After “Ma” and “Da” (and variants thereof), what is the first word uttered by very young children just learning to speak? I checked this with the writer, Paul Theroux, father to Louis and Marcel. He reckons it’s“Why”. But in my experience (I have two sons) the first serious word they utter is “No”. It is possible that Ayaan Hirsi Ali may have been feeling something similar with regard to me. I was late for our meeting. It was taking place in a location somewhere mysterious on the west coast of the US, at an undefined time. I was only about 10 minutes late: bad traffic.

She seemed in high good humour. I like her. Not everyone does. She knows that. It’s not just trolls either. She was the scriptwriter and voice of the short film, Submission (technically, Submission Part 1), deconstructing the treatment of Muslim women in Holland, which led to the director, Theo van Gogh, being assassinated back in 2004. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, pinned a note to Van Gogh’s chest, with a knife, saying that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next.

A lot of people have repeated that kind of threat ever since. She was born to a Muslim family in Somalia, shuttled between Kenya and Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia as a kid, then was married off by her father to a man he thought was ideal for her in Canada. She didn’t like him though: he was bald and he didn’t read any novels (she describes their meeting, hilariously, in Infidel, 2007).

So she got off the plane in Germany and ended up with refugee status in Holland, where she dropped out of Islam and dropped into the Dutch parliament as an MP. Then she took off again and has ended up on the West Coast, married to a historian, with a five-year old son of her own. And a lot of hate mail.

I got another message just the other day from a lapsed Muslim American woman describing her as “a mouthpiece of a well-organised Islamophobia network”.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali laughed at the “Islamophobia” jibe. “There is no conspiracy. Unfortunately. But if you’re an ex-Muslim there are people who want to kill you on account of deserting Islam. It’s reasonable to be a little concerned. That’s not phobia, it’s rational fear. “

Hirsi Ali argued that “Islam” means submission or obedience, not just of women but men similarly. “It seems to the outsider that boys have more freedom than girls, but they really don’t.” But as a young girl she had a massive hierarchy to contend with, of parents and clan and what she calls “bearded men preaching seventh-century laws.” She had to adapt from a “collectivist society” to an “individualist society” in Holland. “Finding the ability to say No, and feeling OK about it in my conscience, was a real emancipation for me.”

And she has kept on saying no ever since. Maybe it’s no surprise that she was once awarded the Richard Dawkins prize by the Atheist Alliance International. She has also won the Simone de Beauvoir prize for promoting the freedom of women.

Hirsi Ali’s minimum demand is the right for everyone to say No if they feel like it, but especially women, whether to men or God. Without feeling tortured about it. Or being tortured. But religion, notably of the monotheistic kind, bought into the idea and made subordination and subservience sacred.

Hirsi Ali will talk about anything and everything. Preferably everything, given there’s enough time. All her big ideas are grounded in small experiences. The problem with the Islamic conception of time is that mere chronology, the Newtonian clock ticking away, keeping everything in order, is irrelevant in comparison with the theological sense of eternity, in which time is effectively abolished. What matters, she argues, in this way of thinking, is only the Hereafter, and thus heaven and hell. Mere terrestrial time is seen as limited and relatively insignificant. Only a stepping stone to the infinite. This, says Hirsi Ali, is the “core” of Islam. “So working hard and making money, or recreational things like going to the pub or watching soccer or going to the movies — all this is rejected as sinful or futile.”

She wonders “if depriving impressionable young men of entertainment and female companionship doesn’t make them more susceptible to calls for self-annihilation.”

She is a woman on a mission (which is what gets some people’s goat). She has managed to get away from thinking of Islam as something peculiar and particular, a thing apart. She is de-ghettoising the subject. It’s actually part of human culture and history and philosophy and therefore is potentially subject to the same kinds of analysis. For example, the same non-linear, non-evolutionary notion of time infects Plato’s thinking (timeless archetypes and the epistem* must be superior to earthly beings and knowledge) and so much of Eastern thinking too (“maya” in the Upanishads, life as we live it, is rejected as an illusion, a constellation of appearances).

With a quick metaphysical flip, the real is turned on its head to become the unreal. Hence the Good, the True and the Beautiful reside elsewhere, in some deathless, supra-sensory realm. We have a habit of desperately seeking the transcendent. We inhabit myths.

“Islam is a set of ideas,” she says, “not a skin colour or a sexual orientation.” But Hirsi Ali would agree that ideas about hell and heaven can have serious consequences for how you behave in the real world. Hirsi Ali is more Lennon: no hell, no heaven. But above all, just no, and the right to say it — without being beaten or seen as a traitor/whore or denounced as an “apostate” and executed.

“There is no conspiracy. Unfortunately. But if you’re an ex-Muslim there are people who want to kill you on account of deserting Islam. It’s reasonable to be a little concerned. That’s not phobia, it’s rational fear. “

Being an ex-Muslim doesn’t really define Hirsi Ali. I think of her as a good writer, (she snorted at this) and a neoexistentialist. She pays attention to the small everyday things, the “infra-ordinary” and not just the extraordinary. Another thing I liked about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I asked her if she would need to check her quotes, before publication. “I trust you,” she said, and smiled. Maybe that is the fundamental problem with all religions. They don’t trust humans enough. So you bring in the Almighty to act as moral arbiter — to make up your mind for you. I’d rather put my trust in someone I can see and hear, no matter how imperfect, than in angels and sky gods, no matter how wonderful. You have to learn to trust yourself. Or as James Joyce put it in the final lines of Portrait of the Artist, “Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience”. Andy Martin is the author of Reacher Said Nothing and teaches at the University of Cambridge The Independent