Pursuing Freedom ... Part 1/5

Novel Infidel by author Ayaan Hirsi Ali

AYAAN HIRSI ALI was born in Somalia, was raised Muslim, and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia.

In 1992, Hirsi Ali came to the Netherlands as a refugee, escaping a forced marriage to a distant cousin she had never met.

She learned Dutch and worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and shelters for battered women.

After earning her college degree in political science, she worked for the Labor Party. She denounced Islam after the September 11 terrorist attacks and now fights for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam, and security in the West.

One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to go to work at his film production company in Amsterdam.

As Theo cycled down the Linnaeusstraat, Muhammad Bouyeri approached. He pulled out his gun and shot Theo several times. Theo fell off his bike and lurched across the road, then collapsed. Bouyeri followed. Theo begged, "Can't we talk about this?" but Bouyeri shot him four more times. Then he took out one of his butcher knives and sawed it into Theo's throat. With the other knife, he stabbed a five-page letter onto Theo's chest. The letter was addressed to me.?

Two months before, Theo and I had made a short film together. We called it Submission, Part 1.

There is the woman who is flogged for committing adultery; another who is given in marriage to a man she loathes; another who is beaten by her husband on a regular basis; and another who is shunned by her father when he leams that his brother raped her. Each abuse is justified by the perpetrators in the name of God, citing the Quran verses now written on the bodies of the women. These women stand for hundreds of thousands of Muslim women around the world.

People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do.?

The answer is no: I would like to keep living.

However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice. This is the story of my life.

PART I.

MY CHILDHOOD

"Who are you?"

"The names will make you strong. They are your bloodline. If you honor them they will keep you alive. If you dishonor them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone. Do it again."

The truth is that this ancestral knowledge seemed pointless to us modern children, brought up in concrete houses, with hard roofs, behind fixed, fenced walls. Mostly we pranced off, dodging the sharp smacks my grandmother aimed at our legs with the switches that she broke off our tree. We would rather climb the tree and play in its branches.?

If they were ever captured they were to say, three times, "Allah be my witness, I want no conflict with you. Please leave me alone." To be raped would be far worse than dying because it would tarnish the honor of everyone in their family.

In the desert, nomad women were not covered. They worked, and it is hard to work under a long veil.?

A woman who is baarri is like a pious slave. She honors her husband's family and feeds them without question or complaint. She never whines or makes demands of any kind. She is strong in service, but her head is bowed. If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to?take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. She is a devoted, welcoming, well-trained work animal. This is baarri.

If you are a Somali woman you must learn to tell yourself that God is just and all-knowing and will reward you in the Hereafter. Meanwhile, everyone who knows about your patience and endurance will applaud your father and mother on the excellence of your upbringing. Your brothers will be grateful to you for preserving their honor. They will boast to other families about your heroic submission. And perhaps, eventually, your husband's family will appreciate your obedience, and your husband may one day treat you as a fellow human being.

If in the process of being baarri you feel grief, humiliation, fatigue, or a sense of everlasting exploitation, you hide it. If you long for love and comfort, you pray in silence to Allah to make your husband more bearable. Prayer is your strength Nomadic mothers must try to give their daughters this skill and strength called baarri.

There was always strong electricity between my father and mother. They teased each other, challenged each other. In a culture that disapproved of choosing your own partner, they chose each other: their bond was strong.

In October 1968 my brother, Mahad, was born. My parents finished building the house on the land my mother had bought in Mogadishu, and moved in, bringing with them my older stepbrother, Muhammad, who was six. My mother quickly became pregnant again, with me, and my grandmother came to Mogadishu from the desert to help her through the last few months of pregnancy.?

My sister, Haweya, was born in May 1971. A few months after that, my father's first wife, Maryan Farah, gave birth to my stepsister, Ijaabo.

Every night till I was six, as my mother stood over the charcoal brazier, we children knelt in a semicircle and begged Allah to free our father. At the time, this didn't make an enormous amount of sense. My mother never took the time to really tell us about God; he just was, and he minded the prayers of little children most of all. But although I tried my best to pray ^-u ^-L/ww^ A^if,'i ^ m hard, it didn't seem to be working.??

My grandmother's vision of the universe was complex. A whole cosmology of magical entities existed alongside the one God, Allah. Djinns, who could be male or female, lived in an intermediate sphere adjoining ours and could be counted on to bring misfortune and disease. The souls of wise men and dead ancestors could also intercede with God on your behalf.

