The Erosion of Women's Rights? | Ayaan Hirsi Ali | EP 155

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I have the great privilege today of talking with Ayan Hirsi Ali. She's one of my heroes, I guess that's the case ever since I read her book, Infidel, which I believe was published in 2006. She's also published Nomad and Heretic, and a new book which we're going to talk about today, a daring book I would say, which is in keeping with her general courage. All things considered, the name of the book is Pray: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights. All topics that I don't believe you can discuss without bringing a tremendous amount of negative attention to yourself, but which in principle still need to be discussed.

You've had an amazing life, Ayan. I don't know if it's the life anyone would choose for themselves necessarily. Maybe just for our viewers who aren't familiar with us, if you could present a bit of biographical information about yourself, that would be a good backdrop to the investigation into your book that we're going to conduct today. Welcome to this discussion, I'm very pleased to see you.

Jordan: Thank you very, very much for having me and yes, the feeling is mutual. You are also one of my personal heroes, and I thank you for your courage. I was born in Somalia and I grew up all over the place. My family left Somalia when I was about seven or eight years old, and then we lived in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. I was in Kenya with my family for about 10 or 11 years, and most of that time my father was absent. Then he came back in 1992 and took what he called his responsibility, which was to find me a husband. I didn't agree with his choice of husband for me. This husband of mine then lived in Canada, and I was supposed to join him in Canada. But instead of joining him in Canada, I went along with the family plan, which was to go to a relative in Germany and find my way from Germany to Canada. But instead of doing that, I went to the Netherlands and I asked for asylum, and this was back in July of 1992.

Jordan: How old were you then?

Ayan: I was 22 years old, and I took to Dutch society like a fish to water. I learned the language, I made friends, I went on to do a master's in political science and by 2000-2001, in my early 30s, I had just turned 30. I was leading the life of the average Dutch woman of my age and loving it. I had just accepted a job with a think tank, a think tank that works for the Social Democratic Party. Then, 9/11 happened. Muslim terrorists, 19 of them, took passenger airplanes and started to bring down the Twin Towers. They wanted to bring down the White House, they had brought down a wing of the Pentagon. You're old enough to remember that, that was a significant moment in history for those of us who were old enough to understand what was going on.

There were a lot of conversations people were having in the Netherlands and abroad. Some said it had to do with American foreign policy, some said it had to do with injustice against the Palestinian people, some said that the 19 men were poor and oppressed and victims of economic challenges. I said that it had nothing to do with any of that. The leader of the 19 men left us enough information, and we were able to find enough information to point out that what motivated them was the conviction acting on the conviction of their religious beliefs. They were waging jihad, and to pretend otherwise was wrong. I didn't understand how sensational that would be, and I was given platforms by some of the Dutch newspapers, radios, and television. From being a complete unknown who had just graduated, I became this, depending on who you talk to, either famous or infamous person. I think the rest of the story is public and documented in Infidel.

Jordan: And you, I know that at one point in your life, you had guards accompanying you wherever you went. Is that still the case?

Ayan: That's still the case, and Jordan, as you know with security issues, the main instruction I've had over these years is don't talk about that. But yes, that's still the case. Aside from a lot of my family members acting disappointed and even threatening me, losing some of my Dutch friends because they thought that I was bending toward the right, Islamophobic, I also had to live with death threats.

It's very interesting when you look at that, you know, if you go back to that time when we were discussing the threats to free speech. I know a lot of people are probably in denial about it, but where they would say there is really no distinction to be seen between Muslim civilization and Christian civilization, Western civilization, other civilizations, all cultures are equal, and so on. It's just a handful of bad people who are giving everyone else a bad name. But then, over and over again, we saw the threats to the freedom of conscience, the freedom of speech, women's rights, the freedom of association, the freedom of the press. Never did I think that we would have what we now have, which is not a threat from outside forces, whether they're religious or not, but threats from the inside, from our own universities where a conversation like the one we're having now or the subject of this book is going to be misinterpreted, which is a charitable way of saying it's going to be dismissed.

Jordan: Yes, well, I must say I'm quite terrified to have this conversation. I was also going to ask you immediately what possibly possessed you to write this book. I mean, it's as if in some sense you're looking at a sequence of hornet's nests and decided to take a swing at the largest one. I mean, I think there's every reason to believe that at least in the possibility that when I air this episode, my channel will be demonetized and that it could conceivably be taken off the air altogether. I've had my fair share, not to the same degree you have certainly, but I've had my fair share of public attack. I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I don't have the same stomach for it that I once did. So, but anyways, onward and upward hypothetically.

So back to this, I guess we'll start to talk about this book, Pray: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights. I had an uneasy feeling reading it continually. I mean, you do say right off the bat, this is a trigger warning for the entire book. Reading it, you should be triggered. Well, I would say I was triggered by reading it. I was triggered partly as a social scientist, I would say to begin with, because as I went through the initial part of the book in particular, which deals with statistics pertaining to the sexual assault of women, I was reminded of the many studies that I've been involved in dealing with complex multifactorial problems. It's very, very difficult to deal scientifically or mathematically or statistically with a complex social issue.

