Infidel

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  I wouldn’t stay here, in Germany; it would be too easy for Mursal to find me. I would get to England. There I would be able to speak the language and understand the culture, with its meadows and cows, and the Queen, and Mayfair and Whitechapel—I knew it all, I thought, from books and Monopoly games. I would go there. I had my certificate from Valley Secretarial College with me; I would work, save money, study. Nobody would know where I was.

  I didn’t know how I would escape or what freedom might mean. But I knew what course my life would take if I went to Canada. I would have a life like my mother’s, and Jawahir’s, and like the life of this woman with whom I was staying in Bonn. I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent—always—on someone treating me well.

  I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it, and now I could see it, smell it in the air around me: the kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own.

  * * *

  Young Ahmed took me all over Bonn. He was friendly; we talked about all sorts of things. As we headed back to his house, I asked him, “Tell me, if I wanted to go to England, how would I do that?” Ahmed said it wouldn’t be easy; there was sea between Germany and England, so you had to have a visa. The countries around Germany never checked you for visas, though. It would be easier, he said, to go to Holland or Belgium.

  Where were we, exactly? All I could remember from geography lessons was a chapter on the wealthy Rhinelands: Germany, Holland, Belgium, was it? I recalled only that our teacher had pointed out that all put together, these places were smaller than Tanzania. I kicked myself for not paying more attention in class; if I had, at least I would know where I was.

  But Holland—I knew someone in Holland. Someone who would help me. Fadumo, the wife of Mahamed Abdihalin, whom I had helped rescue from the refugee camp in Dhobley—she had claimed asylum in Holland. She was living there, in some kind of camp.

  Young Ahmed told me Holland was easy, only one and a half hours away by train. You just bought a ticket and went there, no visa necessary.

  That afternoon I went to the call box at the corner of the street and dialed the phone number of Fadumo’s refugee center. She was so warm and cheerful, so happy to congratulate me on the news of my wedding. I broached the idea of paying her a visit; she was delighted.

  I didn’t tell her I was planning to run away, or give her a date. I didn’t tell Ahmed either. I just told his mother that I wanted to visit a relative for a couple of days, and I asked Ahmed to take me to the train station and help me buy a ticket. I left my big suitcase behind at Amina’s house; I took only a duffel bag, with my papers.

  When I left the house, I took one last look at the suitcase filled with my trousseau: silk dirhas and frankincense, all kinds of Somali accoutrements that I was leaving behind. I had two long skirts with me, some tunics, my coat—what I could carry. I told myself I would explain it all one day to my father.

  It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn’t have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight when I arrived at Amsterdam Central Station. A young North African man came up and asked if he could help me. He took me to the counter where I could change some money and showed me the phone booth. He was very kind—perhaps it was the headscarf I was wearing, or the bewildered look on my face. He gave me his phone number in case I had any problems getting around.

  I called Fadumo. She said it was far too late to make it to her refugee center in Almelo that evening. She gave me the phone number of her cousin Mudoh, who lived much closer, in Volendam. I called Mudoh: it was dark and I was in Amsterdam Central Station and had no idea what else to do. I said, “I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi Magan, and I’m looking for a place to stay the night.” Mudoh told me which bus to take, how much to pay, where to get off.

  It was the middle of the night, and after a few stops I was the only person on the bus. I was very frightened. I kept asking the driver if it was Volendam yet, expecting something horrible to happen. He drove far, and fast. But he didn’t carry me away and cut me into pieces or rape me, as I half-feared. He dropped me off near a green phone booth, at precisely the place that Mudoh had described.

  Mudoh’s husband picked me up. He was Dutch. Mudoh had not just married outside the clan, but also outside the Somali nation and outside Islam. She, a woman, had married a gaalo man. Even I was a bit taken aback by this. I had never met a Somali woman who had done such a thing. I asked Mudoh how her family had reacted when they learned of it. She said they called her filthy: they made her outcast. But after the collapse of Mogadishu, Mudoh told me, they became terribly polite. They asked constantly for help, and money. Mudoh gave help, but only to her closest family, her brothers. Apparently she had cut the clan out of her life.

  I decided to trust Mudoh. I told her everything. I said I didn’t want to go through with my marriage, I wanted to go to England. Mudoh said she wouldn’t advise that. She said it would be too complicated to get there. I should stay in Holland, she told me. I could use my English here, too. She said I should ask for asylum, as Fadumo had; I should go to her and ask her how she’d done it.

  I spent the weekend with Mudoh. She walked me around her neighborhood. All the houses were alike, and all the same color, laid out in rows like neat little cakes warm from the oven. They were all new homes with flouncy white lace curtains, and the grass in front was all green and mown evenly, to the same height, like a neat haircut. In Nairobi, except in the rich estates, colors were garish and houses were completely anarchic—a mansion, a half-built shanty hut, a vacant lot all jumbled together—so this, too, was new to me.

