* * *
One evening, just as Ramadan was ending, we went to see Abshir preaching in his little mosque. It was just a storefront really, in a house in Wardhiigley, a formerly poor neighborhood where people were beginning to build fancy houses. Abshir had a beautiful voice; he had learned the whole Quran by heart, and the way he led prayer was compelling. When he commented on the Quran, he really seemed to understand it.
Abshir had a following. Although many of them were older than he was, they were still young people, all of them Muslim Brotherhood. The boys wore their sarongs or kaftans short and had wispy beards. The girls, behind a partition, were silent. Standing in that women’s room, I heard Abshir preaching, through a loudspeaker. He preached that intimacy before marriage is forbidden. He talked about purity—purity in deed and thought—and said the remedy for forbidden thoughts is more prayer.
Afterward, he tried to kiss me.
It was Ramadan, which made it triply worse. I was repelled. My reaction was completely physical: my skin crawled. I found I couldn’t bear him to touch me any more. There was something creepy about it. I detached myself from Abshir—he saw how shocked I was—and asked him to take us home.
In hindsight I don’t think of Abshir as a creep at all. He was just as trapped in a mental cage as I was. Abshir and I and all the other young people who joined the Muslim Brotherhood movement wanted to live as much as possible like our beloved Prophet, but the rules of the last Messenger of Allah were too strict, and their very strictness led us to hypocrisy. At the time, though, I could see only that either Abshir or Islam was thoroughly flawed, and of course I assumed it was Abshir.
I told Mahad I wanted to end things with Abshir. My brother was exasperated with me; he thought I was typically female, incapable of knowing my own mind. I wrote Abshir a letter. He pleaded and begged; it was as if he had lost his mind. He took to hanging out at Maryan’s house, lamenting to Ijaabo. The whole family—the whole Osman Mahamud clan—began looking after him.
Most of the family, including the women, explained my sudden change of heart as the result of female indecision. They said women were in the grip of invisible forces that played with their minds and made them switch from one extreme mood to another. That was why Allah had ordained that the testimony of two women is equal to that of one man, and also why women should not be allowed to govern or accept public offices, for leadership requires mindful contemplation and judgments reached after careful thought. Women lacked all these by nature. We were flighty and irrational, and it was much better for us if our fathers and other male guardians decided who we should spend the rest of our lives with.
Only Haweya understood me. She liked Abshir, but she hadn’t liked seeing the way I was with him: didn’t like the robe he had me wearing, and my recent Brotherhood behavior. Somehow in that period she managed to lay her hands on some books and passed them to me. Even the bad ones came as a cool stream to a dry riverbed. They provided me with an escape.
I was loath to admit it to her, but I was disappointed with Somalia. I had expected a country where everything made sense to me—a country where I would belong, where I could be accepted, where I could root and discover myself as a person. But even though I loved the heat, the wind, the smells, I didn’t fit in. There was a sense of belonging in Somalia: I could take for granted who I was, and enjoyed the easy acceptance of my family and clan. But even though Haweya had warned me, I was not prepared for the limitations and the price I had to pay for that sense of belonging. Everyone was involved in everyone else’s business. The complete lack of privacy, of individual space, and the social control were suffocating.
Conforming to my allotted role in Somali society—in a clan, in a subclan, in Islam—might have brought me peace of mind: a fixed destiny and a secure place in Heaven. I had less trouble with obedience than Haweya did. But still, I wanted more than to marry Abshir and bear his children, a destiny just like my mother’s. I wanted a challenge, something daring. I felt, suddenly, that the price of my sense of belonging in Somalia would be my sense of self.
Religion gave me a sense of peace only from its assurance of a life after death. It was fairly easy to follow most of the rules: good behavior, politeness, avoiding gossip and pork and usury and alcohol. But I had found that I couldn’t follow the deeper rules of Islam that control sexuality and the mind. I didn’t want to follow them. I wanted to be someone, to stand on my own. If I stayed in Somalia and married Abshir, I would become a faceless unit. That prospect seized me with a sudden panic. I was in a state of moral confusion—a crisis of faith.