You run into that problem or encounter that problem over and over, among many other problems when you're formulating your argument. To begin with, for example, here, and stop me if I get any of this wrong. You're making a case that there is some threat to women's rights in Europe particularly, and that that's associated with immigration. Some of that threat takes the form of enhanced susceptibility, increased susceptibility to sexual assault. Then you start to delve into the sexual assault statistics, and then you run into the immediate problem. It's perhaps worthwhile to walk people through what some of these problems are. How do you define sexual assault, for example? If you define it by the most severe crimes, let's say rape, then you miss all the data that might be obtained when you consider all the other forms of sexual misbehavior that might be regarded as assault, unwanted touching on a street, for example. But if you include those, then you risk minimizing the magnitude of the extremely serious forms of sexual assault like rape and especially if you do it over a lifetime and crank up the prevalence rate so high that they start to become meaningless.

Now, I know it's an appalling thing that a very large percentage of women, and perhaps an unknowable percentage, face unwanted physical unwanted sexual attention, psychological and physical. But if the definition of that becomes so lax that it's a hundred percent of women that suffer from it, then you divert attention away from, for example, from the more serious forms of sexual assault. Then you outline as well the difficulties of doing cross-cultural comparison, cross-country comparisons, because the definitions vary so much from state to state and the difficulty of tracking change in sexual assault prevalence in any given country because of the changing definitions of sexual assault that occur within states.

So, I was tempted to throw up my hands at one point and think, well, it's impossible to get to the bottom of this. So, in the face of all that complexity, what argument have you laid out and why do you think it's justifiable?

Ayan: So, the argument I'm laying out, first of all, isn’t it’s the story of women and their safety in the public space. So in this book, I'm not making, I'm not laying out an argument about sexual violence committed by intimate partners. If you wanted that, it would probably be easier to get those statistics. It would be harder to find them categorized along ethnic lines, but still possible. And I'm not talking about sexual violence against women in, say, the office at work, the themes that were brought to light by the Me Too movement. So those two things are not the subject of this book. What I'm talking about is the public space.

And so I don't start fast with statistics. I really want, I’m not a social scientist, and I don’t think of myself as a social scientist in terms of trying to acquire empirical data, analyze that and interpret it. What I do is it starts with experience. It is, in Northern European countries a decade and a half ago, maybe even a decade ago, women took it for granted that they were safe once they left their front door. Not all women, some neighborhoods are worse than others. But in general, in 1992 when I came to Holland, I don't recall ever being assaulted or feeling unsafe in the public space. I was with my Dutch friends, and asking, I thought it was striking that women took it for granted in the Netherlands that they were safe in public.

When I asked questions about that, they said, "What, are you out of your mind? What's wrong with you? Where you come from? Don't you take it for granted?" I described to them the societies that I grew up in and how incredibly difficult it was for a woman to get out of her front door and enter the public space without being cat-called after. Then I go from the descriptions of verbal sexual violence or sexual propositions that are inappropriate and lewd and obscene, and that are harmful and hurtful, all the way to rape.

These women were just stunned. A decade later, I’m hearing from white women in some of these countries describing situations that I thought were, "But that's weird, that's very interesting." That's a real change. And Jordan, I know you know a little bit of my background, but I've also been engaged in this debate about Islam, integration, immigration, the unintended consequences of immigration, and all the taboos around that. So when I first proposed writing this book, it was for instance my husband saying the argument will no, it won't go anywhere because you will not be able to get the statistics. And I thought, "What, I'll try."

So I started calling up these justice departments of these various countries, and they would provide me with the reports they had made of sexual violence against women in the public space. Again, some countries are totally, as you describe, the definitions shift. Some countries say we do record sexual violence against women but not the ethnicity of the perpetrators or the religion of the perpetrators. In some countries, you would find the testimonies of the victims and they would say that was an Arab-looking man, that was a black man, that was a man who spoke with a foreign accent.

I would ask the people who say that they've collected these statistics, "Why don't you have that information input?" Then you would always run, it would always be off the record, but you would always run into the issue of, "Well, the issue of immigration is really controversial. The issue of Islam is really controversial, and if you take those two and then you link it to sexual violence, oh my God, you're going to empower the right-wing populist parties, you're going to stigmatize Muslims and Islam."

It's not all Muslim men, it's a universal phenomenon, and I agree with all of these things. But we still have a problem. The safety of women in general in the public space is compromised. How can we collect statistics if as a social scientist you start shrouding all these issues with complex cultural and political factors?

