Ayaan Hirsi Ali on The problem of evil

Few public figures have more direct experience of religiously motivated suffering than Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She endured forced genital mutilation as a child, a forced marriage, death threats from Islamists after she collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film Submission, and the murder of van Gogh himself. Her autobiography, Infidel, is in many ways a sustained meditation on the evil that religion can inflict.

During her atheist period, this experience grounded a powerful implicit argument from evil: a world containing this much religiously motivated suffering is not consistent with a benevolent, omnipotent God. Hirsi Ali did not typically frame this in the formal terms of the logical or evidential problem of evil, but the argument was always present in her work — not as philosophy but as testimony.

Her conversion to Christianity makes her position on the problem of evil genuinely complex. She has not explained how she reconciles her extensive experience of suffering with belief in a good God. It is possible that she has adopted some form of theodicy, or that she regards the problem as real but outweighed by Christianity's civilisational benefits, or that she simply lives with the tension. Without more explicit statements, her position remains authentically unresolved.