Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali emerged as one of the world's most outspoken critics of Islam in the decade following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. After publicly repudiating the faith into which she was born, she embarked upon a vociferous campaign in which she asserted that Islamic extremists posed a grave threat not only to the stability of the Middle East, but to the political future of Europe as well. Hirsi Ali is the author of two volumes of autobiography, Infidel and Nomad, each of which dissects Muslim values and culture. "People don't look for all answers in the Bible anymore," she pointed out in an interview with host Neal Conan of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation in 2010. "There's a lot of ideas that have been tested and tried that lead to prosperity and peace and tolerance, but they're outside of Islam."

Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969. Her given name was Ayaan Hirsi Magan, but she changed it to avoid detection when she sought asylum in the Netherlands--a ruse that would later come to play a pivotal role in the end of her political career. Hirsi Magan Isse, her father, was a Sunni Muslim of Somalia's Darod clan and had been educated at Columbia University in New York City. Hirsi Ali's mother was his second wife. Isse was in jail at the time of her birth because of his opposition to Mohammed Siad Barre, the Marxist dictator who came to power the year that Hirsi Ali was born. The family was eventually forced to flee the country, settling first in Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and finally Kenya, where they lived for ten years.

Escaped Arranged Marriage

Both Hirsi Ali and her sister underwent ritual circumcisions at the age of five, but this was done without the permission of their father--who had stated his opposition to it--when the girls were with their grandmother. Years later, Hirsi Ali would become one of the most vocal opponents of female genital mutilation. "That is the main difference between the position of Western women and the position of Muslim women," she explained in an interview with New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon. "A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman."

In Kenya Hirsi Ali attended the Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi, where the example set by a new teacher--an extremely devout Shiite, Sister Aziza, who had been trained in Iran--became a profound influence on her as a teenager. Prior to this, Hirsi Ali and her friends had been nominally pious, but Aziza's devotion to Islam's stricter tenets made a deep impression on them. "Gradually we were covering ourselves," she recalled in a New York Times Magazine interview, this one with Christopher Caldwell. "We were not taking part in sports, we were...