A former Muslim turned atheist has become a vocal advocate for women and a fierce critic of her former faith, making international headlines for her comments and work.
But Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s relationship with the Almighty – and religion – has once again changed fantastically, with the activist penning a head-turning op-ed titled: “Why am I now a Christian“,
In the article, she says she turned to faith because she found “life without any spiritual comfort unbearable.”
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Ali opened the editorial by recalling a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am not a Christian.” She said she discovered the conference in 2002, just a year after condemning the September 11 terrorist attacks.
At the time, she was a non-practicing Muslim, but with so much chaos unfolding around her and with so many opinions about what motivated radical Islamic terror, Ali found herself falling into skepticism.
“When I read Russell’s lecture, I found that my cognitive dissonance lessened,” she says. wrote. “It was a relief to adopt an attitude of skepticism toward religious doctrine, abandon my faith in God, and declare that no such entity existed. »
Ali continued: “Better yet, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of eternal punishment. »
She said understanding why she came to embrace atheism requires understanding the “kind of Muslim” she was, with Ali explaining that the Muslim Brotherhood entered her community in Nairobi, Kenya, when she was child.
“(The Muslim Brotherhood) has defined a direction: the right path. One objective: to work towards admission to Allah’s paradise after death”, Ali wrote. “A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual on the do’s and don’ts – halal and haram. As a detailed complement to the Quran, the hadith explains how to put into practice the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, God and the devil.
All this led her to believe that she should avoid reading novels, watching movies, dancing and other new things. Ultimately, she was drawn into this ideology, feeling that she could not befriend nonbelievers and, in particular, was taught to develop a “hatred” for Jewish people.
Ultimately, all this teaching made Russell’s pedagogy more meaningful, with atheism and the absence of such rules and regulations seeming much more tenable. Ali said the more time she spent with people like famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the more she felt she made the right decision.
But now all that has changed, with Ali quoting several reasons for her adherence to the faith, including recognition of the social benefits of Judeo-Christian values and the emotions she faced in a life devoid of the eternal.
“Western civilization is threatened by three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the form of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilize a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating away at the moral fiber of the next generation,” she wrote.
Ultimately, Ali concluded that “the only credible answer” can be found in “our desire to maintain the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” – a tradition that she believes protects human freedom.
But beyond that, Ali’s conversion also hinged on the discovery of a missing heart link.
“I also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual comfort unbearable – even almost self-destructive,” she wrote. “Atheism has failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
Ali admitted that she still had a lot to learn about Christianity, but she concluded that it was the solution to her personal woes – and those of our society.
Read the entire piece here.