"She's gone. There's nothing to be done about it," my mother told me. "Stop crying. It's the way things are. Being born means we have to die some day. There is a Paradise, and good people like Aunt Hawo find peace there."?

"Nafta, nafta, nafta"—" 'The soul, the soul, the soul!'

You must learn what to fear and what not to fear."

"I don't want you to ever let another child hit you or make you cry," she said. "Fight. If you don't fight for your honor, you're a slave."

After that, circumcision was not discussed at all. It was just something that had happened—had had to happen. Everyone was cut.

Being called a slave—the racial prejudice this term conveyed—was a big part of what I hated in Saudi Arabia.?

Ma taught us to tell the truth because otherwise we would be punished and go to Hell. Our father taught us to be honest because the truth is good in itself I loved his evening lectures, and although we all soaked up the attention he gave us, from the beginning I was Abeh's favorite.

If we kids behaved badly I always took the lead in owning up. I would ^y, "You won't punish us if I confess something, will you? Because if I do tell the truth and you do punish me, you'll be forcing me to lie to you next time." My father would burst out laughing and say, "Tell the truth then," and I would tell him: we had broken something, or annoyed the neighbors. He never hit us, just made us promise not to let it happen again.?

"It's not the rules, it's the spirit."?

Every wedding was like this: all the women falling silent, breathless with anticipation, and the figure who appeared, entirely banal.

Things were not going well at home. My parents' once strong bond was breaking down. Each had very different expectations of life. My mother felt that my father was not attentive enough to his family. It often fell to my mother to accompany us to school and back—different schools, because Mahad was a boy —returning alone. She hated having to go out without a man, hated being hissed at by men on the street, stared at with insolence. All the Somalis told stories about women who had been accosted on the street, driven away, dumped on the roadside hours later, or simply never seen again. To be a woman out on her own was bad enough. To be a foreigner, and moreover, a black foreigner, meant you were barely human, unprotected: fair game.

Sometime after we moved to Riyadh we started school, real school, in the morning, with Quran school in the afternoon. But the real school in Saudi Arabia was just like madrassah. We studied only Arabic, math, and the Quran, and the Quran must have taken up four-fifths of our time. Quran study was divided into a reciting class, a class on meaning, a class on the hadith, which are the holy verses written after the Quran, a class on the sirat, the traditional biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, and a class onjiqh, Islamic law. We learned to recite the ninety-nine names of Allah, and we learned how good Muslim girls should behave: what to say when we sneezed; on which side we should begin to sleep, and to what position it was permissible to move during sleep; with which foot to step into the toilet, and in what posture to sit. The teacher was an Egyptian woman, and she used to beat me. I was sure she picked on me because I was the only black child. When she hit me with a ruler she called me AswadAbda: black slave-girl. I hated Saudi Arabia.

Humans must accept they are mortal, for Allah decrees it. But it is hard to accept the gloating of the oppressor over the scattered bodies ...

Her daily life in no way resembled the life to which she aspired and that she felt she deserved. My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions—she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband, and chosen my father—but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope.

Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself; although she can't have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent, and she was always depressed.

Kenyans were divided into tribes, which were very different from the clans in Somalia; the tribes looked different, spoke different languages, and had different beliefs, whereas all the Somali clans spoke the same language and believed in Islam.?

There is little romance in Somali poetry. Even the lesser, women's poems do not mention love. Love is considered synonymous with desire, and sexual desire?is seen as low—literally unspeakable. To Haweya and me, these poems lacked the seductive power of the stories our classmates lent us.?

Haweya pitied me. She always said, "Just refuse." But I couldn't—I wasn't like my sister. When we were disobedient, we were beaten. My mother would catch me, pull my hair, fix my hands behind my back with rope, and put me down on the floor, on my belly. She tied my hands to my ankles, and then with a stick or a wire, she would beat me until I begged for mercy and swore I would never do it again. I couldn't stand the pain of Ma's beads, and for as long as I could remember, a sense of responsibility had been drilled into me. I should be helping my mother.?

Other children were punished, too. All the children I knew were sometimes?beaten by their parents. But not everyone got tied up, and it didn't happen to them every week, as it sometimes did with me. I was punished far more often than Mahad. But Haweya was punished most of all.?Yet Haweya seemed immune to pain. She took the worst beatings my mother could hand out but refused to relent. Haweya simply would not do the housework—the cleaning, the washing of all the clothes and sheets by hand, wringing them out and hanging them straight in the sun. Haweya would just yell and yell, a ball of fury twice as strong as my mother. As time went by, it became too much trouble to beat her.

