From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Yet I want you to come into this world.

  I think back to my grandmother’s life and I am filled with optimism for you. Grandmother was never sure how old she was, but we estimated that she probably made it to eighty-nine. When she died, her children and grandchildren surrounded her. For her too life was an effort. It had moments of joy, sometimes long stretches of joy, but when she was rearing me I do not remember a day when she did not mention death.

  My mother, your grandmother, had it a little better than her mother did. She conceived me in a city. I was not born under a tree, and she did not cut the umbilical cord herself; she gave birth to me in a hospital, with a doctor and nurses. But I came too soon. The doctor, nurses, and relatives in attendance were all convinced that I would die, for I weighed no more than 3.3 pounds. Mother had no strategy other than to lay me on her belly, wrap the hospital bed sheets around us both, and rub my back and croon to me. Morning after morning, night after night, my little heart kept beating and I cried—my only signs of life. She wanted me. Unlike Oriana, she did not ponder the complexities of what life would present to me, what it would mean to be born into violence, corruption, torture, and anarchy, countless diseases and upheaval. Mother just wanted me to live, whatever life brought.

  My mother went on to conceive child after child. She miscarried and conceived and gave birth and lost children and conceived again. Whenever she and my father were reunited, my mother conceived. The last child was stillborn. Mohammed was his name. He would have been your youngest uncle, born in 1979.

  This history of conceptions and miscarriages is very important for me to know. It is the experiences of your foremothers that give me the confidence to take a chance on having you. In that chain of four generations of women—I am counting you as the fourth—I see a profound advancement in the quality of life and also the potential for continued improvement.

  I now live in Oriana’s world, the world of science, where they take pictures of you in the womb when you are just a seed, “a transparent egg, suspended in the womb that looks like any mammal.” Women visit a doctor every two weeks for examinations, and when two months are completed the doctor says, “It’s a very delicate transition.” I read Oriana’s words and grapple with the irony. Your grandmother would say, “With all the science and education and the knowledge that the infidel amasses, they do not grasp that every part of life is a delicate transition!” But that is what knowledge brings. As the third generation from that woman in the bushes, I have been exposed to too much of it to be nonchalant about conceiving you. I have to think, like Oriana, about whether or not you want to be born. Do you want to come into a world of violence and fraud and corruption? Do you want life?

  The other choice, as Oriana pointed out, is nothingness and silence. Do you prefer nothingness? To stay where you are, in the silence that is not death, because you have not been alive?

  That beautiful frail woman held my hand in her apartment and said, “Let your child come.” She knew. She had worked out for herself an answer that appealed to me strongly. When she conceived, almost everyone around her advised her to have an abortion, but she refused. She wanted her baby.

  Oriana told me the story of how her community rejected her unborn child: the man who fathered her child, her doctor and nurse, her pharmacist, her boss, her best friend. They all said to her, “Get rid of your baby. Abort. Think of your career.” A single woman who decided to have a baby was considered irresponsible. The father of her child offered to pay for half the abortion (only half because, after all, the conception was partially her fault too).

  My community would not agree with Oriana’s. My doctor is a gay man. I went to him and asked him if he could freeze my eggs or embryos. He said he could, but advised against it. Because I was thirty-seven, he said, “Just have the baby. You are a healthy woman. You are strong. I see no reason for you to take such drastic measures.” He never once mentioned the disadvantages to the child of having a single parent. My boss, who is really like an adopted father, would support any decision I made if I were pregnant with you. I could never imagine him persuading me to have you removed. My best friends, my colleagues—no one would stand in my way.

  I have struggled with whether to have you on my own, as Oriana tried to, or to marry your father. As she says, having a child is a personal choice. I agree. It’s not only a personal choice; it’s a very selfish choice. I want to have you for me, for my delight, to enrich my existence. I want to know what it is to love unconditionally and be loved back that way. As I carry you in my womb I want to know what it is to “feel the needles of anxiety pierce my soul, each alternating with a flush of joy,” as she described the early stages of her pregnancy. I want to feel you grow inside me as another life. I want to hold you. I want to give you life. I want you. And I want you for me.

  What shall I give you in return? First I shall teach you how to choose. Sometimes too many options make the mind reel, and sometimes they paralyze us in fear. You, if you make it, will live, unlike your foremothers, in a reality of too many options. And learning to choose is often harder than having only one or no choice at all.

  Education—the thrill and pain and exercise of learning—will be available to you in ways it was not to your grandmothers: preschool and kindergarten, elementary and high school, college and university, summer camps and student exchange programs, internships and alumni conferences. You will learn to read and write, to count and clap, to develop your skills at making friends and compromising with rivals; you will have a choice of ballet, painting, classical music, pop, athletics, team sports; you will read Shakespeare in tiny, clever, illustrated children’s books and listen to Mozart while you’re still in my belly. You will be born in a world of gadgets, and gadgets you shall have—to calculate, to navigate, to call and message and read and listen to music with.

