Infidel

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Ali Wersengeli didn’t have much of a story, it turned out. There was no proof of any wedding ceremony between me and Mahmud: Mahad had torn up my paper, and Mahmud himself conspicuously failed to assert his so-called conjugal claim over me. Most people swiftly concluded that it was all just as Mahad said: a spiteful rumor. Nobody wanted anything to go wrong for Ayaan Hirsi Magan. Amid all the depressing news and chaos of the civil war in Somalia, I was a symbol of hope: a pious, obedient girl who deserved the marvelous match that her father had made.

  A qali is a recognized marriage official, and weeks after the nikah, my father took the marriage certificate drawn up by the qali and officially registered my wedding with the Kenyan marriage bureau. I knew this because one day in June he brought me home an official Kenyan government document written in English and Arabic, with a special box to indicate “Whether Virgin or Not” and the “Amount of Dowry.” The boxes were all filled in for me—the answers were “Virgin” and “Ten books of Holy Quran”—and the document also indicated that I had been represented at my wedding in February by my father. My father told me I must now sign this Kenyan document.

  I hesitated, but I was already married to Osman Moussa in the eyes of Islam and every Muslim I knew. What difference could it possibly make if I signed, I thought? So right under my father’s signature, in Arabic, I signed it: A. H. Magan.

  Abeh worked hard to get me travel documents from the UNHCR office. Within weeks he had my passport, then he went after a visa. Every few days he spoke on the phone with Osman Moussa about it. The Canadian Embassy in Nairobi was crowded with Somalis trying to emigrate, and it seemed impossible to get anything done in the corruption and chaos of the Kenyan bureaucracy. My father ended up enlisting the help of a relative living in Düsseldorf, whose name was Mursal, and together they decided I should go to Germany to wait for the final visa to come in. It would be quicker that way, and more practical.

  My father began calling me to his house in Buruburu for what amounted to a series of extra lectures in Islam and how to be a good wife. We spent several mornings taking up chapters of the Quran on the duties of a wife and formally discussing them. For example, her duty to ask permission to leave the house. My father told me, “You can do the following: you can agree together, early on, that permission is permanently given. That is a form of trust, his trust in you, so you don’t have to ask permission every time you go out for groceries.”

  There is a Quranic injunction to women to be sexually available to their husband at all times. My father didn’t go into the details, but he read it: “Your wives are your tillage, go in unto your tillage in what manner so ever you will.” He said, “You must always be there for your husband, in bed and outside it. Don’t make your husband beg; don’t refuse him; don’t make him look elsewhere. This is also a kind of permission you give from the onset: you are always available. He can’t abuse that because he is from a good family. Force and rape are not an issue because he is a believing Muslim and he is an Osman Mahamud.”

  We talked about living as a Muslim in the West. Having unbelievers as friends was a gray area, my father said; it’s discouraged, but if you can make good, honest friendships with infidels, so long as you don’t follow their ways, then such relationships are not forbidden.

  We went into what you are supposed to teach children. There is one God, no djinns, no saints, no magic, no intercession. Asking help from a spirit or djinn is forbidden; it puts other beings on a level with Allah. In everything you do, ask yourself, “What would the Prophet do?” Some things are clearly permitted and others clearly forbidden, but in gray areas, my father said, the Prophet was liberal: he would never make anything obligatory if it harmed you. “There is no coercion in Islam,” my father said. “No human being has the right to punish another for not observing his religious duties. Only Allah can do that.”

  It was like Quran school, but more intelligent. We even talked about martyrdom. My father said that committing suicide for Holy War was acceptable only in the time of the Prophet—and then only because the unbelievers had attacked the Prophet first. Today there could not be a Holy War, he said, because only the Prophet Muhammad could call for a Holy War.

