Infidel

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Sister Aziza introduced us to the inner struggle. There were two kinds of struggle for Allah, and the first effort was the jihad within ourselves: submission of our will. We must want to obey our parents, and to behave in a manner that spreads kindness. We must want to be dutiful. We must think about Allah’s will in every gesture of every day and choose to lay down ourselves before Him. She ignored the textbooks that were supposed to prepare us for the national exam in Islamic studies. Like our Quran teachers in Saudi Arabia, Sister Aziza was preparing us for a practice of faith, not prepping us in the history of Islam.

  I began praying in the evenings sometimes. It is a long ritual. First you wash and cover yourself in the long white cloth, fixing your gaze to the floor, because Allah is present and you do not look God in the eye. You recite the opening chapter of the Quran, a short chapter made up of just seven verses. Then you prostrate yourself, with your palms open toward Mecca, the heartland of religion. You say Praise be to Allah, and stand up again; you say another verse of the Quran—you are free to choose which verse. You repeat the whole procedure, two, three, or four times, depending on what time of day it is. Each time you must recite the first chapter of the Quran and one other small chapter or some verses from a longer chapter of your choosing. Then you sit and end the prayer by looking sideways, first right and then left, and you cup your hands together and ask for God’s blessing. You beg: Allah make me wise, forgive my sins. Bless my parents and give them health, and please Allah, put my parents in Paradise. Please Allah, keep me on the safe path.

  Then you take your prayer beads, which are a multiple of thirty-three—or, as I did, for I had no beads, you use your finger bones. Each hand has fifteen bones in it, counting the base of your thumbs, so two hands, plus the three digits of one extra finger, are thirty-three. You say Praise be to Allah thirty-three times; God forgive me thirty-three times; Allah is great thirty-three times; and then, if you choose, you may also say Gratitude to Allah.

  Prayer is a long procedure, and it is required five times a day. In the beginning I almost never managed to do all of it, but it felt good to be trying.

  Sister Aziza told us about the Jews. She described them in such a way that I imagined them as physically monstrous: they had horns on their heads, and noses so large they stuck right out of their faces like great beaks. Devils and djinns literally flew out of their heads to mislead Muslims and spread evil. Everything that went wrong was the fault of the Jews. The Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, who had attacked the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was a Jew. The Americans, who were giving money to Saddam, were controlled by the Jews. The Jews controlled the world, and that was why we had to be pure: to resist this evil influence. Islam was under attack, and we should step forward and fight the Jews, for only if all Jews were destroyed would peace come for Muslims.

  I began to experiment with the headscarf. I wore it long, so the shape of my neck and shoulders could not be seen. I wore trousers under my school uniform, to hide my bare legs. I wanted to be like Sister Aziza. I wanted to be pure, and good, and serve Allah. I began to pray five times a day, fighting to collect my thoughts through the whole long process. I wanted to understand better how to live the life that Allah, who was infinitely just, wanted for me.

  I asked my mother for money so Sister Aziza’s tailor could make me a huge black cloak, with just three tight bands around my wrists and neck and a long zipper. It fell to my toes. I began wearing this robe to school, on top of the school uniform that hung off my scrawny frame, with a black scarf over my hair and shoulders.

  It had a thrill to it, a sensuous feeling. It made me feel powerful: underneath this screen lay a previously unsuspected, but potentially lethal, femininity. I was unique: very few people walked about like that in those days in Nairobi. Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim. All those other girls with their little white headscarves were children, hypocrites. I was a star of God. When I spread out my hands I felt like I could fly.

  I was one of the first to robe in school. Some of the Yemeni girls, like Halwa, wore long buttoned coats, but these were tailored to fit the body; you could see a female shape inside. The hidjab I draped over my scrawny frame was overwhelmingly enveloping: there was simply nothing left to see except a small face and two hands.

  When I arrived in school, I took off my robe and folded it up inside my desk. Then, at the end of the day, I modestly unfolded it and put it on—and suddenly I was interesting, mysterious, powerful. I could see it just by looking at my classmates. And the delight in my mother’s eyes when she saw me in that garment! It was the silver lining to the long, dark cloud of her life. Finally I was doing something right.