  You will have me, your father, your nanny, your teachers, and an extended family of adults all cheering you on. You will learn to assemble and reassemble your priorities with each year that comes. But above all you will have to learn to choose from all the options that we give you.

  My education was very different from the one that awaits you. In my school we were required to wear a white shirt and a green skirt, white socks and black shoes, a green cardigan and a green tie with the school emblem. My tie was always askew, my top button always unbuttoned, and my cardigan always getting lost. My high school years were a constant battle with authority.

  My mother dictated to me what to wear, when to play (almost never), what to read, and whom to befriend. She did not allow me to make friends with girls, much less boys, from any other community. She banned reading novels and listening to music; asking her if I might go to the cinema made my mother scream and threaten me with physical punishment. The idea of my having a boyfriend made my mother cringe and curse uncontrollably.

  Nonetheless I had non-Muslim, Kenyan friends along with my friends from India and Yemen. I read everything I could, and did it practically under her nose. I just tucked the pages of my novels in the midst of the Quran, the only book she allowed. I sneaked out to my friends’ homes and listened to their music and watched their movies. I even managed to have a boyfriend. (And this was in the days when there were no cell phones, text messages, or e-mail.)

  My dear child, as you grow and make that transition from girlhood to womanhood your body will change. You’ll grow breasts and hips, and your lips will become full. You will become an object of desire for boys, and you will desire them. This was a frightening prospect for my mother; I am sure every parent feels a protective twinge at the idea of their child having sex. I am fortunate to have lived in different cultures and to have learned that openness about sexuality is preferable to repression. All cultures that have repressed sexuality attain the opposite of what they seek: sexual diseases spread faster, and unwanted pregnancies increase. Abortions attempted in secret often kill the mother too.

  Instead of denying the reality of sexuality, Europeans and Americans
teach their children, as soon as they are old enough to raise the subject, everything they need to know about their bodies: that sex is a source of pleasure, that you can choose when and whom you want to have sex with, all the contraceptives that are available to you, how you can protect yourself against diseases. Then you take the responsibility for your own sexuality and for the risk of bringing a child into the world when you’re not ready. You take responsibility for avoiding being infected with a disease, as well as for not infecting others. Such openness encourages responsibility and choice based on information and reason and not mystification of intercourse.

  So, unlike my mother, I shall not chase away your boyfriends.

  My dear child, I shall aspire to give you the freedoms that I did not have. Instead of the rote learning and strict punishments of my childhood, my authority and that of your school will be more relaxed; it will be geared toward training you to make choices, to take responsibility for the outcome of those choices and to learn from the mistakes that you make. This may give you the sometimes dangerous sense that perfection is attainable: the perfect toy, the perfect best friend, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect home, the perfect community, the perfect country. Such constant inspiration to innovate, to improve, and to progress is in many ways healthy. But, my child, there is no such thing as perfection. The quest for it leads only to frustration and a vulnerability to utopian ideas. At such times reflect on what happened and what continues to happen to the societies of your grandmothers, where the tribe is fixated upon the theologian’s promise of paradise.

  Living in America you’ll be exposed to a stronger promise of the perfect society. You will hear of many isms: socialism and communism and all sorts of cults and collectivisms. The perfection they promise usually comes at the price of mass suffering and death.

  Challenging authority, playing cat-and-mouse with the teachers, having secret agreements with the other kids, and keeping my parents and teachers in the dark—these all provided me with a great deal of entertainment. I wonder if giving you too much freedom will suck the spice out of life. What if, in giving you too much, I take away something vital from your life? What if I curb your sense of adventure? You will be born in an America of many posts: post—civil rights, postfeminism, post—cold war. You will take so much for granted. Decades ago Oriana had to justify the fact that she wanted to be a single mother. Now there is no such hindrance. What will you fight for? What will you fight against?

  My dear child, I do not worry about the bleakness of life. I worry about the bleakness of having no challenges in life. In Holland, for example, I lived in a laboratory of a society, where almost all the challenges in life had been erased. We were taken care of from the cradle to the grave. We debated on euthanasia, a movement that started by defending the right of terminal patients to end their lives and then morphed into a movement that defended the right of anyone to be helped by a doctor if he was tired of life. And this demand of a right to be assisted with suicide when you are tired of life had to be subsidized by the state. To my astonishment, some of the active members of that right were in their twenties and thirties. They had been protected from life, exposed to too little challenge; every day was the same for them. They had nothing to fight for. They convinced themselves that the world was a nasty crucible and declared themselves tired of life.

  I fear that you might become tired of life, and I cannot think of how to prevent that, except perhaps to remind you of the hard lives of your forefathers and foremothers so that you can appreciate what you have. That is your challenge and the challenge of your peers: not only how to keep the freedoms you have, but how to share that freedom with those who don’t have it.

  Beware of being brainwashed, my child. Allah and his agents played a big part in my childhood. A man named Boqol Sawm tried to terrify us into being devout. He droned into our ears that we were all headed to hell for sinning. In hell we would be burned in hungry flames, dipped in cooking oil, made whole again and broiled from head to toe. Each time we perished, Allah would remake us, give us back our bodies and skins ever more smooth and sensitive. Then he would give his angels orders to start burning us again. These horrors would go on and on until Allah was satisfied that we had been justly punished.

