Love brings critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali back for more

"WHY did you choose this place?" asks Ayaan Hirsi Ali, eyebrows arched in feigned alarm. We are in New York's Algonquin hotel, just a few hundred metres from Times Square, where a Muslim would-be bomber parked a car full of explosives a couple of days earlier.

Radical Islamists have been trying for years to kill Hirsi Ali, a softly spoken politician turned intellectual who combines the beauty of a film star with the uncompromising zeal of an Enlightenment crusader.

She has been under siege since the ritualised murder in 2004 of her friend, Theo van Gogh, who had helped her make the film Submission, a blistering polemic about Islam's treatment of women.

A letter pinned to Van Gogh's chest - or, rather, stabbed in place with a butcher's knife - warned Hirsi Ali that "you will go down". She went into hiding, exchanging a career as a Dutch MP for exile.

Six years on, she is still preceded everywhere by a burly security man. "I'm on that endless list of names they have," she tells me - every jihadist's death list. It's a grim, confining way to live, yet here she is, gaily teasing me about my tactless choice of rendezvous: she doesn't seem remotely angry or distressed - radiant, more like.

"There is a new man in my life: Niall Ferguson, a British historian and TV presenter; the situation is a bit complicated. I am deeply in love and that feels great," she told a Dutch magazine.

"We are both constantly travelling, so it is hard to see one another regularly . . . I cannot say what will happen with us. There is still a divorce procedure going on and there are children involved."

The couple will visit Australia at least once this year, when Ferguson gives the annual John Bonython lecture for the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney on July 28.

She clams up now when quizzed about her romance, which has created a frisson in Britain because of Ferguson's high-profile marriage to a former newspaper executive.

All this might be dismissed as tabloid voyeurism had Hirsi Ali herself not turned her own most intimate history into fodder for public debate, first in her acclaimed 2006 memoir, Infidel, and now in its sequel, Nomad.

As a five-year-old in Somalia, she has written, part of her genitals were removed in a ceremony designed to preserve girls as virgins until they can be married off.

Tea at the Algonquin somehow doesn't seem the time or place to ask about her clitoris. Yet the subject of her sexuality - or at least her reproductive powers at the age of 40 - is not so easily avoided.

The most intriguing chapter in Nomad is an odd epilogue entitled Letter to My Unborn Daughter. Part broadside against Muslim malevolence, part corny celebration of love, it is impossible to read without reference to her current romantic predicament.

"Love between man and woman is not a hoax," writes Hirsi Ali, one of whose complaints against Islam is its insistence on unattainable behaviour. "The perfect religion, the perfect God, the infallible prophet, the manual of right and wrong - you can't think of anything more Disneyfied than Islam," she tells me.

True love, by contrast, is a messier affair. Or, as she writes to her (unborn) daughter: "It is contingent on chemistry, compatibility, temperament, lifestyle, even income, but if you fall in love and it's mutual, then it's a very powerful force."

The letter is likely to upset Muslims for many reasons - she declares she will not raise her daughter in the Islamic faith, "for I believe it is fatally flawed" - but for the rest of us it simply invites curiosity. What's all this about an unborn daughter?

And what does she mean when she writes "I have struggled with whether to have you on my own . . . or to marry your father"?

She rolls her eyes and embarks on a long answer about a "rhetorical device". She has devoted a chapter of Nomad to her grandmother, a formidable tribal matriarch who lived a life of camel trains and desert watering holes; another to her mother's confused first steps towards urban life.

She writes of her own embrace of Western modernity, her desperate escape from a forced marriage to freedom as a refugee, so she says it just made literary sense to "imagine" having an American daughter who would represent her family's journey from desert to daiquiris in four generations.

Then she shakes her head with a faint smile. "I'm not pregnant," she declares.

In some ways it's a shame Hirsi Ali's public work should be overshadowed by her private life, because she has plenty of interest to say about radical Islamic aggression and a Western response she regards as wimpish and deluded.

You might have thought with her life in danger she would have opted for a safer route of academic invisibility after her Dutch political career imploded in 2006 over a row about lies she admitted telling on her application for asylum. For the past few years she has occupied a gilded perch as a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of US neoconservatism.

Yet Nomad returns to the inflammatory themes that have sparked so much Muslim rage. From every page springs her contempt for the "indoctrination" of the Koran, the bogus infallibility of the prophet Mohammed and the poisons spread by fundamentalist Islam.

Equally disturbing are her broadsides against Western do-gooders. "To be blunt, their efforts to assist Muslims and other minorities are futile," she says.

By prolonging Muslim transition to modern life or, as she puts it, "by creating the illusion that one can hold on to tribal norms and at the same time become a successful citizen", the West is merely creating a deeply confused underclass ripe for indoctrination by fundamentalist mullahs.

Hirsi Ali comes across as formidable and thoughtful. She has a happy laugh, but I can't help wondering if she is prone to the same lure of martyrdom that appeals to so many Islamic young men. In short, does she have a death wish?

Far from it, she says. She compares her own experience of terrorism to the response to the failed May 1 Times Square bomb attack.

"The next morning New York was just New York," she says. "Someone told me that the way California is used to earthquakes, New York is used to terrorism. They just carry on. And that is me.

"Tomorrow I'll just carry on with my life and that's the best antidote to terrorism. We love life and we live it."