title: Mario Lemieux

text: With their son, Austin, being born prematurely in 1996, the Lemieux family spent quite a bit of time in the hospital with Austin, including 71 days after his birth. The family found that the older children didn't have a place to play in the hospital. Using the Lemieux Foundation resources, driven by Nathalie's idea and vision, founded a program called "Austin's Playroom Project". The project builds play rooms in various hospitals across the US to give both children who are patients and their healthy siblings a place to play and "be kids" and concentrate on being normal and healing. On January 31, 2014, the foundation announced the opening of the twenty-ninth Austin's Playroom at the new Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, Camp Pendleton, California.


title: Mario Lemieux

text: A statue in his honour, created by sculptor Bruce Wolfe, was erected in Pittsburgh on March 7, 2012, outside the Consol Energy Center. The statue is modelled after a play in a 1988 game against the New York Islanders where Lemieux slipped in between Islanders defencemen Rich Pilon and Jeff Norton to score a goal in a 5–3 Penguins victory. Both Pilon and Norton (the latter of which would later play for the Penguins during Lemieux's comeback season), as well as the Islanders, are unbranded on their portion of the statue.


title: Mario Lemieux

text: In 1992, local confectioner D. L. Clark Company produced a Mario Bar, modelled on the caramel Bun Bar, featuring his image on the packaging and including collectors' trading cards.