  * * *

  Sister Aziza told us it was our duty to convert our Christian classmates. She told us it was the only way to spare our friends the pain of Hell. I tried my best to approach the other girls with the message of the true faith. They answered things like, “How would you feel if I tried to make you a Christian?” They said their parents had taught them about Jesus just as mine had taught me about the Prophet Muhammad, and I should respect their beliefs.

  I had to admit I could see their point. Still, I really wanted to prevent these friends of mine from going to Hell. I remember telling Emily one day about the torments that lay in store for her in the afterlife. She said, “But I just don’t believe in that. I am saved. Jesus has come for me, he died for me, and he will redeem me.” The Christian girls talked about their Trinity: God, the Holy Spirit, and God’s Son, all one. To me, this was first-class blasphemy. We’d bicker about theology till it swiftly got to the point where if we didn’t leave the subject alone our friendships would have been over.

  I went to Sister Aziza and said, “The other girls won’t become Muslims. Their parents have taught them other religions. It isn’t their fault, and I don’t think it’s fair that they’ll burn in Hell.” Sister Aziza told me I was wrong. Through me, Allah had given them a choice. If these girls rejected the true religion, then it was right that they should burn. It made me think that by even trying I was probably making things worse, so I stopped trying to convert my classmates.

  Still, it bothered me. If we were created by Allah, and before our birth He had already determined whether we would come to rest in Heaven or Hell, then why would we take the trouble to try to convert these girls, who were also created the way they were by God? Sister Aziza had a very complex theological explanation for predestination. Besides the path that Allah had already determined for us in the womb, there was a further dimension, which was that we had free will, and if you bent your will to the service of God instead of Satan then you pleased God. It wasn’t very convincing, but I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t understand her.

  Quite soon after Sister Aziza arrived, I noticed that a whole religious revival had begun in the school corridors. Just as I and a few other girls met in an unused classroom for Islamic prayer at noon, a group of Kenyan girls prayed together, too, hollering “Hallelujah!” and singing Gospel songs. I don’t know if it was a reaction to the revival of Islam, or some kind of common impulse that drove teenage Nairobi in that direction; but it seemed as though, at the same time that more young Muslims were flocking to a new kind of Islam, more and more Christians were going to church. And they, too, were heading for a purer faith, closer to the roots of their religion. A faith that was less passive, more engaged with personal study of holy texts.

  The charismatic Christians were no less aggressive than the fundamentalist Muslims in those days. The whole country was beginning to fall apart; perhaps people were grabbing for certainties. Preachers of some sect or other were all over the place. Girls in school talked about Alice Lak-wena, in neighboring Uganda, whose followers were immune to bullets. That was the most spectacular movement, but there were many other small bands of strange zealots. Shabby street-front churches began to sprout where once there were grocery stalls. Jehovah’s Witnesses used to go from door t
o door. And, of course, at every street corner there were all kinds of old tribal soothsayers and magicians. Even in my class at Muslim Girls’ Secondary, girls would buy love potions made of crushed fingernails and animal skin, or amulets to help them pass exams.

  The state in Kenya was crumbling from within, buckling under the larceny and nepotism of the men in control. People were given jobs in ministries who couldn’t spell the word minister. The mayor, who was supposed to look after the streets of Nairobi, was barely literate. The government was only there to take your money; its services were minimal. Citizens were no longer citizens—the people who had put such hope in the future of their own, independent nation so short a time ago weren’t loyal to the nation any longer. More and more, Kenyan people saw themselves as members of their tribe above all. And any kind of interaction between the tribes was mediated through religion. Religion and a stronger awareness of tribe and clan belonging were replacing any shared national feeling.

  The same thing was also happening in Somalia, though I didn’t know it then. It was happening, in fact, almost everywhere in Africa and throughout the Islamic world. The more corrupt and unreliable the apparatus of government—the more it persecuted its people—the more those people headed back into their tribe, traditions, their church or mosque, and hunkered down, like among like.

