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 unfacts in an impassioned article entitled, “The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World.” No doubt there have been tremendous challenges for the survival of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan, Iraq, and Egypt over recent months and years, but not every part of the world where Muslims and Christians live together is the same.
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