  This was my father’s Islam: a mostly nonviolent religion that was his own interpretation of the Prophet’s words. It relied on one’s own sense of right and wrong, at least to some degree. It was more intelligent than the Islam I had learned from the ma’alim, and it was also far more humane. Still, this version of Islam also left me with unanswered questions and a sense of injustice: Why was it that only women needed to ask permission from their husband to leave the house, and not the other way round?

  My father’s Islam was also clearly an interpretation of what the Prophet said. As such, it was not legitimate. You may not interpret the will of Allah and the words of the Quran: it says so, right there in the book. There is a read-only lock. It is forbidden to pick and choose: you may only obey. The Prophet said, “I have left you with clear guidance; no one deviates from it after me, except that he shall be destroyed.” A fundamentalist would tell my father, “The sentence ‘Only the Prophet can call a Holy War’ is not in the Quran. You’re putting it in there. That is blasphemy.”

  * * *

  Osman Moussa paid for all my travel arrangements because I was now his. There are rules about these things: you pay for your wife. I did the rounds, bade good-bye to everyone: Halwa, and Ainanshie, and Farah Gouré’s family. They were now my close cousins, because they were my husband’s relatives, too.

  I said good-bye to my father the night before I was due to leave. He embraced me, and said we might not see each other again for a very long time. “When we depart, we may intend to return,” he told me, “but many things might prevent us from doing so.” I eyed him skeptically; I knew that he was speaking from experience.

  The day of my departure, Ma overheard Haweya and me talking about what to do. Haweya thought the best plan would be to divorce Osman Moussa as soon as possible once I was in Canada. Once I was divorced, I could travel to America, she said, and live my own life. She spun a whole romantic story for me.

  Then Ma burst in and said we were immoral. She said I was a slut and a hypocrite who had destroyed her relationship with her own brother and would wreck the honor of her family and my father’s. She said, “There are two conditions if you want me to say good-bye to you and wish you well. The first one is that you promise to stay married to Osman Moussa. You will be a good wife to him and pray to Allah, and be grateful for the destiny your father has made for you. And the second is that you go to your father and tell him everything.”

  I told myself that my mother was right. I should just go to Abeh and tell him everything; that way maybe he would find me a way out. So I put my headscarf on and went to see him again. I said, “Abeh, I have something to tell you,” and he greeted me with his arms outstretched once again. “Ah! Ayaan! My beloved daughter has visited me again!”

  I said, “I have something to confess, about mother’s brother Muhammad, and his son Mahmud.”

  Abeh said loudly, “But we dealt with that, didn’t we? It’s all done, child. Are you worried about your dear old father? My darling, you should be off preparing your departure.”

  He kept overflowing with words, and my tongue stuck in my throat. I think he may have known that what I wanted to tell him was unwelcome. So I went back home, and I told my mother the whole scene. She ordered me to go right back to Buruburu and say it all anyway. I said, “I will miss the plane,” and she said, “Then promise me in the name of Allah that you will stay with this man, your husband.”

  I said no. I told her I wouldn’t promise that.

  So my mother didn’t bid me farewell. I said good-bye to her stiff back, then I left, in a taxi, for the airport.

  PART II

  My Freedom

  CHAPTER 10

  Running Away

  When we landed at the Frankfurt airport, early in the morning, I was dazed by the scale of it. E
verything around me was glass and steel, and all so finished, down to the last little fixture. That impressed me: where I came from, airports were chaos, constantly expanding, always half-built. And everyone around me seemed so sure of where they were headed. There were women as old as my mother, even my grandmother, with fashionable handbags, pushing trolleys full of matching suitcases with energy and purpose.

  I was lost. I was looking for the ticket office. I knew I was supposed to be going to Düsseldorf, but my ticket said Munich, so I knew I must somehow get it changed. I went wandering about, navigating by asking people for help; I didn’t even notice the signage. The airport was as big as a neighborhood, and all of it looked the same: I felt hapless, like a country yokel from the miyé.

