The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  I am a real daddy’s girl. During the short periods he spent with our family, he was wonderfully kind to me and praised me to the skies. He also organized some things for which I feel indebted to him to this day. For example, when we were living in Ethiopia my mother did not want my sister or me to attend school. We were going to be married off within a few years anyway, so what good would all that knowledge be to us? We were better off learning to do the housework. But my father insisted that we go to school. He said he would curse my mother forever if she would not let us. He also declared himself dead set against our circumcision. What he doesn’t know is that my grandmother secretly arranged to have it done behind his back.

  My brother, my sister, and I did tackle him about never spending any time with us. He had brought us into the world but took no responsibility for it. We had nothing against his political activities, felt quite proud even, but we also wanted a father. He thought our criticisms were unworthy of us. Trivial moaning. We should see that he had a vocation and therefore make sacrifices with our heads up. God had bestowed the honor of this position upon him.

  When I was born my father was in prison. I was six years old when I first saw him. Even though our father was absent for long periods, as children we sensed the tension surrounding his political activities. I always refer to the years in Somalia as the whispering years. Hush, hush, nobody can be trusted. I can remember hearing the pounding on the door, my grandmother opening it and being tossed to the floor, the verbal abuse of men ransacking our house. A child cannot understand these things.

  On my sixth birthday we followed my father—who had by then fled the country—to Saudi Arabia. None of us felt happy there, with the exception of my mother, who flourished in a country with such a strict religious climate. But she also compared the local inhabitants to goats and sheep because she found them so stupid. We had to wear a green, long-sleeved dress to school and tightly wrap a scarf around our heads. The heat gave us blisters on our backs. We were not allowed to play outside. After a year we moved to Ethiopia, where a large part of the Somali opposition lived, and then, after eighteen months, to Kenya.

  My father has five daughters and a son, by four different wives. My mother was his second wife. He met her when his first wife, Maryan, was in America. She had been sent there by him to study, but she didn’t do very well. My father wanted her to stay away until she managed to get her diplomas. Meanwhile, at home, he had become one of the organizing forces behind the campaign for literacy. He was a teacher himself and my mother was his pupil. He thought she was smart and ambitious, and married her. Within a short period they had three children, and then one day Maryan turned up at the door, back from America. She knew nothing about his second marriage and was furious. She demanded that he make a choice. My father chose my mother and divorced Maryan.

  In 1980 he left for Ethiopia. After a year he came back to visit us. My mother said, “If you leave again now, I don’t want you to come back ever again, and I will no longer be your wife.” He went away and returned after ten years. My mother refused to greet him and has stuck to this to the present day. Later he married an Ethiopian woman, and then someone from Somalia—I have no idea where they are now. Eventually he remarried Maryan, his first wife, with whom he lives in London.

  Besides an older brother, I had a sister, Haweya, who was two years younger than I and for whom I felt strong admiration. Haweya was rebellious. She did what she wanted, and she didn’t care if she received a beating for it. I was more timid and docile, tending to accept things as they were. But she never did. As a teenager Haweya wanted to wear short skirts, something that was considered thoroughly indecent. My mother ripped them up, but each time she did, my sister just bought herself a new one. During her second year in high school she quit. Everyone was furious, but she couldn’t have cared less. She successfully completed a secretarial course and found a job at the United Nations. My mother forbade her to work, but my sister defied her, despite verbal and physical abuse.

  Haweya was a strong woman and commanded admiration and respect everywhere except at home. When her turn came to be married off, she followed me to the Netherlands. She arrived in January 1994, and after a year and a half her Dutch was good enough to enroll at university. But she started to become tearful and her behavior became eccentric. She struggled in the company of others but could not manage being on her own either. She watched television for hours on end, regardless of what was on. She would lie in bed for days and didn’t eat. After a time she revealed that she was unhappy because she had neglected her faith. She began to wear a headscarf and tried to pray. Some days she could not manage it and that increased her feelings of guilt, because for every prayer you miss, there is a punishment. She also kept saying, I am suffering so much, but nobody understands me. And she was ashamed of the way she had behaved toward my mother in the past and deeply regretted all those arguments.

  Then one day Haweya had a mental breakdown and had to go into hospital. She was treated with medication to which she responded well, though she did suffer some side effects: restlessness, pain, stiff muscles, strange twitches. I saw my sister, that beautiful, strong woman, cracking up before my eyes.

  In July 1997, Haweya returned to Kenya. Instead of medication she received visits from mullahs who had been summoned to drive out her psychoses. They commanded her to read the Koran so that she would calm down. And she was dragged to an exorcist because some people thought that my stepmother had bewitched her. My sister said to the exorcist, If you are capable of releasing such extraordinary powers, you should use them to heal your rotten teeth. In her madness she never lost her wit. Occasionally they tied her up or beat her in order to calm her down, but of course that solved nothing. The manic attacks just grew more uncontrollable. She suffered paranoia and stopped eating. On January 8, 1998, she died.

