Ayaan Hirsi Ali must be the only atheist ex-Muslim scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington DC. Originally from Somalia, the most dysfunctional state in contemporary Africa, Hirsi Ali is best known in the US from her bestselling 2007 autobiography, Infidel, which received a great deal of praise, and not a small amount of criticism. “Hirsi Ali is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women,” wrote one reviewer at the time.

In a recent Newsweek cover story, reprinted in The Daily Beast (which borrows its name from Evelyn Waugh’s satire on The Daily Express in his 1938 novel, Scoop), Hirsi Ali has jumbled together definite facts and outright...