Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Founder of AHA Foundation, is a women’s rights activist, champion of free speech, and best-selling author. She is also known as someone who speaks truth to power.

Ali’s journey began in Somalia where, as a young girl, she was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). From very early on, she questioned the subjugation of women she saw all around her. While listening to a sermon on the many ways women should be obedient to their husbands, she couldn't resist asking: "Must our husbands obey us too?”

Ali’s journey led her to many places, but the watershed moment came when she fled to the Netherlands and claimed asylum to escape a forced marriage set up by her father to a cousin. Once there, she worked her way up from being a janitor to earning a Master’s degree in Political Science from Leiden University and serving as an elected member of the Dutch Parliament, where she campaigned to raise awareness of violence against women, including honor killings and FGM—practices that had followed her fellow immigrants to Holland. She embraced Western freedoms and ideals of liberty for women and unfettered free speech. In 2004, Ali gained international attention following the murder of Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh had directed a short film written by her, Submission, about the oppression of women under Islam. The assassin left a death threat for her attached to a knife stuck in Van Gogh's chest and she has lived under threat from Islamists ever since. This tragic event, and Ali’s life leading up to it, are all chronicled in her best-selling 2007 book, "Infidel".

Ali has shown great courage, risking her life to oppose the oppression she sees around her. But she has done more than just speak out. Ali has connected her life experiences and the attention she garnered to AHA Foundation, which she founded in 2007 to put her ideals into action. By creating AHA Foundation, she took action to preserve, protect, and promote Western values—this is the thread that has run through all her work to this day.

That is why AHA Foundation champions free speech, combats Islamism, seeks to protect women and girls from oppression, and more. As someone who has come under attack for standing up to Islamism and championing free speech and women’s rights, Ali knows all too well how precious and fragile Western freedoms and ideals are.

Ali eventually ended up in the U.S. where she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Today, she is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She writes frequently for outlets such as The Spectator World and UnHerd, hosts The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast, and is on the Board of Advisers and a Founding Faculty Fellow at UATX (aka the University of Austin), where she taught her first class as part of a summer course in 2021.

She has written several books including a memoir, "Infidel" (2007), "Nomad: From Islam to America", a "Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations" (2010), "Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now" (2015), "The Challenge of Dawa" (2017), and "Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights" (2021).