As a victim of female genital mutilation (a subject about which she would write graphically in her autobiography),11 someone who had as a teenager believed death was a suitable punishment for Salman Rushdie, had fled a forced marriage and understood at first hand the challenges of integration, Hirsi Ali tackled the most brittle issues. A sign that the coming years were not going to go well was that this exemplary immigrant found herself assailed not just by a large proportion of the Dutch political class but with extraordinary vitriol by the country’s Muslim community.

Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.’12 But it was. Hirsi Ali had put her finger on the sorest point of Dutch society. A people who liked to think of themselves as tolerant and open and decent were wondering whether this tolerance and openness and decency had gone too far. How could they enforce any limits? Hirsi Ali was telling them that there were limits and she was living proof of some of them. And so in spite of the threats to her life both before and after the murder of her colleague van Gogh, she believed that ‘some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice’.13

Everywhere in Europe these same concerns were growing. During the decades in which European governments allowed immigration to run at the levels they did, few if any expected that one consequence would be that they would spend the foreseeable future trying to balance Islamic laws and demands with European culture and traditions. Yet as the immigrant populations grew, everywhere the same problems erupted. Sometimes it occurred because of the discovery of what was going on within the communities. In France in 2004 a young Muslim woman called Ghofrane Haddaoui was stoned to death in Marseille for refusing the advances of a young Muslim man. In the United Kingdom the police admitted that they had failed to investigate scores of suspicious deaths of young Muslim women because they had thought these potential ‘honour killings’ were community matters. In 2006 the British Medical Association reported that at least 74,000 women in Britain had been subjected to genital mutilation.