Ayaan Hirsi Ali is celebrated in many circles for her bravery, her incisive mind, her powers of expression, her determination and her extraordinary personal journey. Her acute sense of humour and her great sensitivity are attributes that have helped her to assimilate so successfully into a range of different situations and to deal with formidable difficulties she has met with on the way. The intellectual and physical courage she has shown in advancing the position of Muslim women in the West have made her into one of the most remarkable "public intellectuals" of our time: much quoted and admired but also much vilified.

Hers is the ultimate modern fairytale. Rags to riches are small beer compared to her leap "from desert to doyenne". She came from the Somali desert to the US speaking circuit, via refugee safe houses in Kenya, immigration centres in Rotterdam and the women's groups of Amsterdam for which she worked as a translator. She has been a refugee twice, the first time from Somalia and the second when she fled an arranged marriage imposed on her by her father and headed for Holland.

Her experiences and her reading led her to draw inferences about the political and intellectual stalemate in the Muslim world, which stirred up a wide-ranging debate in Holland and beyond about integration, immigration and Islam. She became a Dutch MP and made a controversial film, Submission, which led to the murder of her collaborator, Theo Van Gogh, in an Amsterdam street.