title: Mario Lemieux

text: Lemieux has competed at the American Century Championship, an annual competition to determine the best golfers among American sports and entertainment celebrities. He won the tournament in 1998 and has two top-ten finishes. It was this year when he shot a 3-under 69 to earn him the ACC trophy. The tournament, televised by NBC in July, is played at Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (; ; Somali: "Ayaan Xirsi Cali":" Ayān Ḥirsī 'Alī;" born Ayaan Hirsi Magan, 13 November 1969) is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honor killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. She has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali works for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the American Enterprise Institute, and was a senior fellow at the Future of Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2003, Hirsi Ali was elected a member of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the States General of the Netherlands, representing the centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis related to the validity of her Dutch citizenship, namely the accusation that she had lied on her application for political asylum, led to her resignation from parliament, and indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet in 2006.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim who became an atheist. In 2004, she collaborated on a short film with Theo van Gogh, titled "Submission", which depicted the oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law, and was critical of the Muslim canon itself. The film led to death threats, and van Gogh was murdered several days after the film's release by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic terrorist. Hirsi Ali maintains that "Islam is part religion, and part a political-military doctrine, the part that is a political doctrine contains a world view, a system of laws and a moral code that is totally incompatible with our constitution, our laws, and our way of life." In her 2015 book "Heretic", Hirsi Ali called for a reformation of Islam by countering Islamism and supporting reformist Muslims.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2005, Hirsi Ali was named by "Time" magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards, including a free speech award from the Danish newspaper "Jyllands-Posten", the Swedish Liberal Party's Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship. Critics accuse Ali of having built her political career on islamophobia, and question her scholarly credentials "to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world". Her works have been accused of using neo-orientalist portrayals and perpetuating a "civilizing mission" discourse. Hirsi Ali married Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson in 2011, migrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 2013.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Ayaan was born in 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somali Revolution. Shortly after she was born, her father was imprisoned due to his opposition to Siad Barre’s Communist government. Hirsi Ali's father had studied abroad and was opposed to female genital mutilation, but while he was imprisoned, Hirsi Ali's grandmother had a man perform the procedure on her, when Hirsi Ali was five years old. According to Hirsi Ali, she was fortunate that her grandmother could not find a woman to do the procedure, as the mutilation was "much milder" when performed by men.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: After her father escaped from prison, he and the family left Somalia in 1977, going to Saudi Arabia and then to Ethiopia, before settling in Nairobi, Kenya by 1980. There he established a comfortable upper-class life for them. Hirsi Ali attended the English-language Muslim Girls' Secondary School. By the time she reached her teens, Saudi Arabia was funding religious education in numerous countries and its religious views were becoming influential among many Muslims. A charismatic religious teacher, trained under this aegis, joined Hirsi Ali's school. She inspired the teenaged Ayaan, as well as some fellow students, to adopt the more rigorous Saudi Arabian interpretations of Islam, as opposed to the more relaxed versions then current in Somalia and Kenya. Hirsi Ali said later that she had long been impressed by the Qur'an and had lived "by the Book, for the Book" throughout her childhood.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She sympathised with the views of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a "hijab" with her school uniform. This was unusual at the time but has become more common among some young Muslim women. At the time, she agreed with the "fatwa" proclaimed against British Indian writer Salman Rushdie in reaction to the portrayal of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses". After completing secondary school, Hirsi Ali attended a secretarial course at Valley Secretarial College in Nairobi for one year. As she was growing up, she also read English-language adventure stories, such as the Nancy Drew series, with modern heroine archetypes who pushed the limits of society.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Also, remembering her grandmother refusing soldiers entry into her house, Hirsi Ali associated with Somalia "the picture of strong women: the one who smuggles in the food, and the one who stands there with a knife against the army and says, 'You cannot come into the house.' And I became like that. And my parents and my grandmother don't appreciate that now—because of what I've said about the Qur'an. I have become them, just in a different way."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands in 1992. That year she had travelled from Kenya to visit her family in Düsseldorf and Bonn, Germany and gone to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage. Once there, she requested political asylum and obtained a residence permit. She used her paternal grandfather's early surname on her application and has since been known in the West as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She received a residence permit within three or four weeks of arriving in the Netherlands.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: At first she held various short-term jobs, ranging from cleaning to sorting post. She worked as a translator at a Rotterdam refugee center which, according to a friend interviewed in 2006 by "The Observer" newspaper, marked her deeply.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: As an avid reader, in the Netherlands she found new books and ways of thought that both stretched her imagination and frightened her. Sigmund Freud's work introduced her to an alternative moral system that was not based on religion. During this time she took courses in Dutch and a one-year introductory course in social work at the Hogeschool De Horst in Driebergen. She has said that she was impressed with how well Dutch society seemed to function. To better understand its development, she studied at the Leiden University (Leiden, Netherlands), where she obtained an MSc degree in political science in 2000.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Between 1995 and 2001, Hirsi Ali also worked as an independent Somali-Dutch interpreter and translator, frequently working with Somali women in asylum centers, hostels for abused women, and at the Dutch immigration and naturalization service (IND, Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst). While working for the IND, she became critical of the way it handled asylum seekers. Hirsi Ali speaks six languages: English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, and Dutch.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: After gaining her degree, Hirsi Ali became a Fellow at the Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), a think tank of the center-left Labour Party (PvdA). Leiden University Professor Ruud Koole was steward of the party. Hirsi Ali's writing at the WBS was inspired by the work of the neoconservative Orientalist Bernard Lewis.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She became disenchanted with Islam, and was shocked by the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, for which al-Qaeda eventually claimed responsibility. After listening to videotapes of Osama bin Laden citing "words of justification" in the Qur'an for the attacks, she wrote, "I picked up the Qur'an and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find Bin Laden's quotations in there." During this time of transition, she came to regard the Qur'an as relative—it was a historical record and "just another book."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Reading "Atheïstisch manifest" ("Atheist Manifesto") of Leiden University philosopher Herman Philipse helped to convince her to give up religion. She renounced Islam and acknowledged her disbelief in God in 2002. She began to formulate her critique of Islam and Islamic culture, published many articles on these topics, and became a frequent speaker on television news programs and in public debate forums. She discussed her ideas at length in a book titled "De zoontjesfabriek" ("The Son Factory") (2002). In this period, she first began to receive death threats.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Cisca Dresselhuys, editor of the feminist magazine "Opzij", introduced Hirsi Ali to Gerrit Zalm, the parliamentary leader of the centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), and party member Neelie Kroes, then European Commissioner for Competition. At their urging, Hirsi Ali agreed to switch to their party of the VVD and stood for election to Parliament. Between November 2002 and January 2003, she lived abroad while on the payroll as an assistant of the VVD.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2003, aged 33, Hirsi Ali successfully fought a parliamentary election. She said that the Dutch welfare state had overlooked abuse of Muslim women and girls in the Netherlands and their social needs, contributing to their isolation and oppression.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: During her tenure in Parliament, Hirsi Ali continued her criticisms of Islam and many of her statements provoked controversy. In an interview in the Dutch newspaper "Trouw", she said that by Western standards, Muhammad as represented in the Qu'ran would be considered a pedophile. A religious discrimination complaint was filed against her on 24 April 2003 by Muslims who objected to her statements. The Prosecutor's office decided not to initiate a case, because her critique did "not put forth any conclusions in respect to Muslims and their worth as a group is not denied".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Working with writer and director Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali wrote the script and provided the voice-over for "Submission" (2004), a short film that criticised the treatment of women in Islamic society. Juxtaposed with passages from the Qur'an were scenes of actresses portraying Muslim women suffering abuse. An apparently nude actress dressed in a semi-transparent "burqa" was shown with texts from the Qur'an written on her skin. These texts are among those often interpreted as justifying the subjugation of Muslim women. The film's release sparked outrage among many Dutch Muslims.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan Islamist and member of the Muslim terrorist organisation Hofstad Group, assassinated van Gogh in an Amsterdam street on 2 November 2004. Bouyeri shot van Gogh with a handgun eight times, first from a distance and then at short range as the director lay wounded on the ground. He was already dead when Bouyeri cut his throat with a large knife and tried to decapitate him. Bouyeri left a letter pinned to Van Gogh's body with a small knife; it was primarily a death threat to Hirsi Ali. The Dutch secret service immediately raised the level of security they provided to Hirsi Ali. Bouyeri was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2004, a rap song about Hirsi Ali titled "Hirsi Ali Dis" was produced and distributed on the internet by a group called "The Hague Connection". The lyrics included violent threats against her life. The rappers were prosecuted under Article 121 of the Dutch criminal code because they hindered Hirsi Ali's execution of her work as a politician. In 2005 they were sentenced to community service and a suspended prison sentence.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali went into hiding, aided by government security services, who moved her among several locations in the Netherlands. They moved her to the United States for several months. On 18 January 2005, she returned to parliament. On 18 February 2005, she revealed where she and her colleague Geert Wilders were living. She demanded a normal, secured house, which she was granted one week later.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In January 2006, Hirsi Ali was recognised as "European of the Year" by "Reader's Digest", an American magazine. In her speech, she urged action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. She also said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be taken at his word in wanting to organise a conference to investigate objective evidence of the Holocaust, noting that the subject is not taught in the Middle East. She said, "Before I came to Europe, I'd never heard of the Holocaust. That is the case with millions of people in the Middle East. Such a conference should be able to convince many people away from their denial of the genocide against the Jews." She also said that what some have described as "Western values" of freedom and justice were universal. But she thought that Europe has done far better than most areas of the world in providing justice, as it has guaranteed the freedom of thought and debate required for critical self-examination. She said communities cannot reform unless "scrupulous investigation of every former and current doctrine is possible." Hirsi Ali was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize the same month by Norwegian parliamentarian Christian Tybring-Gjedde.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In March 2006, she co-signed a letter titled "". Among the eleven other signatories was Salman Rushdie; as a teenager, Hirsi Ali had supported the fatwa against him. The letter was published in response to protests in the Islamic world surrounding the "Jyllands-Posten" Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark, and it supported freedom of press and freedom of expression.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: On 27 April 2006, a Dutch judge ruled that Hirsi Ali had to abandon her current secure house at a secret address in the Netherlands. Her neighbors had complained that she created an unacceptable security risk, but the police had testified that this neighborhood was one of the safest places in the country, as they had many personnel assigned to it for Hirsi Ali's protection. In an interview in early 2007, Hirsi Ali noted that the Dutch state had spent about €3.5 million on her protection; threats against her produced fear, but she believed it important to speak her mind. While regretting van Gogh's death, she said she was proud of their work together.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: A private trust, the Foundation for Freedom of Expression, was established in 2007 in the Netherlands to help fund protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In May 2006 the TV programme "Zembla" reported that Hirsi Ali had given false information about her name, her age, and her country of residence when originally applying for asylum. In her asylum application, she had claimed to be fleeing a forced marriage, but the "Zembla" coverage featured interviews with her family, who denied that claim. The program alleged that, contrary to Hirsi Ali's claims of having fled a Somali war zone, the MP had been living comfortably in upper middle-class conditions safely in Kenya with her family for at least 12 years before she sought refugee status in the Netherlands in 1992.