Ayaan Hirsi Ali: 'There are atrocities performed in the name of culture and religion in Europe'

The Monday Interview: Dutch MP and immigration critic

Two burly bodyguards are watching from the wings as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch MP, critic of Islam and the Netherlands' best-protected woman, takes the stage at a lecture theatre in The Hague. About 90 people have come to hear her speak about the EU constitution, but the bodyguards are paying most attention to four Asian youths sitting in the front row, staring hard at the woman who famously described Islam as "backward".

Two burly bodyguards are watching from the wings as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch MP, critic of Islam and the Netherlands' best-protected woman, takes the stage at a lecture theatre in The Hague. About 90 people have come to hear her speak about the EU constitution, but the bodyguards are paying most attention to four Asian youths sitting in the front row, staring hard at the woman who famously described Islam as "backward".

Ms Hirsi Ali's declaration of support for the document is one of the last cards to be played by a "yes" campaign that faces defeat in Holland's referendum on Wednesday. But something about the youths' body language suggests that they are less interested in Ms Hirsi Ali's views on European integration than her status as the country's leading critic of Islam, a woman living under a host of death threats. Some minutes later, while Ms Hirsi Ali is in full flow, the youths stand up in unison and walk out.

Ms Hirsi Ali is unfazed. Her contributions are concise and controlled. Though physically slight she berates the speaker for the "no" side for using emotional, rather than rational, arguments about the constitution. But there is never any hint that she will lose her composure.

Aged 35, the Somali-born former asylum-seeker has found herself at the heart of Holland's recent traumatic political history. It was following the events of 11 September that Ms Hirsi Ali published her first critical article about Islam and was rewarded for her pains with her first death threat. Her calls for a brake on immigration and an end to Islamic schools provoked ructions and, even after the murder of the maverick Dutch anti-immigration campaigner Pim Fortuyn (assassinated by an animal rights activist in 2002), Ms Hirsi Ali did not pull her punches. It was she who wrote the film Submission, which depicted the abuse of women under Islam and which was produced by the outspoken film-maker Theo van Gogh. He was shot and nearly decapitated in broad daylight in Amsterdam and a five-page letter pinned to his chest with a knife threatened Ms Ali with a similar fate.

Van Gogh's killing in November last year forced Ms Hirsi Ali into hiding and a life in perpetual motion, transported between secure locations surrounded by tight security.

She answers questions about her predicament by gesturing to the two ubiquitous bodyguards. "You can observe how it is," she says. "I am limited in my freedom of movement." Things have improved from the immediate aftermath of the killing, when she had to sleep in a naval base. She has travelled to the US and has met Salman Rushdie (the fatwa against whom she once supported in her youth). Now she has a flat, although of its two bedrooms one is reserved for the security team, and each time she opens her door a bodyguard will appear to check on her.

Ms Hirsi Ali travels in an armoured-plated car, and knows that were she to have a relationship she would put a partner's life at risk.

"I travel, I have an apartment since March so I have a little more privacy than when I was being moved from place to place," she says. She smiles slightly as she adds: "There are some bad things and some moments when I think, 'Well, what is all this about?' - some form of panic, you know - you are threatened and stuff like that. But there is also the positive side, because within three years I have been able to convey my message to the public. So everyone in Europe knows the situation of Muslim women is not comparable to the situation of the native women. That there are also atrocities performed in the name of culture and religion taking place within Europe, within the Netherlands, and governments must deal with this."

Born in 1969, the young Ayaan was a pious girl, devoted to her religion, one of three children in her family. Because her father was an opponent of the regime, her childhood was spent in exile in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, before she arrived in Nairobi, where she was educated. Her schoolfriends would regularly disappear as their parents, without warning, arranged marriages.

It was when her own wedding was planned in 1992, to a cousin in Canada she had never met, that her life changed. Sent to Germany while immigration papers were arranged, Ms Hirsi Ali decided to flee, the original idea being to go to England.

