolutely. He was more than a theorist. I mean, at this point, we'll just say Samuel Huntington was actually a prophet and all these leftists and liberals and they were stamping their feet. And I mean, every article that was against his theses wasn't so much that he is wrong.

They never engaged with the empirical facts that he was putting on the table or his analysis. They were simply mad that what he was describing was not consistent with their worldview. And the utopian, you know, in hindsight, nonsensical view of human beings and humanity and relations between nations.

And so they were wrong and he was right. And now we still have to deal with the empirics of what he told us, first in the article and then later in his 1996 book. But now we are paying a lot more. Blood and treasure. And strategically speaking, we're now behind.

I mean, look at our relationship with China. How was Huntington wrong? Look at our relationship with radical Islam. How is he wrong? And Putin and the fact that he plainly stated that it's going to be a conflict. Not just between civilizations. And some of these civilizations will compete, some will collaborate.

But he said there's going, it's also going to be the west versus the rest. And at times you see the rest ganging up on us. So, he was right, and it's just a tragedy that we ignored our best.

>> Andrew Roberts: In your 2015 book, Heretic, you called for a long overdue reformation of the Muslim faith, much like the ones that Judaism and Christianity underwent, which prepared them for existence in the modern world.

Why do you think this reformation, this modernization process never happened for Islam? Do you see any prospect for it?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I do see a prospect, let me start with the second question of do I see a prospect? I look at Mohammed Bin Salman, who is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and some of the very dramatic choices he has made, in which case where he is embracing life on earth for his people.

Which is a very young population, and he is seeking to build those things that make life on earth comfortable, universities, careers, concerts. He's removed the Muslim Brotherhood from Saudi Arabia and other fanatics. Now, that doesn't mean that Saudi Arabia is not still a theocracy. It doesn't mean that he observes human rights the way he ought to.

All that it means is that he has embarked on a path of modernization. And just by doing that, he is rejecting the most basic principles that the Islamic fanatics consistently point to. And so, in this case, if the custodian of the holy places of Mecca and Medina says, I am going to do this, I don't need your endorsement, and he's locking them up, then there you have your progress.

But the question is, is it going to last if. And it's not just Saudi Arabia, it's the United Arab Emirates, it seems to me. It's also the leadership of Egypt, of Bahrain. I see a great deal of hope in Indonesia, that's the world's largest Muslim population, all rejecting radical Islam and radical political Islam.

And that's in my book Heretic, I call that Medina Islam, and Medina Islam is dedicated to Dawah. That is the invitation or the call to Islam for Muslims and Non-Muslims alike. And then when that fails, the use of jihad. So, that's what these Muslim countries used to endorse, and finance with oil money.

And that's what they have stopped doing since the Arab Spring because they were obviously very worried that they would be overthrown. But in terms of the theology of Islam, and who speaks for that theology, that's a problem that we haven't solved yet. And I have my hopes that after this conflict between Hamas and Israel comes down, and it is really not between Hamas and Israel, it's between Iran and Israel.

But when that conflict is won militarily by Israel with the help of America, or maybe not with the help of America, it doesn't matter, but Israel can defeat Iran militarily. The next step is to focus on the ideology. It's this ideology that's moved from generation to generation that inspires the fanatics, the radical political Islamists, and that poisons the hearts and minds of millions of young men, and they then end up being recruited for the jihad.

So, I think Saudi Arabia changing, and taking along with her the other Muslim countries is a fast step, but the next step is to fight the ideology, and that's the long war.

>> Andrew Roberts: And the past has an important part to play here, doesn't it? Because it's often said that Islamic fundamentalism is driven by a profound sense of the Muslim world having historically been in decline since the Muslims were expelled From Spain in 1492, Ottoman armies were turned back from the gates of Vienna in 1683, and the caliphate was abolished in 1922.

Osama bin Laden himself often cited Muslim historical humiliations such as these in his speeches. Do you subscribe to the theory that this essentially revanchist view of the past fuels Islamist extremism? And if so, what on earth can be done about it?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, what can be done about it is to invest in the future, and that is to invest in your societies, invest in such things as, you know, economic prosperity and political stability. I know that we used to say democracy, but that's going to take them a while to get to the, I think to get there, we would have to work with the countries and the governments that want to work with us. And we would have to no longer entertain this sense of, you know, political Islam was an empire that's conquered other peoples and governed them, and they failed.