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In her version of events, she had fled civil war in Somalia, was forced into an arranged marriage with a man whom she had never met, and was not present at her own wedding. Upon escaping she was forced into hiding in the Netherlands, for her ex-husband and father's brothers would have been by Somali custom, required to perform an honor killing. The accounts of various witnesses varied greatly from hers. According to them, she left Somalia prior to any mass violence, and led a comfortable, upper-middle class life in neighboring Kenya, where she attended a Muslim Girls' school and received a full western-style education with focus on the Humanities and Science, her brother attended a Christian school, she lied to the Dutch immigration service about coming from Somalia in order not to be sent back to Kenya, and they allege she met her husband a few days before her wedding. After several meetings with him, they allege she agreed to the marriage, even though her mother said Ayaan should finish her education so she could afford to leave him if the marriage should prove unsuccessful. They also allege that Hirsi Ali was present at the wedding, something her brother later denied, and according to several witnesses appeared to be enjoying herself. Hirsi Ali denies all of this. On her way to Canada, she says she travelled to the Netherlands by train during a stopover in Germany, and applied for political asylum. During her stay in the Netherlands she regularly received letters from her father. The documentary also quoted several native Somalis as saying there is no tradition of honor killing in Somalia.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali had already admitted to friends and VVD party colleagues that she had lied about her full name, date of birth, and the manner in which she had come to the Netherlands in her asylum application, but persisted in saying it was true that she was trying to flee a forced marriage. In her first book, "The Son Factory" (2002), she had already provided her real name and date of birth, and she had also stated these in a September 2002 interview published in the political magazine "HP/De Tijd". and in an interview in the "VARA gids" (2002). Hirsi Ali asserted in her 2006 autobiography (2007 in English) "Infidel" that she had already made full disclosure of the discrepancy to VVD officials back when she was invited to run for parliament in 2002. On the issue of her name, she applied under her grandfather's surname in her asylum application ('Ali' instead of what had till then been 'Magan'), to which she was entitled nonetheless; she later said it was to escape detection and retaliation by her clan for the foiled marriage. In the later parliamentary investigation of Hirsi Ali's immigration, the Dutch law governing names was reviewed. An applicant may legally use a surname derived from any generation as far back as the grandparent. Therefore, Hirsi Ali's application, though against her clan custom of names, was legal under Dutch law. The question of her age was of minor concern. Media speculation arose in 2006 that she could lose her Dutch citizenship because of these issues, rendering her ineligible for parliament. At first, Minister Rita Verdonk said she would not look into the matter. She later decided to investigate Hirsi Ali's naturalisation process. The investigation found that Hirsi Ali had not legitimately received Dutch citizenship, because she had lied about her name and date of birth. However, later inquiries established that she was entitled to use the name Ali because it was her grandfather's name. Verdonk moved to annul Hirsi Ali's citizenship, an action later overridden at the urging of Parliament.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: On 15 May 2006, after the broadcast of the "Zembla" documentary, news stories appeared saying that Hirsi Ali was likely to move to the United States that September. She was reported to be planning to write a book titled "Shortcut to Enlightenment" and to work for the American Enterprise Institute. On 16 May Hirsi Ali resigned from Parliament after admitting that she had lied on her asylum application. In a press conference she said that the facts had been publicly known since 2002, when they had been reported in the media and in one of her publications. She also restated her claim of seeking asylum to prevent a forced marriage, stating: "How often do people who are seeking refuge provide different names? The penalty of stripping me of my Dutch citizenship is disproportional." Her stated reason for resigning immediately was the increasing media attention. Owing to the fact that a Dutch court had ruled in April 2006 that she had to leave her house by August 2006, she decided to relocate to the United States in September 2006.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: After a long and emotional debate in the Dutch Parliament, all major parties supported a motion requesting the Minister to explore the possibility of special circumstances in Hirsi Ali's case. Although Verdonk remained convinced that the applicable law did not leave her room to consider such circumstances, she decided to accept the motion. During the debate, she said that Hirsi Ali still had Dutch citizenship during the period of reexamination. Apparently the "decision" she had announced had represented the current position of the Dutch government. Hirsi Ali at that point had six weeks to react to the report before any final decision about her citizenship was taken. Verdonk was strongly criticised for her actions in such a sensitive case. In addition to her Dutch passport, Hirsi Ali retained a Dutch residency permit based on being a political refugee. According to the minister, this permit could not be taken away from her since it had been granted more than 12 years before.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Reacting to news of Hirsi Ali's planned relocation to the US, former VVD leader Hans Wiegel stated that her departure "would not be a loss to the VVD and not be a loss to the House of Representatives". He said that Hirsi Ali was a brave woman, but that her opinions were polarizing. Former parliamentary leader of the VVD, Jozias van Aartsen, said that it is "painful for Dutch society and politics that she is leaving the House of Representatives". Another VVD MP, Bibi de Vries, said that if something were to happen to Hirsi Ali, some people in her party would have "blood on their hands". United States Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said in May 2006, "we recognise that she is a very courageous and impressive woman and she is welcome in the US."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: On 23 May 2006, Ayaan Hirsi made available to "The New York Times" some letters she believed would provide insight into her 1992 asylum application. In one letter her sister Haweya warned her that the entire extended family was searching for her (after she had fled to the Netherlands), and in another letter her father denounced her. Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said that the asylum controversy would not affect the appointment. He stated that he was still looking forward to "welcoming her to AEI, and to America."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: On 27 June 2006, the Dutch government announced that Hirsi Ali would keep her Dutch citizenship. On the same day a letter was disclosed in which Hirsi Ali expressed regret for misinforming Minister Verdonk. Hirsi Ali was allowed to retain her name. Dutch immigration rules allowed asylum seekers to use grandparents' names. Her grandfather had used the last name Ali until his thirties and then switched to Magan, which was her father's and family's surname. This grandfather's birth year of 1845 had complicated the investigation. (Hirsi Ali's father Hirsi Magan Isse was the youngest of his many children and born when her grandfather was close to 90). Later the same day Hirsi Ali, through her lawyer and in television interviews, stated that she had signed the resignation letter, drafted by the Justice Department, under duress. She felt it was forced in order for her to keep her passport, but she had not wanted to complicate her pending visa application for the US. she still carried her Dutch passport.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In a special parliamentary session on 28 June 2006, questions were raised about these issues. The ensuing political upheaval on 29 June ultimately led to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2006, Hirsi Ali took a position at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.; as the Dutch government continued to provide security for her, this required an increase in their effort and costs.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: On 17 April 2007, the local Muslim community in Johnstown, Pennsylvania protested Hirsi Ali's planned lecture at the local campus of the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh imam Fouad El Bayly said that the activist deserved the death sentence but should be tried and judged in an Islamic country.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: On 25 September 2007, Hirsi Ali received her United States Permanent Resident Card (green card). In October 2007 she returned to the Netherlands, continuing her work for AEI from a secret address in the Netherlands. The Dutch minister of Justice Hirsch Ballin had informed her of his ruling that, as of 1 October 2007, the Dutch government would no longer pay for her security abroad. That year she declined an offer to live in Denmark, saying she intended to return to the United States.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She was a Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School from 2016 to 2019.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2010, Anwar al-Awlaki published a hit list in his "Inspire" magazine, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders and Salman Rushdie along with cartoonists Lars Vilks and three "Jyllands-Posten" staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose. The list was later expanded to include Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was murdered in 2015 in a terror attack on "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris, along with 11 other people. After the attack, Al-Qaeda called for more killings.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In early 2014, Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced that Ali would be given an honorary degree at the graduation commencement ceremony. In early April, the university rescinded its offer following a review of her statements that was carried out in response to protests by the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and lobbying by Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Head of the Islamic Studies Department, other faculty members and several student groups that accused Hirsi Ali of "hate speech". University president Frederick M. Lawrence said that "certain of her past statements" were inconsistent with the university's "core values" because they were "Islamophobic". Others expressed opinions both for and against this decision. The university said she was welcome to come to the campus for a dialogue in the future.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: The university's withdrawal of its invitation generated controversy and condemnation among some. But, "The Economist" noted at the time that Hirsi Ali's "Wholesale condemnations of existing religions just aren't done in American politics." It said that "The explicit consensus in America is ecumenical and strongly pro-religious". The university was distinguishing between an open intellectual exchange, which could occur if Hirsi Ali came to campus for a dialogue, and appearing to celebrate her with an honorary degree.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: A Brandeis spokesperson said that Ali had not been invited to speak at commencement but simply to be among honorary awardees. She claimed to have been invited to speak and expressed shock at Brandeis' action. Hirsi Ali said CAIR's letter misrepresented her and her work, but that it has long been available on the Internet. She said that the "spirit of free expression" has been betrayed and stifled.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, criticised the Brandeis decision as an attack on academic values of freedom of inquiry and intellectual independence.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Lawrence J. Haas, the former communications director and press secretary for Vice President Al Gore, published an open letter saying that Brandeis' president had "succumbed to political correctness and interest group pressure in deciding that Islam is beyond the pale of legitimate inquiry ... that such a decision is particularly appalling for a university president, for a campus is precisely the place to encourage free discussion even on controversial matters."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In October 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center accused Ayaan, and the Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz, of being "anti-Muslim extremists", which caused protests in several prominent newspapers. The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice wrote a public letter to the SPLC asking them to retract the listings.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In April 2018, the SPLC retracted the "Anti-Muslim Extremist" List in its entirety after Nawaz threatened legal action over his inclusion on the list.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In April 2017 she cancelled a planned tour of Australia. This followed the Facebook release of a video by six Australian Muslim women who accused her of being a "star of the global Islamophobia industry" and of profiting from "an industry that exists to dehumanize Muslim women" but did not call for her to cancel her trip. Ali responded that the women in question were "carrying water" for the causes of radical Islamists and stated that "Islamophobia" is a manufactured word. She said that the cancellation was due to organisational problems.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali joined the VVD political party in 2002; it combines "classically liberal" views on the economy, foreign policy, crime and immigration with a liberal social stance on abortion and homosexuality. She says that she admires Frits Bolkestein, a former Euro-commissioner and ideological leader of the party.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali is the founder and president of the AHA Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organisation to protect women and girls in the U.S. against political Islam and harmful tribal customs that violate U.S. law and international conventions. Through the AHA Foundation, Hirsi Ali campaigns against the denial of education for girls, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour violence and killings, and suppression of information about the crimes through the misuse and misinterpretation of rights to freedom of religion and free speech in the U.S. and the West.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali is critical of the treatment of women in Islamic societies and the punishments demanded by conservative Islamic scholars for homosexuality, blasphemy and adultery. She publicly identified as Muslim until 28 May 2002, when she acknowledged in her diary that she knew she was not.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She also explained in an interview that she began a serious reassessment of her religious beliefs after the 9/11 attacks and when she was drinking wine in an Italian restaurant, stating "I asked myself: Why should I burn in hell just because I'm drinking this? But what prompted me even more was the fact that the killers of 9/11 all believed in the same God I believed in."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In a 2007 interview in the London "Evening Standard", Hirsi Ali characterised Islam as "the new fascism":


