Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

From the transcript of her March 2015 interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: So you disagree with President Obama when he says the Islamic State does not represent Islam or he says it isn't Islamic. And what I want to ask you is this, you are a very smart and you understand that he's not writing an intellectual dissertation. This is not a thesis about the accurate way to describe ISIS. What he's trying to do is delegitimize them.

ALI: Yes.

ZAKARIA: And thus the king of Jordan also says in an interview with me, please don't call them Islamic.

ALI: Yes.

ZAKARIA: We don't call them Islamic because we regard them as renegades. So the point is not that any of these leaders don't see that, of course, they are drawing on a version of Islam.

ALI: Yes.

ZAKARIA: But they are trying to delegitimize it by denying them that label. Do you disagree with that strategy?

ALI: I think the strategy of let's not call it Islamic because we're going to delegitimize them has actually being tested. We've seen it, you know, in the U.S. since 9/11 2001, but in the Muslim world, perhaps in, you know, three or four or five decades ago, and it hasn't worked. It hasn't stopped them.

ZAKARIA: But let me understand. So you would rather that the president of the United States say yes, the Islamic State is Islamic, it draws on important strains within Islam and Islam is a bad religion. You think that's going to be a successful strategy?

ALI: I don't think I will ever have our president say...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue