Leiden was so pretty it was like walking through an illustration from the Ladybird books of fairy tales with which I’d learned English in Nairobi. Houses had long-necked bell towers, stepping-stone roofs, and curiously tiny, twisted staircases that I always found so perilous to navigate, each little step much thinner than your foot. Every staircase made me feel more foreign, yet I marveled at this dollhouse of a city.
So, midway through my year at the vocational college, I had applied to Leiden. That was not a happy experience. The woman at the desk told me she was legally obliged to register my application, but made it clear that she thought it most unwise. She sent me to talk to the dean of students, who also seemed dubious. She told me I would do far better to return to vocational college and complete my three-year social work course there: it would qualify me for a real job right away. I might fail a degree in political science in Leiden. It was perhaps too abstract to be useful. Better to stay where I was, it might suit me better. I told her I wanted to apply anyway. I was determined to try, at least.
Now that I had my propadeuse, the condition for my entry, I could begin classes in Leiden. Almost immediately, I was swamped. The first three courses were basic: Introduction to Political Science, Introduction to History, Introduction to Public Administration. There were piles of books to read every week: books on the art of governance, books about what is a state, books about the history of Holland and Europe. We didn’t have to memorize them, but we needed to know the themes, the theories, and—this was new—we needed to develop our own opinion. We were always asked what we thought.
In spite of everyone telling me what a poor choice political science was, I loved it. To others it might seem dry, but not to me. From birth I had been fed shards of this story: democracy, justice, nation, war. Now, with kind and thoughtful teaching, good governance was making sense to me as a process, something that had grown.
European history was a gripping chronicle, which began with chaos. Holland came from nothing: mud and poverty and foreign rule. Even the land was constructed by a collective effort. The sea tides roaring over half the country were too powerful to confront individually, so the Dutch learned to be clever and work together. They cut channels through the silt to control the flooding and built new land where the sea had been. They learned to be resourceful and persistent. They learned negotiation. They learned that reason is better than force. Above all, they learned to compromise.
Half of Holland was Protestant, half Catholic. In every other European country, that was a recipe for massacre, but in Holland, people worked it out. After a period of oppression and bloodshed, they learned that you cannot win a civil war: everyone loses. They set up a system so people could be separate and equal. Two big blocs developed in Dutch society, Protestants and Catholics. Later a third bloc developed for social democrats, who were both Protestant and Catholic, and there was also a much smaller group of nonreligious, secular people called the liberals. These blocs were the “pillars,” the foundation of Dutch society.
These pillars operated just like clans. For generations, Dutch Catholics and Protestants went to separate schools, hospitals, clubs, shops; they even had separate channels on TV and separate radio stations. As late as 1995, in Leiden, the pillars at least partly defined who you were and who you knew, as the clans did in Somalia. But here everything was negotiated and shared out in apparently seamless equanimity.
I came to realize how deeply the Dutch are attached to freedom, and why. Holland was in many ways the capital of the European Enlightenment. Four hundred years ago, when European thinkers severed the hard bands of church dogma that had constrained people’s minds, Holland was the center of free thought. The Enlightenment cut European culture from its roots in old fixed ideas of magic, kingship, social hierarchy, and the domination of priests, and regrafted it onto a great strong trunk that supported the equality of each individual, and his right to free opinions and self-rule—so long as he did not threaten civic peace and the freedom of others. Here, in Leiden, was where the Enlightenment had taken hold. Here, the Dutch let each other be free. And here, this commitment to freedom took hold of me, too.
Sometimes I could almost sense a little shutter clicking shut in my brain, so that I could keep reading my textbooks without struggling to align their content with my belief in Islam. Sometimes it seemed as if almost every page I read challenged me as a Muslim. Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
People had contested the whole basis of the idea of God’s power on earth, and they had done it with reasoning that was beautiful and compelling. Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale. Freud said we had power over ourselves. Spinoza said there were no miracles, no angels, no need to pray to anything outside ourselves: God was us, and nature. Emil Durkheim said humans fantasized religion to give themselves a sense of security. I read all this, and then had to try to stuff it all behind the little shutter in my brain.
In every way, to read these books of Western history was sinning. Even the history of how modern states formed confronted me with the contradictions of my belief in Allah. The European separation of God’s world from the state was itself haram. The Quran says there can be no government without God; the Quran is Allah’s book of laws for the conduct of worldly affairs.
In February 1995 there were huge floods across Holland. When Somalis are faced with catastrophic weather, drought and flooding, they all get together and pray. Natural disasters are signs from God, to show humans they are misbehaving on earth. But the Dutch blamed their government for failing to maintain the dikes properly. I didn’t see anybody praying.
It was such a strange paradox. In Holland everything had been founded on people’s religion, but the whole nation, at its core, seemed so ungodly. Here one could (and many did) contest the very existence of God at every turn. People openly disbelieved every aspect of religion. The very shape of Holland seemed like a challenge to Allah. Reclaiming land from the sea, controlling flooding with canals—it was like defying God.
