In her new book Ayaan Hirsi Ali says that she herself has been a member of these three different groups of Muslims at different times in her life. Today she is a Muslim dissident.
In the book CONVICTIONS: HOW I LEARNED WHAT MATTER MOST (2014), the Protestant New Testament scholar Marcus J. Borg, who died recently, works with three periods in his Christian faith journey in life that parallel the three periods of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Muslim faith journey in life.
Now, for the sake of discussion, I could construct a periodization of my faith journey in life to parallel Ayaan Hirsi Ali's three periods in her Muslim faith journey in life. In my case I would characterize those three periods in my life as (1) being a fundamentalist practicing Catholic, (2) being a non-fundamentalist practicing Catholic, and (3) being a dissident former Catholic.
Fundamentalist Catholics tend to emphasize faithfulness to official church doctrines as they understood them and to the prevailing customs in the Catholic sub-culture in which they grew up.
In terms of notable contemporary American writers and public intellectuals, Garry Wills and James Carroll would be examples of non-fundamentalist practicing Catholics. See Garry Wills' new book THE FUTURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH POPE FRANCIS (2015).
Historically, Protestants embraced the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the doctrine still embraced by many American Protestant fundamentalists today. But the Roman Catholic Church never officially endorsed the distinctively Protestant doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
So those American Protestant fundamentalists who today still hold the doctrine of biblical inerrancy would closely approximate Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Medina Muslims. However, as she makes clear, the scriptural fundamentalists in the Medina Muslim group frequently tend to become violent in their desire to impose Islam on other people -- and at times, on other Muslims.
But most American Protestant fundamentalists today do not manifest this kind of strong tendency toward violence. Similarly, most American Catholic fundamentalists today do not manifest this kind of strong tendency toward violence.
In her characterization of Mecca Muslim immigrants to non-Muslims countries today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes them as preferring "cocooning." Except for Native Americans, all other Americans immigrated to this country. If we wanted to, we could characterize those immigrants to this country as preferring what she terms "cocooning." In other words, those American immigrants tended to form what we could describe in sociological terminology as sub-cultures. By far, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) sub-culture was the most prestigious. But most of the other American sub-cultures that were formed historically worked out their own parallel prestige standards based on the values of the sub-culture in question. For example, immigrant Jews formed their own American sub-culture, just as immigrant Catholics did. And so on.
Now, if we wanted to, we could think of the WASP sub-culture as representing the in-group in American culture and think of all the others sub-cultures together as representing the out-group, or out-groups. Arguably the Jews in the American Jewish sub-culture learned how to organize and exert political influence more effectively than did American Catholics in the American Catholic sub-culture.
In the 1960 American presidential election, Senator John F. Kennedy (JFK), the Democratic candidate, narrowly defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon. President Kennedy was the first Irish American Roman Catholic to serve as president of the United States. In the book THE PATRIARCH: THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TURBULENT TIMES OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY (2012), David Nasaw points out that the American Catholic bishops, the prestige group in the American Catholic sub-culture, did not support JFK's candidacy in the 1960 presidential election. Presumably JFK would have had a wider margin of victory if more of his fellow American Catholics had voted for him. Nevertheless, JFK's narrow election represents a symbolic defeat of the centuries-old WASP domination of the prestige culture in American culture.
No doubt motivated by his sense of political pragmatism, JFK supported the black civil rights movement. By doing this, he was playing with political dynamite. In other ways, he also played with political dynamite. As a result, he was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
Also in the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church, a notoriously conservative hierarchical institution characterized by top-down rule, launched the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). It ruled in top-down fashion to change certain centuries-old customs in the Roman Catholic Church. For example, it officially ruled that anti-Semitism was no longer acceptable. Of course this landmark official top-down ruling meant that henceforth Roman Catholics were to disregard the explicit anti-Jew passages in the canonical texts in the New Testament. (It appears that most of the anti-Jew passages were written by Jews who had jumped on the bandwagon for the Christ myth to denounce their fellows Jews who did not jump on that bandwagon.)
For information about the church's tragic history of anti-Semitism over the centuries, see James Carroll's book CONSTANTINE SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS: A HISTORY (2001).
Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that contemporary Muslims should disregard certain passages in Islamic sacred scripture.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali sees contemporary Muslims as being engaged in a contest with modernity. She claims that "[t]he rational, secular and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age and inherited status."
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