And we are not going back to that time and even anywhere. I mean, look at the places that the radical Muslims conquered, it's Afghanistan, it's parts of Nigeria under Boko Haram, parts of Somalia under the Shabaab, the Islamist regime of Iran. All of those places failed states, and failed economies.

And it's just the most gruesome, the harshest reality for human beings who live there. It's more Hobbesian than Thomas Hobbes could ever imagine, and so it's not an attractive ideology. There is no utopia there, once they had their utopia for a few years, this was Iraq and Syria, Isis.

We saw what they were doing, enslaving women and selling them in markets, beheading people. It was terrible, it was exactly how I imagine hell to be. And so, I think we know, regardless of whether they wear suits and ties and speak perfect English in think tanks, and they join boards, it doesn't matter how they get to their utopia, but once they get to the utopia, that's what it's going to look like.

So I think, and it's not that I know, that most victims of radical Islam are Muslims, but it's not just them. And so, I see that an entire coalition of Muslims and Non-Muslims coming together to fight and eradicate radical Islam.

>> Andrew Roberts: Another such fabled humiliation in the Islamist lexicon is the Nakba, the so-called catastrophe that overcame the Palestinian people when they lost the Israeli war of independence in 1948-1949.

What's your view of modern day Israel? What advice Would you give to the Palestinians today as a way of making the next three quarters of a century of their existence happier than the last three quarters of a century.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: That is to convert this conflict back to what it was, which is a territorial conflict.

And they took it away from being a territorial conflict and with that word nakba, which has tribal connotations, they turned it into a religious conflict. Religious conflicts just never end, do they? Or they end in one way.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, can you see this territorial conflict ending, considering what's happened in Gaza and it does happen in the west bank and so on, is there a way for either of those two types of conflict to end in Palestine?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: It would take at least two generations of leadership and Palestinian population, that is entirely free of the mind of virus of political Islam. That's what it would take. I would advise Israel to be in control of their own security until such time but for now, I don't see.

We have all these ceasefires and the so called peace negotiations and it's all about the process. But if you put yourself in the mindsets that the clan and tribal mindset, there's no such a thing as compromise. In fact, the word compromise has very shameful connotations. The objective is to be victorious and to win.

Now inject that mindset with radical political Islam, which has made Masjid Al-Aqsa the mosque in Jerusalem. That's the symbol of when radical Islam rules the world. That is why Iran, that has no border with Israel, is obsessed with this conflict. And that's why Islamists are obsessed with this conflict.

It's not about the men and women and children in Gaza. It's become a symbol for radical political Islam and they have to defeat that teeny tiny Jewish state for to proceed on their utopia on the way to their utopia, which is an Islamic state and an Islamic caliphate.

And so Israel is standing in the way of achieving that caliphate. And it's not just the countries I mentioned, like Iran and the Taliban, it's also the Prime Minister, now the President of Turkey, Erdogan, who has made it very clear that he is on this path to a resuscitation of the caliphate.

And so I don't see in maybe the Trump administration will change things, but in previous American administrations, this is the core of the issue. And it is this core of the issue that was always avoided and so we always stayed for 75 years. We froze in a state of process until Jared Kushner came along and turned it into something else and said, let's make it about economics and prosperity.

And in my lifetime, I'm 55 years in my lifetime that's the first breakthrough in that so called process.

>> Andrew Roberts: Can you see more breakthroughs under President Trump now that he's about to be inaugurated?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I see the opportunities for breakthroughs, yes. I see the opportunities for a rekindling of these Abraham Accords or resuming it.

It froze after October 7th. And then the future of this Islamist regime in Iran, give Iran to the people of Iran who are not Islamists, who've had enough of this regime, and then work together with the Muslim countries to start the process of de Islam. It's not Islamizing, it is dehumasifying.