Jordan: Please join. Let me give you an example. From January of last year to January of this year, I think today is, what, the last day was the first of February. We have all had to live with the pandemic. We've had a lot of conversations and disagreements about it. But in one year, we've been able to collect the most important statistical data that we need about what the virus is, who's affected, who's likely to die, who's likely to survive. What are the things that we need to do? In response to that data, in response to that knowledge that we gather, we've put policies in place that constrain our liberties to a great deal.

We've overcome huge taboos. The problem I'm talking about, this public safety and the safety of women, I want to date it back at least for two decades when it comes to women in the general public space. We can never even agree on what data is important, let alone collect it effectively and let alone produce effective policies to address that.

So I'm going to ask you rude questions, because they're the sorts of questions that are going to be brought to bear in relationship to this book. They've popped into my mind constantly in light of the fact that it's so difficult to gather data on something, let's say as definable as rape—a physical—and we could narrow that down even more: unwanted physical sexual penetration of a vagina by a penis. How do you go about ensuring that your sense that the safety of women, which is a much vaguer construct, say term concept, that the safety of women in the public domain has been compromised?

That's the first thing, because if that isn't the case? See, because I kept wondering, well, what exactly is the problem here? And I did believe as a consequence of reading your book that your primary concern was that as the public domain, if the public domain becomes less safe, then women are going to have to retreat from engagement in all sorts of public fronts. There's nothing about that that's good. That I believe is the main thrust of your argument, and then we'd have to ensure that—not that women's safety is in fact being compromised—that they feel that it's been compromised.

Then the next part of the argument is that that can be associated with an increase in immigration, specifically from Islamic countries. You even vent some doubt about that, I believe, because at one point in your book you talk about the cultural problem that might be behind this being perhaps not so much Islam but polygamy itself and its influence on Islam. So, I'm not disputing your claims; I'm trying to adopt, as I always do when I read anything, well, anything. I would say the most critical stance to find out where what's solid. And so you're obviously concerned about the safety of women, and what makes you think that your concerns are warranted?

Ayan: So again, I want to be, and I don't think it is rude at all. I think asking these questions is not only justified, it's crucial. It's absolutely necessary for this issue to ever be to be dealt with, one way or the other, or any other social issue that is of this magnitude. I think the most important thing that I can do, any observer can do is to say I want this to be questioned. One of the things about the hard sciences, for instance, is that you could replicate data, and then you could experiment. You can then falsify or verify, as you know. With these types of very complex social issues, that is very, very difficult.

Having said that, if you were to go out and take the exact same steps that I have done, I challenge you. I will say I bet you, you will reach the same conclusions. Now, it is very important to make the distinction between something as gruesome and as horrific as rape. There is rape by one individual against another individual, but sometimes it's done in groups—that's even more horrific—and it's not nearly as horrific as somebody calling you bad names as you, you know, walk by or touching you.

In terms of what is most gruesome, it is rape, especially by groups, and then very often that leads to homicide. Some of the victims actually die, and I didn't want this book to be about just about that. When something like that happens in a European country, that is recorded, and in fact, the authorities make an attempt at finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. You can debate if the severity of the punishment fits the crime; in some of these countries, these conversations are going on. But no one is debating that that is horrific and that that should be.

You could only look at those statistics if you did that, and then you ask those same authorities for the origins of the perpetrators. In many countries, you are going to run into, "We don't recall. We just don't record that kind of data." They have reasons for that, Germany, for instance, because of the history of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and what they had done, right? All sorts of minorities. In other countries, like even the Netherlands, I don't think they would record the religious aspect of it. Some of them will, though, record. I've seen this in Norway, I've seen this in Denmark, I've seen it in Austria. Even in Germany, at a given moment, there was a recording of the testimony of the victim or witnesses, or some of the reporters would say, "Today, in court case XYZ was tried, and the perpetrator was from Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or Somalia" or whatever.

As things evolved, journalists who are told not to do that, and victims would sometimes testify, those who survive the audio. And if this goes to justice, they would describe the physical characteristics of the perpetrators. Now, that is the most gruesome aspect of it. Now go to the lightest. Let's just say, okay, the statistics my critics might look into these statistics and say, "There's nothing to see here." Alright, then you go to the description that I get from the women, and I'm not talking about a context of women who are behaving in ways that might be confusing— that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a woman, a mother in a park, who's pushing her toddler, pushing her baby with her toddler walking next to her, or a woman jogging, or a woman going to do her grocery shopping, or a woman coming home from work and taking the train and who is terrified by a group of young men who think it's a game.

I'm talking about different things where you would say, I'd say I'll give you another data point. There are now neighborhoods where European women have decided no one is going to protect me, so I just want to go there. There are two documentary makers that I've spoken to who have decided they were going to make a documentary about this, visit these women-free zones and actually confront the men, the proprietors of these places, and say, "There's that one example where they order, I think, coffee and they asked to leave."

