Why I Am Now a Christian

From the NYT and international bestselling author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a memoir tracing her journey from radical Islam to atheism to Christianity

“Ayaan, you are spiritually bankrupt.” Ayaan heard these words in January 2023, spoken to her by a therapist in the mountains of Utah. She had not travelled to this rehabilitation centre for a religious revival, but rather for relief from her alcoholism and her depression, a bleak and seemingly unfixable emotional paralysis that had crushed her to the point where she questioned the point of living.

God was not the cure she sought.

Of course, her counsellor knew that Ayaan was an atheist. Not just any atheist—Ayaan had built much of her career on a public and deliberate renunciation of Islam and Allah. A committed rationalist, she had spent years writing and speaking not only in defence of atheism but in outright opposition to religion itself. What could spirituality—or its close cousin, religion—possibly have to do with her and the psychic agony she could not seem to cure?

Ayaan had come a long way from her childhood on the outskirts of Mogadishu, where sand and heat and political unrest defined the landscape. From an unstable, brutal upbringing through civil war, as a teen she declared allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood, then escaped an arranged marriage at 23, fled across Europe, and sought asylum in the Netherlands. There, she rebuilt her life—first as a translator, then a Dutch citizen, then a university student. Speaking out against the social consequences of unchecked immigration, she gained recognition for her critique of radical Islam, eventually winning a seat in the Dutch Parliament.

Then came the murder of Theo Van Gogh by Islamic terrorists—left with a note stabbed into his chest declaring that Ayaan was next. She fled to the United States, went into hiding, and later emerged to build an international career as an author and speaker. From the outside, her life looked like a triumph, a story of resilience against impossible odds. She aspired to a rational, intellectual, empirical approach to the meaning of life.

Spirituality, religion, God had no place in her world.

And yet, by the time the counsellor spoke those words to her, Ayaan was more emotionally destitute, more hopeless, than she had ever been.

Why I Am Now a Christian is the moving and inspiring story of Ayaan’s conversion to Christianity and the peace and meaning that finding God has brought into her life.