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Just like Nazism started with Hitler's vision, the Islamic vision is a caliphate—a society ruled by Sharia law—in which women who have sex before marriage are stoned to death, homosexuals are beaten, and apostates like me are killed. Sharia law is as inimical to liberal democracy as Nazism ... Violence is inherent in Islam—it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In a 2007 article in "Reason", Hirsi Ali said that Islam, the religion, must be defeated and that "we are at war with Islam. And there's no middle ground in wars." She said, "Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace ... There comes a moment when you crush your enemy. ... and if you don't do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed." Adding: "the Christian powers have accepted the separation of the worldly and the divine. We don't interfere with their religion, and they don't interfere with the state. That hasn't happened in Islam."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She reiterated her position that the problem isn't just a few "rotten apples" in the Islamic community but "I'm saying it's the entire basket." She stated that the majority of Muslims aren't "moderates" and they must radically alter their religion. Max Rodenbeck, writing in "The New York Review of Books", noted that Ali now narrowly criticizes what she calls "Medina Muslims", meaning the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on sharia, and who ignore the more inclusive passages of Muhammad's Meccan period, a small minority of Muslims, who are, nevertheless, quite influential among young Muslims, according to Hirsi Ali: "These men, I find them to be far more influential in inspiring and mobilising young men to see the religion of Islam the way they see it, than the way either Imam Faisal says he sees it, or Maajid Nawaz says he sees it."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Ayaan Hirsi Ali stated that, in her opinion, "The Christian extremists here, in the United States, who take the Bible and use it to kill people and hurt people, they are the fringe, but unfortunately, what we are seeing in Muslim countries is that the people who feel they should be governed under the Sharia Law, are not a fringe. ... Islam can become a religion of peace, if politics is divorced from religion", and she stated that: "The individual that wants to kill me because I am an apostate of Islam, is inspired to do that from the scripture of Islam, the example of the prophet Mohammed, the clergy that preached to him, and the reward that he will get in the hereafter."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Although Hirsi Ali has previously described Islam as beyond reform, she has stated that the Arab spring and growing visibility of women's rights activists within Muslim societies has demonstrated to her that a liberal reformation of Islam is possible, and outlines how this could be achieved in her book "Heretic" by supporting reformist Muslims.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She described Islamic societies as lagging "in enlightened thinking, tolerance and knowledge of other cultures" and that their history cannot cite a single person who "made a discovery in science or technology, or changed the world through artistic achievement".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In a 2010 interview with "The Guardian", she compared the responses of Christians and Muslims to criticism of their respective religions. While Christians would often simply ignore criticism, Muslims would instead take offence, display a victim mentality and take criticism as insults.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She insists that many contemporary Muslims have not yet transitioned to modernity, and that many Muslim immigrants are culturally unsuited to life in the West and are therefore a burden. Ali calls upon atheists, Christians, Europeans, and Americans to unite against Muslim extremism in the West. She urges the former to educate Muslims and the latter, especially Western Churches, to convert "as many Muslims as possible to Christianity, introducing them to a God who rejects Holy War and who has sent his son to die for all sinners out of love for mankind". Hirsi Ali stated that: "Islam needs a reformation. Muslim leaders who are serious about achieving true and enduring peace, need to revise the Koran and the Hadith, so there is a consistency between what the peaceloving Muslims want and what their religion says."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: It's wrong for Western leaders like [former Prime Minister of Australia] Tony Abbott to say the actions of the Islamic State aren't about religion. I want to say to him 'please don't say such things in public because it's just not true.' You're letting down all the individuals who are reformers within Islam who are asking the right questions that will ultimately bring about change.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In an interview following the November 2015 Paris attacks, Hirsi Ali responded to Barack Obama's statement that the West should not declare a war on Islam by agreeing that while Western civilization is not at war with the Muslim world as a whole, Islamic extremists and terrorists who are abetted by conservative Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar and invoke Islamic theology are waging a war on Western society and that American and European governments need to understand Islamic fundamentalism is an ongoing threat to Westernized society which predates 9/11.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Speaking shortly after the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, Hirsi Ali commented on the nature of radicalization within communities of Islamic believers, stating, "If we talk about the process of what we now call radicalization, that you see a process where individuals are putting on a religious identity. It's all about being a Muslim, you shed the rest of it or you downplay the rest of it and you try to make everyone else as pious as yourself. And this would be, looking back at San Bernardino, the telltale signs. These changes that the family, the friends, the close circle of relatives should have observed."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: When discussing Muslims who become radicalized by Islamic state on the internet, Hirsi Ali argued that many of these people already adhered to fundamentalist Islamic ideas or came from families and communities that followed a literal practice of Islam before ISIS declared a caliphate, and that ISIS now gave them a focus to execute their beliefs. She commented that what the media has come to refer to as "radical Islam" or "extremist" individuals are in fact Muslims who become more pious in their beliefs and take both the Quran and examples set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad literally. She concluded that "people who have that mentality and that mindset are not a minority and they are not a fringe minority. Because of the large number of people who believe in this within Muslim communities and families who believe in this, definitely not all, but it is so large that these individuals who want to take action, who want to take it beyond believing and beyond practicing but actually want to kill people, they have a large enough group to hide in."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In a 2016 presentation for the American conservative platform "Prager University", Hirsi Ali asserted that a reform of Islam was vital. She elaborated that while the majority of Muslims are peaceful, Islam as a belief-system in its current form cannot be considered a religion of peace as justification for violence against homosexuals, apostates and those deemed guilty blasphemy are still clearly stated within Islamic scripture and that Western leaders need to stop downplaying the link between Islam and Islamic terrorism. She also added that Western progressives have often dismissed reformist and dissident Muslims as "not representative" and accused any criticism of Islam as racist. She argued that instead, Western liberals should assist and ally themselves with Muslim reformists who put themselves at risk to push for change by drawing a parallel to when Russian dissidents who internally challenged the ideology of the Soviet Union during the Cold War were celebrated and assisted by people in the West.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2017, Hirsi Ali spoke of how "Dawah" is often a precursor to Islamism. In an article for "The Sun" she stated "in theory, "dawa" is a simple call to Islam. As Islamists practice the concept, however, it is a subversive, indoctrinating precursor to jihad. A process of methodical brainwashing that rejects assimilation and places Muslims in opposition to Western civic ideals. It is facilitated by funding from the Middle East, local charities and is carried out in mosques, Islamic centres, Muslim schools and even in people's living rooms. Its goal is to erode and ultimately destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Sharia law."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In September 2020, Hirsi Ali compared "Wokeism" and the Black Lives Matter movement to ISIS, saying both reflected the "intolerant doctrines of a religious cult".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali criticises the central Islamic prophet on morality and personality traits (criticisms based on biographical details or depictions by Islamic texts and early followers of Muhammad). In January 2003 she told the Dutch paper "Trouw", "Muhammad is, seen by our Western standards, a pervert and a tyrant", as he married, at the age of 53, Aisha, who was six years old and nine at the time the marriage was consummated. She later said: "Perhaps I should have said 'a pedophile'". Muslims filed a religious discrimination suit against her that year. The civil court in the Hague acquitted Hirsi Ali of any charges, but said that she "could have made a better choice of words".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali is an opponent of female genital mutilation (FGM), which she has criticized in many of her writings. When in the Dutch parliament, she proposed obligatory annual medical checks for all uncircumcised girls living in the Netherlands who came from countries where FGM is practised. She proposed that if a physician found that such a girl had been mutilated, a report to the police would be required—with protection of the child prevailing over privacy. In 2004, she also criticized male circumcision, particularly as practiced by Jews and Muslims, which she regarded as being another variant of mutilation practiced without the consent of the individual.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali has criticized Western feminists for avoiding the issue of the subjugation of women in the Muslim world and singled out Germaine Greer for arguing that FGM needs to be considered a "cultural identity" that Western women don't understand.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: During the Brandeis University controversy, Hirsi Ali noted that "an authority on 'Queer/Feminist Narrative Theory' ... [sided] with the openly homophobic Islamists" in speaking against her.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Rich Lowry wrote in "Politico" that while Hirsi Ali had many traits which should have made her a "feminist hero" such as being a refugee from an abusive patriarchy, being an African immigrant who made her way to a Western country and an advocate for women's rights, this does not happen because she is "a dissident of the wrong religion". Feminists instead criticise Hirsi Ali for "strengthening racism" instead of "weakening sexism".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In a 2006 lecture in Berlin, she defended the right to offend, following the "Jyllands-Posten" Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark. She condemned the journalists of those papers and TV channels that did not show their readers the cartoons as being "mediocre of mind". She also praised publishers all over Europe for showing the cartoons and not being afraid of what she called the "hard-line Islamist movement". In 2017, Hirsi Ali described the word Islamophobia as a "manufactured term" and argued "we can't stop the injustices if we say everything is "Islamophobic" and hide behind a politically correct screen."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2006 Hirsi Ali as MP supported the move by the Dutch courts to abrogate the party subsidy to a conservative Protestant Christian political party, the Political Reformed Party (SGP), which did not grant full membership rights to women and withholds passive voting rights from female members. She said that any political party discriminating against women or homosexuals should be deprived of funding.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In the Netherlands about half of all education has historically been provided by sponsored religious schools, most of them Catholic or Protestant. As Muslims began to ask for support for schools, the state provided it and by 2005, there were 41 Islamic schools in the nation. This was based on the idea in the 1960s that Muslims could become one of the "pillars" of Dutch society, as were Protestants, Catholics and secular residents. Hirsi Ali has opposed state funding of any religious schools, including Islamic ones. In a 2007 interview with London-based "Evening Standard", Hirsi Ali urged the British government to close all Muslim faith schools in the country and instead integrate Muslim pupils into mainstream society, arguing "Britain is sleepwalking into a society that could be ruled by Sharia law within decades unless Islamic schools are shut down and young Muslims are instead made to integrate and accept Western liberal values." In 2017, Hirsi Ali reasserted her belief that Islamic faith schools should be closed if they are found to be indoctrinating their students into political Islam and that such faith schools often exist in migrant dominated communities where students will have a lesser chance of integrating into mainstream society and that such cultural and educational "cocooning" breeds a lack of understanding or hostility towards the host culture. In 2020, Hirsi Ali stated that children in predominantly Muslim schools are less likely to be taught about the Holocaust and argued that schools should not cave into demands from Muslim parents that children should not be taught to remember the Holocaust in history lessons.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: The Netherlands has always been one of the most prominent countries that support aiding developing countries. As the spokesperson of the VVD in the parliament on this matter, Hirsi Ali said that the current aid policy had not achieved an increase in prosperity, peace and stability in developing countries: "The VVD believes that Dutch international aid has failed until now, as measured by [the Dutch aid effects on] poverty reduction, famine reduction, life expectancy and the promotion of peace."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2003 Hirsi Ali worked together with fellow VVD MP Geert Wilders for several months. They questioned the government about immigration policy. In reaction to the UN Development Programme Arab Human Development Report, Hirsi Ali asked questions of Minister of Foreign Affairs Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and the Minister without Portfolio for Development Cooperation Agnes van Ardenne. Together with Wilders, she asked the government to pay attention to the consequences for Dutch policy concerning the limitation of immigration from the Arab world to Europe, and in particular the Netherlands.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Although she publicly supported the policy of VVD minister Rita Verdonk to limit immigration, privately she was not supportive, as she explained in a June 2006 interview for "Opzij." This interview was given after she resigned from Parliament, and shortly after she had moved to the United States.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In parliament, Hirsi Ali had supported the way Verdonk handled the Pasić case, although privately she felt that Pasić should have been allowed to stay. On the night before the debate, she phoned Verdonk to tell her that she had lied when she applied for asylum in the Netherlands, just as Pasić had. She said that Verdonk responded that if she had been minister at that time, she would have had Hirsi Ali deported.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2015 when Donald Trump suggested a complete ban on all Muslims entering the United States as part of his presidential campaign, Hirsi Ali responded by saying that such a pledge gave "false hope" to voters by questioning the reality of how such policy would be implemented and in practice it would offer a short-term solution to a long term ideological issue. However, she also praised Trump's campaign messages for highlighting the problems posed by Islamic fundamentalism and said the outgoing Obama administration had "conspicuously avoided any discussion of Islamic theology, even avoiding use of the term radical Islam altogether."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In response to the Trump administration's Executive Order 13769 which imposed a travel ban on and temporarily restricted immigration and visa applications from several Muslim majority countries, Hirsi Ali described the ban as both "clumsy" but also "too narrow" for excluding nations such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who have been implicated in terrorism. However, she also stated agreement with Trump's assertion that some immigrants from Muslim nations are less likely to adapt to a Westernized lifestyle or are harder to screen as potential security risks, citing Ahmad Khan Rahami and Tashfeen Malik as examples of Muslims who entered the U.S. on immigration visas before committing acts of terrorism. She also maintained that as an immigrant herself, she was not opposed to Muslim immigrants coming to America seeking a better life but expressed concern over the attitudes that younger generations of Muslim-Americans bring with them and that society had a limited capacity to change those values. She has also defended the right for Western nations to screen all prospective Muslim immigrants to assess their beliefs and deport or deny residency to those who display sympathetic views to fundamentalism and violence.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2020, Ayaan echoed statements made by French President Emmanuel Macron that Muslim immigrant communities, composed of both newly arrived migrants and second generation immigrants, had formed "separatist societies" in some European nations, and that there are "pockets of Europe" where Muslims have limited access to education or jobs and extremist Muslims "come in and take advantage of them." She also argued that many of the problems Europe faces in the twenty-first century with terrorism and parallel societies was born out of "racism of low expectations" in the past, in which European governments did not expect immigrants from Middle Eastern or African backgrounds to become Europeanized or have the capability to contribute positively, but instead out of misguided compassion, multicultural sentiments and political correctness, encouraged immigrants to keep their native cultures or caved into demands from religiously conservative immigrant communities who rejected European culture.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali discussed her view on immigration in Europe, in an op-ed article published in the "Los Angeles Times" in 2006. Noting that immigrants are over-represented "in all the wrong statistics", she wrote that the European Union's immigration policy contributed to the illegal trade in women and arms, and the exploitation of poor migrants by "cruel employers".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She drew attention to the numerous illegal immigrants already in the European Union. She believed that current immigration policy would lead to ethnic and religious division, nation states will lose their monopoly of force, Islamic law (sharia) will be introduced at the level of neighborhoods and cities, and exploitation of women and children will become "commonplace". To avoid this situation, she proposes three general principles for a new policy:


