TWAA: Why the Fight for Western Civilization Matters
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Inaugural Weekly Column
On March 4, the team at the AHA Foundation launched Restoring the West, which you are now reading. It’s a new Substack with old-yet-urgent underpinnings: that of defending and renewing the principles of Western civilization. The launch of RTW was a long-brewing dream that finally percolated to culmination, and it’s a reminder of why I still fight.
What I’m Thinking About
Bouncing around between several countries in Africa and the Middle East, I didn’t dream much as a child. When you live under an oppressive state that dictates nearly every last detail of your life, dreaming big isn’t exactly encouraged. That changed when I moved to Europe as a young person, and the difference was heady and intellectually intoxicating. Even with my abusive past, life seemed to boast of new and endless possibilities. I certainly had never imagined as a child that I could be involved in national politics, let alone in those of a foreign country. And I definitely did not forecast discovering a lifelong mission of reestablishing the values that solidified Western society as the freest in human history.
Though I might seem an unlikely initial candidate–an immigrant girl born in Mogadishu, Somalia who eventually became a Dutch politician before earning American citizenship in 2013–I believe my lack of childhood dreams say otherwise. My home culture taught me only to obey and submit; my new Western culture encouraged me to dream. So when I watch videos of Iranian women dancing in the streets around the globe after the death of their dictator, I smile. I see a bit of myself in them, yes, but I also know that the dreams of millions have just been conceived or revived. Perhaps more unlikely defenders of Western civilization have just been set free to dream!
When we allow others to erase Western civilization and replace it with intolerant ideologies and oppressive forces that despise our cultural inheritance, who knows what budding dreamers we are forever silencing?