They have a conversation about, "But why should I leave?" These are female filmmakers who are doing this. These are female filmmakers who have seen in France certain neighborhoods that have become inaccessible for women. They want to address that. They go and talk to the proprietors of these cafes and things, and who is it that brings up the cultural element? It's not the women; it's not the researcher or the statistician. It's the men themselves who say, "No, you're not safe here." It's inappropriate. She says, "But this is not like some place in Algeria." He says, "This part is." You better go.

We have another example in Sweden, Northern Europe, where a politician is taken to a neighborhood, and he's asked what is missing, and he's baffled and he couldn't imagine what was missing. And you looked around, it was women. So there are ways of looking at the complexity of this issue and not only relying on the statistics that are gathered by the institutions that are actually supposed to be enforcing the values, the rule of law, the protection of women because they gather the data, and like you when you said I finish the book and then I throw my hands up in the air, what are we going to do about it, many of them do exactly that. They throw their hands up in the air and they decide let it be.

Jordan: Well, it's very difficult for me to understand in the present political state of the West. It's very difficult for me to understand how a conversation about this can really be undertaken, because I don't think we're capable of doing it. I mean, which is partly why it's so stressful to undertake—to try to undertake a conversation like this, I guess. What we're trying to do, the problem is, is that we're pitting two virtues against each other, and those are the most difficult moral conundrums.

It's not wrong versus right. It's right versus right. Yes, and on the one hand, there's compassion for the dispossessed, including dispossessed young men in war-torn countries—war-torn and catastrophically riven countries. And the benefits of immigration economically and on a humanitarian basis. And then, on the other hand, there's the safety of women, and it’s very difficult not to be for both of those.

But unfortunately, there are circumstances where the interests are not going to align in a context like this one and the context. We have been having conversations not just about having compassion for dispossessed men and not allowing them to then violate the rights of women. We've been having similar conversations about the limits of free speech and what you sometimes see is people concluding, "Well, let's not have that win-win where we protect free speech, but we also protect against incitement and violence." That would be a rational discussion to have. It would be a rational outcome; it would be a good outcome for our society.

We have this other confrontation, say between transgender rights and then compromising the rights of women. We could have a win-win. We could lift up transgender people and respect their freedoms and their dignity and for them to live the way they want to live without compromising the rights of women. But that is the context we live in, and that's when you open this conversation. You said you were terrified of being deplatformed.

If we were to have this conversation, I think it's very, very important in a free and liberal society that adheres to the rule of law to have these uncomfortable conversations. I don't care. So let's walk through the central argument again. You're attempting to demonstrate in the book that using statistics—and you outline the unreliability of the statistics and the difficulty of obtaining them—but all using statistics and also like on-the-ground anthropology and case reports essentially to make the case that there has been a deterioration in the public safety of women over the last—would you say 10 years, perhaps?

Ayan: I think in the last 10 years it's been more pronounced, but I think it's been going on for at least 20 years, depending on where you are. In certain neighborhoods in Paris or Malmö, you could say, or in certain, you know, the Tower Hamlets area in the UK, right around London, some of those places you could go as far back as 20 years, even longer.

Jordan: And that deterioration is linked to poor immigration policy or to… or to what exactly is the problem? Is the problem the immigration policy?

Ayan: I might also say, I mentioned youth and masculinity as contributing factors to violent behavior.

Jordan: Yeah.

Ayan: But unemployment as well is going to be a contributing factor.

Jordan: I know that's all true, so all the socio-economic factors, these are all contributing factors. People actually are, I would say, more willing to talk. They feel like they're more licensed to talk about the socio-economic factors than they are licensed to talk about the cultural factors.

So if you have men and families—men and women come from countries where men and women relate to one another differently in the public space and in the private space, and then they come to liberal societies and the values are different, then yes, all the very complex socio-economic aspects are there. But the question is, are those the defining ones, or is it the cultural aspects?

And then my conclusion is it is for integration policies—in other words, for assimilation policies. It is very difficult to culturally assimilate minorities if the receiving societies are not confident in their own values. The process of assimilation and developing successful assimilation—that is socializing these young men into the values of the host society—this is all compromised by that moral relativist attitude where we were saying you can integrate and we will only talk about the socio-economic aspects.

When it comes to the values, you can keep—we're not going to question those, and so there was not a proposition to yes, impose the values of liberal societies on the incoming minorities. There would be an opposition to that. This still is an opposition to that from within, saying to do that is to recolonize them. It's ethnocentric, it's Eurocentric, it is, it’s arrogant, it's racist, it is xenophobic, it's an excuse to keep people out.

So the integration process has been frustrated on the one hand from the establishment, which is relativist, and on the other hand by the populist and extreme right-wing parties that are saying we don't want anybody assimilating. We don't want them deported. Then you have this other third force, which is the Islamists, the radical Muslims who are preaching in the mosques to Muslim minorities and telling them, "Do not adopt the values of the infidels of the host societies because they're un-Islamic."

So if you ask me, the greatest failure is it's the failure of the simulation process, of the integration process.