I spoke to Mahad about my doubts and fears, and he comforted me. He said it was all normal, just part of growing up, that the questions, the feelings of confusion, and the sense of moral crisis were part of the transition into adulthood. He said, “Just remain sincere, and you’ll see, everything will be fine.”
I took to going to the mosque more often in that period as I searched for answers. I began to attend the Friday noon prayers at the central mosque, to listen to the imam’s sermons in Somali. Again, though, I found myself having mental debates with him.
You’re not supposed to argue with an imam. You are definitely not supposed to argue with the word of Allah. Islam is submission. You submit, on earth, in order to earn your place in Heaven. Life on earth is a test and I was failing it, even though I was trying as hard as I knew how to. I was failing as a Muslim. When I prayed, I felt that the angel on my left shoulder was growing weary of writing down all my sins. I imagined arriving in Heaven with a slim book of good deeds and a volume of sins as vast as the unabridged Oxford Dictionary. I wanted to feel a renewed sense of being a Muslim, a sense of the meaning of Allah. But I felt nothing. I told myself it meant that Allah didn’t want me. I wasn’t worthy.
* * *
Haweya moved out of Maryan’s house—she couldn’t stand Ijaabo’s disapproval and Arro’s constant sniping—and moved in with Ibado Dhadey Magan, our aunt. As the director of Digfeer Hospital, Ibado had contacts with the UN and got Haweya a job.
Then she found me a job, too, with a small office that the United Nations Development Program had set up to establish phone lines into rural Somalia. The work was not inspiring. I was supposed to be a secretary, but I often ended up translating for my boss, a rather bewildered Englishman. He would meet with a delegation from the provinces, and I would try to explain why he wouldn’t just give them the cash to set up a phone line. He would also try to explain why they shouldn’t tear up and resell the cables he’d just laid, while they ignored him and talked among themselves. He had no authority over his staff, but this was a so-called multilateral project, so he was under orders to respect their views and their way of doing things even if they had neither views nor methodology.
While I was working in that office I began to realize just how much fighting was going on in the country. More and more UN offices were closing and leaving the rural areas because they were unsafe. The Hawiye clan had formed their own political movement, called the United Somali Congress, led by Ali Mahdi and General Muhammad Farah Aideed. Although Mogadishu itself was peaceful, with Siad Barré still in control, the Hawiye were now in rebellion against the dictator in the south and the Darod and the Isaq in the north.
Working also gave me a close-up look at the Somali bureaucracy. Almost every civil servant I encountered seemed abysmally ignorant. Their scorn for all things gaalo, including my boss, was profound. (Gaalo usually means “white unbeliever,” but not always. Ma used this word for the Kenyans, too.) They were completely uninterested in doing their jobs, and spent their time scheming about how to “transfer” government funds, a euphemism for stealing them.
In Somalia, to have a stake in government was to have a family member in the place where tax money and money from kickbacks was distributed. No more, no less. I saw what that does to a nation: it destroys public trust.
In the face of such widespread corruption, no wonder people were susceptible to the lure of preachers who s
aid all the answers were to be found in the Holy Writings. Organizations set up by Brotherhood sympathizers were not corrupt. Many Somalis had ceased to trust the banking system and carried out financial transactions in shops and warehouses that were owned by Brotherhood people. The Brotherhood also gave free health care to the needy. They set up Quran schools for the unemployed youths who roamed the city. On Fridays they distributed grain and meat outside the mosque. Their ranks were swelling, as was their influence.
A UN car took me to and from work, and I wore a headscarf in the office, where I worked from eight until two. It was a comfortable routine, but my job was tedious. My boss was polite, but we had no personal interaction, no conversation or teaching. When work ended, I went back to Maryan’s house and talked to the maid.