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Regarding unemployment, social marginalization and poverty among certain immigrant communities, Hirsi Ali places the burden of responsibility squarely on Islam and migrant culture.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2010, she opposed the idea of preventing immigrants from traditional Muslim societies from immigrating, claiming that allowing them to immigrate made the U.S. a "highly moral country". The subject is also discussed in her 2017 Hoover Institution Press publication "The Challenge of Dawa, Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In 2017, Hirsi Ali identified what she regarded as four categories of Muslim immigrants and asylum seekers in the West she has encountered in her personal and professional life:


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: However, she also maintained that each category is not rigid and "menaces" can become "fanatics" by becoming exposed to Islamism in prison while the children of immigrant "adapters" can turn into "fanatics" through rejecting liberalism and embracing stricter and fundamentalist branches of Islam. She has also written in support of refusing residency and citizenship to those who cannot become "adapters."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: "When I speak of assimilation", Ali clarifies, "I mean assimilation into civilization. Aboriginals, Afghanis, Somalis, Arabs, Native Americans—all these non-Western groups have to make that transition to modernity". Sadiya Abubakar Isa criticized these comments in an article for the "Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies", accusing her of Orientalism.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: As for Israel's problems, Hirsi Ali says, "From my superficial impression, the country also has a problem with fundamentalists. The ultra-Orthodox will cause a demographic problem because these fanatics have more children than the secular and the regular Orthodox."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: The crisis of Dutch socialism can be sized up in its attitudes toward both Islam and Israel. It holds Israel to exceptionally high moral standards. The Israelis, however, will always do well, because they themselves set high standards for their actions. The standards for judging the Palestinians, however, are very low. Most outsiders remain silent on all the problems in their territories. That helps the Palestinians become even more corrupt than they already are. Those who live in the territories are not allowed to say anything about this because they risk being murdered by their own people.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali has also said Western governments should stop "demonizing" the state of Israel and instead look to the country as an example of how to implement efficient border security and counter-terrorism measures.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali has attracted praise and criticism from English-speaking commentators. Literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens regarded her as "the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa." Patt Morrison of the "Los Angeles Times" called Hirsi Ali a freedom fighter for feminism who has "put her life on the line to defend women against radical Islam."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Tunku Varadarajan wrote in 2017 that, with "multiple fatwas on her head, Hirsi Ali has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I've met, Salman Rushdie included." According to Andrew Anthony of "The Guardian", Ayaan Hirsi Ali is admired by secularists and "loathed not just by Islamic fundamentalists but by many western liberals, who find her rejection of Islam almost as objectionable as her embrace of western liberalism."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In his 2006 review of this collection of seventeen essays and articles on Islam by Hirsi Ali, journalist Christopher Hitchens noted her three themes: "first, her own gradual emancipation from tribalism and superstition; second, her work as a parliamentarian to call attention to the crimes being committed every day by Islamist thugs in mainland Europe; and third, the dismal silence, or worse, from many feminists and multiculturalists about this state of affairs."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: He described the activist as a "charismatic figure in Dutch politics" and criticised the Dutch government for how it protected her from Islamic threats after her collaboration with Theo van Gogh on the short film "Submission" and the assassination of the director.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Mahmood noted that the title of the work is "highly reminiscent of the nineteenth-century literary genre centered on Orientalist fantasies of the harem".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: "The Guardian" summarised "Infidel" thus: "[Hirsi Ali]'s is a story of exile from her clan through war, famine, arranged marriage, religious apostasy and the shocking murder on the streets of Amsterdam of her collaborator, Theo van Gogh. Told with lyricism, wit, huge sorrow and a great heart, this is one of the most amazing adventure narratives of the age of mass migration."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: William Grimes wrote in "The New York Times": "The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of "Infidel," her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author's geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In his critique of the book, Christopher Hitchens noted that two leading leftist intellectual commentators, Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma, described Hirsi Ali as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist[s]". Hitchens noted further that, far from being a "fundamentalist", Hirsi escaped from a "society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: "The Guardian" observed that "Nomad" describes "a clan system shattering on the shores of modernity". The books expands Hirsi Ali's previous early life descriptions focusing on "the remarkable figure of her grandmother, who gave birth to daughters alone in the desert and cut her own umbilical cord, raged at herself for producing too many girls, rebelled against her husband, arranged for the circumcision of her granddaughters and instilled in them an unforgiving, woman-hating religion." According to the newspaper's review, "Hirsi Ali observes that her own nomadic journey has been taken across borders that have been mental as much as geographical. In "Nomad" she calls her ancestral voices into direct confrontation with her demands for reform of Islamic theology. The result is electrifying."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali called "Nomad" her most provocative book for urging moderate Muslims to become Christians. She later backed off from this view. After witnessing the Arab Spring, Hirsi Ali also took back her argument in "Nomad" that Islam is beyond reform.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In the book Hirsi Ali quoted statistics such that 75% of Pakistanis favour the death penalty for apostasy and argue that Sharia law is gaining ground in many Muslim-majority nations. Hirsi Ali quotes verses in the Qur'an encouraging followers to use violence and make the argument that as long as the Qur'an is perceived to be the literal divine words, violent extremists have a justification for their acts.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Andrew Anthony for "The Guardian" in 2015 wrote that even her fiercest critics would have problems denying what Hirsi Ali writes about current issues in Islam and since those issues are unpalatable an added difficulty was a cultural practice at the time to "not offend anyone". Anthony concluded that regardless of what critics may think of her solution, Hirsi Ali should be commended for her "unblinking determination to address the problem".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Susan Dominus of "The New York Times" wrote: "In "Heretic," Hirsi Ali forgoes autobiography for the most part in favor of an extended argument. But she has trouble making anyone else's religious history—even that of Muhammad himself, whose life story she recounts—as dramatic as she has made her own. And she loses the reader's trust with overblown rhetoric. ... She tries to warn Americans about their naïveté in the face of encroaching Islamic influences, maintaining that officials and journalists, out of cultural sensitivity, sometimes play down the honor killings that occur in the West."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: "The Economist" wrote: "Unfortunately, very few Muslims will accept Ms Hirsi Ali's full-blown argument, which insists that Islam must change in at least five important ways. A moderate Muslim might be open to discussion of four of her suggestions if the question were framed sensitively. Muslims, she says, must stop prioritizing the afterlife over this life; they must 'shackle sharia' and respect secular law; they must abandon the idea of telling others, including non-Muslims, how to behave, dress or drink; and they must abandon holy war. However, her biggest proposal is a show-stopper: she wants her old co-religionists to 'ensure that Muhammad and the Koran are open to interpretation and criticism.'"