Jordan: Okay, and so let's decompose that. If we had a more effective assimilation policy, what do you think that should look like? I mean, the obvious issue is employment.

Ayan: Perhaps the problem would disappear to a large degree if immigration policy was matched to employment policy. I'm obviously not sure how that could be done. It's a very complicated problem, but perhaps one policy shouldn't be developed in the absence of another.

Jordan: But I'm wondering, so people read your book and let's say they accept your conclusions that—and can I get you to state again? We've sort of developed the first part of your statement, but which is that women are being compromised with regards to their safety in public spaces and that's starting to impose counterproductive restrictions on their activities.

Ayan: And the second part is… and that's importantly a consequence of poorly designed immigration policies that allow for the arrival of people from cultures where women's rights are not valued. I'm not doing a disservice to your book to make that summary. I'm hoping—

Ayan: No, you're not. So I think it is totally possible to make the case that you can get people to come from societies that are very different in their cultural outlook and in their socioeconomic outlook. But if then the receiving society acknowledges that there is a problem and develops an appropriate integration or assimilation regime, then you could continue to have that flow of people coming in.

Jordan: So, yes, first of all, the immigration policies are themselves poorly designed. There's a lot of talk of asylum and refugees and humanitarianism and compassion and very little about the consequences on the ground for the receiving societies as the scale, as the number goes up and up.

Ayan: Well, you use Germany as an instructive example, and maybe we can just walk through that a bit, because you stated quite bluntly in your book that Angela Merkel was motivated to switch her attitude towards refugees and the borders of Germany as a consequence of an emotional response, a compassionate response, and that well thought-through policies weren't in place to back up her transformative actions.

Jordan: I spoke to German citizens who lived with her, livid. They voted for her or they voted for the SPD, the Social Democratic Party in Germany. So they are not… these are not right-wing extremists who want to close the doors to immigrants, but these are people who are livid. Livid. Very angry and saying this was spontaneous; it wasn't thought through. And they pointed to all the integration issues that were already straining.

Jordan: Let me say, relations between various ethnic groups, and they said we hadn’t even attended to that. We hadn’t these are people who were in the second generation and we were having assimilation issues with those. And now you open the gates and you say, “Okay, everybody come in because I feel for sorry for this little girl who, you know, who's really upset and the cameras are on me.”

Jordan: So people were really angry with her. But again, I still don't think that that answers the question, the deeper question, which most Europeans maybe right now, most people on the left side of this issue don't want to face, which is it's not the socio-economics that changes the culture. It is the culture that changes the socio-economics.

Ayan: Do you know much about the immigration situation in Canada?

Jordan: A little bit, yes. I know that Canada in some ways looks more like Europe than North America.

Ayan: Well, because they took in large numbers of immigrant men, and some of these situations that I described, some of these anecdotes I think I could see a lot of them happening in Canada.

Jordan: Well, it's not been obvious to me that in cities like Montreal and Toronto that we've seen a palpable increase in the kind of street activity that has produced a decrement in women's feeling of safety. I haven't—that's not something I've been personally aware of.

Jordan: I don't know if that means that Canada might be doing something right. It isn't obvious to me that our cities—Montreal and Toronto in particular, which have the biggest immigrant communities, especially Toronto—haven't fallen prey to segregation and the development of communities that are distinctively separate from the other communities in the city. I mean, there are obviously ethnic enclaves in Toronto, but I've never had the sense that we have the same problem here, for example, as has manifested itself in France.

Ayan: You know, Canada does have an official policy of multiculturalism, and I don't think that we're walking down the more intense assimilation route that you were describing. I mean, I'm obviously very pleased to see that it's certainly not been part of that—the kind of problems that you're describing haven't really become part of the Canadian national conversation. I mean, it's a strange time now, of course, with everyone locked down with COVID, but it's possible.

Ayan: I don't know why things have perhaps turned out better here, but they seem to have.

Jordan: Well, there is this one—again, I'm not an expert on Canadian immigration and integration policies—but one thing that I found striking about Canada is the selection at the gate. So Canada has its own resettlement policies. It has a very aggressive, I would say compared to some other countries, in trying to get in skilled labor, for instance. You have to speak English; you have to, you have to meet a lot of criteria before you can get into Canada.

Jordan: But there's also geography. I mean, if you look at the way it's become incredibly difficult for European authorities to keep out spontaneous immigration, so everybody wants to select their immigrants, and for some countries it's easier than others, and I think in Canada and Australia are some of the countries that have that geographical…

Ayan: Yes, that's a very good one. That's a good point.

