For the past several decades, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been everywhere. She has been a New Atheist, a Dutch parliamentarian, and a public intellectual living under Islamist death threats; now, to the shock of many, she has converted to Christianity and launched her own media platform to advocate for the restoration of the West called Couarge.Media.
In retrospect, there were indications that Hirsi Ali was considering Christianity. In 2021, I interviewed both Hirsi Ali and her husband historian Niall Ferguson within a few weeks of each other. Both had just released books; I was reviewing Ferguson’s Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe for The American Conservative and Hirsi Ali’s Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights for this publication. Later, going over my transcripts, I noted with interest that both Ferguson and Hirsi Ali had brought up—and defended—Christianity during the interviews unprompted.
Ferguson had noted that despite his atheism he believes Christianity is essential to the West and stated that people should go to church. Hirsi Ali mentioned that she admired many Christians and that the death of Christianity has left a catastrophic civilizational void. I thought it strange, got on with writing my reviews, and didn’t think much of it until Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s now-famous 2023 essay “Why I am now a Christian” was published in 2023.
Hirsi Ali has expanded on her essay since then, sitting down with a disappointed but affectionate Richard Dawkins at Dissident Dialogues and atheist Alex O’Connor on his podcast, in which she clarified that her conversion was not a merely aesthetic or political one (an impression some had gleaned from her UnHerd essay). Then, in October, Hirsi Ali announced her next major project: a new platform called Courage.Media. According to the founding statement:
Courage.Media is founded on the principle that courage is bold action in the face of threats to individuals, culture, and the pursuit of truth. Courage is the endeavor to be honest, even when conformity is easier. Inspired by my journey from tribalism to civilization, Courage.Media is a place where ideas are openly discussed and challenged; a community that values freedom of thought and expression.
Hirsi Ali’s own story—summarized later in the founding statement—is itself a testament to courage. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969, she was subject to female genital mutilation at the age of five and fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage in 1992. She worked as an interpreter in asylum centers, earned a degree in political science at the University of Leiden, became a critic of the Islamic world’s treatment of women, and served as a Dutch MP from 2003 to 2006. Christopher Hitchens called her perhaps the most important public intellectual to come out of Africa.
In 2004, her friend Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death by a Dutch-born Moroccan Islamist. She and Van Gogh had created a short film titled Submission, which detailed the abuse of women in Islam. A death threat to Hirsi Ali was pinned to Van Gogh’s chest as he died in the street. Twenty years on, this threat still looms. Indeed, 31 years after being targeted by a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Salman Rushdie was brutally stabbed by an Islamist attacker in 2022 in New York. Rushdie says his first thought when he saw the man rushing the stage was: “So it’s you. Here you are.”
Hirsi Ali remembers the Rushdie fatwa well. “I had been brainwashed enough to agree with that fatwa, and to actually go out and protest along with the people who were dumb enough to buy the book and burn it,” she told me. She, like Rushdie, now lives with perpetual security—even before Van Gogh’s murder, she was a target. “At first, it’s shocking, it’s all you can think about, it is frightening. I have to admit that I was and still am very frightened. But as time goes by, you learn to live with it, you learn to protect yourself, you learn to survive.”
“By the time Theo was killed, I lived in the Netherlands and was surrounded by armed men protecting me, moving me from address to address. So you just get into this: What if? What if? And it is so mentally, physically, and spiritually daunting.”
“It isn’t just the toll that it takes, in my case, of having my freedom of movement highly constrained,” Hirsi Ali said. “It is the toll that it takes on you mentally, this constant fear that’s hanging over your head. I also had feelings of just awful guilt towards Theo. It’s a constant replay in my head of: What if things had gone differently? What if we didn’t make the film? What if he had just taken a different route to work? What if he didn’t have his address in the telephone book? What if the mayor of Amsterdam had protected him?”
Despite this threat—which, as the Rushdie stabbing grimly reminded us, always remains—Hirsi Ali refuses to stop speaking the truth as she sees it. She has published several explosive memoirs (the first defiantly titled Infidel) and is now making her mark with Courage.Media. This platform, she says, is a place where people can engage in the marketplace of ideas without the threat of being vilified, cancelled, or censored, and she hopes it will also be a corrective to the self-censorship so many have imposed on themselves as the result of the Islamist violence.
Hirsi Ali says she is grateful for many alternative media platforms—The Free Press, UnHerd, Substack, and X—but she believes there is room for more. She sees Courage.Media as “a quest for the restoration of what makes the West great … for us to be able to embark on the mission of restoration. We also want to be able to articulate what is a threat, what are the termite-like forces chipping away at Western thought, Western institutions, Christianity—and I want to do it unabashedly, unapologetically. I think Western civilization is the greatest civilization that ever was, and we need the courage to say that and the courage to try and restore it.”
There are still major challenges facing platforms seeking to provide an alternative to the mainstream press. Few organizations outside of traditional media have the budget or the staff to put reporters on the ground to provide coverage from conflict zones to other crises. The collapse of the mainstream media’s credibility has created conditions rife for the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and many reputable foreign correspondents see their work dismissed by those who no longer trust the masthead. Few alternative media platforms have the capacity—or ambition—to replace this key journalistic function.
Hirsi Ali sees this challenge as an opportunity. “At the moment, it’s messy,” Hirsi Ali told me. “It’s going to continue to be messy until, yes, we have enough resources to be able to afford [to do this work].” There is room, she noted, for a “news organization that reports primarily on war zones and dangerous zones and does that type of work” without being “beholden to some narrative they’re trying to push or some political angle they want us to see instead of just the plain truth. The market for that is wide open.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been at the forefront of public debate for decades. Now, with her conversion to Christianity and her new media platform, she approaches our turbulent times—which she, more than most, has experienced personally—with fresh eyes. “My conversion to Christianity now plays a role in everything I do,” she told me. “It’s a way of life, and it is how I live. I [am always] praying to God for guidance in how I do it, and in doing it in the right way.”
