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Aayan Hirsi Ali, photographed in the Union Club in Soho. Ali is known as a fierce critic of Islam and the way it treats women. Ali has been subjected to death threats due to her divisive opinions on Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch feminist activist, writer, politician and founder of the women's rights organisation the AHA Foundation. She is the daughter of the Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo van Gogh's movie Submission led to death threats. When she was eight, Hirsi Ali's family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet in 2006. As of 2011 Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and has been living in the United States.In 2005, she 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.In 2006 she published her memoir, which appeared in English translation in 2007 titled Infidel.?? Antonio Olmos / eyevine