Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  On the Thursday after the shooting I was catching a flight from New York to Boston. The TV screens at the departure gate were dominated by the image of Nidal Malik Hassan. A woman sitting next to me was staring at the screen.

  “Are you worried about terrorism?” I asked.

  “I am,” she replied, “but this is America they are messing with, and they won’t succeed.”

  “But he was in the military,” I said, “an enemy from within.”

  She fidgeted a little and then gave me a line that I would have expected to hear from a policymaker. “We cherish our diversity in this country,” she told me just before we were interrupted by the call to board the aircraft.

  Diversity is a wonderful concept, I thought, and E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one,” is one of the mottos proudly displayed on the Great Seal of the United States (and therefore on every dollar bill). But Americans still have a long way to go before they really understand the challenge posed to their country by radical Islam, a religion that rejects not only those core principles of the Enlightenment that so inspired the founding fathers, but also the very notion that the diverse many should become one united people.

  *All figures come from Integration of the Human Rights of Women and the Gender Perspective/Violence Against Women (2003), Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, Radhika Coomaraswamy, submitted in accordance with Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2002/52/.

  PART III

  SEX, MONEY VIOLENCE

  CHAPTER 11

  School and Sexuality

  When I was about five years old, my grandmother would wake me up in the morning, sometimes by prodding me with a stick, other times by yelling out my name. Her aim was to teach me to light the morning fire and make tea for the adults. “Wake up!” she would yell. “At your age my daughters would be milking goats and taking them out to the fields, and you can’t even wake up!”

  So I would make the fire. I would sleepwalk to the charcoal brazier, which was in a room that my mother had more or less arbitrarily deemed to be the kitchen. With the door and shutters open, the early morning daylight spilled into the room, whose walls were black with soot. I would take my wooden stool and carry it to the stone stove, which was knee-high, shaped like an hourglass, and the size of a large cooking pot. The lower part of the hourglass held the stove up, while the upper part contained a mound of ash, buried in which were burning embers from the night before. My grandmother taught me how to dig out the embers using a pair of metal tongs and a metal dustpan.

  She would hover over me, urging me to work quickly, for the longer it took for me to find and pile up the embers, the sooner they died. When there were no more burning embers I would carry the brazier a few feet out of the kitchen and throw out most of the ash. Then I would return it to its corner, flatten out the remaining ash, put some of the burning embers on top of the mound, fill the brazier up with charcoal, and put the remaining burning embers on top. Then I would fan the fire and blow into it. Because it had no chimney or window, the brazier was very hard to light, which is why Grandma would scream that I should be quick before the embers died. I would then pick up an aluminum kettle, fill it with water, balance it precariously on three points of the brazier, and continue blowing and fanning until the water boiled.

  As the water came to a boil, I would pick up a packet of Lipton English Breakfast tea and put a scoop of tea leaves into the boiling kettle. Very often the kettle would boil over and kill the fire that I had had such difficulty lighting. The entire time, Grandmother would be cursing and spitting on me for my incompetence. Often she would take over for fear that I would kill the fire or spoil the tea. In fact I was so afraid that the kettle would boil over and kill the fire that I often would put the tea leaves in too soon and spoil the tea.

  Grandmother could have done all this on her own, but she was convinced that the oldest daughter should master the skill of making breakfast before she turned six.

  Once I was more or less competent at boiling water, Grandmother taught me to milk her goat. First she demonstrated: she leashed the goat and put a wooden stool right behind it, parted its legs, put a bucket underneath its udders, and started pulling at them. But when I first sat on the stool and reached for the udders, the goat kicked me on my forehead, knocking me off the stool. Every day it kicked me again and again, until I had bruises everywhere, including on my bottom, from falling over. On some mornings I refused to go near the goat. Grandmother would pull and prod me and even slap me sometimes, but even that was much more bearable than a kick from that animal.

  This was a form of education in subservience. Grandma continually lamented the loss of our nomadic way of life—our soul, as she saw it—and that our culture had begun to give way to a new, decadent way of life. She tried to salvage what she could by making me live according to her wisdom; thus I was required to master all the skills of becoming a good wife. To her, the fact that I cried when the goat hit me, that I made a mess when I tried to light the fire, or that she had a hard time pulling me out of bed were all signs of my corruption, an indication that I was destined for ruin. “Who will ever marry this girl when she becomes a woman?” she would lament. “Ayaan is useless.”

  All the little girls I knew in Mogadishu had to learn these skills. When we lived in Saudi Arabia, even though the Saudi girls who were our neighbors had servants working for them, they too had to learn to cook. In Ethiopia the Somali girls and women were continuously cooking, cleaning, washing, and otherwise serving. When we moved to Kenya, I was glad to find that the charcoal braziers there were different; they were easier to light and were made of metal and had windows, so I did not have to blow as much. Also, by then I was stronger and more able to snatch the kettle off just before it boiled over, without burning myself or extinguishing the fire.