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Clifford May of "The Washington Times" wrote: "The West is enmeshed in 'an ideological conflict' that cannot be won 'until the concept of jihad has itself been decommissioned.'" May goes on to suggest that if "American and Western leaders continue to refuse to comprehend who is fighting us and why, the consequences will be dire."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In May 2015, Mehdi Hasan wrote an article in "The Guardian" arguing that Islam does not need a reformation, and that she will never win any fans over from Muslims, regardless of whether they are liberal or conservative. Hasan wrote: "She's been popping up in TV studios and on op-ed pages to urge Muslims, both liberal and conservative, to abandon some of their core religious beliefs while uniting behind a Muslim Luther. Whether or not mainstream Muslims will respond positively to a call for reform from a woman who has described the Islamic faith as a 'destructive, nihilistic cult of death' that should be 'crushed' and also suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu be given the Nobel Peace Prize, is another matter." Hasan also invoked the death toll of the Christian sectarian conflicts of Thirty Years' War and the French Wars of Religion to argue that an Islamic reformation would lead to conflicts of a similar scale. Hasan also wrote that Islamic reformation should not be promoted by non-Muslims or ex-Muslims.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Ali's public commentary and stances, particularly her criticisms of Islam, have elicited denunciations from a number of commentators and academics. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned her as "one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide." Saba Mahmood wrote that Hirsi Ali "had no public profile until she decided to capitalize on the anti-Muslim sentiment that swept Europe following the events of 9/11". Adam Yaghi has questioned her appeal in American society where her "serial autobiographies are treated as honest and reliable testimonies in spite of the troubling inaccuracies, exaggerated descriptions, blunt neo-Orientalist portrayals, and sweeping generalizations". Stephen Sheehi wrote that in spite of her lack of scholarly credentials and academic qualifications "to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world", Hirsi Ali has been accepted in the West as a scholar, feminist activist, and reformer primarily on the grounds of her "insider claims about Islam".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Other critics have called Ali an "inauthentic ethnic voice" at the service of "imperialist feminism". Kiran Grewal asserted that Ali is "a classic enactment of the colonial 'civilizing mission' discourse", while "Salon"'s Nathan Lean called Hirsi Ali's story as the "modern-day version of [a] hoary captivity narrative" of the type popular during the Barbary Wars. Grewal described Ali's works as using "the language of 'lived experience' to justify an intolerant and exclusionary message" and alleged that her "extremely provocative and often offensive statements regarding Islam and Muslim immigrants in the West" had alienated some feminists and academics.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Yaghi commented that "Ali attributes everything bad to a monolithic Islam, one that transcends geographic and national boundaries ... willfully ignoring her own distinctions between different interpretations of Islam, versions she personally encountered before leaving to the West". Pearl Abraham has made a similar observation: "[I]n her writings, lectures, and interviews", Ali "reaches for the simple solution and quick answer. Always and everywhere, she insists on depicting Islam and Muslims as the enemy, her tribal culture as backward". Hirsi Ali is also criticized for persistently singling out Islam and Muslims, but never manifestations of religious revivalism present with other religions.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: According to Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian journalist and foreign policy analyst, Ali's criticism applies mostly to "Wahhabism", the strain of Islam most familiar to Hirsi Ali, and not to Islam as a whole. Jebreal added that Ali's "outbursts" originated from her own pain, "physical scars inflicted on her body during childhood", which were justified by a radical version of the religion into which she was born. Jebreal wrote: "To endorse Hirsi Ali so unabashedly is to insult and mock a billion Muslims. It's time to listen to what is being said by the Muslim voices of peace and tolerance. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not one of them."


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Hirsi Ali has continued discussion of these issues in her two autobiographies, published in Dutch in 2006 and in English in 2010. In her first work, she said that in 1992 her father arranged to marry her to a distant cousin. She says that she objected to this both on general grounds (she has said she dreaded being forced to submit to a stranger, sexually and socially), and specifically to this man, whom she described as a "bigot" and an "idiot" in her book.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: She told her family that she planned to join her husband, who was living in Canada, after obtaining a visa while in Germany. However, in her autobiography, she said she spent her time in Germany trying to devise an escape from her unwanted marriage. Hirsi Ali decided to visit a relative in the Netherlands, and to seek help after arrival and claim asylum.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Her first autobiography, "" (2006), was published in English in 2007. In a review, American Enterprise Institute fellow Joshua Muravchik described the book as "simply a great work of literature", and compared her to novelist Joseph Conrad.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In her second autobiography, "" (2010, in English), Hirsi Ali wrote that in early 2006, Rita Verdonk had personally approached her to ask for her public support in Verdonk's campaign to run for party leader of the VVD. Hirsi Ali wrote that she had personally supported Verdonk's opponent, Mark Rutte, as the better choice. She says that after telling Verdonk of her position, the minister became vindictive. Hirsi Ali wrote that, after the 2006 report of the "Zembla" TV program, Verdonk campaigned against Ali in retaliation for her earlier lack of support.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Her latest book was released in February 2021 and is titled "Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights".


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: Ali is a contributor at "The Daily Beast". She has also hosted her own podcast since 2021, in which she interviews intellectuals.


title: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

text: In the year following the assassination of her collaborator, Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali received five awards related to her activism.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The Bailiwick of Guernsey (; Guernésiais: "Bailliage dé Guernési") is an island country off the coast of France as one of the three Crown Dependencies.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Separated from the Duchy of Normandy by and under the terms of the Treaty (or Peace) of Le Goulet in 1204, the Bailiwick comprises a number of islands in the English Channel which fall into three separate sub-jurisdictions: Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. Herm is administered as a part of Guernsey.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: A bailiwick is a territory administered by a bailiff. The bailiff of Guernsey is the civil head and presiding officer of the States of Guernsey, but not of Alderney or Sark. He is the head of the judiciary of the Bailiwick.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The history of the Bailiwick of Guernsey goes back to 933, when the islands came under the control of William Longsword, having been annexed from the Duchy of Brittany by the Duchy of Normandy. The island of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands formed part of the lands of William the Conqueror. In 1204 France conquered mainland Normandy – but not the offshore islands of the bailiwick. The islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Duchy of Normandy.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Initially there was one governor, or co-governors working together, of the islands making up the Channel Islands. The title "governor" has changed over the centuries. "Warden", "keeper" and "captain" have previously been used. The bailiff stands in for the Governor, or more recently the Lieutenant Governor, if the latter is absent, for a short term or for longer, for instance during the five years of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey is the Lieutenant Governor of the Bailiwick of Guernsey and, being the personal representative of the British monarch, has usually had a distinguished military service.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Originally the local courts in Guernsey were ""fiefs"" with the lord of the manor presiding. Before 1066, a superior court was introduced above the "fiefs" and below the "Eschequier" Court in Rouen and comprised the bailiff and four knights; the court heard appeals and tried criminal cases.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Otton de Grandson, then the governor of the Islands, delegated the civil powers to two separate bailiffs for Guernsey and Jersey before he went on crusade to the Holy Land in 1290. This can be assessed as the date of first creation of the two bailiwicks.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Situated around , Alderney, Guernsey, Herm, Sark, and some other smaller islands together have a total area of and coastlines of about . Elevation varies from sea level to at Le Moulin on Sark.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: There are many smaller islands, islets, rocks and reefs in the Bailiwick. Combined with a tidal range of 10 m and fast currents of up to 12 knots, this makes sailing in local waters dangerous.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a separate jurisdiction in itself, and is in turn also three separate sub-jurisdictions. It does not form part of, and is separate from (but is not independent of, or from) the United Kingdom. The two Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey together make up the Channel Islands.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The Islanders have never had formal representation in the House of Commons of the British Parliament, nor in the European Parliament. Those Islanders who were not somehow qualified and eligible "in their own right" to register to vote and to vote in the United Kingdom under the Representation of the People Acts as "overseas voters", were excluded from the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Guernsey has an unwritten constitution arising from the Treaty of Paris (1259). When Henry III and the King of France came to terms over the Duchy of Normandy, the Norman mainland fell under the suzerainty of the King of France. The Channel Islands however remained loyal to the British crown due to the loyalties of its Seigneurs. However, they were never absorbed into the Kingdom of England by any Act of Union and exist as "peculiars of the Crown".