Jordan: Yes, absolutely. We weren't—we're not as close to Syria, and so that protected or that distance from the downstream consequences of the Syrian conflict and not just the Syrian conflict, the economic travails of the continent of Africa. You know, coming, you can come through Libya; you can come through… people just arrive in boats, and the European authorities that, you know, that deploy the coast guards are confronted with, "Do you let these fellow human beings die, or do you rescue them and bring them in?" And then when you bring them in, whose responsibility are they? The conversation doesn't seem to go beyond that, and I don't think you've seen something like that in Canada. We've seen something like this in the U.S. from some of these failed or failing Latin American countries with the caravans and building the wall.

Jordan: We have those conversations in America, but I don't know—

Ayan: No, I think that's a good analysis. The simplest explanation could well be that Canada’s geographical position has protected it against many of the events or shielded us against many of the events that have made immigration such a contentious issue in other countries.

Jordan: Yeah, because you can select—you can select beforehand and also I think Canada has—Canada requires as far as I know that if you want to go and work and live there that you have someone to sponsor you. They have all of these requirements that they can actually enforce.

Ayan: Having said that, you've had a number of honor killings in Canada, you've had a number of terrorist attacks in Canada, you have a number of extreme right-wing incidents, attacks in Canada, so it's not like you're protected from some of these manifestations.

Jordan: So you suggested just a few minutes ago that this is an extremely contentious issue. I mean, one of the things I was struck when I read about when I read your book, Infidel, it was so interesting to see how you responded to Dutch culture because I got to see what one of the Western countries looked like through the eyes of someone who was decidedly non-Western.

I remember, for example, your amazement when you saw that a Dutch bus—that there was a sign indicating when a Dutch bus, public transportation bus was going to arrive and that it actually arrived at that time. And I thought that was an extremely powerful part of the book because it is a kind of miracle that that sort of thing can occur. It requires an incredible amount of social organization, and Holland is a great example of a country that couldn't even exist without that large-scale, tightly knit, almost machine-like organization, given that a huge proportion of their country would actually be underwater if it failed.

You're making a… you make a case in Infidel, you're making a case now that in order for the West to develop an effective integration policy that would enable an effective immigration policy, that we have to have faith in our own values, the values that gave rise, say to the idea of equal rights for women.

To accept that those—the rise of that idea was something perhaps distinctively Western, and that we need to teach those, we need to have enough faith in those presumptions to teach them to newcomers. That strikes me that the probability that we're going to do that strikes me as extraordinarily low if that's what's necessary, because I don't think—I mean, the last time I was in Holland, I was struck by the degree to which all the Dutch people that I talked to seemed to accept the proposition that they didn't really have much of a culture at all, that there was nothing particularly special about Dutch culture, perhaps that it even existed.

Jordan: Certainly didn't feel that it was of sufficient quality to impose on other people.

Ayan: I think we—and how would you address when you're criticized for being a neo-colonist, let's say? How do you—you're in such a strange position because of your, your where you were born and how you immigrated. And don't you think that there is a danger in the Western assertion of primacy of value, for example?

Ayan: And is that such a danger that it mitigates against any attempts to assimilate immigrants, for example?

Jordan: I think the way you started with, you know, the bus arriving on time and for something like that to happen, that a society that is hyper-organized, and you want to call that Western, I'm happy to call it Western, right? Some people just call it modernity. I don't know; some people think it was just luck. I think there's a bit of everything, but if you then look at societies where the bus doesn't come on time, that is one factor.

And I just really like the time factor, in fact. We can—we should just have one podcast only about that. Things happening on time and in a predictable fashion for millions of people—how do you organize that? And I think that sort of makes Western society distinct from societies that haven't managed to find a way of dealing with time effectively and efficiently.

The second thing is what we've been talking about all this time, and it's violence; it is suppressing male violence and channeling it so that it has other outlets instead of disrupting society and it being used against women. The sec—the third one I would say is money, and it is for societies to have these large surpluses where they can actually take care of the weak. They can afford compassion. Compassion is not just something you say, "I feel sorry for you." We pay taxes so that we can pay for people's—for the dispossessed, and we can pay for their medical care. We can pay for the housing.

We can so—and that again greatly enhances stability and social stability. And then finally, it’s sex, which is not something that you can spontaneously have whenever, whatever you know. Again, it's not perfect, but compared to some other societies, unwanted diseases, unwanted babies, rapes, and sexual violence, all of that in Western societies seems to be really different.

Now you take those four factors and you say we're going to bring people in from groups, from societies who don't have that. Should we bring them into this call? It's first assimilation or just socialization, or freeze, whatever you want to call it. But if we fail to do that and the number gets ever bigger, then we are going to have unstable societies. We're going to have—and the Dutch can say, and I've had the Swedes do the same thing; I've had Germans say the same thing to me, French—they say, "There is nothing uniquely different from my culture."

Maybe because they take it for granted because it's never been challenged. They all look alike, they think alike. And then one day—well, you do take whatever's around you all the time for granted, and it's clearly the case that we don't understand our own cultures, let alone other people's cultures. You don't understand what you have until you don't have it anymore.

