Ali:

As atheists, we took a lot of pleasure mocking the faiths of others. But my Christian faith sharpens my reason and makes me a more committed scientist and more committed to science than when I was an atheist, because Christianity demands curiosity.

My name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali Ferguson, and I am a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump… and I’m also still surprised sometimes by the opportunities this job has given me, by the company I sometimes keep.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC where Francis Collins would have a conversation in front of a group of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill insiders with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I knew that name, but not much more about her than that she had once been one of the well-known New Atheists and had more recently become a Christian.

That was intriguing enough for me to ask for an interview, and we made it happen right before the event. As I prepared, I went through the book that first made her widely known, Infidel, which tells the story of her upbringing in a very conservative form of Islam in Somalia and her eventual departure from it. And I came to realize that she remains a controversial figure today.

So let me say this clearly at the outset: having Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Language of God doesn’t signal that we agree with all of her views. It doesn’t take too much digging to find places we’re not totally aligned. That’s never been the standard for this podcast. We’ve had atheists, young earth creationists, and many others whose perspectives differ sharply from our own. What we’re after is thoughtful, respectful conversation across those differences.

In this case, our conversation focuses on one particular part of her story—her journey from atheism to Christianity. We talk about how she understands that shift, what she found lacking in her atheist years, and how she now connects faith, reason, and science.

Whatever you make of her broader public voice, I think it’s worth hearing this part of her story in her own words. I was very glad to meet her.

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:  

So you’re a pretty well known public figure, but there’ll be many people in our audience, I think, who don’t really know your story. Could you give us some of the highlights, or an overview of your story and how you came to the place where you are now.

Ali:

Normally, I would just start with sort of the geographical journey. I was born in Somalia in 1969 in Mogadishu, and then I went to Saudi Arabia. My family went there when I was about seven years old, and then we went from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia. And from Ethiopia we went to Kenya. And Kenya is where I was 10 years old when we got there, and that’s where I learned English, where I went to a school system that was left behind by the British. And I would say maybe that was my first acquaintance with Western civilization. But then, in 1992 I actually moved—I was on my way to Canada. My father had arranged the marriage for me. That’s the Somali Muslim tradition. The Father looks after his daughter by arranging marriage, and I didn’t want to be in that marriage, and I rebelled against it. And so I was in Germany where a distant family was helping my father with my immigration to Canada. But instead of waiting for the immigration stuff to be sorted out, I went to the Netherlands and I sought asylum. I saw many people doing that, and so I ran away from that life. I rebelled against that life, and then really went to live in the Netherlands. I went there. In 1992. In 1995 I enrolled at the University of Leiden. And if you say, you know, how do you end up in this academic milieu? That is because of the training and education I had at the University of Leiden.

Stump:

And throughout part of this, there’s also a religious story to be told of the journey that you have been on. Can you give us some of those highlights as well?

Ali:

So well, the highlight actually starts with a lowlight. I went full on—So 9/11, 2001 there’s an event that people our age know very well, which was there was this incredible attack from the religion that I was raised in, Islam, they came for symbols of economic power, which was the Twin Towers, military power, the Pentagon, and then they were on their way to the White House. And I remember responding to that event and saying, you know, “these men did what they did because they were moved by conviction.” And then I had to ask myself eventually, “well, what is my conviction?” Because if I’m a Muslim, true Muslim, would I not be supporting them? And so I came to a different answer, and it was, No, I do not support them. If I do not support them, I need—I can no longer have this one leg in Western society and one leg in Islamic society. I have to make a choice, and the choice is a moral choice which was really difficult to make. It’s what we always like to avoid. And especially if you’re living in the West, and especially if you’re living in the Netherlands in the 1990s and the 2000s all life was about avoiding moral choices. But I had to make that moral choice, and so I decided I cannot be a Muslim, because I do not, I deeply, resoundingly disagree with the moral compass that the Prophet Muhammad provided in the Quran and Hadith, the scriptures.

Stump:

Before you move on from there, could you just address, maybe, the question, there were certainly other Muslims who opposed and disagreed with al Qaeda, right? 

Ali:

Yeah

Stump:

Why did you feel the moral choice, the moral necessity to leave the religion altogether, as opposed to condemning one part of it, the. Doesn’t speak for all of them. 

Ali:

Actually, I was in conversation at that point, on the phone with another distant cousin who lived in Switzerland, whose father had liberated my father from prison. And his father was killed because he had liberated my father from prison, so you can imagine how close these ties of kinship are. And he was saying, “I understand your condemnation of the act itself, but you cannot leave Islam because it’s the truth.” And I was saying, “but it can’t possibly be the truth, and it can’t possibly be moral to kill innocent people”. And I would just describe to him the victims who were so trapped that they were jumping out of windows. And I said, “How can God want that?” And we went back and forth, back and forth, and I said, You’re a coward. You’re staying in it because you don’t want you—it’s your fear of wanting to ask these very hard questions. And he said, “and you are an infidel.” That’s the title of my book. And I describe in that book what is meant by infidel, and how I came to my infidelity. But then for 10 years I was an atheist. 

