THE SUNDAY TIMES: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is under threat from jihadists. It has not stopped her finding romance with the married historian Niall Ferguson
‘Why did you choose this place?” asks Ayaan Hirsi Ali, eyebrows arched in feigned alarm. She then giggles endearingly. We are in New York’s Algonquin hotel, just a few hundred yards from Times Square, where a Muslim would-be bomber parked a car full of explosives a couple of days earlier.
Radical Islamists have been trying for years to kill Hirsi Ali, a softly spoken politician turned intellectual who combines the beauty of a film star with the uncompromising zeal of an Enlightenment crusader.
She has been under siege ever since the ritualised murder in 2004 of her friend, Theo van Gogh, who had helped her make the film Submission, a blistering polemic about Islam’s treatment of women. A letter pinned to Van Gogh’s chest — or, rather, stabbed into place with a butcher’s knife — warned Hirsi Ali that “you will go down”. She went into hiding, eventually exchanging a career as a Dutch MP for exile.
Six years on, she is still preceded everywhere by a burly security man. “I’m on that endless list of names they have,” she tells me — every jihadist’s death list. It’s a grim, confining way to live, yet here she is, gaily teasing me about my tactless choice of rendezvous: she doesn’t seem remotely angry or distressed — radiant, more like.
“There is a new man in my life: Niall Ferguson, a British historian and TV presenter; the situation is a bit complicated. I am deeply in love and that feels great,” she told a Dutch magazine last week.
“We are both constantly travelling so it is hard to see one another regularly. On the other hand, we do not need to explain the situation to each other. I cannot say what will happen with us. There is still a divorce procedure going on and there are children involved.” She clams up now when quizzed about her romance, which has created a certain frisson in Britain because of Ferguson’s high profile and marriage to a former newspaper executive.
Yet I sense that silence on this is difficult and she seems to be talking as much to herself as me when she adds softly: “I just think no comment is best.”
All this might be dismissed as tabloid voyeurism had Hirsi Ali herself not turned her own most intimate history into fodder for public debate, first in her acclaimed 2006 memoir Infidel and now again in its sequel, Nomad. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she has written, part of her genitals were removed in a circumcision ceremony designed to preserve girls as virgins until they can be married off; she has since hinted that thanks to a sympathetic surgeon she got off lightly compared with other Somali Muslim women. >>> Tony Allen-Mills | Sunday, May 09, 2010
Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is published by Simon & Schuster on Thursday
