Those meetings were honest grillings. Some of the Party leaders thought I was brazen; a few were flat-out hostile. Most told me, “Your cause is brave, and just, but you don’t belong in our party.” One woman, the baron of the Liberals in Leiden, grilled me for an hour and then said, “I think I’m going to love you very much. You have a certain authenticity about you, and that is very much a part of our party.”
To everyone who asked me, I made it clear that when I first arrived in Holland, I changed my story on my asylum application: I gave another name and didn’t tell the whole truth. I said this on TV and in radio and newspaper interviews and told the VVD leadership about it when they asked me if I had anything in my past that might prevent me from functioning properly as a politician. It simply was never an issue.
In the end, Gerrit Zalm got enough support from the Party barons to put me on the VVD list as number sixteen. That meant I was almost certain to be elected.
* * *
That week, on the BBC, I listened to the news of riots that had erupted in Nigeria. A young woman journalist assigned to cover the Miss World competition there had written, “Muslims thought it was immoral to bring ninety-two women to Nigeria to ask them to revel in vanity. What would the Prophet Muhammad think? . . . He would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.”
More than two hundred people were killed in the riots that broke out. The office of her newspaper was burned down, and the reporter was forced to leave the country. Now I listened to a snotty British woman who had organized the pageant. Instead of blaming the violence on the men who were burning down houses and murdering people, she blamed the young reporter for making “unfortunate remarks.”
I was incensed by this excusing of fanaticism. That journalist had written nothing wrong. She was right: the Prophet married most of his wives because they caught his eye in one way or another. As a gesture of solidarity with that young journalist, I decided that when I got the chance, I would say publicly what I thought the Prophet Muhammad was really about.
That moment came just a few days later, when Arjan Visser, a Dutch journalist from Trouw, asked me to participate in a series of interviews he was doing, using the Ten Commandments as a framework to talk about the place of religion in people’s lives. In the interview I told him what I thought was the real nature of the Prophet. In the next few weeks, the interview didn’t run, and I forgot about it.
* * *
On November 30, the day of the Liberal Party Congress, I walked into a huge room full of security people. There was a wide bank of cameras going flashflashflash at me. I was supposed to stand with the other candidates on a platform with a microphone, where each of us would introduce ourselves, one by one. But I shivered and froze at the doorway. I couldn’t move. In front of me were all those cameras and behind me the bodyguards. I felt hunted, trapped. I was shaking. Very softly, Gerrit Zalm told me to be calm, to breathe, and not to worry.
One after the other, the candidates made their speeches, during which the room was only moderately attentive. Candidate fourteen, candidate fifteen. It was my turn. I had prepared a small speech with the help of Neelie and her husband, the politician Bram Peper, but I got frightened again, because when I stood up everybody in the audience stopped talking. Hundreds of people fell silent, and then the camera shutters all started up again. I froze on the steps to the dais. Frits Huffnagel, who was introducing the candidates, could see that I was shaking; he gave me his hand and said, “Easy.”
Somehow I managed to control myself and read my speech. Afterward, walking down, I was swamped by the media. The camera people even followed me into the ladies’ room. One Liberal MP, the former Olympic swimmer Erika Terpstra, decided to protect me; she put her body around me and pushed people away.
From that time on I could no longer have a normal relationship with journalists. I could not simply say what I thought, like an ordinary person. I was now a politician: the media, rather than a source of information, was an instrument I must learn to use. Professional PR people who dealt with press for the Liberal Party now screened my calls and requests for interviews from journalists. They gave me a short bio of each journalist and told me what each was likely to ask. I received a quick education in Liberal Party priorities: the election program, agriculture, housing taxes, and so on. Because I was a Liberal Party candidate, it was normal that what I said to the media should roughly correspond to the Party platform.
Most of the media thought switching political parties made me an opportunist, and they were watching to see if I screwed up. My first interview was supposed to be a human interest story, but I was asked if I still wanted to ban denominational, religious schools. It was the most sensitive issue in the Netherlands right then. If they won the elections, the Liberals were planning to govern with the Christian Democratic Party, and for the Christian Democrats, faith-based schools were a holy cow. I said I was opposed to this form of schooling. I explained how bad Muslim schools are for education. This set off a small storm about how I wasn’t toeing the Liberal Party line, and how I wouldn’t make it to the elections.
Gerrit Zalm, the Liberal Party leader, was stalwart throughout my candidacy and my political career. As a professional politician, he was polished and effective, a real example, and on a human level he proved himself to be clear-minded and direct. He didn’t support me just because I could attract publicity for the Liberals and help them get elected; he never showed any sign of wanting to tidy me into some corner once the election was done, and he has stuck his neck out for me again and again. Throughout my political career, Zalm consistently led battles in support of my causes, from domestic violence to excision.
After that first interview, Zalm didn’t flinch for a moment. He didn’t say “This young woman has only just arrived in Holland and she doesn’t understand the importance of these institutions to our society.” He said, “I’m a Liberal, and there are good arguments for abolishing faith-based schools. But we can’t do that right away, because we have to form a government with the Christian Democrats.”
