Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  But even if you had done nothing and stayed in your hut made of thorns, even if you had lived all your life dismantling the hut, loading it on the back of patient camels, traveling in a caravan to the next green pasture with your husband and children, and their children, and the wives and children of your husband’s kith and kin—even so, modern life would have come to you. In the shape of bullets and bricks, decrees, men in uniform—it reaches into every part of the world.

  Grandmother, I have compared the infidels’ morals to those that you taught us, and I must report that they have, in practice, a better outcome for humans than the morals of your forefathers.

  You taught us the virtues of suspicion and distrust, and Islam taught us to survive by taqqiyah, pretending to be something you are not. You were fierce to me when Mahad threw me into a latrine pit full of excrement, because in your eyes, trust, even of my brother, was equal to stupidity. “Be wary” was your motto. But wariness leads to weariness. It is exhausting never to let down your guard in case someone takes advantage of you. It means you cannot truly collaborate with anyone, and you cannot risk public error for fear of shame.

  The infidel insists on honesty and trust. Everywhere you turn here, you must trust someone: to fly the airplane you travel in, to teach your child, to take care of you when you are sick and feed you food that is edible. And everywhere your trust is borne out.

  The infidel does not see life as a test, a passage to the hereafter, but as an end and a joy in itself. All his resources of money, mind, and organization go into making life here, on Earth, comfortable and healthy. He is obsessed with cleanliness, a good diet, and the right amount of rest. He is loyal to his wife and children; he may take care of his parents but has no use for a memory filled with an endless chain of ancestors. All the seeds of his toil are spent on his own offspring, not those of his brothers or uncles. He shows special love, generosity, and compassion to people he chooses to befriend, on the basis of common interests rather than the dictates of blood relations.

  Because the infidel trusts and studies new ideas, there is abundance in the infidel lands. In these circumstances of peace, knowledge, and predictability, the birth of a girl is just fine. There is no need to pout and sulk and every reason to celebrate and rejoice. The little girl sits right next to the little boy in school; she gets to play as much as he does; she gets to eat as much as he does; she gets the same care in illness as he does; and when she matures she gets the same opportunity to seek and find a mate as he does.

  Grandma, I know this will shock and offend you when you first hear it, but when you calm down and think about it with a cool head, you will understand that there is no need to groom one child to obey and be a slave to the other child when they reach adulthood. And there is no need to cut and sew a girl’s genitals to preserve her for a man who will purchase the right to her body.

  The infidel praises frugality, just as you did, but here the display of wealth is everywhere considered important, so much so that they have classes of people divided according to their wealth or lack of it. They are also divided along ideas and ideology. These divisions—for man shall always live to dispute—are more practical than the false promise of brotherhood in the name of a shared great-great-grandfather. Organized around real and practical common interests, the association is more genuine and forthright than the pretense of unity between men just because they can recite their lineage to a common ancestor.

  Do you remember Farah Gouré, the clansman who took care of us in Nairobi? He worked, earned, invested, and saw his wealth grow, but in the name of your morals he had to share, to give away his wealth to the family of the man who never bothered to leave his bed, the man who chose not to work, the man who abandoned his wife and children. They all fed off Farah Gouré until he was squeezed dry. This is now happening to your favorite grandson, Hassan, who lives in America, the country where Abeh went to university, before he met Ma.

  Abeh is dead now, and so are you, and I do not wail for you, or for the passing of your world.

  You recited old poems and tried to make me memorize them. I did not. I failed you and the next generation. I did not learn them by heart; I did not write them down. Now you are gone, and all those poems of adversity and triumph, of longing and love, of fear and valor, pride and humiliation, generosity and pettiness—they are gone with you. The parables of intrigue and old wisdom were buried with you when you were laid in a hole in the sand.

  I wail for that loss of memory, but in this new world those poems no longer have the power to sustain us. The Somali clans are now adrift on a violent sea of uncertainty whose waves bring sudden, sweeping changes, and we have no props, or tools, or boats for support. The bloodline is tired and impotent; adhering to it leads only to violence. It is no strategy for unity and progress.

