A little disappointing that the Times, in an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has to come up with this kind of stuff:
The girl at the other end of a long room says she is cold. Shy and nervous too, I note. She’s going to get some socks, and disappears. She’s slender, understated, almost childlike in her physical uncertainty. When she returns she is wearing well-worn slippers beneath her jeans and she curls her feet under her on a sofa.
This is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the world-famous human rights campaigner, or preposterous critic of Islam, depending on your point of view….
Subsequent publicity has painted Hirsi Ali as a formidably strong woman, fearless, uncompromising and almost one-dimensional: a designer-clad cipher who repeats her mantra ad infinitum without apparent emotion. She is against injustice done in the name of Islam, whether it is honour killings or circumcision and other forms of brutalisation to women. She is intolerant of Muslim fundamentalism. So it is curious to meet her and see that there is vulnerability beneath the public persona, or to use her language, to find that the reality does not entirely match the image. […]
Most questions she answers with polemic, but I know what she believes so I try to disarm her by saying that she doesn’t look 37. It is true, she wears no make-up and she looks more like 17; the strain of the past few years has not taken its toll on her face. “Yes, but it does take it on the mind,” she replies. “I find it easier to let go, not make a fuss about small things. Every time we are put in a position to think about life and death it becomes relative to make a fuss about not getting your coffee right.”
Does she ever do anything frivolous, I ask. “Yes!” she says with a little snuffly giggle. “A very good social life.” Thank goodness for that.
So what’s the secret of her fresh complexion? Does she use creams, facial scrubs? We’re simply not told.
Still, she’s used to being patronised. [And here]
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