Stump:

Yeah, talk about that stage now. And what that was like. 

Ali:  

That stage initially, it was exhilarating. Okay? It was exhilarating. Because I read Bertrand Russell, “why I am not a Christian”, and when I die, I’m going to rot. And that liberated me from that afterlife, the torture in the grave, all of these things that I carried with me all my life up to that point, which was I had so annoyed and upset God and my father and my clan and everything. And now I had just stacked up so many punishments, i’d lost count of them. I don’t even think Dante could do the roiling and the boiling—

Stump: 

Which circle you were in.

Ali: 

Circle yes. You know, circle of circle of the circle of hell. And so I felt liberated from that. And I got into these, what the Enlightenment really sells, which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the definition of happiness as I understood it, as an atheist, was the pursuit of pleasure. And I attained all of these happinesses, right? I became materially, extremely comfortable. I married, I had two children. I was living the life of the 0.001% and yet I was absolutely miserable. And I couldn’t—It was this huge contradiction in my life. I went to do what atheists do, what you do if you believe in science, which is—and I believe in science, of course—is to go and see doctors about this. And I saw psychiatrists. I saw psychologists, and they would always say something about my childhood and something about the fact that I was terrorized and living in this mindset of being terrorized, and that’s what was causing my depression, and they would diagnose me with PTSD. And I think all of that’s made sense, reasonable sense.

I was very unhappy. But my husband, being, of course, a rational atheist, would say, “hang on a minute, being terrorized. We have—that’s a problem with a rational solution. All these guys will carry guns and so you don’t have to fear for your life. You don’t have to fear for my life. You don’t have to fear for anybody’s life. You can just in any way, to be honest with you what you’ve done—” And then he would talk me up, and he would say, ”if you weren’t threatened, you would not be effective.” So he would say all of these wonderful things, but I was just miserable. 

Stump: 

That didn’t make you happy.

Ali:

It didn’t make me happy. And I was treating, you know, they were giving me all this medication which had side effects, so I didn’t want to take that. And I was treating it all with alcohol. And I ended up in a rehab in Utah. This is January of 2023. And the woman who fast on a black note like this one, notes down my story, listens to me, everything. She doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t know my background. She just listens to me, And then she says, “you know what, you are spiritually bankrupt.” And that—it’s like touching the edge of a nerve. It just resonated with me to my bone marrow. And I knew that what she was saying was true, because it felt so true. 

So the next assignment for me then was, how am I going to fill that spiritual bankruptcy? What do I do about it? And then I went on a journey of discovery. You have to ask questions. And one of the questions she asked is, “if you were to design a god, what would the characteristics of that God be?” And so as I was going down the list of what the characteristics are, I thought, look, who am I kidding here? And this woman who  said you are spiritually bankrupt, she didn’t say you should believe in Jesus Christ. She gave me a menu of choice. She said, here the Eastern religions. Here are the Western religions. Here’s all of this stuff. She said, “I have clients who see their higher power as their dead mother or their dead parent, whatever.” So having that meaning of choice, having lived through Islam, I made my choice, and it was Jesus Christ. And when I did that, and I fell to my knees and I started to pray in total and utter despair, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. I felt at peace. I felt as if someone had switched on a light. 

Later on, I’d read about how people come to Christ and they would have visions, and they would have all these amazing stuff. I didn’t have that. Maybe I’m too cerebral. That’s also one of I think—it’s a big problem. I didn’t have visions and dreams and all of that. But I have just got this quiet awareness. I became aware. It’s almost like becoming alive again. I was in this dark, dark tunnel, and there was no hope, there was no light at the end. And now I have hope. And my life hasn’t changed. And it’s very important for me to note that after two years from that event, I relapsed. I started drinking again. And I had a moment when I thought, Why is God doing that? Why? And, you know, kind of get angry. And then realized, no, you put your faith and your trust in God. It’s not God who’s doing that, it’s you who’s doing that. And I took an interest in the Christian concept of sin and brokenness, and that is where I am now. I’m exploring that brokenness. What does it mean to be broken? Why are we broken? And what does God say about that? And what is it to be a Christian? It means to me, now, with the help of a mentor—John Lennox—it is to read the Bible and try to understand it, try to get the way of life. If you want to live as Christian, you can’t get it from a mentor. A mentor can only guide you and say, go there. What he’s saying go there, is read the Bible. That’s what I am now. And my life— And here’s, I think, for your audience, what is really cool, is this: my life has not changed. My problems have not disappeared. But instead of that deep, dark tunnel, I have hope and I feel at peace. When I wake up in the morning, I feel connected to my God, to my husband, to my children, to my work, to the flowers in my garden, if you will. I’ve started gardening, and I love it.  I think now finally, I’m beginning to understand there is something called happiness, as opposed to pursuing pure pleasure.

Stump:

So that account you give, there are two things that stand out to me about that. One, for being an academic, cerebral, intellectual that sounds a little mystical, still. Maybe there weren’t visions or voices that you heard, but even the as you describe, that this weight being lifted off of you and this palpable sense of hope you have now. That’s not fully explainable by reason, is it?

Ali:

No. But our reason as humans, I think, is also limited. By the way, I do not think that faith and reason are incompatible. I think faith without reason is magical thinking.

Stump:

Many people, when they use the word faith, they mean I just believe it, but don’t have any reason to believe it, right? And I don’t think that’s the Christian understanding of the kind of faith that we were called to

Ali:

No. And so my cerebral side is inspired and invigorated by my Christian faith. My Islamic faith wanted to dull it. My atheist faith—which I think most atheists will vehemently disagree that atheism is a faith, but it is a faith—my atheist faith would mock— As atheists, we took a lot of pleasure mocking the faiths of others. But my Christian faith sharpens my reason and makes me a more committed scientist and more committed to science than when I was an atheist, because Christianity demands curiosity. And that is, I think, why Christianity and Christian civilization—before it was called Western civilization—Christian civilization became the most advanced because it’s an act of worship to want to understand and discover nature, because that’s where you find God.

[musical interlude]

Stump:

The second thing from your conversion story there that jumps out at me after reading the essay that you wrote for UnHerd in 2023 and some of the other interviews that you had done, in those you gave a pretty high place in your conversion story to the sort of values that Christianity brings to a society and that are needed for a society. I’m not saying that that’s somehow in tension with the very personal story that you just told. But can you talk about that aspect of it as well, of the difference that Christianity makes for you in a cultural sense.

Ali:

Absolutely, I got a lot of letters after I wrote that piece accusing me and saying, “you just can’t be cultural Christian. You have to be a true Christian.” I also got some letters that seemed to me to be terrified of, “Oh, you can’t bring Christianity back into public life. We’re not a Christian society. We’re a secular, liberal society.” For me, an appreciation of the culture of Christianity, the cultural consequences of Christianity, it doesn’t put me in I have to choose the culture versus the faith. No, in many ways, I actually do think that cultural Christianity might be really the gateway to real Christianity, as believing in the risen Christ, because that is where my friend Richard Dawkins has a problem with is how can that be? So he and I are now in a conversation where he says he appreciates cultural Christianity. You see, he goes to evensong. He loves the music. He loves the art. And obviously, he loves the morality. He just says, “I just don’t believe in a bunch of claims about Jesus being conceived in the womb of a virgin. I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. I don’t see how it could be possible that he rises from the dead, and so I don’t want to believe in these things, so I’m not a Christian in that sense, but I appreciate the consequences of Christianity.” He’s in his 80s. He could still change. I pray for him. But I think for many young people today, because we are in a deep, deep, deep moral crisis in the West, I think they are asking the questions that I was asking. If I believe these things to be true, then I want, first of all, to know where they come from. So now you go back to the Bible. So we’re going back to our biblical foundations. And please tell your audience where we are right now.

Stump: 

The Museum of the Bible.

Ali:

The Museum of the Bible. I had no clue there was a Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. So I think we’re all going back, and we’re all going to start re-anchoring and reorienting ourselves. And that gives me a great deal of hope, a great deal of hope that we are going to understand this period of moral wilderness that we find ourselves in, and that we’re going to overcome it. And the job now falls to the millennials in Gen Z

Stump:  

One of the things you said there that is intriguing is the nature of faith, that even atheists have faith. And I wonder if you might compare a little bit, the faith you have now versus the faith you had as an atheist. And I think it’s fair to say that in the sense of being committed to a particular sort of worldview or explanatory network that can’t answer everything, but you’re committed, in a sense. And even faith you had as a Muslim. Is the nature of faith in each of those three phases of Your spiritual life, similar, but it just has a different object that it’s aiming toward. Or do you understand faith differently?

Ali:

So I’m working on a book now called “Why I am a Christian now.” With the emphasis on the now. And the book is divided into three parts: my life as a Muslim, what it meant to be a Muslim, spiritually speaking, right? Same thing. What it was, second part is when I was an atheist, and then the third and last part is as a Christian. Now I haven’t been a Christian long enough to write a book about it, but what you’re going to get in that last part is just a taste of what it is that I’m going through now. I used that example of the alcohol as, but why didn’t it just magically disappear? But it didn’t magically disappear. I didn’t magically change. I just have a different attitude to what life is, and then hope. 