  Your children and grandchildren are left without foundations or guidance. Take Ladan. You were always full of contempt for her because of what you saw as her waywardness, her attraction to the music and entertainment of the infidel. She is in Britain now, and the people who once felt sorry for her and gave her food, shelter, and alms are now also full of contempt for her. She cannot meet your standards, nor can she meet those of the infidel. She feels a part of the clan, but it means nothing to her. She is lost.

  Salvation lies in the ways of the infidel, Grandmother. He has printed and bound books full of memory. He peeks through lenses that allow him to see an invisible world of creatures that live in us and with us, and he has sought and found remedies that attack them and defend our bodies. Grandma, fevers and diseases are not caused by jinn and forefathers rising from the dead to torment us, or by an angry God, but by invisible creatures with names like parasites and bacteria and viruses. The infidel’s medicine works better than ours, because it is based on facts, inquiry, and real knowledge.

  The sooner we adopt the infidel attitude toward work, money, procreation, and leisure, the easier and better life will be. I know your thoughts on the easy life: too much ease leads to a loss of discipline and moral muscle. You passionately condemned even the washing machine. If machines washed our clothes and dishes, you seethed, young girls and women would find themselves with too much time on their hands. We would be tempted into all sorts of mischief and risk becoming whores.

  In a way you were right about washing machines, and in a way you were wrong. The best medicine against decadence is to focus on goals. You might add prayer too, but I don’t know if that helps anything at all. Since I came to the lands of the infidel, where machines wash our clothes and dishes, where we order food from stores online and where we save hours and hours of the day, I have not been idle. I have been more useful, and I have had pleasure. And pleasure is good.

  Grandmother, I no longer believe in the old ways. The world began changing in your lifetime, and by now the old ways are not useful to me any more. I love you, and I love some of my memories of Somalia, though not all. But I will not serve the bloodline or Allah any longer. And because the old ways hamper the lives of so many of our people, I will even strive to persuade my fellow nomads to take on the ways of the infidel.

  PART II

  NOMAD AGAIN

  CHAPTER 8

  Nomad Again

  After my father died, memories flooded into me unbidden. Some of them were painful, others sweet, but strangely, most of them were of Holland, the country I had recently left.

  Holland was the safest place I had ever lived, and the place where I was happiest. I remember with particular nostalgia the summer of 2001. I had just graduated from the University of Leiden with a master’s degree. I had made enough money, working as a Somali translator for the Dutch social services, to buy a place of my own with my best friend. I had learned the language of the society I immigrated to, and I had just found a meaningful job at a think tank for an important Dutch political party. I had friends with whom I could share the gifts and trials of life.

  In those days, when I reflected on what I had achieved and where I was going, I
felt a sense of accomplishment. Yes, I was disobeying many of the laws of Allah, and I had taken a huge risk in exiting the world of my clan. Yes, I had plainly hurt my parents and put myself at the mercy of a wrathful God. Yes, I had lost my sister and felt deep pain. But I also felt that I was succeeding at something important, something that my family had always warned me I would fail at.

  In every story I was ever told, the girl who left her family—or, even worse, her clan—to pursue her own goals found that her story ended swiftly in horrible depravity and bitter regret. I had not just left my family and clan; I was on my own in an infidel country. But I felt I could still hold my head high. I had not fallen into the pitfalls of depravity; I had hoisted myself onto the road of progress. And I felt that I was still basically a faithful Muslim, just a slightly lapsed one. I didn’t pray, I drank alcohol, and I had sex out of wedlock, but I felt (uneasily) that in essence I still obeyed Allah’s main rules and would one day in the distant future return to his narrow path.