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: A unique constitutional position has arisen as successive British monarchs have confirmed the liberties and privileges of the Bailiwick, often referring to the so-called "Constitutions of King John", a legendary document supposed to have been granted by King John in the aftermath of 1204. Governments of the Bailiwick have generally tried to avoid testing the limits of the unwritten constitution by avoiding conflict with British governments.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: This peculiar political position has often been to the benefit of islanders. Until the 19th century, the Bailiwick was generally able to be exempt from the harsher parts of Westminster legislation, while being included in favourable policies, such as protectionist economic policies. England, and later the United Kingdom, passively exploited the strategic benefits of the Channel Islands. For example, they were able to serve as a convenient stop-off point for trade to Gascony.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The bailiwick comprises twelve parishes: Alderney, Sark and ten on mainland Guernsey (one of which includes Herm). Each parish has a parish church from the 11th century, with strong religious control exercised initially from the French Catholic church and for the last 500 years from the English church. Over the years the religious aspect of the administration of each parish has been reduced in favour of democratically elected douzeniers.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Each jurisdiction has inhabited and uninhabited islands and its own elected government. All three legal jurisdictions need royal assent from the Monarch on its primary legislation. Each jurisdiction raises its own taxation, although in 1949 Alderney transferred its rights to Guernsey.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: With a population of around 1,900 in , Alderney has its own parliament, the States of Alderney, which has ten elected members and an elected president.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: From 1612 Alderney had a judge appointed, with similar judicial powers to a bailiff; but on 1 January 1949 the island adopted a new constitution, giving up some independence, moving closer to Guernsey and confirming that it is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The island of Guernsey has a population of around 63,000 in and forms the legal and administrative centre of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. The parliament of Guernsey and of the nearby inhabited islands of Herm, Jethou and Lihou is the States of Guernsey.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Sark has a population of around 600 who live in . Its parliament (together with the inhabited island of Brecqhou) is the Chief Pleas of Sark, with 18 elected members.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: In 1565, Helier de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen in Jersey, was granted the fief of Sark by Queen Elizabeth I. He received letters patent granting him Sark in perpetuity, on condition that he kept the island free of pirates and that the island was occupied by at least forty men to defend it. Despite most families coming from Jersey, Sark remained within the Bailiwick of Guernsey.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: There is no flag or coat of arms for the Bailiwick of Guernsey. In historic times, the governor would have used his personal symbols before a generic flag for use by the governor was created.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: In 1279 Edward I granted a Seal for use in the Channel Islands. In 1304 separate seals were provided to Jersey and Guernsey. The provision of separate seals is one of the earliest indications of the separate identity and personality of the two Bailiwicks. The seal comprised three leopards (or lions), a symbol taken from the original arms of the Duchy of Normandy.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The United Kingdom and His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom are responsible for the defence and also for "formal" international, intergovernmental and consular representation of, and the foreign affairs generally, of the Bailiwick.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: While never a member of the European Union or its predecessors, before Brexit the Bailiwick had a special relationship with the EU, under Protocol 3 of the UK's Treaty of Accession 1972 to the European Community. Pooling resources with Jersey, the Bailiwick established in 2010 an office in Brussels to develop the Channel Islands' influence with the EU, to advise the Channel Islands' governments on European matters, and to promote economic links with the EU.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: The Bailiwick of Guernsey is in the Commonwealth (Commonwealth of Nations), although not as a "member", "in its own right". The Bailiwick is also a member of the Commonwealth Games Federation, and competes in the Commonwealth Games.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: In 1969 Royal Mail relinquished control of postal services in the Bailiwick, with Guernsey then being recognised by the Universal Postal Union.


title: Bailiwick of Guernsey

text: Since 1999 the Bailiwick of Guernsey has been a member of the British–Irish Council, currently represented by the Chief Minister of Guernsey.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, 1st Viscount Lisle, (22 August 1545) was an English military leader and courtier. Through his third wife, Mary Tudor, he was brother-in-law to King Henry VIII.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Charles Brandon was the second but only surviving son of Sir William Brandon, Henry Tudor's standard-bearer at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where Richard III was slain. His mother, Elizabeth Bruyn (d. March 1494), was daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Bruyn (died 1461).


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Charles Brandon was brought up at the court of Henry VII, and became Henry VIII's closest friend. He is described by Dugdale as "a person comely of stature, high of courage and conformity of disposition to King Henry VIII, with whom he became a great favourite." Brandon held a succession of offices in the royal household, becoming Master of the Horse in 1513, and received many valuable grants of land. On 15 May 1513, he was created Viscount Lisle, having entered into a marriage contract with his ward, Elizabeth Grey, "suo jure" Viscountess Lisle. The contract was ended and the title was forfeited as a result of Brandon's marriage to Mary Tudor in 1515.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: He distinguished himself at the sieges of Thérouanne and Tournai in the French campaign of 1513. One of the agents of Margaret of Savoy, governor of the Netherlands, writing from before Thérouanne, reminded her that Lord Lisle was a "second king" and advised her to write him a kind letter.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: At this time, Henry VIII was secretly urging Margaret to marry Lisle, whom he created Duke of Suffolk on 4 March 1514, although he was careful to disclaim any complicity in the project to her father, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. When Brandon was made Duke of Suffolk, he became only the third duke in the kingdom.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: After his marriage to Mary, Suffolk lived for some years in retirement, but he was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: He invaded France in company with Floris d'Egmont, Count of Buren, who was at the head of the Flemish troops, and laid waste the north of France, but disbanded his troops at the approach of winter.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Brandon was appointed Earl Marshal of England in 1524, a position previously held by Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk. However, in 1533 he relinquished the office to Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, "whose auncesto[ur]s of longe tyme hadde the same until nowe of late."