For me, the most sensitive issue was general amnesty for asylum seekers who had overstayed their legal residency in Holland. I wanted that amnesty. When I was with the Labor Party think tank, the Labor caucus in Parliament opposed it—but the Liberals opposed it even more. When interviewers asked me about it, I was clear about my views. I told Gerrit Zalm, “You know, I can’t agree with everything the Liberals say.” Zalm told me that was perfectly fine. I should just be myself. So long as I stuck to my own portfolio, which was integration, and so long as I voted with the Party once I was in Parliament, I could say what I thought.
During two months of campaigning, I went from one TV station to the next, from one speech to another. I sold tangerines in the market in Leiden; I shook hands on street corners. I met many citizens who surprised me with their apparently unconditional support for my ideas, and lots of Labor Party voters who said, “We deplore your choice of party, but your issue is so important that we will vote for you wherever you are.” I met Frits Bolkestein, the aging lion of the Liberal Party; he was formal, but at the same time very kindly, paternal, and genuine. He took my ideas seriously and offered me good advice, and he insisted that I call on him whenever I needed help. I developed enormous respect for him.
Of course, I also encountered hostile reactions in campaigning. People called me names, even spat at me; I received more threats. The most remarkable people, to me, were those who apparently approved of everything I said but nonetheless wouldn’t dream of voting for the Liberal Party. It reminded me of Somalia: they wouldn’t vote outside their clan.
Now that I was a national politician receiving death threats, I was under the protection of the Royal and Diplomatic Protection Service, the DKDB. Everywhere I went I was under heavy guard, in a convoy of cars and armed men. They frightened me a little, at first, these strange men with their radios and weapons. Some of them stood very close and wanted to know every detail of what I was going to do a day in
advance. I couldn’t deviate from the schedule; every location had to be checked ahead of time. It was awkward going about my daily life under such scrutiny. The guards had to walk around me through the aisles of supermarkets when I went out for groceries. One afternoon, trying to buy pots and pans, I felt like an idiot, as if I ought to try to impress these men with my selection.
Sometimes the DKDB would inform me about a particular threat against my life. Mostly, though, they didn’t. They felt it wasn’t in my interest for me to obsess about the danger I was in. They were there to protect me; that was all I needed to know. In a way I agreed with them. Thinking about death threats all the time is no way to live.
Neelie Kroes found me a place to stay in The Hague, a lovely apartment that belonged to a friend of hers. But after I’d lived there two weeks, the local newspaper got wind of it from people in the neighborhood and published my address. At around lunchtime that day one of my bodyguards told me, “I’m sorry, but you won’t be going back to the apartment. For tonight, we’ll take you to a hotel, but you’ll have to look for somewhere else to live.” I didn’t even get to go back to pack; they sent police officers to go through my drawers and pack my clothes and books.
Neelie went through her inexhaustible mental Rolodex and arranged for me to live for a few weeks in an apartment at the top of the phone company building in The Hague, where the director of the phone company could sleep when he was working late. I couldn’t stay there for long, though. After two months, it was agreed that I could rent one of the houses on the phone company’s grounds for up to a year, until I found a place of my own. It was wonderful, with a fireplace and gardens, and the rent was affordable; I thought that at last I would be able to settle down again. I planned to move in during the last weekend in January.
* * *
January 22 was the election. The Liberal Party rented a hall in Utrecht with a big screen; everyone congratulated each other in front of the cameras as the results came in. In reality, however, the Party’s gains were quite modest. The Christian Democrats and Labor were the big winners and seemed likely to form a coalition government together. (Governments in Holland are always coalitions.) The Liberals won only 18 percent of the vote—not enough, in principle, to claim the right to govern. Still, we had twenty-seven seats in Parliament, which meant that, as number sixteen, I had been elected.
In Holland, voters for each list may, if they wish, indicate a preference for particular candidates. This makes for a complicated calculation, because if many voters indicate their support for a candidate, that person can move up on the electoral list. I was sixteenth on the list, but sixth in terms of voters’ individual preference—a high score for a newcomer. To be precise, 37,058 Liberal voters picked me to represent them. I felt a rush of strength at this support for my ideas. My combat was legitimate. I could make a difference. I felt the weight of real responsibility.
CHAPTER 16
Politics
On the last Saturday in January 2003, Johanna and Maarten came to help me move into my new house. The new Parliament would take its seats on January 30, and I wanted to be in some sense settled before the opening ceremony. That morning I didn’t even turn on the radio, just set about packing my boxes.
But Johanna and Maarten were woken up by the news: “Hirsi Ali Calls Prophet Muhammad a Pervert.” Trouw had just run the interview about religion that I had given weeks before. In the interview I talked about the Ten Commandments in the Quran, the version of the Ten Commandments passed on to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad. I described him as a cruel man who demanded absolute power and who stunted creativity by limiting the imagination to only what was permitted. I discussed aspects of his life. Conveniently, Allah helpfully indicated that Muhammad should marry the wife of his adopted son, Zayd. He also allowed the Prophet to marry the six-year-old daughter of his friend Abu Bakr, and to consummate that marriage when the girl, Aisha, was only nine. Aisha’s description of the scene is truly pathetic; she was playing on her swing in the garden when her mother called her and placed her on the Prophet’s fifty-four-year-old lap. I said, “By our Western standards, Muhammad is a perverse man, and a tyrant.”