  A new kind of Islam was on the march. It was much deeper, much clearer and stronger—much closer to the source of the religion—than the old kind of Islam my grandmother believed in, along with her spirit ancestors and djinns. It was not like the Islam in the mosques, where imams mostly recited by memory old sermons written by long-dead scholars, in an Arabic that barely anyone could understand. It was not a passive, mostly ignorant, acceptance of the rules: Insh’Allah, “God wills it.” It was about studying the Quran, really learning about it, getting to the heart of the nature of the Prophet’s message. It was a huge evangelical sect backed massively by Saudi Arabian oil wealth and Iranian martyr propaganda. It was militant, and it was growing. And I was becoming a very small part of it.

  CHAPTER 6

  Doubt and Defiance

  While I was taking the high road to God, Haweya was veering off the rails. My struggle to submit my will to Allah held no interest whatsoever for my little sister. She said Sister Aziza acted as if we all still rode camels. She called my black robe hideous. Haweya was tall and pretty, and she knew it. She had no intention of creeping around Nairobi covered in a tent, as she described my veil.

  My mother may have beaten me a lot, but she also installed in me a sense of discipline. I struggled to do well in school, and I liked it there; I had a lot of friends. But Haweya hated Muslim Girls’ Secondary. She made friends but always ended up fighting with them. She was far brighter than I: she let crowds of girls copy her homework in return for the paperback novels that she liked to read. But Haweya’s classes were chaotic: In 1985 the Kenyan government decided to purge the secondary school system of aspects it deemed too colonial. This meant that textbooks were missing and teachers had no idea of the syllabus. My sister was bored stiff at school, and she was also tired of being cooped up in our house.

  Haweya had always been headstrong and never bowed her will to Ma. She refused to do household chores unless Mahad was made to do them, too—knowing, of course, that that would never happen. When Ma did beat her, Haweya could just withdraw inside herself, as if she were immune to pain. My mother would hit her until her arm hurt, and when she’d finished Haweya would still be defiant. My sister had a will of steel. Sometimes she locked herself in the bathroom and cursed my mother—screaming, calling her hateful and cruel and selfish. But somehow Haweya avoided crying.

  My mother had simply no idea of how to manage teenagers. It was as if she had never imagined we would grow up. Adolescence was another part of modern life that was completely foreign to her upbringing. In the desert, where my mother grew up, there is no meaningful space between childhood and becoming a woman.

  Haweya was clear-minded and honest, and a fighter. Part of me admired her guts. But sometimes in those teenage years the house would almost explode with the rage it contained. The scenes were hideous. They made me want to crawl inside myself and hide there. Ma, Grandma, Haweya: all of them would scream until fat veins stood out on their foreheads. Any of them might at any time stand up suddenly and push the table over, yelling and cursing to Hell. The sheer volume of it shattered me.

  One time Haweya went over to Jinni Boqor’s house and asked if she could use his phone to call our father. She said she needed Abeh to send her money to groom herself. Jinni gave Haweya two hundred shillings, and she got her hair straightened and cut into curls around her face. Ma complained to Jinni, but he just winked and said, “The phone call would cost me almost as much. And anyway, she does look good!”

  Haweya usually won her battles. She wore high-heeled sandals with straps round her toes, skirts above her knees, and she painted her nails. She looked like my mother’s worst nightmare. When Haweya got her period, Ma just burst into tears.

  Then Haweya met Sahra, an Isaq woman. Actually, it was my grandmother who met her first, while she was out grazing her sheep, and brought her home for tea—a kinswoman. Sahra dressed in trousers and blouses and wore huge sunglasses, and her hair was dyed red. Sahra was older than we were, about twenty-three or twenty-four. She’d been married at fourteen and had three children. She invited Haweya and me over to her house to watch TV. I had no time for Sahra, but Haweya liked it at her place and took to going there almost every afternoon. The two of them could talk and watch videos for hours. Sometimes Sahra would go out by herself, while Haweya looked after her children; she would buy Haweya books and lipsticks in return.

