Reflection: My Interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Then-contributing editor Vahaken Mouradian’s May, 2021 interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali has taken on increasing urgency amid the growing number of reports of rape in Europe by migrants, especially as two Afghan asylum seekers were sentenced this week for the assault on a 15-year-old English girl.
I owe Ayaan Hirsi Ali a Greek iced coffee and a follow-up conversation. I promised her as much when we spoke, for the first and only time, in May of 2021—about immigration and the West, about Islam and Europe, about tribalism and America. Four eventful years later, I still find myself talking about immigration and the West, Islam and Europe, tribalism and America. (Increasing revelations about a decades-old sexual-crime ring in the English town of Rotherham now give Ayaan’s Prey, the book she and I had discussed then, soon after its publication, the rare glow of prescience—a sooner vindication than any author can hope for.) There is nothing new under the sun, according to the Christian Old Testament. Except, in this case, a new Christian.
In late 2023, I read Ayaan’s essay about her having found God. I did not know she had been looking. Sure, the beginning of these Groaning Twenties was eventful. But this? Forget Trump 45, Covid-19, inflation at 9.1 percent. This news seemed otherworldly. Akin to the discovery, let us say, that Anglicanism had won over the pope (or the British royal family).
Timeless reading in a fleeting world.
