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In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: November 13
Activist
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Feminist
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Xamar
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Adamant
Kenya
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Muslim
More quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
We have to start with the little babies who are born now, socialize them in freedom and critical thinking. We don't have to throw away their faith. People confuse the two, thinking if you are enlightened that means apostasy. It doesn't.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Women covering their heads is traditional, but now we're seeing more and more women covering themselves from head to toe. This is said to be for religious reasons but it's actually the conflation of religion and politics - every political movement has its slogans, flags and dress.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Every time you take a train, step into your car, walk into the shopping mall, go to the airport - every single time, something could happen. That's how terrorism works.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious.... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother's angels and djinns.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