Andrew, you're the historian here. The word I'm looking for is to denazify what we did in 1945 after we defeated Hitler. There was the Marshall Plan, all of these things. But there was a project to get rid of the ideology, imaginalize it as much as possible. Something along those lines has to happen to the ideology of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Islamist regime of Iran.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the biggest network and the most sophisticated network. And it's in America and it is in Europe and it's everywhere. And so I think that if we go after the ideology, then eventually peace between Arabs and Jews will emerge. As now, peace between some Arabs and some Jews has already taken place.

I mean, synagogues are allowed in the UAE. Many of my Jewish friends have told me feel safer on the streets of Dubai and Abu Dhabi than in London, in Paris, in Antwerp and in Amsterdam. That's saying something.

>> Andrew Roberts: Important area, of course, is education. If you're going to, as you say, need two generations to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood stance towards the world, you can no longer have Palestinian children being taught that Jews are dogs and deserve to die.

And that's an absolutely key aspect of it. Can you see a day when that happens?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: It won't happen by itself. And I think education is key, but I think there are many tools in the toolbox. There's diplomacy, there is intelligence. It just has to be a concerted effort to marginalize those who hold this ideology and keep that at a sustained level for again, a generation maybe we will need to.

And it's that kind of commitment. I think that if you ask me what's the difference between the British empires and American empires, Americans just don't want to commit to these long term. They don't want to make these long term commitments. And so maybe America can lead the process of convening the Israelis and the Arabs and others to say, all right, we will bring you together.

But you have to commit to this process yourself and not outsource it to I mean, you've heard of UNRWA, these international organizations like the United Nations, and several of the agencies that are part of its bureaucracy. They are unaccountable, they are weak. They have no way of dealing with any kind of subversion.

So UNRWA was initially a United nations organ that was supposed to help the refugees, the Palestinian refugees. And it was subverted, and it was turned into an arm for advancing the ideology of Hamas. And that is why they were actually in charge of many schools. And it is in UNRWA schools that these indoctrinations were happening. And so you don't want to play those games anymore.

>> Andrew Roberts: You mentioned America. In America today, histories on the front line of the culture wars, with the 1619 project essentially attempting to provide historical ammunition in support of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter. Is there an alternative paradigm, though? One in which American history can be seen through a more optimistic and positive prism? How do you think American history should be taught to Americans?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, you should teach it, Andrew, together with Niall.

>> Andrew Roberts: I'll come on to Niall in a moment

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: You know exactly what happened.

No, I agree with you. I think there is this perversion, and again, I like to use the word subversion. There is a subverting of the story of America. And yes, Americans, like many other empires made mistakes, but America not just abolished slave trade, but following the example of Britain in stopping it wherever it is.

America fought, reluctantly two world wars, and the second one liberated, Europe liberated, Jewish communities liberated. And not just that advanced an idea that human beings are created equal. We had the desegregation process. America has a lot of very good stories to tell, and we don't have to focus only on what was wrong, what happened in the past.

If you look at American philanthropy, a lot of it, like that of George Soros, is dedicated to destructive things, but a lot of it is also dedicated to constructive things, to eradicating diseases, advancing the quality of life of human beings. So America has a beautiful story to tell, and I hope with this election that we now have the confidence to put a stop to these narratives.

I came to America in 2006, and I will say that was when racism was at its lowest. I mean, to be a racist was to be a shameful person, a horrible person. And that is an almost unanimous opinion in America. And it's with Barack Obama's presidency that people started to rekindle and to try to make racial relations tense again.

And this was for political gain. It was very, very cynical. And it's not just with race, it's also with sex and gender. The narratives that are totally dedicated into making men and women enemies of one another and people in the rural areas enemies of people who live in the city.

And universities have become a hub for this, so I hope with this new election, with this, that we can come out of it and say, we're not taking any more of this. And we're going to go back to common sense and throw out diversity, equity and inclusion and all of this nonsense which the big companies are now doing already, even before the inauguration.

>> Andrew Roberts: Bibi Netanyahu, who I've interviewed for this podcast, described what it was like growing up in the house of an historian. In this case, his father, the distinguished historian Benzion Netanyahu, saying that the past and its debates were ever present in his home. Now, you are married to a very famous and distinguished historian.

Sunil Ferguson. Is the past and its discussions are they, are they ever present in your home too?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Always, always, as you know. And no one dares get anything wrong. I think one of the lovely anecdotes is when our sons who are taught history in ways that of course Niall finds appalling, and he took them.