  Sometimes I thought life was hard on me, but then I would look at the experience of girls like Ubah, an orphan who lived in one of the houses on our block in Nairobi. Ubah had been brought to Nairobi from Somalia to live with her aunt, who was pregnant every year and worked Ubah like a slave. Ubah had to sleep on a thin mat in the kitchen that was black with soot from cooking and covered in food stains. She seemed to have only one dress, which was full of holes. All day long Ubah looked after the children, did the heavy grocery shopping, washed mountains of cloth diapers, and was yelled at throughout. My mother and grandmother never tired of reminding me of Ubah’s circumstances. “Look! You live in enormous luxury compared to Ubah,” they would point out. “Ubah is a slave because she is not with her mother. You are well cared for.” More important, I went to school and Ubah did not.

  Whenever I hear Westerners today say “Education is the answer,” I need only think back to that time to recognize the absolute truth of this statement. The women of the neighborhood would get together and complain that school was corrupting young girls like me and making us rebellious. They saw that Ubah and others who did not attend school simply obeyed. These girls were so accustomed to subservience that they never questioned their status. On a few occasions I caught Ubah trying to stifle the sound of her sobs, because even crying was considered to be a form of protest. The Somali men would also complain, “It’s because they go to school that they now talk back to us. It’s because they go to school that they are now making all of these demands, trampling on tradition and ignoring religion.”

  Some girls were pulled out of school just after their first menstruation and kept at home to keep them obedient, or they were forced into early marriages. But for those of us who stayed in school, it was true that education did give us a voice and an awareness of the world outside. My sister Haweya and I spoke to one another in English or Swahili; both languages were foreign to my mother and grandmother. It gave us power over them that they had not had over their parents.

  We also learned something else in our Kenyan schools that girls like Ubah did not learn: sex education. It was nowhere near as open and graphic as that whic
h I later encountered in Holland, but it was enough to intimidate my mom.

  Sex education was embedded in our biology book. Actually my teacher, Mrs. Karim, tried to skip the chapter. But like my friends, I skimmed the pages on amoebae, protozoa, and the reproduction of single-celled organisms and went straight to human procreation and the diagrams of fallopian tubes and the uterus, as well as testicles and the penis. It was very scientific, but even so most of the mechanics of sex remained a mystery. Still, at least with this information we began to understand why we were being told to avoid men and the basics of how our bodies worked. Again, this gave us some relative power over our parents. My mother refused to talk about these things and hit me when I first got my period. She hit me out of pure helplessness, for she herself had never been armed with this understanding of how the body functioned, and she feared that my very basic grasp of the simple facts had already in some mysterious way corrupted me.

  Like my grandmother, the other Muslim women in my life, mothers of my classmates and of other Somali girls in my neighborhood, felt that the best strategy was to keep girls at home, to cover them, to circumcise them, and, if the girls rebelled too much, to engage their brothers and fathers and even cousins to punish them. These punishments varied from thrashings to forced marriages. We also heard stories of girls who were killed by their families.

  Long ago, in the desert, nomads in clan societies bound themselves together by family ties, through old lineages that gave them protection and assistance across great distances. Outside the clan lineage lay danger and chaos, every man for himself. In a clan society, every kind of human relationship turns on your honor within the clan; outside it, there is nothing—you are excluded from any kind of meaningful existence. This was the most precious lesson that Grandma tried to teach her grandchildren.

  A man’s honor within a clan society—and these societies are, largely, about men—resides in his authority. Men must be warriors; shame consists in being seen as weak. Women are the breeders of men, and women’s honor lies in their purity, their submission, their obedience. Their shame is to be sexually impure, and it is the worst shame of all, because a woman’s sexual disobedience defiles herself, her sisters, and her mother, as well as the male relatives whose duty it is to control her.

  No Muslim man has any standing in society if he does not have honor. And no matter how much honor he builds up through wise decisions and good deeds, it is destroyed if his daughter or his sister is sexually defiled. This can happen if she loses her virginity before she’s married, or if she engages in sexual intercourse outside of the marriage—and that includes rape. Even the rumor that she may have had sex is reason enough to label her “defiled” and lead to loss of honor for her whole family. A father who cannot control his daughters, a brother who cannot control his sisters, is disgraced. He is bankrupt socially and even economically. His family is ruined. The girl will not fetch a bride-price, and neither will her sisters or her cousins, because the mere suspicion of independent feeling and female action in their family taints them too. Such a man suffers a social death, exclusion from the mutual assistance and respect of the clan—the worst possible fate that could befall a person, whether child or adult, male or female.

  Controlling women’s sexuality and limiting men’s access to sex with women are the central focus of the code of honor and shame. Muslim women are chattel, and every Muslim girl must be a virgin at marriage. Once wed (with or without her consent), she must be faithful to her husband, who, in traditional societies, she will never refer to by his first name but only as rajel, my lord. In case of divorce or widowhood, the job of monitoring her sexual activities is assumed by her new guardians: her sons, if they are adults, or her husband’s father and his male bloodline. These men may select a new husband for her. Few Muslim women are ever free to choose whom they will have sex with.

