Tucker Carlson made his most outlandish claim yet: Now, AYAAN HIRSI ALI exposes the provocateur, leaving him no option... but to admit he's gotten it all wrong
Tucker Carlson has built a career on saying what others will not. Yet few of his recent remarks are as unsettling as his praise for regimes that have historically adhered to Sharia law and his implication that a directionless West might do well to take notes.
I spent years inside the civilization that Tucker claims to admire from the outside. I was born in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, subjected as a child to practices carried out in Islam's name, and eventually fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage.
When Tucker looks at the Muslim world and sees a culture on the rise, I see the world I ran from.
He claims that all Western cities are in decline, but it is in Europe, above all, where the stakes of his confusion are now most consequential. It is there, in a society Tucker weeps for, that Sharia is expanding its social and legal footprint.
His diagnosis of what made Europe vulnerable to that expansion is worth taking seriously. The continent is in a moral and spiritual crisis. Regular church attendance across the region has fallen to such an extent that converted churches have become common features of the urban landscape, their spires still pointing heavenward above nightclubs and luxury condos.
In Italy, where the Church has shaped everything from art to politics for centuries, only 19 percent attended Mass weekly, with 31 percent never attending at all. In the UK, the religiously unaffiliated now outnumber Christians — 46 percent to 43 percent — for the first time in recorded history. In Germany, the unaffiliated have similarly overtaken both Catholics and Protestants combined, a crossing that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
Most Western Europeans still call themselves Christian the way they call themselves avid readers — sincerely, and increasingly without practice. The gap between nominal identity and lived faith is precisely what church leaders mean when they speak of a spiritual crisis, and Tucker sees it clearly enough.
His broader indictment holds, too. Europe once set the pace on productivity growth; it now trails the United States by a margin that has widened steadily and shows no sign of closing. Germany, the engine of the European economy, has spent a decade flirting with recession and shows every sign, as I write, of finally tipping into one.
I spent years inside the civilization that Tucker claims to admire from the outside
Few of Carlson's remarks are as unsettling as his praise for regimes that have historically adhered to Sharia law
I was born in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia , Kenya, and Ethiopia , subjected as a child to practices carried out in Islam's name, and eventually fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage. (Pictured: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right, in the Netherlands in 1993)
Finland, France, and Austria each spend roughly 32 percent of GDP on social benefits, a fiscal commitment so large it crowds out nearly everything else a government might choose to prioritize. The EU, once a genuine geopolitical ambition, has become a bloated bureaucratic machine more comfortable issuing directives than defending borders, its security subcontracted to Washington for decades.
Meanwhile, fertility rates hover around 1.34 children per woman, with Spain, a country that once exported its civilization to half the world, sleepwalking toward 1.1 by century's end — too exhausted, or too despairing, to replace itself.
Tucker reads the symptoms well enough. It is the remedy he reaches for that gives cause for alarm.
He watches the Arab Gulf states project confidence onto the world stage and mistakes what was renounced for what was retained. The skylines are real, the sovereign wealth funds are real, the global ambition is real. What he gets wrong is what produced them. Tucker sees this vitality and attributes it to Islamic identity, to some civilizational coherence the secular West has abandoned. He has the causation exactly backwards. The Gulf states are thriving precisely because they retreated from Sharia, not because they embraced it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation and Contributor to the Restoring the West Substack
For decades, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors bankrolled the global export of Wahhabist orthodoxy—blaming Jews and Israel for the negative consequences of their actions, funding madrassas from Karachi to Cologne, paying the salaries of imams who preached that music was haram, that women were chattel, and that apostates deserved death.
They could afford the piety because oil paid for everything. Then came the reckoning. Oil revenues grew volatile; the young population wanted jobs, not just theology. The world economy beckoned.
And so the trade-off was made, quietly but decisively. Less Sharia, more prosperity. Saudi Arabia expelled or sidelined the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE built a Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence. Qatar hosts American military bases and serves alcohol in its hotels. These governments came to understand, through hard experience, what Tucker has not yet grasped.
He imagines Sharia as a kind of spiritual seasoning for a modern society. It was never designed to be that. Sharia is total. It is a system that governs diet and dress, commerce and criminal punishment, family law and foreign policy.
You cannot have Sharia and a stock exchange, Sharia and women in the workforce, Sharia and a tourism industry, without something fundamental giving way. The Gulf chose the economy. They chose pragmatism. And their Islamists—the true believers who wanted the authentic version—were shown the door.