When I was fourteen I got my period, without even knowing menstruation existed. I had no older sister, and my mother never discussed anything to do with sex. In one class, when I was twelve, all the girls got the assignment to go home and ask our parents what the moon meant. Probably the moon meant menstruation to some Kenyan tribe, and when they went home with this question, presumably they received some kind of explanation. But when I told Ma of our school assignment and asked her what the moon meant, she pointed at the sky and said, "There it is. And if the slaves don't know that, then why am I sending you to their school?"?

So I was mystified. The next day the teacher, who was male, wrote up a bunch of diagrams and some words on the blackboard, and there was a lot of giggling. Perhaps menstruation was one of the words, but I couldn't tell you. I had not the first idea of what the whole thing was about.

Two years after that episode, I woke up on a Thursday morning with blood running down my legs. There was no cut on my thighs, and I couldn't figure out why I should bleed. It continued all day, enough to fill my underpants, and I didn't have that many underpants; so I washed them out and hid them behind the boiler to dry. I kept bleeding all the next day, too, and by now there were four or five underpants balled up behind the boiler and the pants I was wearing were wet. I was worried— I thought there was a cut inside my belly, that I might die —but I didn't tell my mother. I knew that what was happening to me was shameful, though I didn't know why.?

Don Omar Taboo Lyrics

There was no further discussion. In our household, the whole subject of what was between your legs was taboo. I knew what I needed to know about sex, and my mother knew that I knew it. I was a Somali woman, and therefore my sexuality belonged to the owner of my family: my father or my uncles. It was obvious that I absolutely had to be a virgin at marriage because to do otherwise would damage the honor of my father and his whole clan—uncles, brothers, male cousins—forever and irretrievably. The place between my legs was sewn up to prevent it. It would be broken only by my husband. I don't remember my mother ever telling me these things, but I knew them.

She told us we could now get pregnant and taught us about contraception and the basic biology of wombs and embryos. She did not explain how the sperm got to the egg; there was just this sperm. It didn't help me much.?

Haweya and I were entering the danger zone, the time of our lives when we should not be permitted out of the house without supervision. About a month after my first period, Ma decided we girls should stop attending Quran school.

?My mother beat me—really beat me—and then she said, "I'm not going to untie you. You can sleep on the floor tonight."

Around three in the morning, Ma came back in from her bedroom and released me, and I fell asleep. At eight it was time to go to school. I was blurry and off-balance, and just before lunchtime, I fainted. Someone brought me home, and I slept some more, and then my mother went out. I went into her bedroom and opened the drawer that was full of all kinds of medicine. I took a huge mug?of water and started swallowing pills. I probably took forty or fifty of them.?

Later, the doctor said they were mostly vitamin pills, but at the time I didn't know that— I wanted to die. I was in pain, physically, mentally, and socially.

Our life seemed to have unraveled. Everyone was unhappy. My mother gave us no sense of security or direction; she was using me to vent all her anger and pain, and I had to face facts: my father was never going to come back.

I confessed to her that I had taken the pills, and every time she visited she would cling to me and?tell me she loved me and cry. I had never seen her so vulnerable. After that, she didn't beat me again for several years.?

Heroines fell in love, they fought family obstacles and?questions of wealth and status, and they married the man they chose.

The Quran lists Hell's torments in vivid detail: sores, boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels, the everlasting fire that burns you forever, for as your flesh chars and your juices boil, you form new skin. These details overpower you, ensuring that you will obey.?

Sister Aziza never actually told us we should robe as she did, or not to go to the cinema or talk to boys. She just read through the verses in the Holy Quran, using an English-Arabic edition, so we could understand it. Then she talked about them. She said, "I'm not telling you to behave like this. I'm only telling you what God said: avoid sin."?

I knew precisely what Sister Aziza meant when she talked about sinning. Sin was the feeling I had when I was with Yusuf. The sudden, tingling awareness, the inner excitement. At night I thought about how much I would like to marry Yusuf when I grew up. I tried to put it in a context where this feeling would not be sinful.

" It was about studying the Quran, really learning about it, getting to the heart of the nature of the Prophet's message. It was a huge evangelical sect backed massively by Saudi Arabian oil wealth and Iranian martyr propaganda. It was militant, and it was growing. And I was becoming a very small part of it.