  Mudoh put the trash out on the street on Sunday evening. All along the street people were doing the same thing. She explained that there were rules: you had to put the garbage containers out at the proper time, in the proper way. Brown was for organic waste; green was for plastic; and newspapers were something else entirely, some other time. If you faithfully observed these rules, the government came the next morning and whisked it all away for recycling. Wow, I thought. In Kenya you feared the government, and when it did come around to your house it was frightening. Garbage you hauled to a dump at the end of the road. This seemed like a life I could adjust to.

  On Monday I went to Almelo to ask Fadumo how to go about becoming a refugee in Holland. Fadumo was so happy to see me; she hugged me and cried. Her camp didn’t look anything like a refugee camp in the sense of Dhobley; these weren’t tents, but houses—temporary, but adequate—and everything was orderly. Fadumo had one whole prefab to herself, with her five children; one, a baby just born.

  We sat down to talk and I told her everything. Fadumo was horrified and asked me, pleaded with me, not to do it. “Think of your father,” she begged. Fadumo was Osman Mahamud, so of course she felt it keenly: she must protect me from making a terrible error, something that would damage me forever and hurt the honor of the whole clan. Her marriage was arranged by her parents, she told me, and it was a happy one. Arranged marriages were best. An arranged marriage within the family with your father’s blessing: that was the best destiny.

  I made her tell me anyway. She said asking for asylum was easy. There were special receiving centers for refugees; the closest one was in Zwolle. You went there, and you asked to be a refugee. You had to go as quickly as possible and say you had recently run away from the civil war, and that you had only just got to Holland. There was a time limit.<
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  I went to Zwolle. The center was easy to find. Everyone seemed to speak English, or at least want to understand it. There was a policeman in uniform, and I felt a sudden fear when I saw him, but he told me politely, “Our center is full, we’re not taking any more refugees, but you can go to Zeewolde.” He gave me a bus card and a train ticket and instructions for the journey. He said I should go to see Refugee Aid before I registered, and complimented me on my English.

  Police to me were oppressors, demanders of bribes. They were never helpful. I asked him “Why are you helping me?” and he smiled and said, “Those are the rules.” I asked, “And is every policeman this kind?” and he replied, “I sure hope so.”

  After this, anything was possible. To me, government was bad. It was crooked and duplicitous and it oppressed you. And here all these people were busy helping you and this for foreigners. How on earth did they treat their own clans?

  On the bus to Zeewolde, I stared at the countryside around me. It was flat, with long farm roads and windmills and fat, cream-colored woolly sheep—more wool than sheep, I thought, accustomed to our scrawny black-headed herds. There were lines of water everywhere: dikes. Buses were sleek and clean; their doors opened by themselves. Near Zeewolde, the land seemed emptier and the vegetation drier, and the land was crisscrossed by wider ditches; it was a polder, new land that the Dutch were reclaiming from the sea, though at the time I had no idea of all that.

  I was facing a huge opportunity, but it was daunting. At twenty-two years old, I was on my own for the first time. I would have to see if I could make it without falling into the hazards that my family, and most Muslims, think befall girls on their own: ending up in prostitution, or working as a maid, or marrying beneath your status to a man who will exploit you—out of haste, your name smeared.

  Waiting to change buses, I noticed that the bus came precisely at the time it was supposed to, 2:37, to the minute. It had been the same with the buses in Bonn, and this eerie punctuality seemed positively uncanny. How on earth could anybody predict a bus would arrive at exactly 2:37? Did they also control the rules of time?

  The Zeewolde Reception Center was a huge compound of bungalows, each one surrounded by a little hedge. There was a tennis court, and people playing volleyball, and close to the offices I saw a signpost for a swimming pool. It was all quite unbelievable.

  I went into the little office near the gate and showed a man the paper I had received from the policeman in Zwolle. This man shook my hand, and said “Welcome,” and told me he would take me to Admin. He picked up my duffel bag in one hand and two bags containing blankets and bedsheets and towels in the other, and led me to a bungalow.

  All around us were asylum seekers. There were a lot of Kurds and Iraqis and quite a few Iranians, who all had pale faces, though the Dutch call them black. A large number of women were from Africa, dressed in minis and T-shirts; I guessed from the way they looked that they were from Liberia and Congo, two countries at civil war. There were a few huddled heaps of cloth: these were the Arab women, sitting on the ground with their robes around them, watching the men.

  There were also a lot of people who were white; I asked the Dutch man who these people were and he said, “They are the Muslims.” He saw my surprise, and added, “From Bosnia.”

  He took me to Bungalow 28 and said I would be sharing with three Ethiopian girls. Every Thursday, he told me, I could take my sheets to the laundry and receive a clean set. I gaped at him. He explained that dinner would be at five-thirty in the canteen, and told me that tomorrow I would receive a fuller introduction; someone else would show me where the interview would take place, where the lawyer’s office was, and the health center. Health care was free, he informed me, and so was room and board: it was all provided by the government. I would also receive a weekly allowance for my basic needs.

  I had never heard of a welfare state. I had no idea why complete strangers were giving me so much. Where did they get the money from? Why didn’t it run out?