  Gradually, Haweya and Sahra began going out together, to afternoon discos. Sahra used to tell me I, too, should go out and have fun; fun was something you couldn’t do when you were older and married. These places were noisy and creepy and didn’t appeal to me at all, but Haweya loved to dress up in Sahra’s clothes and go dancing.

  Sahra told Haweya how awful it was to be married. She said her husband, Abdallah, was repulsive. She told Haweya what it was like when Abdallah had first tried to penetrate her after they were married: pushing his way into her, trying to tear open the scar between her legs, how much it had hurt. She said Abdallah had wanted to cut her open with a knife, because she was sewn so tight that he couldn’t push his penis inside. She described him holding the knife in his hand while she screamed and begged him not to—and I suppose he felt pity for that poor fourteen-year-old child, because he agreed to take her to the hospital to be cut.

  Sahra’s wedding didn’t end with a celebration: there was no bloody sheet to show off to the applause and ululations of the wedding guests. There was only a murmur of disappointment and doubt, a suspicion about Sahra’s virginity and a snickering about her husband’s manhood, before she was taken to the hospital to be made ready for Abdallah the next night.

  The story frightened me: a huge group of people, a bloodied sheet—a kind of rape, organized with the benediction of Sahra’s family. It didn’t in the least seem like something that could happen to Haweya, or to me. But this was marriage, to Sahra: physical assault, public humiliation.

  Sahra told Haweya, “I never had a childhood. They took my life away from me.” Abdallah was ten or fifteen years older than she; he was some kind of cousin. He didn’t seem to beat her, but her hatred of him was implacable. Her revenge was that she did nothing for her kids. She called them his kids. She treated her nine-year-old daughter, Hasna, like a slave. Hasna did the groceries, cooked, and cleaned; Sahra constantly beat her, and spent all her husband’s money on clothes and makeup. I thoroughly disapproved of Sahra.

  * * *

  Haweya wasn’t the only member of the family straying off the hard and narrow path our mother had in mind for us. Mahad dropped out of school the year he turned sixteen. He just stopped attending. After a few months, Mr. Griffin, his headmaster, told Ma there was nothing more
he could do: Mahad couldn’t be allowed back. Ma was outraged when Mahad was expelled, but he just sneered, looking down at her, far too tall and strong now for her to hit.

  Mahad had no father to guide him through adolescence. He had only his friends, some of whom smoked hashish and drank beer in bars, acting cool. Mahad had always been close to my mother—she colluded with him, cooking special meals for him when he snuck out of school—but sometime after we got to Kenya, as he became bigger and stronger and just plain smarter than she was, he stopped feeling that he had to obey her and so he disregarded her authority. Ma’s restrictive Somali traditions seemed completely pointless from the viewpoint of a normal boy who spent much of his life in the streets of Nairobi. Islam, at the time, had no appeal for him. He had never worked at his studies but couldn’t tolerate getting lower grades than other boys whom he’d once outshone. Mahad lost his way.

  My mother had no idea what to do about Mahad’s future. And he wasn’t her only worry. The house that we rented in Kariokor had been sold to another owner and Ma couldn’t stave off our eviction for long. But rents had gone up, and she had no money, only what my father’s Osman Mahamud relatives gave her to live on. Month after month she had to walk to the house of Farah Gouré, one of the big Osman Mahamud businessmen in Nairobi, and pretend not to be begging when she haughtily informed him that the cost of living had gone up again. Ma didn’t want to live in some cramped, noisy apartment building in Eastleigh, like most of the other Somalis in Nairobi. She wanted a nice house, somewhere clean.

  Farah Gouré was a good man, but his pockets were not bottomless. He finally told Ma point-blank that she would have to move to a flat. We were not the only SSDF family without a father, and he wasn’t prepared to pay for us to live in an even more expensive house. It was a standoff.