  I had been reconciled with my father. He had even acknowledged that he should not have forced me to marry against my will, and he worked for months to get me a divorce. I felt it was proof that not only had he forgiven me, but he had accepted my chosen path in life. I was in constant touch with my mom and sent her a monthly allowance. Mahad had been taken ill, which saddened me, but when he felt well he and I could speak on the phone. Once in a while I exchanged emails and phone calls with my cousins: Hassan, Magool, Ladan, Hiran, and others. The family circle did not by any means embrace me, but as time went by I sensed that my difference was becoming accepted. My professional success in Holland brought me respect, and I felt that I again belonged to my family, but on my own terms.

  My life back then was not yet politicized. I had not yet made the public statements about Islam that would bring me notoriety, fame, a seat in the Dutch Parliament, a mission to improve the lives of millions of women I have never met, as well as drama, death threats, and bodyguards. My best friend, Ellen, and I used to take bike rides with friends—a crowd of young women riding our bicycles six or seven miles to the beach, flying down the roads with a picnic as our goal. We splashed in the freezing cold North Sea waves and walked across the sand dunes to get bags of spicy patat-oorlog, “warlike French fries,” in swimsuits that were still covered in sand. I felt full of joy, freer than I had ever been in my life. I looked forward to a future that promised no upheaval, but a safe, steady, and predictable existence surrounded by loving friends, a slightly blurry but undoubtedly wonderful mate, and children, perhaps even an inquisitive little girl who looked like me.

  But my life in Holland ended abruptly in May 2006, in an atmosphere of high drama and low farce. Although I was then a relatively prominent member of the legislature, the Dutch Minister for Immigration and Integration, Rita Verdonk, stripped me of my citizenship—only to be forced to restore it a few weeks later, after a debate in Parliament that led to the collapse of the government and new nationwide elections.

  When I first arrived in Holland, I was told by refugee advocates that in order to obtain permission to stay, it was not enough to say that I was running away from a marriage that was forced on me. If I said that, I would be sent back to Africa. To receive permission to stay in the Netherlands I had to state that I was being persecuted in Somalia for my political opinions or clan. So, although it was not true, that was what I claimed, and I duly received refugee status.

  Years later, when I was asked to join the Liberal VVD, a political party founded on the principles of individual freedom, limited government, a free market, and national security, and to run for Parliament, my party leader asked me if I had any skeletons in the closet. “Yes, I do,” I said. “When I came to the Netherlands I changed my name, I changed my year of birth, and I pretty much lied my way in.” I told him the whole story.

  My party leader talked to some of the party’s legal advisers and lawyers, but everyone treated the whole affair as something insignificant, a small lie told years before. They emphasized that I had managed to assimilate to Holland; this, they clearly felt, was far more important than the lie I had once told. They wanted to tout me as an example: if immigrants seriously chose to adopt Dutch values, learn the language, study and work, then they too could succeed as I had. Besides being a role model, I was also seen as an expert on the social and cultural obstacles to integration, and how to surmount them.

  Rita Verdonk was my colleague in the Liberal Party; indeed, she and I had been recruited into the party’s proposed parliamentary list at almost the same time. She had run a prison and had been director of a civil service unit, the Department of State Security of the Ministry of Interior Affairs. I had written articles about Islam. It was a time of turmoil in Dutch politics. Pim Fortuyn, a powerfully charismatic speaker and an openly gay man, had recently surged to political prominence, only to be assassinated by a deranged animal rights activist when he was on the brink of taking power. In appointing Rita and me, the Liberal Party was clearly seeking people who might attract some of Fortuyn’s voters.

  I was to be the face of the Muslim woman who had sought and found freedom in Holland. Unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labeled racists, I could voice my criticisms of the feudal, religious, and repressive mechanisms that were holding back women from Muslim communities. Rita Verdonk, meanwhile, would be the face and voice of those Dutch men and women who had voted for Pim Fortuyn, who felt that they were disenfranchised in their own country, who felt invaded, their society pushed into mayhem.

