"You don't need a Freud to understand that the core problem with Islam is sex and sexuality," she said on Tuesday, citing comments from Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly. "By describing women as raw meat and men as wild dogs [Hilaly revealed] a world view that is sexually centred."

As a Dutch MP, Hirsi Ali rose to worldwide prominence in 2004 after the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist outraged by a short film, Submission, which Hirsi Ali helped make. In it misogynist verses from the Koran were painted on the naked body of a Muslim woman. Pinned to van Gogh's chest with a knife was a death threat against Hirsi Ali and she has lived with round-the-clock protection ever since. When she visited the Centre for Independent Studies on Tuesday she had three state-supplied bodyguards. Hirsi Ali was the superstar of last week's Sydney Writers' Festival, drawing sellout crowds and standing ovations. But her criticism of Islam as a religion in need of profound reform, and of multiculturalism as another religion which condones Islam's repressive practices, has made her enemies among the intellectuals of the liberal-left establishment. They have labelled her a reactionary polemicist in bed with neo-conservative Islamophobes, and expended endless words on whether it is culturally insensitive to criticise a religion that advocates stoning a woman to death for adultery.

She is a refreshing antidote to those who try to politely explain away the barbaric subjugation, enslavement and murder of women around the world in the name of Islam. "If you improve the conditions for women you would change the religion the fastest," she says. But if you accept the idea that women wield the most power in their individual sexual relationships with men, and certainly that they have power over their young sons, then you have to ask how Islamic culture could remain so oppressive towards women without the support of women.

On Tuesday Hirsi Ali skated over the question of why Muslim women are complicit in their own subjugation. She acknowledged it was her grandmother who secretly had her circumcised against her father's wishes. Her father, a Somali opposition politician and "modern man" who adored his spirited oldest child, had "considered the practice barbaric [and] had always insisted that his daughters be left uncut", she writes in Infidel.

"My grandmother was concerned I would not find a husband [unless circumcised]. From her point of view she was doing me a favour," she said on Tuesday. "Women think they have to be submissive because that's what gets you ahead." But she also pointed to the phenomenon in some Muslim countries of mothers-in-law instigating honour killings and stoning of their daughters-in-law. In many cases the subjugated mother exerts her power through her son, and in the Middle East often is defined by him, being known as mother of Mohammed, rather than wife of Osama. "The boy child is the key to the lock but that all goes away when [he marries]," Ali said.

Marriage "takes away her boy child and all her anger and resentment is then projected onto the bride". The Arab-American writer Nonie Darwish has written on the mother-in-law problem and what she calls the "impossible family dynamics of Islam". When men are free to marry multiple wives, the result is "strained and hostile relationships among women in the Muslim world … constant fear of envy". The channelling of female resentment against other women is but one of the catastrophic consequences of subjugation. It may also play a role in the reluctance of Muslim migrant families to integrate in the West.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Muslim families would not want to unleash their daughters into a culture in which Paris Hilton is the dominant female archetype and young girls are prematurely sexualised and objectified. Such women would not be the ideal wives for the precious sons of Muslim mothers. Hirsi Ali acknowledged that "90 per cent" of the complaints she heard from Dutch Muslim families about Western culture were "legitimate. They worried that Dutch culture would overtake their children with drugs and sex."

But she concluded that Muslim children were only vulnerable to Western vices because their parents "haven't prepared them". This overlooks the fact that non-Muslim families in the West also struggle with the effects of a decaying moral culture. Hirsi Ali says the West can "win the war of ideas if we persuade as many Muslims as possible [of the benefits] of equal opportunities for women and men, gays and heterosexuals". This will happen only if Muslim mothers can be persuaded that their sons will not be lost to wanton women.