  Haweya’s death was the hardest moment of my life. When my father gave me the news over the telephone, I burst into tears, at which he said, “Why are you so upset? You know we all return to God.” I jumped on the first plane to Nairobi but arrived too late for the funeral. Presumably she died from exhaustion, but I will never be sure because no autopsy was performed. In our culture it is taboo to ask questions about the cause of death. Every time I brought up the subject, I was dismissed as a tiresome child who keeps asking the same old question. The response was invariably: God gives and takes life away.

  My sister and I were still very young when we began to notice that we were always told to respect our brother. He was only ten months older than I, but we realized that only boys count. A Muslim woman’s status depends on the number of sons she has. When people asked my grandmother how many children she had, she would answer: “One.” She had nine daughters and a son. She was the same with regard to our family, said we had only one child. “What about us?” Haweya and I would ask. “You are going to bear sons for us,” she replied. It drove me to desperation. What was I to do with my life on earth? Bear sons! Become a production plant for sons. I was nine years old at the time.

  To maximize their potential as producers of sons, girls are taught from early on always to conform—to God, to their father and brothers, to the family, to the clan. The better a woman seems at this, the more virtuous she is thought to be. You should always be patient, even when your husband demands the most dreadful things of you. You will be rewarded for this in the hereafter. But the reward itself is small. Women can look forward to dates and grapes in paradise. That is all.

  When we were living in Saudi Arabia, my brother was always allowed to go everywhere with my father. We had to stay at home. But my sister and I were inquisitive children. We wanted to come, too, thought it was unfair. That was a word that touched a chord in my father. We knew this. And he immediately wanted to set the record straight. “Allah has said: ‘I have given woman an honorable position. I have placed paradise underneath her feet.’” We looked down at my mother’s feet, and then at my father’s, and burst out laughing. As always, his were co
vered by expensive leather shoes from Italy, while my mother’s were bare, the skin badly cracked and peeling from walking on cheap sandals. My father laughed with us, but my mother grew angry, hit us, and sent us out of the room. She was terrified of blasphemy.

  In Kenya I went from my primary school to the Muslim Girls Secondary School. The school was attended by girls from Kenya but also from Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and India. There were some very bright girls there, who were good at everything, academic subjects as well as sport. In the mornings our names were called out. You had to say “Present.” But after a certain age there seemed to be a growing number of absent girls. No one knew where they had gone. Later we heard that they had been married off. Some I met again after a year or two. There was nothing left of them. All those girls had become production plants for sons: plump, pregnant, or already holding a child in one arm. The fighting spirit, the light in their eyes, the jittery energy had all vanished. Among these girls, suicide and depression were common. In a way I was lucky that my father was not living with us at the time. Otherwise I would probably also have been contracted to marry someone when I was sixteen, and at that age you cannot run away. Where could I have fled?

  From the mid-1980s Islam was becoming more prominent in Kenya. Like many other adolescents I was looking for something, and I was strongly impressed by our Islam teacher. She looked striking, with a pale, heart-shaped face that formed a mysterious contrast with her black headscarf and long black dress. She could talk passionately about the love of God and our duties to Him. It was through her teaching that I first felt the need to become a martyr. It would bring me closer to God. Submission to Allah’s will—that was what it was about. We repeated this sentence over and over, like a mantra: “We subject ourselves to God’s will.” I spontaneously began to wear a veil and black garments over my school uniform. My mother was thrilled, my sister less so.

  Then I got a boyfriend. That was forbidden. We kissed. That was worse than forbidden. On top of everything he was a very religious boyfriend, strict when it came to doctrines regarding the relations between men and women. But in actual life he did not observe the rules. At that moment I experienced my first strong doubts. Because I lied and he lied. The more religious I became, the more I found myself lying and deceiving. That seemed wrong.

  Later on I stayed in a refugee camp on the border between Somalia and Kenya. I saw how women who had been raped during the war were abandoned. And I asked myself, If God exists, why does He allow this? It was forbidden to think such thoughts, let alone speak them, but my belief was crumbling. Nonetheless I continued to call myself a Muslim.

  September 11 was a decisive turning point, but it was not until six months later, after I had read The Atheist Manifesto by Herman Philipse, that I dared to admit to others that I no longer believed. I had been given the book in 1998 by my boyfriend Marco but didn’t want to read it at the time. I thought: an atheist manifesto is a declaration of the devil. I could feel an inner resistance. But recently I felt ready. The time had come. I saw that God was an invention and that subjection to His will meant nothing more than subjecting yourself to the willpower of the strongest.

  I have nothing against religion as a source of comfort. Rituals and prayers can provide support, and I am not asking anyone to give those up. But I do reject religion as a moral gauge, a guideline for life. And this applies above all to Islam, which is an all-pervasive religion, dominating every step of your life.