She recalls: "I wanted to go to the UK because I spoke English. I grew up in Nairobi, and did my primary and secondary education there. And I didn't feel like learning a new language at the age of 22." That was not how it turned out because, as she puts it, "there was a sea between Germany and the UK." Instead she took a train to the Netherlands, though she "knew nothing about the Netherlands except that there was a footballer called [Marco] van Basten, that they had dykes, that they walked on wooden shoes - normal stereotypes."

What she found, she says, was "liberalism itself with traditional tolerance". From menial work she moved to become a translator for the social services, specialising in cases where women had been physically abused. She studied political science and joined the Dutch Labour party.

After 11 September, her criticism of Islam as a backward religion offended the party's multicultural sensitivities. Eventually she quit Labour to join the centre-right VVD Liberal party.

The terror attacks in the US set in chain the events that catapulted Ms Hirsi Ali to prominence, though she sees herself as a "pawn" in a wider game, her comments used by both sides in a polarised debate.

Looking back, she regrets the language she used. She says: "I was in a debate with some men and they had provoked me to trade insults with them. They had accused me of calling Islam 'backward'. It's my belief that I was brought up within Islam, so why don't I have the right to call my own religion 'backward'?

"When I blurted that out I did not know it was going to cause so much commotion. I should have used another word, 'lagged behind' - more politically correct - I don't think it would have helped though."

Why is Ms Hirsi Ali a supporter of the European constitution? Ms Hirsi Ali says: "I believe in the European dream. When I look at the whole process of Europe reunification I think there were many hurdles along the road but it's a very optimistic vision and it has benefited the Netherlands."

She believes that fundamentalism, terrorism and illegal immigration can only be tackled at a European level, and that the EU is one of the answers to population movements and fanaticism, and a bastion of freedoms and basic standards for women.

She says: "When it comes to co-operating in matters of migration, trading women, and drugs, this constitution gives us the opportunity to co-operate on all of those issues, especially in fighting against terrorism.

"We don't have [frontier checks at] borders with Belgium and Germany any more so we can't control our borders any more, our [external] borders lie very far away and I think this constitution helps develop a unified aim on matters like migration, asylum, terrorism." A supporter of the French separation of religion and state, Ms Hirsi Ali is also pleased that the document does not refer to Christianity. She argues: "I think that religion and politics should be kept apart and the constitution is a political instrument, it's public life, and I consider religion a private affair.

"Because there are so many gods and so many holy books and so much belief and superstition, it's hard to elevate one of them into the constitution while leaving the others behind." To do so, she adds, "would be excluding all the Muslims and all the Buddhists and all the Sikhs and all the atheists like me. I think it is not wise to have religion in the constitution."

Speaking two days before the French vote, Ms Hirsi Ali concedes that the decision there will set the tone of the past few days of campaigning in the Netherlands. Despite a host of opinion polls predicting a Dutch "no", Ms Ali is not defeatist, arguing that the Dutch "can be very unpredictable". However, she concedes that a French "no" would make a Dutch rejection almost certain: Such a result would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. Since 2002, the Netherlands Holland has seen two political murders, two electoral earthquakes, a national identity crisis and a seismic change in the political debate. In all this turmoil its solid pro-Europeanism has given way to growing uncertainty and Euroscepticism.

Ms Hirsi Ali says that Dutch have in their mind a vision of Madurodam, a neat and pleasant children's attraction in The Hague based on a scaled-down model of a city. "It's this perfect little place. About 50 years ago the Netherlands looked like that, there was no real crime, and people got police tickets because they were sitting on the wrong side of their bicycle. Now they have to deal with issues of migration and Islamic fundamentalism and the whole aftermath of the globalisation process."

The CV

* Born Mogadishu, Somalia, 13 November 1969

* School in Nairobi, Kenya

* 1992 arrived in Netherlands as asylum-seeker

* Worked as a translator, joined Dutch Labour Party

* 1995 started studying political science at Leiden University

* 2001 published first articles critical of Islam

* 2002, defected from Labour Party to VVD, Liberal Party

* 30 January 2003 elected MP

* Co-wrote film Submission with producer Theo van Gogh

* 2 November 2004 goes into hiding after Van Gogh killed