RUTHFULLY YOURS

ABUJA, Nigeria—The death toll climbed from Boko Haram’s Saturday night rampage through a refugee camp in northeast Nigeria, as residents buried bodies and terrified survivors ferried wounded to nearby towns for treatment and refuge from another assault.

Government authorities on Monday said the number of dead in the town of Dalori had risen to 65. Another 136 wounded were taken to local hospitals, said Sani Gatti, spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency.

The attack, which targeted those fleeing Boko Haram’s violence, was a gruesome reminder of how indiscriminately violent the Islamist insurgency has become in the two years since vigilantes helped push the jihadists from urban centers like Dalori, a suburb of Maiduguri, the largest city in northeast Nigeria. Witnesses described the militants burning down houses as children screamed inside.

Aisami Modu, a local resident who lost his wife and daughter in the attack, which involved suicide bombers and gunmen on motorcycles, said authorities recovered the remains of his 6-year-old daughter, which he immediately buried in accordance with Islamic rites.

“My daughter was found burned to death today.…I have lost my wife,” Mr. Modu said over the phone from Maiduguri, where he fled with other survivors.

Baba Kaka, a 45-year-old fish trader, escaped to join his wife and two daughters, who were attending a wedding in Maiduguri. “I was just running toward the outskirts of the town while gunshots cracked in the air. Before the military came to our rescue, I thought I would be killed.”

RIYADH—A Saudi court on Tuesday overturned a death sentence against a Palestinian poet convicted of apostasy and imposed an eight-year prison term and 800 lashes instead.

A court in the southwestern city of Abha also ordered the poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to repent and renounce his poetry on official state media, his lawyer Abdulrahman al-Lahim said.

Mr. Lahim said his client, 35 years old, was innocent of the charges against him and would appeal the latest sentence. He also said he had asked the court to release Mr. Fayadh from jail on bail, pending the outcome of his appeal.

This was the latest Saudi freedom-of-expression case in recent months to be met with a harsh sentence. It has become a flashpoint for criticism from international free-speech and human-rights groups, which have called on the Gulf kingdom to free Mr. Fayadh since his detention in January 2014.

President Obama on Wednesday will visit a U.S. mosque for the first time in his presidency. According to the White House, during this visit he will “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.” Over the past two years, in the president’s efforts to counter violent extremism, he has emphasized the responsibility of Muslim “scholars and clerics” to help ensure that mosques are not used as a platform to preach Islamist extremism.

Such extremism isn’t limited to out-of-the-way mosques where radical clerics operate in the shadows. It is occurring in mainstream and leading mosques world-wide, including at one of the most important religious institutions in Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Consider a Jan. 16 sermon at Al Aqsa by Sheikh Abu Taqi Al-Din Al-Dari, a Palestinian cleric who called for jihad against the West and Europe, and for the burgeoning Islamic State to “conquer Rome, Washington and Paris.”

When Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist on a street in Amsterdam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali could not even attend the funeral because she would have put the lives of others at risk. So the Dutch intelligence agreed to take her to the morgue. The next day, bodyguards accompanied her from her home and gave her three hours to pack and leave. From there she went to the air base at Valkenburg, near The Hague, where she would be embark on a plane. The portholes were closed, they told her not to approach them nor go near the door. The plane was full of soldiers. Hirsi Ali was leaving a country at war. They landed at a military base in Maine, in the United States. This is how the love affair between America and the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust began. A story that continues to this very day.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is still a shadow. But her voice at the telephone is clear, tough, cool. It is that of a young Somali woman who has undergone genital mutilation, who has lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, before being betrothed to a Canadian cousin she had never seen before. Hirsi Ali escaped from Germany to the Netherlands.

She worked as an interpreter in the Islamic Dutch ghettos, she graduated, became a Liberal MP, helped Van Gogh to make the film “Submission” and then disappeared. Now she talks with me about Europe from her think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Hirsi Ali recently released her third book on Islam, “Heretic”, an optimistic book on the reform of Islam.