  I came to value the struggle to elude all forms of authority as part of the spice of my life. I have kept the great lessons of duty and perseverance that my mother and grandmother taught, as well as the passion for learning that some of my teachers in high school instilled in me. I was inspired by my father’s resistance to state authority when he opposed the Somali dictatorship from 1969 to 1990. But I resisted his authority to decide for me when and whom to marry. Now, of course, I shall worry about your finding the right person. But unlike my father, I will let you pick your mate. And if I think he is wrong for you, I will swallow my judgment, however hard that may be, and defer to you.

  My child, love between you and me is unconditional. Unknowingly, we may hurt one another, disapprove of each other’s choices, friends, and tastes, but whatever happens, you can depend on me. No matter what your age, your sorrows will be my sorrows, your happiness my joy. Love between a man and a woman is not a hoax, as Oriana stated, but it is conditional. It is contingent on chemistry, compatibility, temperament, lifestyle, even income, but if you fall in love and it’s mutual, then it’s a very powerful force. Love between a man and a woman can be generous, and should be generous. Unfortunately, my dear child, you will hear of many love stories where the basic desire is to possess one another, to change one another, to control one another. It’s precisely these things that kill affection and passion. Steer clear of those, if you can.

  There are three values I would like to share with you from my journey of freedom, and one pitfall to avoid.

  The first one, I am sure, will be drilled into you in your American school. It is the value of responsibility. I have made a lot of mistakes, but I strive to take responsibility for my actions. I am impulsive and impatient and sometimes I agree to things I don’t want to do and can’t do. But when I find a moment to think about my actions or inactions I find that most of the time I am the only one to blame.

  Related to responsibility is duty. How boring, you might think. Duty: what a tedious four-letter word. There are things in life that are not exciting, that are not fun, that are not fair and do not feel right. But we must do them. Whenever I could, I have supported my family. I did it knowing they would not support me in return, and I rarely enjoyed the tasks. But those tasks gave me a personal reward, a sense of pride and accomplishment. Duty might seem selfless, altruistic, but the outcome, at least for me, has been a selfish pleasure.

  The third value is that of critical thinking. I learned about it at the University of Leiden. My professors there gave us the works of different men and women to read. They called those works theories, ideas that could be right or wrong. Our main task for five years was to sort the good ideas from the bad ones, not only to learn to refute the theories of others but to come up with better ones ourselves. The process was to teach us to think and to recognize thoughts, even big complicated ones, as the product of the human mind. There was nothing divine in Leiden except the human faculty of reason. I was very fortunate to have gone to university, to have been exposed to the exercise of critical thinking. If you are lucky, you shall be educated in this valuable skill too. But beware of zealots of any flavor. Beware of proselytizers of religious utopias. And beware of professors who confuse teaching students how to think with teaching them what to think.

  Many people in your life will tell you of all the emotional pitfalls that lie waiting for a young a girl to tumble into. Let me touch on one: the trap of resentment. It is probably the worst mental prison in the world. It is the inability to let go of anger and the perceived or real injustices we suffer. Some people let one or two, or maybe ten unpleasant experiences poison the rest of their lives. They let their anger ferment and rot their personality. They end up seeing themselves as victims of their parents, t
eachers, their peers and preachers.

  People always ask me if I am angry at my mother or father, at the Quran teacher who fractured my skull, at the Dutch politician who tried to take away my citizenship, at any number of people who have slighted me or gone out of their way to hurt and humiliate me. I am not. I know that my parents loved me unconditionally in their own way. I know that those who seek to hurt and humiliate me want to trap me in a prison of anger and resentment and there is no point in rewarding them with success.

  I have discovered life for what it is: a gift from nature. For those who believe in a benign God, it is a gift from God. It is a gift we enjoy for just a brief period of time. Some of us get to hang around longer than others, but we all pass. In that brief period it is a tragedy to trap our minds in a toxic cage of bitterness and rage. Such a snare shifts our energies from focusing on how to make the best of our lives to becoming vengeful, apathetic victims of others.

  Life holds so much promise for you. Please take it with both your little hands, and live it well. Live, laugh, love, and give back with a broad grin.

  I shall not bring you up in the Muslim faith, the faith of your forefathers and foremothers, for I believe it is fatally flawed. I will, however, introduce you to different religions, their founders, and some of their followers. I will bring you up to have faith in yourself, in science and your own reason and the force of life. And I will never seek to impose my own beliefs or unbelief on you.

  Whenever I rebelled against my mother’s values she would blackmail me and even curse me with fearsome Somali maledictions. “I wish you a child that will reject your God the way you have rejected my God!” was one. She told me I would never know how painful that rejection is unless I went through it myself. So I fully expect it will be terrible to accept your independence. But even if it is so, I will try to hide my pain.