And so the question, I think, for the atheism is that there is no hope. Like the word hope doesn’t make sense in atheism. This is the life you have, and so you make the most of it. And I fell in with a crowd that defined life as pleasure. It’s the avoidance of pain and it’s the pursuit of pleasure. And when I did that, and I found all the pleasures and the material comforts and everything, I was still unhappy. And now I didn’t understand what’s going on with me. And so when you have that spiritual void atheism doesn’t know how to fill it. There is materialism. You can go shopping until you drop. You can drink. You can have as much sex as you want. You can, you know if it’s your thing, one of my things was to see the world. And I had been to so many places, and I’d seen the world. And I had read as many books. And I’d done everything that I wanted to do, that when I was a Muslim, that I was deprived of. I was deprived of those things. I was deprived of, as a woman, especially of doing the things that I wanted to do. And so that was my life as an atheist. It’s just, it’s great for a while. It’s a great teacher as well. And you come to understand the statement, “man cannot live by bread alone.” 

My life as a Muslim was incredibly regulated. It was a regiment. It was very, very regimented. So it’s appealing to, I think, some people who just, they don’t want to have to think about what’s right and wrong. They want to be told what is right and wrong. And they want to be told when you get out of bed, you know, right leg out first, then left leg. And as you get into your slippers, put the right foot into the slipper first and then the left. It gets into that level of detail. And when you look at Islamic fundamentalists, you know, guys we think of as lunatics, that’s the kind of fascistic regiment that is appealing to those personalities. It is the following. It’s what Jesus liberated us from. You know, the Pharisees, when I read about that, I think, “oh my gosh, that’s exactly what he was talking about.” Law is not going to save you. But there are people who do follow the law, wanted to follow the law. So when, as a Muslim, the greatest thing that you show to the world is, you know, on your forehead, if you have this little sort of black scarring to show that you’ve been paying, that you are devoted, you’re a true worshiper. And of course, that life for someone like me is very, very confining and constraining, and not just for someone like me and not just for women, but I think the greatest victims of Islam are actually young boys and men, because it limits their potential, and it tries to squeeze them into this straight—it’s called the straight path for a reason—and that straight path is just too narrow.

As an atheist, you toss God out, and you say, I’m just going to go for what pleases me. And at some point, you achieve that, and you hit a wall. And as a Christian, I’m discovering something else entirely. I’m discovering joy. I’m discovering peace. My life has meaning. My life has purpose now. At the end of church, at the end of the church service, we say, “Go in peace and serve the Lord.” That’s my purpose, to serve the Lord.

Stump:

You mentioned a little bit about science earlier, and a kind of curiosity that comes from that, how do you think about maybe, just to unpack that a little bit more, same sort of question I just asked you about faith, how do you think about science differently as a Christian as when you were an atheist, and this sort of assumption of ideal rationality and science maybe as the only way of knowing, the only sort of method by which we understand anything.

Ali:

So let’s, let’s just see if you and I and your audience have the same understanding of the word science. When I went to the University of Leiden, I was told science is an activity. It is observing the world, trying to understand it by finding patterns, explaining—now the explanations are called theories. And then the next step is you seek to either verify or falsify what you think, the pattern that you think that you discover. Easier in physics than in political science, which is what I do. Politics is not science. The humanities are not science, because of that very reason. You cannot easily verify or falsify these things. 

As a Christian, I am told to look at the world in wonder, that if I really want to understand and discover God, I have to look at what God created. And so I repeat again. It is no wonder that Christian civilization became the most advanced civilization because it became a form of worship to seek God through His creation and discover patterns, try to explain them and understand them. What we have done as a Christian civilization is we took the Christian out of the civilization. We have said, You know what? We became really arrogant, and we gave im to our arrogance and rebellion and said, “now we can understand nature and everything else, but without God.” So that is the way I look at science. And I think if you— Being a Christian is being a scientist, if you understand Christianity, right? If you have the right understanding of Christianity, you will continue to seek and innovate and understand because that is your way of getting closer and closer and closer to God, or at least attempting to get closer and closer to God. That’s what you’ve been commanded to do. The very opposite of what we are told in Islam, which is the gates of reason have been closed. You have all the answers in the Quran and in the Hadith and in the example of the Prophet Muhammad. You shall seek no farther. And if you ask questions, you’re banned. And then with atheism it is the arrogance of tossing out this wisdom of 1000s of years and thinking it all began during—it began with Descartes and Spinoza. That’s it. [laughs] And reason, and I think a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. And then, to a certain extent, an embracing of Marx. Because what Marx does is he places man in the place of God. And so man comes to worship, man, nothing good is going to come out of that.

Stump:

So let me end just by saying thank you very much and go in peace and serve the world. 

Ali:

Serve the Lord. 

Stump:

Serve the Lord by serving the world. Perhaps. Thank you.

Ali:

Thank you so much. 

Credits

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. 

Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.