  The next morning I had to go to the immigration police. They fingerprinted me and had me fill out forms, but it was utterly different from anything I had expected. It was “How are you, ma’am? Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee?” and every step of the procedure was explained; they even asked if I needed a translator. Then they gave me a green card, which made me an official asylum seeker, someone who had asked for an interview to be considered for refugee status.

  The police sent me to the Refugee Aid office, where two women told me I was eligible for free legal advice and walked me through the procedures. They asked why I wanted to live in Holland, and I told them my story, honestly: my father had obliged me to marry a man I didn’t accept, and I didn’t want to go to Canada to live with him. One of the women said, “It’s horrible what has happened to you, but how many women from Somalia are married against their will?”

  “It’s our culture,” I said. “Practically all of them.”

  “And what about other countries?” she asked me. “Does it happen elsewhere?”

  “I think in every Muslim country,” I told her.

  “So you see?” she told me. “It’s impossible to give refugee status to every woman who has been married off by her family.” She read me the Geneva Convention on refugees, and said, “If your story is not true and not consistent, and if it does not fall into these categories, then your chances are slim. To be a refugee, you must prove you have a clear, specific fear of persecution.”

  I went back to the bungalow. I had a meeting the next day with a government-supplied lawyer. I started drafting a story based on my experience leaving Mogadishu in 1991, and the experiences of the refugees in our house in Park Road. This story was detailed, consistent, but it was an invention. With hindsight I’m not proud of this fact, but yes, it is true that I did not tell my full story to get into Holland.

  In addition, I didn’t say my name was Ayaan Hirsi Magan; that would make it too easy for my family to track me down. I hit on my grandfather’s birth name, Ali, the name his father gave him, before people called him The Protector. A modest name, a name easy to disappear with. I would be Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born November 13, 1967.

  August 6 was my interview with the Dutch Immigration Service. My lawyer, a careful woman with long black hair, came with me. When I knocked on his office door the immigration official bounded out from behind his desk to shake my hand. He was polite, but I felt he was testing me, trying to catch me out. He kept probing my story, and I left feeling that he had seen through me. I would be rejected for sure.

  After the interview I was in a constant state of tension. I thought Mursal would find me, or even Osman Moussa himself; both would be hunting for me now. I watched buses drive up to the center, filled with refugees from Bosnia. I watched CNN and the BBC on the TV at the asylum center and felt horrible. I was occupying a bed meant for someone deserving, someone from Liberia or Bosnia, who had suffered. I was a spoiled brat, stupid and ungrateful, who should thank her father for finding her a husband in a rich country.

  I was carrying a huge weight of guilt over what had I done to our family. And I felt fear, not of being alone but of the unknown: What would become of me? But I also felt a sense of freedom. This was real life that I was experiencing. I remember thinking, in that refugee center, “If I fall down dead right now, then at least I’ve seen the world.” I didn’t for one moment ever seriously entertain the idea of going back to Germany and picking up my visa to Canada. That part of my life was over.

  The Ethiopian girls with whom I shared the bungalow at first seemed frivolous and hopelessly silly. They said I was so lucky to be from a country mired in civil war, which meant I was far more likely than they were to get refugee status and be allowed to live in Europe. The time they spent getting dressed, and the clothes they wore! The makeup and the miniskirts, and lending each other belts—the whole procedure took forever, and then they went out uncovered, perfectly happy with themselves. Mina was the friendliest. One morning she told me,
“Come on, take off the scarf and the long skirt. You’re pretty.”

  “I will not!” I said. “I am a Muslim.” This was precisely what people had always warned me about: the devil, in the form of Ethiopian girls, come to tempt me. But this Mina, who had been very welcoming and helpful and in every way agreeable up till now, asked me, “But why? Why do Muslims have to cover themselves and never have sex and all that? What is wrong with you?”

  Growing up in Nairobi, everyone knew about Ethiopians: they seemed to have sex whenever they felt like it. There was a house of young Ethiopian refugees down the road from us, and people used to say that they went at it like goats, all the time. The Ethiopians would insult the Somalis in return, saying Somalis don’t know how to enjoy sex and are all frustrated, that’s why they’re always fighting people. This kind of caricature very much informed how we felt about Christians, because Somalis and Ethiopians have always been at each other’s throats, since time began.

  “Why should I uncover my naked skin?” I asked Mina. “Don’t you have any shame? What are you hoping to achieve walking around undressed? Don’t you know how it affects men?”

  “I wear these skirts because I like having pretty legs,” said Mina. “They won’t be pretty for long, and I want to enjoy them.” She shook one at me and said, “If anyone else enjoys them, so much the better.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I said, “This is precisely the opposite of what I have been brought up to believe.” And all of them, because all the girls had gathered around by now, chimed in, “But why? Why are all you Muslims so difficult?”

  “But if men see women dressed like you are now, with your arms bare and everything naked, then they will become confused and sexually tempted,” I told them. “They will be blinded by desire.”

  The girls began laughing, and Mina said, “I don’t think it’s really like that. And you know, if they get tempted, that’s not such a big deal.”