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: After Wolsey's disgrace, Suffolk's influence increased. He was sent with Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, to demand the Great Seal from Wolsey; and Suffolk acted as High Steward at the new queen's coronation. He was one of the commissioners appointed by Henry to dismiss Catherine's household, a task he found distasteful.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: His family had a residence on the west side of Borough High Street, London, for at least half a century prior to his building of Suffolk Place at the site.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Charles supported Henry's ecclesiastical policy, receiving a large share of the lands after the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1544, he was for the second time in command of an English army for the invasion of France. He died at Guildford, Surrey, on 24 August in the following year. At Henry VIII's expense he was buried at Windsor in St George's Chapel. Brandon was perhaps the only person in England who successfully retained Henry VIII's affection for most of a period of forty years.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Charles Brandon took part in the jousts which celebrated the marriage of Mary Tudor, King Henry VIII's sister, with King Louis XII of France. Later, on King Louis XII's death in 1515, he was accredited to negotiate various matters with the King; and was sent to congratulate the new King, Francis I of France, as well as to negotiate Princess Mary's return to England.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Love between Charles and the young Dowager Queen Mary had existed before her marriage, and King Francis I roundly charged him with an intention to marry her. King Francis, perhaps in the hope of his wife Queen Claude's death, had himself been one of Mary's suitors in the first week of her widowhood, in which Mary had asserted that she had given him her confidence in order to avoid his overtures.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: King Francis I and King Henry VIII both professed a friendly attitude towards the marriage of the lovers, but Charles had many political enemies, and Mary feared that she might again be sacrificed for political considerations. The King's Council, not wishing to see Charles Brandon gain further power at court, were opposed to the match. The truth was that King Henry was anxious to obtain from King Francis the gold plate and jewels which had been given or promised to his sister Mary by King Louis XII as well as the reimbursement of the expenses of her marriage with King Louis; and he practically made his acceptance in Charles's suit dependent on Charles obtaining them. However, when Charles was sent to bring Mary back to England, King Henry VIII made him promise that he would not propose to her. Once in France though, Charles was persuaded by Mary to abandon this pledge. The couple wed in secret at the Hotel de Clugny on 3 March 1515 in the presence of just 10 people, among whom was King Francis I. Charles announced their marriage to Thomas Wolsey who had been their fast friend.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Technically, this was treason as Charles Brandon had married a royal princess without King Henry's consent. Thus, King Henry VIII was outraged, and the privy council urged that Charles should be imprisoned or executed. He was only saved from King Henry's anger by Wolsey and from the affection that the King had for both his sister and for him. Hence, the couple got off easily and were charged only with a heavy fine of £24,000 to be paid to the King in yearly instalments of £1000, as well as the whole of Mary's dowry from King Louis XII of £200,000, together with her plate and jewels. Nonetheless, the fine was later reduced by the King. They were then openly married at Greenwich Hall on 13 May 1515 in the presence of King Henry VIII and his courtiers. The Duke of Suffolk had been already twice married, to Margaret Neville (the widow of John Mortimer) and to Anne Browne, to whom he had been betrothed before his marriage with Margaret Neville. Anne Browne died in 1511, but Margaret Neville, from whom he had obtained a declaration of nullity on the ground of consanguinity, was still living. He secured in 1528 a bull from Pope Clement VII that assured the legitimacy of his marriage with Mary Tudor.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Mary died on 25 June 1533, and in September of the same year, Charles married his ward, the 14-year-old Katherine Willoughby (1519–1580), "suo jure" Baroness Willoughby de Eresby. Katherine had been betrothed to his eldest surviving son, Henry, Earl of Lincoln, but the boy was too young to marry. Not desiring to risk losing Katherine's lands, Charles married her himself in the end.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: By Katherine Willoughby, he had his two youngest sons who showed great promise, Henry (1535–1551) and Charles (c. 1537–1551), who later became Dukes of Suffolk. However, they eventually died of the sweating sickness within an hour of each other.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Between 1536–1543, Charles gave his London residence Suffolk Place, rebuilt by him in fine Renaissance style in 1522, to King Henry VIII in exchange for Norwich Place on the Strand, London. He also leased Hoxne manor at this time.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Before 7 February 1507, Charles Brandon firstly married Margaret Neville (born 1466), widow of Sir John Mortimer (d. before 12 November 1504), and daughter of John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu (slain at the Battle of Barnet) by Isabel Ingaldesthorpe (or Ingoldesthorpe), daughter and heiress of Sir Edmund Ingaldesthorpe (or Ingoldesthorpe) and his wife, Joanna Tiptoft, by whom he had no issue. The marriage was declared void about 1507 by the Archdeaconry Court of London, and later by papal bull dated 12 May 1528. Margaret (née Neville) subsequently married Robert Downes, gentleman.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: In early 1508, in a secret ceremony at Stepney, and later publicly at St Michael's, Cornhill, Charles secondly married Anne Browne (the step-daughter of Margaret Neville's sister, Lucy Neville), daughter of Sir Anthony Browne (Standard Bearer of England in 1485), by his first wife, Eleanor Ughtred, the daughter of Sir Robert Ughtred (c. 1428c. 1487) of Kexby, North Yorkshire and Katherine Eure, daughter of Sir William Eure of Stokesley, Yorkshire. By Anne Browne, he had two daughters:


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: Charles was then contracted to marry Elizabeth Grey, 5th Baroness Lisle (1505–1519), and was thus created 1st Viscount Lisle of the third creation in 1513, but the contract was annulled, and he surrendered the title either before 1519 or in 1523.


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: In May 1515, Charles thirdly married Mary Tudor, Queen Dowager of France (18 March 149625 June 1533). After their marriage, Charles and Mary resided at Westhorpe Hall where they raised all their children. They had two sons who died young, and two daughters:


title: Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

text: On 7 September 1533, Charles fourthly married Katherine Willoughby, 12th Baroness Willoughby de Eresby (22 March 151919 September 1580), the daughter and heiress of William Willoughby, 11th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, by his second wife, María de Salinas. He had two sons by her, both of whom died young of the sweating sickness:


title: Ken Kesey

text: Ken Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.


title: Ken Kesey

text: Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in 1960 after completing a graduate fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University; the novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later. During this period, Kesey participated in government studies involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD) to supplement his income.


title: Ken Kesey

text: After "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was published, Kesey moved to nearby La Honda, California, and began hosting happenings with former colleagues from Stanford, miscellaneous bohemian and literary figures (most notably Neal Cassady) and other friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters; these parties, known as Acid Tests, integrated the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Grateful Dead (the Acid Tests' "de facto" house band) throughout their incipience and continued to exert a profound influence upon the group throughout their career.


title: Ken Kesey

text: Kesey's second novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion"—an epic account of the vicissitudes of an Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga—was a commercial success that polarized critics and readers upon its release in 1964. Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.


title: Ken Kesey

text: In 1965, after an arrest for marijuana possession and faking suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, he returned home to the Willamette Valley and settled in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life. In addition to teaching at the University of Oregon—an experience that culminated in "Caverns" (1989), a collaborative novel by Kesey and his graduate workshop students under the pseudonym "O.U. Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute fiction and reportage to such publications as "Esquire", "Rolling Stone", "Oui", "Running", and "The Whole Earth Catalog"; various iterations of these pieces were collected in "Kesey's Garage Sale" (1973) and "Demon Box" (1986).


title: Ken Kesey

text: Between 1974 and 1980, Kesey published six issues of "Spit in the Ocean", a literary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished novel ("Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier", an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease) and contributions from writers including Margo St. James, Kate Millett, Stewart Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William S. Burroughs. After a third novel ("Sailor Song") was released to lukewarm reviews in 1992, he reunited with the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works on the Internet until ill health (including a stroke) curtailed his activities.


title: Ken Kesey

text: Kesey was born in 1935 in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Geneva (née Smith) and Frederick A. Kesey. When Kesey was 10 years old, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon in 1946. Kesey was a champion wrestler in high school and college in the weight division, and almost qualified to be on the Olympic team, but a serious shoulder injury halted his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.


title: Ken Kesey

text: While attending the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in neighboring Eugene in 1956, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Oregon State College student Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade. According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I would have been swept overboard by notoriety and weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulbous breasts." Married until his death, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon. Additionally, with Faye's approval, Ken fathered a daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and her stepfather, Jerry Garcia.


title: Ken Kesey

text: Kesey had a football scholarship for his first year, but switched to the University of Oregon wrestling team as a better fit for his build. After posting a .885 winning percentage in the 1956–57 season, he received the Fred Low Scholarship for outstanding Northwest wrestler. In 1957, Kesey was second in his weight class at the Pacific Coast intercollegiate competition. He remains in the top 10 of Oregon Wrestling's all-time winning percentage.


title: Ken Kesey

text: A member of Beta Theta Pi throughout his studies, Kesey graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.A. in speech and communication in 1957. Increasingly disengaged by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much of his major, he began to take literature classes in the second half of his collegiate career with James B. Hall, a cosmopolitan alumnus of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who had previously taught at Cornell University and later served as provost of College V at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hall took on Kesey as his protege and cultivated his interest in literary fiction, introducing Kesey (whose reading interests were hitherto confined to science fiction) to the works of Ernest Hemingway and other paragons of literary modernism. After the last of several brief summer sojourns as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, Kesey published his first short story ("First Sunday of September") in the "Northwest Review" and successfully applied to the highly selective Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for the 1958–59 academic year.


title: Ken Kesey

text: Unbeknownst to Kesey, who applied at Hall's request, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at the University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee to select the "rough-hewn" Kesey alongside more traditional fellows from Reed College and other elite institutions. Because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a traditional master's degree in English as a communications major, Kesey elected to enroll in the non-degree program at Stanford University's Creative Writing Center that fall. While studying and working in the Stanford milieu over the next five years, most of them spent as a resident of Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave next to the university golf course), he developed intimate lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.


title: Ken Kesey

text: During his initial fellowship year, Kesey frequently clashed with Center director Wallace Stegner, who regarded him as "a sort of highly talented illiterate" and rejected Kesey's application for a departmental Stegner Fellowship before permitting his attendance as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard Scowcroft later recalled that "neither Wally nor I thought he had a particularly important talent." According to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and continued to reject Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959–60 and 1960–61 terms.


title: Ken Kesey

text: Nevertheless, Kesey received the prestigious $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress (the oft-rejected "Zoo") and audited the graduate writing seminar—a courtesy nominally accorded to former Stegner Fellows, although Kesey only secured his place by falsely claiming to Scowcroft that his colleague (on sabbatical through 1960) "had said that he could attend classes for free"—through the 1960–61 term. The course was initially taught that year by Viking Press editorial consultant and Lost Generation "eminence grise" Malcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen. Cowley was succeeded the following quarter by the Irish short-story specialist Frank O'Connor; frequent spats between O'Connor and Kesey ultimately precipitated his departure from the class. While under Cowley's tutelage, he began to draft and workshop a manuscript that evolved into "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".


title: Ken Kesey

text: Reflecting upon this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie."


title: Ken Kesey

text: At the invitation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vic Lovell, Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital, where he worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private drug use that followed.