The little one is only seven years old, but a 13 year old is really one of most fortunate children because he has Neel as his father who sets him right when his entire environment seems to be conspiring to put him on the wrong path of history. So it's great to have this firsthand human encyclopedia and ask him, okay, what happened then and then.

Or the other anecdote is when Tucker Carlson had interviewed some guy, Daryl Cooper, I believe.

>> Andrew Roberts: No, of course. Who said that Churchill was worse than Hitler

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So I started reading those passages and I said, but you know some of these, I can see why people and Niall. No, you can't see, let me tell you.

>> Andrew Roberts: And he puts you right. It's rather shocking. You should have even seen a sentence of Daryl Cooper's that you could have possibly.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, what I was seeing wasn't the content that Daryl Cooper was producing, but I was saying if you live in various parts of America.

And you haven't been introduced to the history of the Second World War as intensely says, if you lived in Europe, then you would see why some Americans would say, yeah, what if things went the other way?

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell me you've become a Christian. How did that come about?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, I think you should be a Christian if you're not joking.

>> Andrew Roberts: Go on,

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: How did it come about? I mean, it's a long story, but I don't know how to. The shortest way to describe it is to say I was probably very, very hungry for spiritual health and well being and that I had neglected that and not just neglected it, but I was determined not to believe.

I was an atheist, and I wasn't just an atheist, I was a militant atheist. I was going to these atheist conferences and telling to. To leave their religions and I was mocking other religions. So with that, when my own spiritual crisis hit, I wasn't going to turn to God or religion.

I was just going to stay as stubbornly as I could on what I was doing. And one of the, I would say things that eased. That was alcohol, I was drinking quite a lot. And, of course, I think I've now come to see that a spiritual crisis, perhaps part of it, when we think I wasn't drinking for pleasure.

There was a time when I used to drink for pleasure, but I wasn't drinking for pleasure. I was drinking simply to get rid of the pain and drinking myself to blackouts. And I wasn't getting healthier on any level at all. And so when I couldn't hide anymore and no doctors could help me, I just ended up surrendering and saying, well, if it is spiritual crisis, then I will stop the resistance that I'm putting up against God, and I will choose then to believe.

And I started praying. And the fire hose of thoughts that was constantly in my head, keeping me in pain and awake and fretting and it just went away. And it's been a way since and Andrew came to our baptism. And you can see that I'm completely transformed. And the effect it has had on us, on the family, on me, on my productivity, it's astounding.

>> Andrew Roberts: And it had to be Christianity. It couldn't have been any of the other great world religions that attracted you. There was something about Jesus Christ and Christianity that particularly, what was it? What was that?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah, I write down my values. What are your values? You had to write down a list of my values.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: And then I thought, but heavens, that is Christianity

>> Andrew Roberts: Really, so you did it from first principles, as it were, okay? You looked at what you believed, and then you realized that these were Christian principles.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Exactly.

>> Andrew Roberts: Rather than the other way around, as it were.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah, I mean, and I had tried. I don't want to say I tried other religions, but I did try. When you're told you're in a spiritual crisis, you say, okay, fine, let's see what we have here. And what was being offered to me was meditation and mindfulness and various other borrowings from Buddhism.

And if you lie down for 12 minutes and you listen to sounds made by a man with a very pleasant voice in an app called Headspace, and he says, feel your toes and let the feeling go. And then you feel all of your feet, and then you feel it goes up and your legs and so on.

And having done that many times, and instead of feeling a sense of peace, the thoughts that I was avoiding were always there, never to go away. But also, I felt irritated at times and thought, this is just a colossal waste of time, what am I doing here? And then started, I was working with a woman who was really very good and said, I know you reject God, but let's just imagine not the God you grew up with.

You imagine a God and write his character traits down, what would that God be like? And I finished the exercise, and then I did the exercise on values, and it was clearly Christian. And that is when I said so I was in denial about it. But I think in some ways, morally speaking, I identify as a Christian.

