Lawrence Wright, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ebtihal Mubarak, and others: A Conversation

SPEAKER BIOS

Lawrence Wright

is a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security, an author, playwright, and screenwriter, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.  His book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was named one of the top ten books of 2006, according to both The New York Times and The Washington Post, and was nominated for the 2006 National Book Award. A portion of that book, “The Man Behind Bin Laden,” was published in The New Yorker and won the 2002 Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting. He has also won the National Magazine Award for Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism.  Currently he is working on a script for MGM about John O’Neill, the former head of the FBI’s office of counterterrorism in New York, who died on 9/11. In 2006, he premiered his one-man play, “My Trip to al-Qaeda,” at The New Yorker Festival, and then enjoyed a sold-out six-week run at the Culture Project in Soho.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. An outspoken defender of women’s rights in Islamic societies, Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. She escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992, and served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006. In 2007, she published her book, Infidel. Infidel details the formation of Hirsi Ali’s insights on Islamic reform, and introduces a path to realizing a fundamental shift of values in modern Muslim society. Tracing not just her personal history but also the history of the militant Islamic movement throughout Africa and the Middle East, Infidel charts the influences and beliefs that have defined the past thirty years. In parliament, she worked on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of women in Dutch muslim society. In 2004, together with director Theo van Gogh, she made Submission, a film about the oppression of women in conservative Islamic cultures. The airing of the film on Dutch television resulted in the assassination of van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.  At AEI, Ms. Hirsi Ali will be researching the relationship between the West and Islam; women’s rights in Islam; violence against women propagated by religious and cultural arguments; and Islam in Europe.

Ebtihal Mubarak

is a 2008 Fellow of the Dag Hammarskjöld Scholarship Fund for Journalists at the United Nations. She is a reporter for the English-language Arab News in Saudi Arabia and reports on the small but growing movement for greater political and social rights for Saudi women and the challenges they face. Among the only 5 percent of Saudi women who work outside the home, Ms. Mubarak was instrumental in publicizing the case of Fatimah Al Taimani, forcibly divorced from her husband and then chose imprisonment to escape her half brothers who accused her husband of lying about his tribal affiliations. More recently Ms. Mubarak covered a Saudi rape victim, known as the “Qatif Girl.” Her reporting was picked up by the international press. At the United Nations, she intends to seek interviews with as many world figures as possible and “to represent working Saudi women in action.