Dutch politician and human-rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali has lived under heavy police protection since the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, with whom she collaborated on a short film about Muslim women. The Somali-born activist has devoted her career to raising awareness of the injustices committed in the name of Islam, a faith she herself has renounced. "September 11---mark my words---was the beginning of the end of Islam," Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper quoted her as saying.

Escaped Arranged Marriage

Born in 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia's largest city, Hirsi Ali came from a Sunni Muslim family. Her father, a moderate Muslim, had earned a degree from Columbia University in New York City a few years before she was born. She and her sister underwent female circumcision, but this had been arranged in secret by their grandmother, because their father opposed it. When he joined the organized opposition to Somalia's Marxist regime, the family was forced to flee the country. Hirsi Ali lived in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia before her parents settled in Nairobi, Kenya, where she attended private school. A new teacher, a strict Shiite Muslim, impressed Hirsi Ali at a formative age, and she and some of the other female students at the school became increasingly devout under the teacher's tutelage. For a time, Hirsi Ali even wore the hijab, the headscarf that more fundamentalist Muslims deem necessary to protect a woman's modesty outside the home.

Hirsi Ali's attitudes toward Islam's more traditional values began to change in...