Maryan’s house was filling up with more and more of her Marehan relatives from the countryside. They came in dribs and drabs, to escape the troubles in the provinces. Ijaabo and Maryan tried to enforce house rules and teach these country cousins to flush the toilet and sit on chairs, but if Ijaabo or Arro spoke to them sharply, the visitors responded angrily and accused the girls of having turned away from “our culture.”
There were reports that crime was rising in the neighborhood. One of Maryan’s recently arrived uncles bought a gun.
* * *
Haweya and I received constant invitations from people on my father’s side of the family. We went to my cousin Aflao’s house and spent time with his wife, Shukri, his sisters, Amran and Idil, and his cousin Ainanshie, who lived with them all and worked at Aflao’s espresso bar downtown. They were a clamorous, friendly family, full of gossip about Maryan’s side of the family. Ainanshie, in particular, hated anyone from Siad Barré’s clan, the Marehan, and he had a grudge against Maryan.
Aflao’s sister Amran took us strolling along the beach, where the Arabs lived in houses enclosed by high walls the color of the sand. Once in a while a woman completely covered in black would scuttle along the walls, heading in. These women walked barefoot, because of the sand, and all you could see of them was their feet. Even though these shapeless black heaps were moving forward, they might just as well have been inanimate; you couldn’t talk to them. Amran called them the Confined; she said, “Pay no attention to them,” with disdain. It reminded me of Saudi Arabia.
Soon after I broke it off with Abshir I stopped wearing the stiff, horribly hot cloak that the Brotherhood girls wore and reverted to my black robe from Nairobi; it was cooler. But on top of a long dress and long sleeves, even that robe came to seem excessive. It stood out a lot on the street. Nobody in Somalia wears black. I began dressing in a light-colored dirha, like most people: a long tunic with a flap on the side, and a cotton shawl draped on my head.
Far fewer women dressed in Western clothes in Mogadishu in 1990 than they had just ten or twenty years before. They had always been a minority, but now the tide had visibly shifted against them. Ainanshie used to say, “Before the Brotherhood came, you could see everyone’s arms and legs. We never used to notice. But now that women are covering so much, all I can think about is those round calves and silky arms and the hair, smelling of coconut. I never used to think about a neck before, but ooh, a neck is so sexy now.”
Ijaabo’s schoolmates and Ainanshie’s pals from downtown would laugh at the Brotherhood’s gibberish and sneer that it was all Arab cultural dominance, but a few weeks later some of them, too, would be wearing robes and spouting Arabic. The movement wasn’t only about religion. Its members were hardworking and clever. They probably received money from Saudi Arabia, but there were also lots of successful businesses run by Brotherhood followers, especially in transportation and money transfers. They helped swell the Brotherhood’s coffers.
One afternoon, Ainanshie was walking us back to Aunt Maryan’s neighborhood after lunch, as he always did. Because he hated Maryan and all the Marehan, he used to leave us about a hundred yards from her house. Just before we reached the corner where we usually bade him good-bye, a hand gripped my neck, hard, and I felt the sharp blade of a knife pressed against my throat. I looked at Haweya: a scrawny man with huge, red-rimmed dark eyes was pointing a knife at her, too. I assumed this was the end. I remember thinking, “Well, we made it to age eighteen and twenty.” I knew Ainanshie was armed—he always had a little pistol on him—but under these circumstances, that wasn’t going to be much use.
“The gold!” said the man who gripped Haweya. I croaked, “We’re not wearing any.” The man holding me started feeling my ears and neck under my shawl, keeping the sharp knife pointed into my throat. He sneered, “Where do these tall beautiful girls come from, and who is this little shit they’re standing on the street with?”
The man was Isaq; I could tell from his accent. Mogadishu was filled with Isaq refugees, displaced from the north by the fighting. I thought perhaps he would let us go if we were Isaq, too, so I quickly began reciting my grandmother’s clan, just as she taught me. Ainanshie caught on; he was very calm. He didn’t pull his gun out; if he had, my throat would have been slit in a minute. “See? These girls are your Isaq sisters,” he told the muggers. “And I am married to another of their sisters. I am escorting them home.”