  An element as powerful and potent as a Muslim girl’s virginity also has great commodity value, which means that virginity is above all a man’s business. Daughters are bait for attracting alliances, or they can be reserved for the highest bidder. Power, wealth, and the solidifying of clan relations may hinge on marriage alliances, so raising daughters of quality who are modest and docile is important. Using violence to ensure their obedience and to warn them against straying is a perfectly legitimate reminder of the law in a system of values in which women have only a little more free will than livestock. There must be blood on the wedding night from her broken hymen or she will be condemned as a slut.

  This ancient code of sexual morality is derived from tribal Arab culture. It dates from long before the Prophet Muhammad began receiving revelations from the Angel Gabriel, which were written down by his disciples on pages that have long since become dust. At that time, in that place—the desert towns of Mecca and Medina, whose distant tribes worshipped many different idols and gods—honor and shame were the central ideas that governed life between men and women. Islam cemented this into an everlasting rule. As Islam grew and spread, it brought its sexual mores to other countries, from Mali to Indonesia. Under Shari’a, a Muslim woman is effectively the property of her father, brothers, uncles, grandfathers. These men are her guardians, responsible for her behavior, in charge of her choices. Above all, she must remain sexually pure.

  An inextricable mass of traditional dictates and rituals has been incorporated into Islam, and it is being further amplified by the Islamic revivalist movements that are sweeping through the Muslim world today. The fundamentalists seem haunted by the female body and neurotically debate which fractions of it should be covered, until they declare the whole thing, from head to toe, a gigantic private part.

  When and why did Arab, and subsequently Muslim, societies become so obsessed with controlling women’s sexuality? Perhaps there was once some logic to it. For a tribe to be strong, its warriors need to be loyal to each other. Maybe independent female sexuality undermined that. Maybe fighting over women was even more divisive to a male society than fighting over camels, and so, once upon a time in the desert, it was resolved to control the women, to confine them to their homes, banishing them from the public sphere, or to veil them so they became invisible, to cut their genitals to limit their sexual desire and sew them shut to make sex unbearably painful.

  Grandma did not busy herself with such questions. She understood only that we had to follow the rules as if our lives depended on it—as, perhaps, her own life once had. She explained and enforced that code in our household. As she never tired of saying, “All I am trying to teach you is to survive.”

  Even today virginity is the linchpin of a Muslim girl’s education. Growing up, I was taught that it is more important to remain a virgin than it is to stay alive, better to die than be raped. Sex before marriage is an unthinkable crime. Every Muslim girl knows that her value relies almost wholly on her hymen, the most essential part of her body, far more important than her brain or limbs.

  Once the hymen is broken, a girl is a thing used, broken, filthy, her filth contagious. This is how my cousin Hiran felt about herself when she succumbed to desire and then was diagnosed with HIV. This is how Ladan felt about herself and how she lost her self-esteem. She saw herself through the eyes of those closest to her, people like my grandma, and those old ghosts seemed to blame her and scream at her, “Whore!”

  Muslim cultures have evolved various means to police and guarantee women’s virginity. Many confine their women, depriving themselves of their labor outside the home, and monitor their movements obsessively. This constant whisper of gossip, the continual surveillance of every untoward gesture and raised eye, is also a form of confinement, strangling every movement. When a woman leaves the house, she veils, another form of confinement: every breath of air you take outside your four walls is stifled by a thick, heavy cloth; every stride is hobbled, every centimeter of skin enclosed from the sun. Even out of doors a veiled woman is inside all the time. The air she breathes is stuffy; thick material presses against her eyes, her nose, and her mouth
. Everything she does is hidden and furtive. Blindfolded and reduced, erased from public contact, Muslim women often lose confidence in their ability to undertake independent action. Even independent motion seems strange. Every woman who has worn such a veil for years and then taken it off will attest that it is difficult to walk at first. It is as if, uncovered, your legs do not work the same way.

  After a girl first menstruates, she must have as little contact as possible with men outside the immediate family. In Saudi Arabia women are shut in their homes by law; this is not the case in other countries, but confinement is still common everywhere that there are Muslims. Even after they are married many Arab women are not permitted contact with an unrelated male. It is an offense even to look a man in the eye.

  Other societies, too poor to do without their women’s labor out of doors, must police their chastity by other means: it must be built into their bodies. This may be the origin of female excision, the only possible incontrovertible proof of virginity. And chastity must be built into their minds. Victims of rape do not report it if they survive it; unmarried women who get pregnant are banished or put to death. Too often girls take their own lives after losing their virginity in a way deemed to be illicit.

  Although Muslim doctrine has certainly amplified and confirmed this attitude, the tight web of restrictions on women that characterizes Arab and Muslim clans goes back further than Wahabi Islam, the most common school of Islam in Saudi Arabia. The very word harem, the section of the house where the women dwell (in Arabic, hareem), is derived from haram, forbidden. In most Muslim cultures people still retain memories of the old, pre-Islamic beliefs in jinn and ghouls. (This is sharply disapproved of by most Islamic purists, who believe it raises the possibility of deities other than Allah.) Those ghouls are most often withered old women or sexually voracious young women, who inspire fear and disgust in equal measure. Defiled every month by menstruation, the female is naturally closer to evil.