"Today, Ali is a Christian, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a conservative powerhouse. But the path between then and now reveals a fracture in modern identity politics. When Ali first arrived in the Netherlands in 1992, fleeing a forced marriage, she was lauded as a survivor - a Black, female, Muslim survivor. Here was someone who had been subjected to awful things - including genital mutilation - and her activism brought her recognition and celebration across the West."
"But then, she started to say other things. She refused to blame "culture" while absolving scripture. She leaned in too hard, arguing that violence was not a structural aberration or the result of unseen power dynamics, but a feature of the faith, and she went on to call Islam "a destructive, nihilistic cult of death." Eventually, the mood changed. Ali lost the room. Suddenly, she was no longer a brave survivor or part of a certain political tribe but a "native informant" and an "Islamophobe.""
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and spent her teenage years in Nairobi, where Islam functioned as a distant, habitual backdrop. In 1985 the Muslim Brotherhood's influence and a charismatic female teacher transformed her into a politicized, devout believer who adopted the heavy black hijab and renounced Western culture. She later fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape a forced marriage and became a celebrated survivor after revealing abuses including genital mutilation. She later criticized Islam as inherently violent, called it 'a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,' and was subsequently marginalized and labeled a native informant and Islamophobe. Kwame Anthony Appiah frames identity as a spectrum involving dialogical formation and the pressures of identity-based movements.
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