An analysis of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s outlook on Islamic practice

Abstract

A Somali-born, Dutch American writer, activist, former politician, and employee of Harvard University, Stanford University, American Enterprise Institute, and The Hoover Institution, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a self-professed public intellectual and a global socio-cultural phenomenon whose influence permeates social media, academia, international relations, and global politics, making her a ubiquitous force. Renowned for her anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim crusade, she tenuously and conjecturally declares Islamic practice to be out of place in secular, pluralistic societies due to the clash between Islamic and Western norms and ways of life.

The research question of this thesis centres on Hirsi Ali’s critical views of Islamic practice in her book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, published in 2015, that are seemingly not based on data or empirically driven research or on empirically tested and proven study and, therefore, they do not align with empirical research on Muslim religious life in the West. This disconnect is both a real scientific conundrum and a sociological quandary in the sense that Hirsi Ali seems to be disenfranchised from the social reality of Muslims and her outlook on Islamic practice creates uncertainty around this important phenomenon in the West. The literature on Hirsi Ali has neglected to address this dilemma that sociologists have failed to provide any analytic insights into. This study aims to address this lacuna by analysing Hirsi Ali’s outlook on Islamic practice in Heretic. The following question pertains to this approach: Is there an empirical distance between Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s claims in Heretic and the Islamic lived experience of Muslims in the West?

With specific reference to Muslim religious life in Australia, the thesis employs Pierre Bourdieu’s and others’ conceptualisation of capital, habitus, and field to argue that Muslims are in possession of individual, religious, social, and political resources and advantages that facilitate their religious rituals and behaviours. Employing a two-pronged methodology of in-depth semi-structured interviews with Australian Muslims and an autoethnography of salah (ritual prayer), the thesis gains insight into the lived reality of Islamic practice. The study draws on its empirical findings to analyse Hirsi Ali’s outlook on Islamic practice. It achieves this aim by identifying Hirsi Ali as first, failing to appreciate the dynamic relationship between Muslim capital, Muslim religious habitus, and Western social fields that produce Islamic practice; second, adopting the “Islam and” view of the relationship between Muslims, Islam, and the West; second, discursively displacing Muslims from the West by adopting a reactionary sense of place; third, conveying the message of Orientalism; and fourth, engaging in mythmaking which renders Heretic a mythmaking device.

Date of Thesis submission	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Jan Ali (Supervisor)