  My distant uncle, Mursal, had agreed to look after me in Germany while I was waiting for my visa. I had never met him. When I finally got to Düsseldorf, I changed some dollars to Deutschmarks, figured out which was the right coin, and phoned the number Mursal had given my father. Another man answered the phone. He was Omar, Mursal’s associate. He said, “So you’re Hirsi Magan’s daughter. Can you write down an address and give it to the driver of a taxi?”

  I said yes, took the address down, and stepped outside. Everything was so clean, it was like a movie. The roads, the pavement, the people—nothing in my life had ever looked like this, except perhaps Nairobi Hospital. It was so modern it seemed sterile. The landscape looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise. These buildings were cubes and triangles, and they gave me that same neutral, almost frightening feeling. The letters on the signs resembled English, but I couldn’t understand them; it felt like trying to make sense of algebra.

  My grandmother must have felt this way when she went to a city for the first time and saw a lightbulb, a radio, a whole road full of cars. I felt that foreign.

  There was a line for taxis; the word was in English. But all the taxis were cream Mercedes. In Nairobi, such taxis would line up only at fancy hotels: they were the most luxurious option conceivable, really only for foreigners and government ministers. Before I got into such a car, I felt I must ask the driver how much money the ride would cost.

  He said, “About twenty marks,” which I could pay. I asked, “But will you drive me in this car?” and the driver laughed. He was nice, and spoke English. I sat in the front beside him and he told me all about Düsseldorf, and how good and kind the German people were.

  The old city of Düsseldorf was indeed wonderful, its church spires and angled towers a bit like minarets. The streets were cobbled; they looked as if made for humans, unlike the scary, ultramodern airport.

  The taxi dropped me off and I was met by Omar: a tall, easygoing man with a mustache, wearing a gray suit and no tie. He said I was amazing. Nobody ever made it all the way from the airport so easily, and to have changed planes in Frankfurt, too—I was a prodigy. “You’ll be fine here,” he told me. “Most Somalis call in the middle of night and say ‘Please come and get me.’ When I say ‘Where are you?’ they tell me ‘I’m standing next to a tall building.’ They’re useless.”

  Omar wasn’t troubled by the fact that my luggage hadn’t arrived with me. He said that in Germany such things never got lost. My uncle was detained by business and would meet me later, so Omar took me to a hotel in the old city. He said he would be back at eight to take me to dinner.

  Everything in the room was white, and pristine. I examined the duvet, vowing to tell Haweya about this amazing invention. The room was small, but all somehow cleverly planned to fit: the closets fit into the wall, the TV inside a cabinet. How cool, I thought.

  The bathroom was another revelation. We had a shower in Park Road, but it never had hot water, so we boiled water and used a pail and a scoop. Here was hot water, tons of it, in different jets from above and from the sides. I washed. It was still light outside, so I decided to go out. I had to see more of this place.

  I wrote down the name of the hotel—I knew I would get lost—pulled on my headscarf and long coat, and walked into the street. I had never seen so many white people. The women were bare—they seemed naked—their legs, their whole arms, their faces and hair and shoulders were all completely uncovered. Kenyan women were often more uncovered than we Somalis, but somehow the whiteness of these women’s skin drew my eye more. Men and women were sitting together, not at bars but with easy familiarity, as if they were equal. They held hands in broad daylight, not hiding from anyone, and everyone else seemed to find this completely normal.

  After a little while I took my coat off; I thought I might stick out less. I still had on a headscarf and a long skirt, but it was the most uncovered I had been in public for many years. And yet I felt anonymous. There was no social control here. No eyes silently accused me of being a whore. No lecherous men called me to bed with them. No Brotherhood members threatened me with hellfire. I felt safe; I could follow my curiosity.