Just as quickly as they appeared, the men melted away.
After that, Haweya and I realized that it wasn’t safe to walk on the streets of Mogadishu alone anymore. Every day there were reports of killings, rapes, and houses burned by armed robbers. Homeless refugees lived all over the place. Displaced people, like the Isaq men who attacked us, had moved to the city with nothing to lose, armed and filled with rage. Army soldiers also roamed about with their weapons. Although we didn’t yet know this, large sections of the army had defected and were joining the various clan-led factions all over Somalia who could not wait to get their teeth into Siad Barré’s throat.
In contrast to the clan warfare, the Brotherhood seemed to have a more universal character because it included people of every clan. Of these groups, the Brotherhood seemed to many to be the most reliable. As its following grew, the movement became more self-assured. Brotherhood imams began operating in larger mosques, no longer restricting themselves to semiclandestine houses. We heard more and more gossip about openly political sermons announcing that the government’s days were over and the time for Islamic law had come.
Siad Barré began sending troops to mosques, to disperse large gatherings; they would shoot their machine guns overhead, as a signal of who was in power, and people were often killed in the ensuing stampedes. After every such action, the Brotherhood’s support in the city would grow. The movement had become a power to reckon with in businesses, hospitals, schools, and universities. Ijaabo’s university, Lafoole, on the outskirts of Mogadishu, was pretty much a Brotherhood enclave now.
In mid-1990, a group of politicians—elders representing virtually every clan—published a manifesto calling for Siad Barré to resign. They told him that the country was in chaos and he should relinquish power so elections could be held. Siad Barré had some of these men thrown in jail. A stable peace in the country seemed remote.
Maryan’s country relatives bought several small machine guns and began sitting at her gate, day and night, with coils of ammunition across their bellies. The same happened at other relatives’ homes. Guards armed to the teeth, often clan members from the countryside, took up positions in front of the doors of their urban relatives to protect their lives and property.
* * *
I fell out with Arro and moved in to Ibado Dhadey’s house. One particularly lugubrious Saturday, I decided to visit my Aunt Khadija, my mother’s much older half-sister. Khadija was grand and imperious, almost as old as my grandmother but taller, more regal, and even sharper-tongued. I groaned inwardly as I thought about the tongue-lashing she was bound to inflict on me for having visited her so little in the months I’d been in Mogadishu.
I was careful to be impeccably clean and ironed my clothes, and I made sure I had a present for her. Khadija was a hawk about eti
quette. She pounced on every infelicity of diction. You had to wait for her to greet you, and then greet her poetically back, standing perfectly upright.
I acquitted myself acceptably at the doorway; we swept into the dining room for tea. I marveled at the room and its antique European chairs and knives and forks. Khadija must have been the only woman in Mogadishu to live this way. I was so astonished that, despite my wary pledge to myself to put on my best manners, I made the mistake of flopping on a chair.
Khadija was at me in a minute. “Didn’t poor Asha even teach you how to sit? Are you a little monkey?” Her tongue-lashing went on and on, comparing me to a host of little animals of which no manners could be expected, and constantly tossing out half-veiled insults at my mother, who hadn’t trained me right. It was really a bravura performance, and although part of me was insulted, I also marveled at the play of language—this beautiful, haughty, dry prose, delivered by an old woman sitting ramrod straight, with the steadiest gaze I had ever seen.
You couldn’t rebel, or cry, or protest when Khadija scolded you. If you did, you’d get another lecture on how weak your character was, how you would never learn anything, and die as shabbily as you were born. You were required to look her in the eye, nodding to show you were taking it in, and I did that. I could see my stoicism pleased my august aunt.
When she was finished, Khadija commenced serving tea. I turned toward the door and was startled to see a young man standing in the doorway. He was strikingly good-looking, and he was grinning broadly at my predicament. Clearly he had witnessed the whole scene.
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