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AYAAN HIRSI ALI (SOMALIA)

Friday August 26 2011

AYAAN HIRSI ALI (SOMALIA)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a writer, activist and politician who, in 2005, was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a revolutionary thinker and politician who fought for the rights of women in Somalia. Ayaan followed in her father’s footsteps. After receiving asylum in the Netherlands, she worked as an independent Somali-Dutch interpreter, helping women in asylum centres and hostels for battered women. She became increasingly disenchanted with Islam, due to radicalism, during this time and published many articles and spoke at many forums about the abuse of Muslim women and girls, despite numerous death threats. Hirsi Ali wrote the script and provided the voice-over for Submission, a film produced by Theo van Gogh, which criticised the treatment of women in Islamic society. Theo van Gogh was later murdered. She is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank and is the founder of the AHA foundation, which helps protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.

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