The most important part was missing, which was real faith. That is to open myself up to the idea that Jesus Christ is the son of God. And after that, resistance fell away. I mean, it's like a force. It's very hard to describe it. I have a Christian mentor now who's a mathematician, and I think one of the things that I was afraid of was it would be either science and reason or it would be faith, you can't have them both.

And that's, of course, not the case. And this mentor of mine is saying it's just a relationship, basically. Your idea of God was always some entity above you that would punish you if you did things wrong and send you into a mental state of shame, and guilt, and self loathing, and this is different.

This is a relationship. And I have that relationship now, and it's fantastic. And I think Niall will tell you about the effect it has had on me and how things have changed.

>> Andrew Roberts: And he embraced Christianity as well, didn't he at the same moment, the same time?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: It took him a bit longer.

And, of course, you are his friend, you know why. He was raised by two atheists. His father was a doctor, a medical doctor, and his mother is a physicist and they were appalled by religion. They grew up in Scotland during the years when the Protestants and the Catholics were at each other's throats, and that wasn't appealing.

But I think Niall now knows that's one way of looking at religion, where what human beings do to one another, we say that's God's fault or that's religion's fault, but it's exactly what God is telling you not to do. At least I now read in the Gospels exactly what Jesus was saying not to do is what these Catholics and Protestants were doing.

So they were Christian in name only, but I aspire to be a practicing Christian, which is a way of life. Think about it as being a way of life. It's a way of being. It's a state of mind, and it's wonderful.

>> Andrew Roberts: What book are you reading at the moment?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So at the moment, I am into my neck about the crisis of the negative unintended consequences of immigration. I am reading this book. It's in Dutch now and it's called Mechatzi Magnet Netherland, which is Migration Magnets in Holland. But this book is going to come out in-.

>> Andrew Roberts: Who's it by? Sorry, what's the author?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The author's name is Jan Van Rieeek and he's a mathematician and a cultural anthropologist and he did his PhD in 2010 on immigration to the Netherlands. This is the Dutch version, but it's reading now also a PDF which he sent just today of that book.

But in English, it's going to be called Borderless Welfare State, The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances. Very interesting, very timely. And as soon as it's in English, I will try and publicize it for them.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you were an MP, of course, in the Netherlands, weren't you yourself?

And so you've seen these issues upfront and personal as ever.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: That's right, and I had of course pointed to the cultural, and religious, and social consequences in terms of negative consequences. And in this book, he writes in detail the financial consequences. You remember Milton Friedman saying you can either be a welfare state or an immigration state, but you can't be both.

And here, I think in what he's describing in Holland, that's a beautiful case study that supports Milton Friedman's thesis that you can't have it both ways. These countries are literally They're dripping. I mean, finances are draining. They can't afford to go on like this.

>> Andrew Roberts: What about your counterfactual?

Have you got a counterfactual in history that you like to think about what might have been if things had been different?

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: This is going to make you laugh. My counterfactual is, what if Kamala Harris had won the election?

>> Andrew Roberts: Okay, come on, tell us what you think the result would have been.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, I think we have also a microcosm of what that might have looked like, which is Keir Starmer, who is the leader of the Labor Party, won the election in Britain in July and he's been in office only for six months. He's doing the opposite of the things that he said.

And the impression he made while he was campaigning was that he was going to be a safe pair of hands. A very different project.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Jeremy Corbyn-

>> Andrew Roberts: Is a noun, so well gone.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: That makes me think of Kamala Harris, where we knew that she was very radical. But during those two, three months in the lead up to the election, she has changed. She has now come to the center. She's someone very different. And I think, what if she had become the President of the United States and six months on, she would be like Keir Starmer but on steroids with American resources, and it wouldn't only be America that would be going down the tubes.

I think it would be the whole of Western civilization. If you had America's prestige and power, and resources to go full on woke on the world, that would have been, I think, the end of it. And so, that's a counterfactual that I'm going to be a bit religious and say I had prayed would not happen and I'm glad that our prayers are answered.

>> Andrew Roberts: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lady Ferguson, one of the most thoughtful and inspiring public thinkers of our times. Thank you very much, indeed, for coming on Secrets of Statecraft.

>> Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Andrew, thank you very much. As always, I enjoyed talking to you.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Ayaan. My next guest on Secrets of Statecraft is presidential historian John Meacham.

>> Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.