Many of those Islamists are now headquartered in Europe and proclaim to want to conquer it. I speak of all this from personal knowledge. My father described Chop-Chop Square—Riyadh's public execution ground, where beheadings and floggings were carried out before assembled crowds in God's name—in a voice carrying the wound of a man who had seen something he could not unsee and wished he had never seen.
My father described Chop-Chop Square—Riyadh's public execution ground (above), where beheadings and floggings were carried out before assembled crowds in God's name—in a voice carrying the wound of a man who had seen something he wished he had never seen
Qatar hosts American military bases, such as the Al Ubeid base (above) and serves alcohol in its hotels
He needed his children to understand that the place we slept, ate, and went to school in was also the place that did this. I did not need to be told twice that this was Sharia in operation: the hudud punishments prescribed in the Quran, applied with complete fidelity to the text.
Sharia's record is long and legible. Tucker should acquaint himself with it.
Afghanistan under the Taliban is the clearest case. Girls banned from school at twelve. Women banned from leaving the house unaccompanied. Music silenced. The economy is in freefall, sustained only by opium and foreign charity. Iran under the Islamic Republic abides by the Shia variant of Sharia morality police—beating women for a loose hijab, systematic torture of dissidents, an economy strangled by its own ideology, terror networks and international sanctions, a young population seething with contempt for the regime that governs them in God's name.
Hamas in Gaza is authentic Sharia: execution of homosexuals, suppression of women, and the subordination of every civic institution to permanent violent jihad. Remember ISIS, which built its caliphate on the most rigorous scholarly interpretation of Islamic law available, and produced genocide, sex slavery, and mass beheading. Another key feature of Sharia is the pathological commitment to destroy the Jews. Each of these is the product of sincere conviction, not deviation from it.
Tucker rightly interprets Europe's exhaustion as proof that the secular liberal project has failed, but wrongly concludes that a strong, Islam-centered civilization is ascending. He is looking at the wrong variable. What is actually ascending in the Gulf is technocratic authoritarianism draped in Islamic aesthetic. It is MBS, not the Quran, running Saudi Arabia. And MBS's first order of business was crushing the clerics.
Europe's crisis is real, and it deserves honest confrontation. The continent's spiritual vacancy, bureaucratic constipation, demographic implosion, economic sclerosis, and defense freeloading are legitimate subjects for alarm. But the answer is not to romanticize a legal and theological system that produces, wherever it runs unchecked, misery on an industrial scale.
The self-hatred Tucker identifies in European elites is also real, but it is not shared by ordinary Europeans who are increasingly and urgently voting against the immigration policies and cultural relativism their leaders imposed on them without consent. The evidence is now abundant. In Austria's September 2024 national election, the Freedom Party won the largest share of votes—28.9 percent—its best-ever result, a party that has made opposition to mass immigration from Muslim-majority nations central to its platform.
In France, Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration National Rally took 31.5 percent of the vote in the 2024 European Parliament elections, more than double the score of President Macron's centrist party—a result so shocking it prompted Macron to immediately dissolve parliament and call a snap election.
The self-hatred Tucker identifies in European elites is also real, but it is not shared by ordinary Europeans who are increasingly and urgently voting against the immigration policies and cultural relativism their leaders imposed on them without consent
Hamas in Gaza (above) is authentic Sharia: execution of homosexuals, suppression of women, and the subordination of every civic institution to permanent violent jihad.
In France, Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration National Rally took 31.5 percent of the vote in the 2024 European Parliament elections
These are democratic majorities registering, in the clearest possible terms, their rejection of choices made in their name without their consent—which suggests the problem is elite ideology, not civilizational surrender. And elite ideology can change.
What cannot change, what has never changed wherever it has been fully applied, is Sharia's fundamental character. It demands submission of the individual to the collective, of women to men, of non-Muslims to Muslims, of reason to revelation.
Every society that has tried to run a modern economy, a modern military, a modern state on authentic Sharia premises has either imploded or been driven to abandon them by necessity.
Tucker Carlson has made outlandish claims, incomprehensible claims, and occasionally ones that mattered. He has had the courage to walk back previous statements and admit error. This is an invitation to demonstrate that courage again.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation and Contributor to the Restoring the West Substack.
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