Almost everything was secular here. God was mocked everywhere. The most common expletive used in Dutch is Godverdomme. I heard it all the time—“God damn me,” to me the worst thing possible—and yet nobody was struck by a thunderbolt. Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly. This man-made system of government was so much more stable, peaceful, prosperous, and happy than the supposedly God-devised systems I had been taught to respect.
Sometimes the shutter wouldn’t close any more: I had stuffed too many ideas behind it. I would have an attack of guilt, and take stock of myself: the trousers, the hair, the books, the ideas. I would think about Sister Aziza’s angels, who were certainly still on my shoulders, watching me, recording it all. I would tell myself, weakly, that I was pursuing knowledge. If Allah had predetermined everything, he must have foreseen me doing this.
I told myself that, one day, when I had developed the willpower, when I was back in a Muslim environment, I would find the strength to repent and truly obey God’s laws. Meanwhile, I would be honest. I would try not to harm anyone. I would not myself adopt the ideas I was reading about. But I would keep reading them.
* * *
With the exception of statistics, which I failed repeatedly, I enjoyed every subject at Leiden, particularly political philosophy. Humans have made so many observations; I felt so lucky that I didn’t have to think of all of this by myself. It was such a privilege to watch people thinking, page after page. Everything in the books was so beautifully put together, so rational. We learned to define, to think clearly about what we were saying, to set out our thinking in building blocks and argue with data. In that way we improved on older theories and expanded our understanding of the world.
Most of those first courses in Leiden stressed the empirical. Just the facts: the facts themselves are a beautiful idea. They were about method and reason. There was no place here for emotions and irrationality.
Sometime
s, reading history or philosophy books, I would actually get goose bumps. I remember this happening when I read the story of the First World War. At the end of the nineteenth century, science brought industry, wealth, and medicine to Europe. Then, as the century turned, countries become suspicious of each other. They formed alliances and stocked arms. They sought power and territory. War broke out, and a whole generation of young men, who had just recently escaped from poverty and disease, were mowed down in the trenches. People came back to their senses and stopped the war, only to repeat it twenty years later. It was appalling, but also completely gripping to me, like a novel, and it bore so many parallels with what I had known in other countries.
When I turned and looked at the kids sitting next to me, they clearly didn’t feel the same thrill I did. To them, it was a story they knew by heart already, just another grade. Most of the students in Leiden were eighteen years old, and this was their first experience of living away from their parents.
All the students in Leiden seemed to be white, with blond hair and light blue eyes. There were clear clan distinctions among them, however. There were the girls with their hair in stiff little bobs, who wore blue eye makeup and sweaters that said Benetton on them; they were the clones. The girls who colored their hair and let the roots show were trash. And girls whose hair was oily and unwashed were sleazy; they did drugs. As soon as a girl who looked slightly different left a group of students, the others gossiped about her. Although these girls identified each other by dress and accent—by class, not clan—it was just like being among Somalis, trying to figure out if everyone was Osman Mahamud and then all feeling comfortable to talk about the Hawiye.
Sometimes I would remark during a lesson that something was a class issue. People would always say, “We have no class problems in Holland. We are an egalitarian society.” I didn’t believe it for a second.
Top people sent their children to Leiden, CEOs and people in the government. These children had their own upper-class fraternity, Minerva, within which they divided into old money—the old Dutch nobility—and the nouveaux riches. They all gathered in the grand old Minerva student house, and their social lives circulated within the club. Most of them did law or banking. If they were doing social science, they studied government. Political science was apparently considered left-wing.
There were all sorts of fraternities. Catena was for nonconformists, kids from intellectual families in Amsterdam who didn’t want to go through a week of hazing. They had multiple pierced ears, wore dirty clothes, and organized environmental protests. Quintus was for people who couldn’t get into Minerva and wished they had. In my first few weeks people took me around to these fraternities. When they told me about the de-greening week—that’s the Dutch phrase for hazing—I told them I had already lost my bloom. I was twenty-five; this was not for me. I had been “de-greened” by life.
I wasn’t tempted either by the student dorm I visited when I first arrived in Leiden. It was filthy. So I rented a room from a lovely woman, Chantal, who had a big house in the suburbs. I bought a brand-new bicycle, which I still have a decade later, and rode it to class every morning.
For the first few months, I didn’t socialize much. When I wasn’t studying I was working as a translator. I had now registered as a Somali interpreter, and I worked all the time. In the morning, if I didn’t have class, I would leave my beeper on. I bought my own phone so I could be available for phone translations from all over the country until late at night. I was called by police, by hospitals, by law courts, by all kinds of shelters.
The worst calls were when I had to break the news to someone that, no, the authorities won’t allow your wife and children to come to Holland to be with you. No, we cannot give you the opportunity to go back to Somalia and get your children, even though you have been raped and your husband has been killed and four of your fingers have been cut off. Or, I have to inform you that you have HIV/AIDS. Sometimes I would put the phone down in my little room and shake with the feelings I had just translated.