  A fifty-plus woman who looked her age, with dark, short hair styled around her face, Rita was plump in a muscular way that made her look strong yet warm and even motherly. She was a perfect image of Dutch rectitude, exuding hard work and competence; she had that direct, slightly disapproving clear gaze that is particular to a certain kind of Dutch person. This had intrinsic appeal to Fortuyn’s voters. Moreover, Fortuyn had been an outrageously gay academic who spoke with the haughty vowels of the upper class; Rita more closely mirrored his voters’ mannerisms and values, in addition to sharing many of their views. The plan was clearly that together, behind closed doors, she and I would find consensus, issue by issue. Many in the establishment saw us as rebels; others, as puppets. But the goal was that we would make separate, rebellious parties such as Fortuyn’s unnecessary, for we would gather his now docile voters within the steady embrace of the impeccably well-behaved Liberal Party and all would end well, the Dutch way: in consensus.

  Who were these voters of Fortuyn’s? Policemen, teachers, civil servants, owners of small family businesses—the baker, the butcher, the florist—who felt tyrannized by regulations and taxes and saw immigrants from Morocco and Turkey both as competitors (with small shops that could sell cheaper goods because they hired cheap, illegal workers) and as bad employees (unpunctual and disrespectful slackers who could not speak proper Dutch). They perceived immigrants as verloedering, debasing, corrupting. They did not scrupulously separate their recyclable from their non-recyclable trash. Their children did not ride their bicycles only in designated lanes. They had no respect for public or private property. They vandalized shops, committed crimes, molested and harassed women, and turned once pristine neighborhoods into areas both unsafe and unclean. If picked up by police, they would be set free by the judge on grounds of being minors. They were dropouts from school. Their families lied their way into generous welfare payments and out of proper payment of taxes; they jumped the queues for public housing. None of these generalizations was exactly or universally true, but they were true enough for this perception to be widely held.

  There was a real tension between this “Rita class” of voters and the elite ruling class. Fortuyn’s voters no longer trusted their rulers, for they had opened the borders of Holland to foreigners. Even though the middle and upper classes could still afford to move to airy, expensive neighborhoods and send their children to safe schools, and could lobby for informal favors to keep from
being fully exposed to disruption from immigrants, the Rita class felt that they and their neighborhoods were bearing the brunt. But when they voiced their concerns, they were chastised for being provincial and intolerant.

  Having run a prison, “Iron Rita” was plainspoken to the point of bluntness and scrupulously respectful of the law. I rather liked her. She became the most popular politician among the voters of my party. As minister for immigration and integration, she was a powerful member of the cabinet. I was merely a member of Parliament, but I had been appointed our party’s spokesperson for integration and emancipation. (My title did not specify integration into what or emancipation from what.)

  It was common knowledge that my views on immigration were different from Rita’s. For instance, I supported an immigration amnesty for the twenty-six thousand asylum seekers who, after more than five years of living and working in Holland, had been turned down for refugee status, and who thus had no further right to live in the country. But on other issues we agreed. We both supported immigration quotas that would favor the entry of people from Poland and other Eastern European countries over those from Morocco and Turkey. Our point was that Holland should attract immigrants who work; we needed nurses, caretakers of the elderly, fruit, vegetable, and flower pickers, workers in restaurants and hotels, electricians, painters, and construction workers. The immigrants from North Africa and Turkey were being admitted on the grounds of family formation and reunion. They went straight into welfare or applied for unemployment benefits after hardly a year in the workforce. Most of them were unemployable or unqualified or had a work ethic that employers found unsuitable.

  Like me, Rita also wanted to confront Islam’s treatment of women head-on. I applauded her in 2004 when she walked into a mosque and extended her hand to an imam, knowing that he would reject it. It was an image that produced a great deal of anger and confusion in Holland, but the gesture she provoked—a blatant expression of contempt for a government minister—encapsulated not only what some imams in Holland were saying about women, but their scorn for Dutch values, society, and law. Like Rita, I thought that people needed to see this; once they saw it, they could no longer pretend it wasn’t there.