Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and activist, was in Toronto recently to promote her new book, Nomad. While here, she gave reams of interviews and spoke before a sympathetic crowd at the Donner lecture series.

You couldn't miss the police presence. But I didn't spot her bodyguards, who are supposed to escort her everywhere because of the numerous threats on her life.

When writing profiles of her, the word almost every writer employs is "brave," whether they agree with her or not.

Elegant and striking, she speaks softly on stage but carries a big stick (as Teddy Roosevelt would have said), with which she beats radical Islamists, in particular, and Islam, the religion, generally.

Author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (Associated Press)

She also seems to like taking a few swipes at liberals, leftists, erstwhile feminists and Western apologists who go out of their way to make excuses for the murderous misdeeds of Islamic militants.

As I was leaving the theatre, I heard it said that a magazine editor who was in attendance pronounced her presentation "simplistic."

That's not the first time she has been criticized in this manner.

The widely travelled New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, while finding her "intellectually brilliant," dismissed her by claiming she is "by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex."

Real enemies

Hirsi Ali has also been attacked by other liberal intellectuals, including Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma. These attacks so incensed the writer Paul Berman that he defended her in his book The Flight of the Intellectuals, berating the critics for being full of "masculine condescension."

Of course, just because Hirsi Ali is brave, or at least braver than her critics (who are not facing death threats), that doesn't necessarily mean that all her arguments are correct.

But she is clearly a fan of the intellectually free West and the Enlightenment, which she says is this culture's gift to modernity.

As a result, she doesn't sound the slightest bit bitter when speaking of all those nice, smart people arrayed against her, at least in public. In fact, she even managed to sound amused and full of irony.

But maybe that is to be expected. After all, she has real enemies who want to kill her for her virulent criticisms of Islam, not just find fault with her arguments.

Submission

When I first met Hirsi Ali, in a small editorial meeting at the CBC a year ago, I was impressed, but puzzled.

This is clearly an imposing woman who had gone through hell, undergoing genital mutilation as a girl and then fleeing a hectoring, tyrannical father, a brutal tribal culture and the murder of her Dutch film collaborator, Theo Van Gogh.

She clearly disapproved of Islam as oppressive to women and psychologically damaging to men, who become obsessed with honour and ostentatious warrior heroics.

But unlike many critics and historians who try to make distinctions between Islam and the societies it inhabits, she decries the doctrines of the religion itself.

Indeed, she takes Islam at its word: that it is a religion of "submission."

Women are key

For Hirsi Ali, there is no reforming Islam, like her friend, the Canadian Irshad Manji believes.

The entire religion is at odds with the liberating, reforming principles of the West. She believes that what we have here is what the late Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington famously described as "a clash of civilizations."

You can see why anybody wishing to try to live in harmony with more than a billion Muslims worldwide might be upset by her line in the sand.

But if she is right, what is to be done? For Hirsi Ali, Muslims must simply stop being Muslims. Let them grow up and throw off the strictures of an imprisoning, medieval faith.

A year ago, I asked her — no doubt like a thousand people before me — how can you possibly change the minds of a billion people?

She didn't have a real answer. Her only hope is to try to change the mindset of Islamic women. For her, they are the key to leading Muslims out of Islam.

Betting on the oppressed

Dare I suggest that, no matter what you think of Islam, this seems unrealistic.

Oppressed women overturning the patriarchy of Islam? If you're going to bet on history, I wouldn't necessarily bet on this one.

But her own thinking on this seems to have evolved somewhat, at least from what can be construed from the Donner lecture and recent interviews.

Muslim women, she tells us, continue to write to her and say that, while their religion is oppressive, they also need something larger to believe in, something that supersedes private autonomy and individual freedom.

Hirsi Ali takes these arguments seriously. She herself has admitted to experiencing a sense of loneliness in the West. She also may fear that the so-called godless West, with its religion of reason, doesn't have the stomach to take on a real, live fervid faith.

In Nomad, as well as in the Donner lecture and interviews, she argues that the West must offer real competition to Islam in the battle of ideas.

As she told Maclean's magazine, "Next to every mosque, build a Christian centre, an enlightenment centre, a feminist centre. There are tons of websites, financed with Saudi money, promoting Wahabism. We need to [say] we have an alternative moral framework to Islam. We have better ideas."

Now why would a self-proclaimed atheist, like her, argue that Christians should proselytize among Muslims?

In her lecture, she joked she was being "naughty." (Though her suggestion of marshalling Christians to convert Muslims has apparently annoyed her friend, writer Christopher Hitchens, one of the "New Atheists" and a hater of all religions.)

But Hirsi Ali's latitude here is based on the idea that, over its history, Christianity has become a demonstrably more enlightened religion.

The fact that liberal Christianity, as we now know it, may not have the stomach for this kind of head-to-head competition with Islam, she simply did not address.

Still, there she is — a brave, complicated, non-believer opening the door to religion on both practical and existential grounds by suggesting that secular humanism can't do the job all by itself.