  People blame me for not drawing a distinction between religion and culture. Female circumcision, they say, has nothing to do with Islam, because this cruel ritual does not take place in all Islamic societies. But Islam demands that you enter marriage as a virgin. The virginity dogma is safeguarded by locking girls up in their homes and sewing their outer labia together. Female circumcision serves two purposes: the clitoris is removed in order to reduce the woman’s sexuality, and the labia are sewn up in order to guarantee her virginity.

  Circumcision dates back to pre-Islamic times, when the ritual was observed among certain animist tribes. Clans in Kenya first circumcised their women out of a fear that the clitoris would grow too large during child delivery and smother the baby. But these existing local practices were spread by Islam. They became more important and were sanctified. In countries such as Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia, where Islam is a big influence, the emphasis on virginity is very strong.

  People also say that my negative image of Islam is the product of personal trauma. I am not saying that I had a rosy childhood, but I managed to get through it. It would be selfish to keep my experiences and insights to myself. It wouldn’t be feasible. Young Muslim girls in the Netherlands who still have the light in their eyes do not have to go through what I did. We must face the facts and offer to immigrants what they are denied in their own culture: individual dignity. The big obstacle to the integration of immigrants is undeniably Islam.

  Marco—my former boyfriend who gave me The Atheist Manifesto—lived in the same students’ house as I did. We circled around each other for two months and then we fell in love. I didn’t mention it to my parents. But I told my brother, who demanded that I break off the relationship immediately. I ignored him. Marco and I lived together for five years. Incidentally, it was a big step for me to move in with someone else. That went right into the teeth of what is conventionally expected in our culture: you remain a virgin until you are married off. In the end it did not work out because we are both strong-willed and neither of us is inclined to give in. That always led to arguments. Moreover, I am rather scattered, while he is meticulous and strict. That also gave rise to problems. We are still very fond of each other; it just became impossible to go on. Around us we saw other relationships trying to survive despite tremendous pressure, with all its consequences. We did not want that.

  The fact that I did not want to be married—not to a distant cousin in Canada nor to anyone else—could not be discussed. My father said: “Child, just trust me to know what is best for you.” But I did not trust him, and I fled to the Netherlands. I wrote him what I think was a loving but unambiguous letter, in which I begged him to let me have my freedom. He sent it back to me. In the margin he had written in red ink that he regarded this as an act of treason, that he never wanted to see me again, and that I was no longer to call myself his child. We did not speak for six years. One evening in 1997 the phone rang. Marco answered, listened, and handed me the receiver. “I think it’s your father,” he said. I took the receiver and heard “Abbe,” my child. He had forgiven me and wanted to let me know he was proud of me because I was taking good care of my sister. I wept and wept. It was one of the most beautiful days in my life. He had taken me back as his daughter.

  Seven

  Being a Politician

  Is Not My Ideal

  1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

  My faith has been a faith of fear. Fear of making mistakes. Fear of incurring Allah’s anger. Fear of being sent to hell; fear of flames and of fire. Allah was like the government: always present, everywhere; ready to arrest my father and lock him away in prison. My relationship with Allah was like this: as long as He left me in peace, I was happy. Certainly, I prayed when I was in pain; I begged Him to stop my mother from beating me. But like any child who, sooner or later, realizes at the back of his mind that Santa Claus does not exist, I accepted that I should not expect much from Him.

  I think I am an atheist at heart; it just took me a while to find my convictions confirmed in print somewhere. This may sound arrogant, but I think that most people who call themselves religious are essentially atheists. They avoid thinking about whether they really believe in God and allow themselves to be distracted by details. We should have a debate in the Netherlands about the source of our moral standards: did we people invent them, or were they the work of God? We should begin by analyzing the things our prime minister—or any world leader—says. Have you ever listened to him properly? He is forever referring to biblical standards and values, ne
ver to the things God asks us to do or forbids us. Yet he is an academic, a man who has learned to use well-reasoned arguments to find certain truths. Can he believe that the world was created in six days? That Eve was created from Adam’s rib? That simply cannot be true. Scientists are unbelieving. I am convinced that our prime minister is not a Christian.

  2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

  With the first commandment Muhammad wanted to lock away common sense, and with the second he subjugated the beautiful, romantic side of mankind. I am really appalled that so many people are denied access to art. In this respect, Islam is a culture that has been outlived, by which I mean it is an unchanging, fossilized culture. Everything is written down in the Koran, and that is the end of the discussion. Personally, I still find the teachings of Muhammad outdated, but since in my present capacity as politician I can’t afford to enter into an argument with people who will forever accuse me of having called them backward, I had to take back that remark. Or, rather, I modified my statement: I find the principle of Islam—to submit yourself to Allah’s will—a backward point of departure, but that doesn’t mean that I find those who adhere to the belief primitive as well. They are behind in their development, which is not the same thing. It is not too late to make progress.