One Somali girl lived in an asylum center, just as I had, and she had an Ethiopian girlfriend, just like me. This Somali girl got in a car with four men; she thought she was meeting her girlfriend at a party. She was raped repeatedly, then ran away from the house and was found in the village, which was when the police called me. I sat in my little room in the attic of Chantal’s lovely home and tried to translate what they were telling her. I explained to this girl that she must not wash herself, because the sperm and blood that were still trailing between her thighs were evidence. I couldn’t ask if she had been infibulated because the rules are you can’t insert your own questions and opinions, you are purely a machine. I could only try to calm her down.
The girl was completely hysterical. She was frantic that the other people in the asylum center would shun her because she was defiled. The policewoman I was translating for had me talk the girl through her story and persuade her to give evidence. She told her that in six months they would give her an HIV test, if she wanted one. I asked the policewoman if it would be possible to have her transferred to another refugee center, so there would be no shame; she agreed. The girl grew calmer.
I put the phone down, blown to pieces by this horrible world, and then I had to walk downstairs to have dinner with Chantal. There could not have been a greater contrast with her tidy, gentle, pleasant life. Sometimes it was hard even to talk about what I had been doing. When I told Chantal my stories, she was horrified. She said these things were unheard of in Holland.
It didn’t occur to me then, but this was also another kind of education—an education in suffering, abuse, pain, misery, and the evils of ignorance.
I did abortion clinic translations. If it was a phone translation, then mostly I had to explain to the girl what abortion means, translate a few questions: Does the father know? Have you thought about keeping the baby? I knew the form by heart. Then, when I put the phone down, I would know that this girl would now have an abortion, and I had been instrumental in this sinful act. I would stuff it all behind the shutter in my brain and go on to my next class or appointment.
Sometimes I would have to go to the abortion clinic and explain to the girl that because her scar was still almost completely closed up, she would have to have complete anesthesia to cut it open and remove the baby. The girl would always be horrified and insist, “Then you must resew me afterward.” Mostly the doctors would nod, but they never did it. One young doctor asked me to explain. “It’s unnecessary and dangerous for you, and we in Holland don’t do these things,” he told me to tell the girl. She just cried, helplessly.
When I went to the awful places—the police stations, the prisons, the abortion clinics and penal courts, the unemployment offices and the shelters for battered women—I began to notice how many dark faces looked back at me. It was not something you could avoid noticing, coming straight in from creamy-blond Leiden. I began to wonder why so many immigrants—so many Muslims—were there.
It was particularly striking when I visited women’s shelters—terrible, depressing places. The addresses were supposed to be secret. Perhaps thirty women, but sometimes as many as a hundred, would live in each shelter, and children ran everywhere in the living space. There were hardly any white women: only women from Morocco, from Turkey, from Afghanistan—Muslim countries—alongside some Hindu women from Surinam.
The Somali cases were almost always the same, again and again. The husband took all the welfare money, spent it on qat, and when the wife hid the money he would beat her until finally the police intervened.
One Somali woman was about my age, from a rural area. She couldn’t read or write Somali or speak a word of Dutch. She had been married in Somalia, to a man who had come to visit, looking for a wife, and who then brought her straight to Holland. She almost never left the apartment on her own: she was frightened of the foreign streets. Her husband beat her; finally, the police brought her, horribly bruised and cut, to the women’s shelter. This woma
n was not only homeless in Holland; she could not go back to her family in Somalia either. She told me it was Allah’s will. “Allah gave me these circumstances and, if I am patient, Allah will remove this misery.”
Women like this never pressed charges. The prospect of making their way alone seemed to them impossible. They were convinced that by accepting systematic, really merciless abuse, they were serving Allah and earning a place in Heaven. They always went back to their husband.
I was only a translator, but I absorbed these stories and had to confront the unfairness of it. The social workers would always ask the women, “Do you have family here? Can they help you?” The women would say to me, “But they support my husband, of course!” You must obey your husband if you are Muslim. If you refuse your husband and he rapes you, that is your fault. Allah says husbands should beat their wives if they misbehave; it’s in the Quran.
This attitude made me angry. I knew that many Dutch women were abused, too. But their community and their family didn’t approve of it. Nobody blamed them for the violence, or told them to obey better.
I went to prisons, to the penitentiaries in Rotterdam and The Hague. Mostly they were violent assault cases; Somalis weren’t usually involved in stealing or dealing drugs. But if Somali men disagree, losing their temper and grabbing a weapon is almost second nature. One man had hit his landlord on the head with a hammer when he came to the flat to ask for the rent. Social services sent the man to counseling, but I don’t believe there was jail time.
I went to remedial schools, schools for children with learning disabilities, schools for the mentally handicapped and the deaf. Once, I was called to a school to help a teacher explain to some parents that their seven-year-old was extremely aggressive. If he beat up one more child he would have to be sent to a special school for aggression treatment. I had trouble even finding the words in Somali to explain what aggression treatment might be.
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