Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion to Christ Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: One of the biggest stories of the past few days, especially when it comes to followers of your work and ministry, is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s claim that she is now a Christian. Let’s take a look at her essay.^[1] For anyone unfamiliar with her, she was considered one of the most prominent atheists since the early 2000s. She’s a refugee from Somalia with a Muslim background, she is a victim of female genital mutilation, a former Dutch politician, and now an American and mother. I’m sure, Bill, people have been sending you information on her and this story.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, we have British friends who sent us copies of the large spread in The London Times about the story of her turning to Christianity, away from atheism. This is causing quite a ripple in the UK.

KEVIN HARRIS:

The Egyptian intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour wrote in reaction to the news that “Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s announcement of embracing Christianity is one of the biggest pivotal moments culturally since 9/11 and I don’t know how many people actually realize that. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam. Not just is she saying that she is not certain about that promise anymore, she is saying she isn’t even certain about the promise of the future the New Atheists could afford themselves.

Mansour continued: “As Western elites ditched Ayaan for the Islamists, Ayaan turned to the ancient fort of Christianity for a last escape.”

Ayaan’s decision to convert prompts a series of very big questions that go to the heart of the challenges facing the West at present: Can religion be justified on pragmatic grounds, or does it require sincere faith? Is an increasingly secular West doomed to lose the civilizational war we find ourselves in? Can Christianity actually serve as a unifying force in that fight? And if religion won’t unite us, what else might?^[2]

I suppose I should ask you right at the start about the pragmatism of her conversion. Many are saying that one doesn’t become a Christian on purely pragmatic grounds.

DR. CRAIG: I think it's false to oppose pragmatic grounds to sincere faith. I think that a person can come to Christ for pragmatic reasons, but then have a genuine conversion experience of Christ, to be born again, regenerated, and have that new spiritual life within. So I see no inconsistency between the pragmatic reasons that might lead you faith and the sincerity of that faith. I think it would be presumptuous for people to pronounce upon the sincerity of her newfound faith. Now, having said that, I noticed later in the article that there is a differentiation between the political need for Christianity in the civilizational war and the existential importance of Christian faith for an individual person. That second existential ground for faith is especially consistent with a sincere and robust Christian faith, and indeed I imagine that most people come to Christ on those sorts of grounds rather than on disinterested intellectual grounds.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let’s begin looking at portions of her essay titled “Why I am a Christian”, subtitled, “I was born a Muslim in Somalia. Then I became an atheist. But secular tools alone can’t equip us for civilizational war.'' This essay, by the way, is a rollercoaster. I encourage everyone to read it. She writes,

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

Any thoughts on Russell’s famous essay?

DR. CRAIG: Well, Bertrand Russell was a great philosopher, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but his essay “Why I am Not a Christian” really disappoints. It is not a very good essay, doesn't have very good arguments in it, and therefore it's not often cited today. It's largely overlooked, I think.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next she writes regarding the 9/11 attacks.

I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war.

I suppose she is talking about political correctness. What do you think she means by leaders excusing the terrorists because they had an alibi?

DR. CRAIG: People in the West find it impossible to think that a major world religion would actually sanction violence toward unbelievers as a means of propagating that religion. People in the West think, “Surely all of these great religions believe basically the same thing, and they all hold to the same values that we do.” And so you have all this nonsense by our political leaders about how Islam means peace and how Islam is a peaceful religion. Then they blame the terrorism and the violence on other factors like, for example, colonialism. We see this perfectly today with the invasion of Israel by Hamas and the hideous atrocities that were committed against innocent civilians (men, women, and children) rather than attribute this to jihadist principles of Islam. Israel is to blame. It's Israel's fault that Hamas came in and murdered these people. What Westerners need to understand is that the mentality of Islam is completely different from that of Christianity. Islam sees the world as divided into two houses: the dar al-Harb and the dar al-Islam. The dar al-Harb means the house of war. Those are the nations that have not yet been brought into submission to Islam, and religious war is to be perpetrated against these nations until they are forced to submit. The dar al-Islam is the house of submission, and those are the countries of the world that are now in submission to Islam and have Muslim leadership. The goal of Islam is nothing less than world conquest – to wage religious war until all of the world is brought into the house of submission. So Westerners need to wake up and realize that not all religions are alike. Islam is an incredibly evil belief system that sanctions violence and enjoins violence upon its adherents in the propagation of the faith.

KEVIN HARRIS: She continues. She said just what you said:

We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

It opens up a real can of worms there on that current conflict. Do you want to open it some more?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Our experience has been that Palestinians are taught since childhood to hate Jews. There is an intense and irrational anti-Semitism that is inculcated into these Palestinian children from the youth up. But Western elites rationalize this anti-Semitism as a response to the West's imposition of a Jewish state in what was earlier British territory. Following World War II, the British colonial empire ceded this land to establish a Zionist state – a Jewish State of Israel. The Western elites will rationalize this anti-Semitism as basically being anti-colonialism or anti-Westernism when, in fact, this is a deep-seated hatred of Jews as Jews.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next she writes,

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

You’ve addressed this in your work. How should we think about things like fear of hell as a motivation for following Christ?

DR. CRAIG: Well, Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” And that is referring to God. So we are to have a certain fear or reverence of a holy God. But there is a great difference between Christianity and Islam in their respective views of hell. In Christianity, hell is an expression of God's perfect justice and holiness. In Islam, by contrast, Allah is a capricious dictator. His omnipotence trumps his own moral character. So, according to Islam, on the Judgment Day God could arbitrarily decide that everyone who has confessed that there is one God, Allah, and that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah – all of those faithful Muslims shall go to hell and the infidels shall all be saved. That's perfectly within God's power and prerogative. There are no constraints on God's omnipotence posed by his moral character. So the doctrine of hell in Islam is indeed a terrifying prospect because it's capricious and unrelated to God's moral character and justice.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing, she says,

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.

The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated a direction: the straight path. A purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil.

. . . On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the sake of Allah.

I’m sure you’ve noticed young people, especially college students, who are often drawn to a movement or something bigger than themselves. She certainly was.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think it does give meaning to one's life to give one's life in some cause that is greater than oneself. I really admire students who are idealists and are devoted to the propagation of some cause rather than just hedonism – living for self-interest and pure pleasure. I think that the irony is that the life devoted to these ideals will ultimately be more satisfying and more fulfilling than one that simply pursues pleasure for its own sake.

KEVIN HARRIS: She writes,

The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. . . . We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

. . . what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

I can imagine that some would accuse Christians of the same kind of hate and isolation, citing something like Paul’s admonishment not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Can we clarify that?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think this is one of the major differences between Christianity and Islam. In Islam, the adherents of Islam are instructed to hate unbelievers because Allah hates unbelievers and opposes them. Whereas in Christianity God loves unbelievers. He loves them so much that he gave his only Son to die for them, and therefore we're to love them, too. Jesus, in The Sermon on the Mount, said,

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:43-48).

And so just as God, our heavenly Father, is loving toward all persons (even those who oppose him), similarly we are to be loving and gracious even to those who are our enemies. What a difference with Islam.^[3]