The great boxer Muhammad Ali was famous for many things, including his public conversion to Islam in the mid 1960s, as well as his colorful phrase describing his fighting style: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." I grew up watching him pummel his opponents.
There is another Ali whose life has taken a very different path ... a kind of parallel-reverse you might say.
I first became aware of Ayaan Hirsi Ali after I read a long article about her life story. I was so impressed that I immediately got a copy of her book Infidel. This was in 2008 and the book was less than a year old. I read it in one sitting, on a flight from the West Coast to the Miami area.
At one point I screamed fairly loudly.
Probably not the best thing to do on a flight. Especially if you are holding a book with the word Infidel in large font on the cover.
But I had just read something so horrifying I could not contain myself. How could anyone mutilate a child's genitals like that? I'd never even heard of the practice of FGM.
Born in Somalia, sexually mutilated (without anesthesia) at five according to local Islamic tradition, Ali became a serious Muslim, wearing the hijab and supporting the Islamic Brotherhood. After 9/11, she became increasingly disenchanted with her religion and eventually became a Dutch citizen, earning a seat in parliament. She was a public opponent of Islam, the Islamization of Europe, and eventually proclaimed she was an avowed atheist.
I have since followed Ali's story, like many Americans, reading everything of hers I could find, and have been amazed at her courage, clarity, and brilliance. Yet I was deeply saddened for her as she had left Islam to become a hardcore atheist, often writing and lecturing on the subject and even appearing on stage with Richard Dawkins, leader of the New Atheism movement, who became her friend. Submission to Allah had destroyed her ability to imagine the one true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus made no sense to her at all.
While there was no clear and explicit theological statement, the very idea of her moving from Islam to secular atheism and then to Christianity was actually mind boggling.
When a Muslim leaves their religion — especially for Christianity, they are under a sentence of death. When a well-known public atheist announces conversion to Christ, they shake the world up.
This was no light public pronouncement from a pop singer finding Jesus.
Her friend Richard Dawkins was not at all happy:
He claims (unironically!) that Christianity is all about weakness: "How could you succumb to such weakness?" (See 2 Corinthians 12:9-11)
Over the weekend, Ali had the chance to publicly respond on stage to Dawkins and the Dissident Dialogues conference in New York.
Watch:
You're coming from a place of ‘there's nothing.' And what has happened to me is, I think I have accepted that there is something. And when you accept that there is something, there's a powerful entity — for me, (that's) the God that turned me around.
Like you, I did mock faith, in general, and probably Christianity in particular, but I don't do that anymore. And again, that's where humility comes into it ... I have come down to my knees to say that those people who always had faith have something that we who lost faith don't have.
Ali also said this:
What you value in Christianity is something that really is absolutely necessary to pass on to the next generation. And we have failed the next generation by taking away from them that moral framework and telling them it's nonsense and false. We have also not protected them from the external forces that come for their hearts, minds and souls.
The Gospel is the very best kind of fighting: It floats like a butterfly, but stings like a bee. Gentle ... and irresistibly powerful!
Dawkins refers to 'barbaric practices' of religion; Ali specifically says it was the barbaric practices of Islam that made her leave that religion. But she has discovered, as Dawkins only subconsciously does through his love of the "cultural Christianity" that built Britain, that Christ is altogether different.
This is not a new story. Her attraction to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth was exactly the same set of things that have been bringing people to Christ for 2,000 years.
In February of 1983, I was not converted because I found some attractive barbarism in the Bible — I was converted by grace through faith, the gift of God. I was a miserable fool, and I found hope in the midst of lostness.
This most certainly did not make me a theologian. I was not articulate in explaining what had happened to me, but I wanted to tell people. I knew it was real, and I knew I was different.
Dead, and alive again.
The truth stings, but the gospel of grace transforms something ugly into something beautiful - much like the metamorphosis of a butterfly.
As Ali rightly says, "Christianity is actually obsessed with love."
Pray for Ali to receive good teaching, mentorship, and discipling, and to read the Bible even more vigorously than she used to read the Koran!