Jordan: And what have you experienced the West as having? The values that should be transmitted to the immigrant population that we're inviting in? What's crucial in your estimation, and how do you communicate it? I mean, you tried to do that when you wrote Infidel, right?

Ayan: And I'm trying to do it again in this book and I've tried to do it in Heretic. I try to do it in every book in using different sentences, but pretty much saying the same thing, which is before I came to the Netherlands, I knew of the concept of freedom, but to me it was a dream; it wasn't something you had. So when I came to Holland, I was stunned, of course in a good way. I felt safe as a woman in any kind of space. That's not something I was used to.

I was told that I had equal rights before men, so when the man my husband was—my father married me off to—when he came to claim me, the woman at the asylum seeker center told him, "You don't have to go with him. You can call the police." And we called the police, and I didn't go with him. Tonight I can remember how stunned you were. Your account in Infidel, that the police were actually there to help you and that you could rely on them.

Ayan: You can rely on them, and she explained, and this is—and then I said, "What can I do in the Netherlands?" She said, "You don't have to do anything. This is the law." And that was the law when it was enforced. And again, that is something she was just as shocked as I was because she's so—there are places where they do this sort of thing and it is, oh my goodness.

So I can give you a whole list of things that I didn't have, and I even took it for granted that I didn't have those things and then come to free societies. And then you can read as many books as you want; you can befriend whoever you want; you can sleep with whomever you want; you can—you won't find—you know, you might be rejected from this job or that job, but it is taken for granted that you can find your own employment, and if you do, you can keep the money that you make from that.

I've been saying the same thing over and over again. You can associate with whoever you want. Again, in our conversation, when we started, I told you some of these things are changing, and they're not changing just because of external factors like Islam or immigration; they're changing from within. Because a lot of us people who are born and raised here for generations have decided that they are disappointed in modernity. They call themselves postmodernists or critical race theorists or whatever you name it.

But this is an ideology that's taking on—you can see it in newsrooms, in publication houses, the tech world, and there is an alarming rejection of the fruits of modernity, of free speech, of all the things that I was impressed with when I came to the West.

Jordan: So you contrast an Islamic attitude towards women with a Western attitude towards women. So do we say that that's a contrast between the Islamic attitude towards women and the Judeo-Christian attitude towards women? Is it reasonable to make that a religious issue? And or, what do you think about that? I mean, is this—is it…?

Ayan: Yeah, it is a religious issue; it's a cultural issue. It's also an issue of not only generating and being the motto behind modernity and constantly modernizing, which is what Western societies are constantly doing, and then obviously the religious component. For me, when I analyze the leadership of Islam is the disappointment with modernity and the rejection of that.

Jordan: And again, that is why—what are they rejecting, do you think, that we've accepted? What are the differences that it enables the emergence of the idea that women could be equal or that they are equal and that that equality should be fostered and treasured and developed? What's the difference?

Ayan: And maybe, I mean, I'm not expecting you necessarily to know the answer to that. But, but it is the issue.

Ayan: Well, the issue is when you study the narrative that the radical Muslims preach and propagate, there's this deep disappointment that Islam is no longer the dominant force of the globe. The answer that they give to that question is because they strayed away from the pure doctrine and the behavior of the Prophet, especially when he was in Medina and he had become so powerful.

He had conquered not only Arabia, but then went beyond, and then his disciples went to almost every continent, and they were dominant. Then what went wrong? I think people like Bertrand Russell and others have tried to give the answer and they came late to the game of modernity and then had these debates about, "Well, if we want to move forward and catch up with the West," when they looked down on—then we have to become like them.

That was the attempt that Kamal Ataturk made in Turkey. But then another force, a retrograde force—this is the modern Islamists—said no, that is actually the wrong answer. We have to make them submit to us. When I say they reject modernity, they like the gadgets and the nuclear weapons and that sort of modern stuff that makes them feel dominant or strong. But when it comes to adopting attitudes such as liberating women, they recoil from that, absolutely.

They recoil from that because they think that's what's going to take them about. That's looking like them or running your societies according to this, that time machine that the West does. They think that that's all empty, looking at the clock all the time.

So there are aspects about the West that they admire and want to incorporate, but the end goal is that it is not—their goal is not to adopt some of these Western values. But a lot of people are voting with their feet. There are people who are poor, dispossessed, subjected to all sorts of violence who want to come to the West and start all over again, and those are the people we are talking about.

I think the people to give those people a chance to actually become a part of modernity and modern society is to assimilate them, and the way to do it is just by admitting that some of these… the voting with the feet says it all.

Jordan: Well, you know, the classic response to that, the classic criticism of that perspective would be that those dispossessed people wouldn't have had to vote with their feet if the West hadn't engaged in its colonial mission and devastated the economic opportunities of two-thirds of the globe while elevating themselves to positions of unearned superiority.

Of course, there's no shortage of evidence for that if that's the evidence that you choose to look at, and sorting that all out seems to be impossibly difficult. The West is guilty for all the crimes that have been committed in its name, and many of those crimes were real.