Admittedly, I let rip in that interview. Now, weeks later, it was published, and Maarten and Johanna were appalled. I didn’t know it yet, but hundreds of people were already heading for police stations across the country to demand that I be punished for saying these things. The country was in an uproar, and I hadn’t even been sworn in.
Ellen called and told me she had received an angry message on the answering machine at our house. A man with an accent said, “This is the last straw,” and threatened to blow the place up. The Leiden police took her complaint and stepped up their rounds. Everyone was nervous.
After we moved all my boxes I took Johanna and Maarten out for dinner, to thank them for helping me. As we were eating, one of the bodyguards came up and said, “The situation here is too dangerous. We’re taking Ayaan out of here.” They asked Johanna and Maarten to go home by themselves, then they took me out by the kitchen and rushed me back to the phone company flat. When I got there, the building was crawling with security, maybe a dozen policemen, in uniform and plainclothes. I realized that the situation was really serious.
I slept in the apartment, now almost empty. The next day a large group of security people came over, men who were higher up in the hierarchy of three different police and security agencies of the ministries of Justice and the Interior, and also a man from the Security Division of Parliament. We went to the house where I planned to move. The man from the agency that evaluates security risks, the ABB, announced that my risk level was “maximum.” (There are three levels: maximum, medium, and minimal.) The man from the agency that does the actual protection, the DKDB, looked around and drew up a list of all the modifications and reinforcements that would have to be made for the house to pass the maximum security requirements. Reinforced glass, cameras—he said it would cost over a million euros.
I was a member of Parliament, so Parliament would have to pay the bill: those are the rules. The man from the Security Division of Parliament turned to me and asked, “How long are you planning to live in this new house of yours?” I told him I had a lease for a year. He said, “I’m sorry, but we can’t do it. Parliament won’t invest a million euros for just one year. You’ll have to find another place.”
When it came time for the pageantry of swearing in the members of the new Parliament on January 30, I was living in a hotel. For weeks I kept on moving. Every few days, people in the hotel would learn who I was and the security people would move me again. I went house hunting, but when I found a perfect house it was unacceptable to the security people: it was a row house, with a garden that connected to a whole street of gardens. Another house was acceptable, but there was no way I could pay the rent. It went on and on, a very unsettling situation.
I was nervous at the ceremony, of course, and felt enormous regret that my father would not be there. He would have been proud. To him I was an apostate, but still, I was following in his footsteps, committed to working for the well-being of others, just as he had always been. It pained me to phone him and have him hang up on me. But I was now also filled with a kind of hope. I had a mission. I was going to put the plight of Muslim women on my country’s agenda.
At the first meeting of the Liberal caucus in Parliament, everyone had read the Trouw article and was furious. That morning Frank de Grave, a courtly man who had taken me under his wing, came into the office that I had been assigned in the old parliament building and told me, “When the meeting starts, you’ll see, people will attack you. I want you to stay quiet. When it’s your time to speak, you must say, ‘This interview happened a long time ago, before I was even elected. I realize this is not how things work, and I apologize for causing such commotion. From now on I will consult the Party before coming out with such things.’”
When some of my Liberal colleagues in Parliament started saying nasty things—and it wasn�
��t everybody—I did stay quiet. But then one man looked over at Gerrit Zalm and asked, “Don’t you think we should protect her from herself?” I saw red. I said, “What surprises me is that not one person in this room has asked ‘Is this true?’ If the Prophet Muhammad went to bed with a nine-year-old, then according to Dutch law he is a pedophile. If you look at how the Prophet Muhammad ruled, he was a lone ruler, an autocrat, and that is tyranny. As for being protected from myself, that is condescending, and inexcusable.”
Zalm finally calmed down the voices raised in uproar. He, Johan Remkes, Mark Rutte, and Henk Kamp supported me on the grounds of freedom of speech. They also said the threats against me were inexcusable; to have to live with bodyguards was virtually unheard of in Holland. After the meeting, Frank de Grave came up to me and said, “What have you done! Why did you say that?” I told him. “Because it’s true. I’m not going to apologize for the truth.”
* * *
Parliament was slow to start up; the winning parties had still not agreed to form a government. The Christian Democrats were mired in talks with Labor over forming a coalition. Weeks went by. The new Parliament was seated, but the old government that had ruled before the election was still in place—not making new policy, but keeping the country minimally governed while everyone waited for a new cabinet to be named.
The situation was surreal. Pim Fortuyn’s ministers, some of whom had been decisively voted out of Parliament, were still running the nation. Poor Zalm; when he wasn’t running the Liberal caucus meetings he was baby-sitting the Pim Fortuyn ministers, who behaved as if they hadn’t left kindergarten. I promised myself to try to be less of a worry to him.
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