  I walked until my feet hurt. Everything was so well kept. The grooves between the cobbles on the street were clean. The shopfronts gleamed. I remember thinking, “This is amazing, how can it be so?” I was used to heaps of stinking rubbish and streets pockmarked with huge potholes, where the dirt comes at you and nothing ever stays clean. In Nairobi, apart from a few wealthy enclaves reserved for superrich government officials and millionaire businessmen, people live on top of each other, in slum houses made of bare cinder block or cardboard and metal sheets. There are beggars and bag snatchers and orphans living on rubbish heaps; the traffic swerves and radios blare and matatou drivers beckon you into their buses. I felt as though I had been thrown into another world, calm and orderly, as in the novels I’d read and certain films, but somehow I had never really believed them before.

  When I got back to the hotel Omar was very worried. He said it was already nine p.m. I said it couldn’t be: it was still light outside. He sighed, and explained patiently that in Europe there is a season when it is warm, and then it is light until very late at night; and another season which is cold, when it’s dark almost all the time. In Europe, he said, you can’t tell the time by the sun. He gave me his watch and asked if I needed to be taught how to read it.

  I felt crushed to have been so stupid. I could see that even the planets and solar system were different here. I was Alice in Wonderland.

  Omar said Africans like us couldn’t eat German food and took me to a Chinese restaurant. I tried to follow the route and realized that all the streets had their names helpfully written on little signposts. You didn’t have to stop people constantly and ask them for directions. How pleasant and ingenious, I thought; in our neighborhood in Nairobi there were street signs on only a few main roads. I asked Omar who put them up. He just rolled his eyes and said, “This is a civilized country.”

  I met my relative, Mursal, the next day. He seemed embarrassed to admit it, but he told me he couldn’t actually have me stay at his house. He had married a German woman who didn’t take kindly to housing stray Somalis. So he had arranged for me to stay with another Osman Mahamud family, in Bonn. It wasn’t far. Mursal said he would phone the Canadian Embassy every day to inquire whether my visa papers had arrived; I could just as easily wait at this other woman’s house as at his.

  They drove me there, after my luggage was politely delivered to my hotel by an airport van. We arrived at a whole field of identical houses—a housing estate owned by the government, they informed me. This woman in Bonn, Amina, was also an Osman Mahamud, of course. But Amina felt shunned by the other Osman Mahamud because she had married a Hawiye, and her children were Hawiye. Mursal had helped her a lot; he must have spent a huge portion of his income on fellow Somalis and their troubles.

  There were TVs on in all the rooms, and lots of children. The oldest boy, Ahmed, was about fourteen; he volunteered to show me around Bonn. It was July, and therefore school vacation, and Ahmed, who had nothing to do, was eager to show off his superior knowledge of the city.

  Though
she had apparently lived in Germany for some time, I could see that Amina was still completely Somali. She couldn’t find her way about on her own and took her son with her to buy groceries. Whereas when I went out walking with Ahmed the next day, I could see that I could probably manage to make my own way around, as he did. He explained how to use the subway; it wasn’t that difficult.

  These white people didn’t frighten me. They seemed uninterested, but that was welcome. I had taken two airplanes on my own, I had wandered around the streets, and the world did not seem as dangerous as my mother and grandmother had warned me. Everyone was anonymous here, but it gave me a feeling of freedom and power to be managing my way around these strange places. I felt safe.

  For months I had been thinking more and more frantically about how to undo the marriage my father had chosen for me. I didn’t want to go to Canada and live with Osman Moussa and live the life that was preordained for me from the time I was born a girl—my mother’s life. I had thought that when I got there I might purposely perform so badly as a wife that Osman Moussa would simply send me back home to my mother’s house in Nairobi. There was a hitch to that: I might get pregnant. But that first afternoon in Bonn, a new idea crept up on me: I didn’t even have to go to Canada. I could disappear here. I could escape it all, hide, and somehow make my own way, like someone in a book.

  I didn’t have any concrete plans of how, but I thought I would look for the right moment. I didn’t worry about loneliness, or how I would live without my family. I didn’t have a detailed plan, barely even an idea. I thought escape would be like quickly stepping off a matatou when it slowed for a traffic light, and then watching it lurch on down the road. I would find the right time and I would get away.