And so I don't—we don't know how to uphold what we have of value while simultaneously atoning for our past sins. Maybe even the ways I—I would say we could at least admit that our past sins were the failure of our— the failure to live up to our values, rather than the values themselves. But it's certainly not—it's certainly not the case that everyone's going to agree to that. It's a real mystery why the idea of equality between the genders or equality between men and things in general came about.

You know, to me it seems to have a deep rooting in the idea of the universal soul and the intrinsic value of each person and the intrinsic value of each person's capacity for speech and creative production. I think that's a deeply Judeo-Christian idea. Its roots go deeper than that. I don't understand; I don't know if there is an Islamic equivalent.

Ayan: I think first of all, just by telling only one side of the story, the story of what is making a lot of people in the West feel guilty and that they feel that they have to atone for the colonization, the slavery, the segregation— all of these well-documented terrible things that Western societies have engaged in, that is one side of the story.

But there's also another side of the story, and the other side of the story is that it is Westerners who took the initiative among humanity to change all of that, to end slavery, to end segregation, to aspire for equality. So if you're going to tell the story, then it's better to tell both sides of the story.

Now, for the people who tell only the negative side of the story, who are toppling statues and saying the only way to redeem Westerners is for them to destroy everything and start all over again, I think even with those, aside from the obvious nihilism, the let's just destroy stuff and the selective telling of the story, there's also an element of superiority in there.

An element of, sorry, an element of superiority or supremacy because only whites and Westerners are held for bad things they did in the past or do today. Do you mean about bad things that were perpetrated by Europeans? I mean, it's certainly the case that slavery was a human universal; it's not something unique to European society by any stretch of the imagination, and so was colonialism, and so was and is segregation still to this day.

Take a continent like India where the caste system is still vibrant and healthy or any—take any of the Arab countries where people with my skin color are still regarded as slaves. So I think if you want to litigate history and all the things that were done bad by human beings, selecting only whites and especially white men and saying only they have to forever atone for their sins is in itself an expression of supremacy.

Because holding the Arabs and holding the Chinese—and the Chinese right now are engaged in a genocide against the Uyghur people. We have reports of them forcibly sterilizing women. Why can't we hold them to the same moral standard that we are holding ourselves?

Jordan: So you think it's inappropriately colonialist for white Europeans to attribute universal human guilt to themselves?

Ayan: It's an expression of supremacy; it's an expression of only we can meet those high, very high standards, not the rest of humanity. They are all victims in one way or the other, or we just take it for granted—they just can't do it.

Jordan: Well, what conclusion would you like your readers and anybody concerned with public policy to come to as a consequence of reading, well, let's say your books, Pray, in particular since it's your last book?

Ayan: Is it—you think that there is a clash of civilizations and that we should be aware of that?

Ayan: It's manifestations here and there. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

Ayan: Yeah, you're right. So there is indeed a clash, at least—even if you don’t want to call it a clash of civilizations, because people responded badly to that. You can call it unmistakably a clash of values. And in that encounter between the cultures and the value systems, the conclusion of this book is we can assimilate or integrate whatever the Europeans call it.

These young men who are dispossessed and who are vulnerable without sacrificing the rights of women. But we can't do that unless we forthrightly confront the problems that are associated with an open with a more open immigration policy, and that is the first step. That is the first step.

And even maybe even a step ahead of that is we have to have these conversations. So let's stop putting these issues, putting a taboo over these issues. We have to see the way these things are linked. If you want to do that, like stop using—you and I started our conversation with statistics—and stop using statistics as a tool of obfuscation, as a tool of lying about things that are going on. Let's use statistics and data actually to solve these problems.

And we can't if we keep on declaring—if we demonize one another and we moralize towards one another and then we don't know where to go from there. So then we start compromising free speech, and so then you can't have these conversations. So maybe the first step is, I wish this book would only contribute to the opening of that conversation. It's not just about women; it's really about this—how to coexist with one another in places—in Europe, in America, on the globe.

Jordan: Alright, I've had the distinct pleasure, complicated pleasure, speaking with Ayan Hirsi Ali today. And she's the author of multiple books, including this one, her newest, published in 2021 called Pray: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights. Ayan is launching a podcast Monday, which is February 8th, Monday, February 8th. And as well as launching her new website, which is ayanhirsiali.com.

I'd encourage anybody who wants to know more about Ayan's thinking to visit her website and to attend to her podcast, which I'm sure will be very interesting and, no doubt, perhaps more interesting than people will be able to tolerate. We'll see.

Thank you very much for talking with me today, Ayan. It was a pleasure to see you again.

Ayan: Thank you, Jordan. Thank you so very much. We could have continued this for a good long time, but I had to go into the kids, so thank you so much for having me.

Jordan: Bye-bye.

Ayan: Bye-bye.

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