Islam is Dangerous and Must Be Reformed Says Former Somali Muslim

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of my heroes. She is a proud American, and a former Muslim, born in Somalia, who believes Islam is dangerous and must be reformed.

She was born to a Muslim family in Somalia, shuttled between Kenya, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia as a kid, and then, aged 22, was married off by her father to a man he thought was ideal for her in Canada. She didn’t like him though so she got off the plane in Germany and ended up with refugee status in Holland and, ten years later, was elected to the Dutch parliament as an MP. She now lives in America, on the West Coast, married to a historian, Niall Ferguson, with an eight-year old son of her own. And an awful lot of hate mail and death threats for her well-earned views about Islamic reform.

What does she say about Islam?

“There is no conspiracy. If you’re an ex-Muslim there are people who want to kill you on account of deserting Islam. I'm one of them. That’s not phobia, it’s rational fear. If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible. Islam is NOT a religion of peace.

We can’t even have this conversation without first talking about how there is ONE Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and reformers. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers. Right now, the Medina have the upper hand. By Medina I don’t just mean the renegades—Islamic State, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, non-state actors and movements—but large groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, and more importantly, the nation-state of Saudi Arabia, the nation-state of Iran. They are the core centers, with Sharia Law; Saudi Arabia of Sunni Islam, Iran of Shia. Their rule is marked by violence, intimidation and aggression.

To reform Islam, we must:

1) Abandon the literalist reading of the Quran. Muhammad called upon the believers to do things that, today, fall under a declaration of war or pure crime.

2) We must change Islam’s excessive investment in "life after death" instead of "life before death."

3) We must do away with Sharia Law, very much a global goal if you are a Medina Muslim and if you take the Quran literally.

4) We must end the little-known concept of “commanding right and forbidding wrong." For example, under Sharia law, in Afghanistan, if a woman is accused of burning the Quran, not that she did, but a man screams to a crowd, “She burned the Quran!” and they all come running and stone her to death.

5) Jihad, holy war, must be abandoned entirely. Jihad commands Muslims to convert or kill all non-believers.

6) We must stop the normalization of women covering their bodies from head to toe. Women covering their heads is traditional, but now we’re seeing more and more women covering themselves from head to toe. This is said to be for religious reasons but it’s actually a political symbol to show the power of Islam and the oppression of women. The Hijab today is a political symbol, no longer religious."

7) We must end the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) or "cutting" that removes the clitoris and labia from women to deny them pleasurable sex and to keep them from straying.

8) No doctrine is more violent to the gay community than Islamic doctrine. It is time to take on Muslim homophobia.

Bottom line? There are 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet. Either we do the hard work of reform or the extremists rule and we all die. Pretty simple.