Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Immigration, Islam, and Christopher Hitchens

“What I have found in the book is strong enough to suggest that there is a correlation between mass migration from Muslim-majority countries and the increase in sexual violence.”

On May 11th, Merion West’s Vahaken Mouradian spoke with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, New York Times bestselling author of Infidel, about her latest book—Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. After escaping forced marriage and requesting asylum in the Netherlands, Ms. Hirsi Ali has been a politician, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the subject of campus protest and disinvitation long before the practice became fashionable. She is one of the most prominent and eloquent apostates from and critics of political Islam.

A video of the conversation is also available on YouTube.

Hi, I’m Vahaken Mouradian, contributing editor at Merion West, and I’m delighted today to be in the company of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at the Hoover institution, and author most recently of the book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. Ayaan, welcome; thank you for joining me.

Vahaken, thank you very much for having me.

After two memoirs of noted literary quality and two treatises for an Islamic reformation, you offer with your latest book something much more social scientific. You take on perhaps the most barbed European public policy question of our time: mass migration. How and why did you decide to write Prey?

Well, I think mass migration has been a topic in Europe and a very controversial one for decades now, but we weren’t having an honest conversation about the impact of young men coming from Muslim-majority countries on the rights of women. You would have anecdotal evidence. Sometimes in newspapers, sometimes online, [or for example] at birthday parties [with] people in close proximity, behind closed doors. [They] would say this is what happened; this is what happened to my daughter; this is what happened to me; that sort of thing. But there was this sense of “Let’s look away from it.” There was a taboo around what’s happening on European streets and neighborhoods as a direct consequence of immigration and what’s happening to women.