Two Sisters

by Åsne Seierstad

  The final-year pupil’s tone conveyed a deep distrust not only of Hanne’s authority as principal, but of the entire system. Ayan wanted to make her own rules, challenge the old ones. Deep down, Hanne could not help being a tad impressed. After all, this was exactly how she encouraged her students to act. Think for yourself! Beat your own path. Seek out information, find things out, read, check up.

  The principal was anxious to see if Ayan would follow her instructions. She hoped the self-confident young woman would see sense and not sabotage her education.

  15

  STRANGE BIRD

  Ayan’s sister, Leila, was now fifteen years old. On her first day at lower secondary two years earlier, she had turned up in bright green pants and a red sweater, and wearing large round glasses. The other girls were wearing pastel colors and light tones.

  She came across as tough and a little rough at the edges, someone who demanded respect—and got it. She played football in PE class and dived in swimming, and her Facebook profile looked like any other girl’s. Still, she was different. When she wore a short white dress just like the others did for the Constitution Day celebrations, she received praise for her looks from the other girls for the first time.

  “You look lovely!” exclaimed her classmates when she finally dressed like them.

  “That’s, eh … lovely!” they said when she turned up with intricate copper henna patterns on her hands and running up her arms after Muslim feasts.

  She was an exotic bird, accepted, at times admired, but mostly overlooked. The important things took place outside and away from her; she was not in on anything. She was like Teflon. None of the other girls attached themselves to her. None of them let her in on their secrets. And what is a teenage existence without shared confidences?

  She started a blog that no one read. She scrapped it and began a new one, which she called Pumpkinface. “I’m going to continue blogging as usual the last one didn’t go that well sooo I’m going to concentrate my efforts on this one hahahahahaahahaha sorry I just realized that … nope I’ve forgotten.…. . buuuuut I’ve been thinking that I should blog more sooo I’m going to blog exactly what I’m thinking about unless I forget it because that can happen, my cousin calls me goldfish brain because I forget things so quickly.” No one read that blog either.

  Cliques formed quickly among the girls in the class, and these set the agenda for what and who was cool and trendy, what was noteworthy and what ridiculous, who was classy and who was not.

  Leila did not fit into any gang. On rare occasions, like when they had group homework, she did go to other pupils’ homes. Then they would have to keep the dog locked up if they had one, because Leila could not be near dogs, it was haram, a word the rest of the class learned early on. Haram = not allowed. Halal = allowed. Leila knew a lot, because she went to Koran school, and she was also in some Muslim organization or other in Oslo together with her sister. She carried a little red book in her bag with hadith sayings and stories about Muhammad. So passed the first year of lower secondary school.

  Then summer came. While the rest of the class returned slightly more tanned and slightly taller than before, Leila had changed completely. The summer vacation she had spent with her extended family in Somaliland had led to her discarding the green trousers and red sweaters, and she turned up at school in a long skirt. Soon she began wearing a long cape and a matching hijab in colors blending with the autumn around.

  “Why do you wear that?” a girl asked.

  “It was given to me,” she replied.

  The congregation bought it for her, the girl told her classmates.

  Those who knew Leila’s sister, Ayan, had noticed a similar change. Everything was dark, plain, and dull. In autumn, Leila wore athletic shoes in muted tones; in winter, she switched to hiking boots, like the boys in the class wore, except that hers were in fake leather. Not exactly the nicest type either, the girls agreed.

  In cooking class, she was excused from making anything containing pork and exempted from eating meat that was not halal. The pupils in her group always made two desserts if the one on the menu contained gelatin. The stiffener was made from the skin, bones, and tissue of pig, which was not halal, the class learned.

  One time the group she was in received good marks for their work and the boy sitting next to her raised his hand for a high five. Leila stared fixedly at him. He understood. Of course, palm against palm was haram.

  On another occasion a boy who had forgotten his pencil case asked to borrow a pen. She said, “All right, but then I can’t ever use it again.”

  He did not quite understand. Before she tossed it to him, she said, “Just keep it. I can’t touch anything you’ve handled.”

  Another time a classmate, overjoyed at something, had hugged the person closest to him—who happened to be Leila—and she had broken free and shouted, “Don’t ever do that again!”

  “Oh, sorry, I’m really sorry…” he stammered. He had not meant to offend her.

  “If a boy touches me here,” Leila pointed, “it is like getting a nail through my arm. If someone hugs me, it is like getting ten nails through my head.”

  When the bell rang, she had to make it to her next class early to avoid the throng, so as not to risk bumping into a boy.

  She no longer took part in extracurricular activities. Although she turned up for gym class, she refused to take part in ball games where there was a chance of her being tackled by a boy. She also rejected swimming, as she could not show herself in that state of undress, and dance and gymnastics, as they were haram.

  So passed the second year of lower secondary school.

  On the first day of their final year, her classmates returned more tanned and with sun-bleached hair. Leila arrived in a niqab.

  Some of the boys laughed. When she went to the back of the classroom to pray, they took photos of her. “She’s not right in the head,” one said. They started calling her the Phantom Blot.

  Nobody had seen her praying at school the year before. Now she was preoccupied with respecting prayer times and wore an alarm clock on a belt that vibrated when it was time to pray. If it went off during class, she put her hand up and asked permission to go out.

  The teachers were uncertain how to tackle this newfound piety: Some allowed her to leave the room when she asked, while others did not. The school’s attitude was that it was important to accommodate diversity. After a while she was designated a place to pray, a supply closet in the corridor. She was loaned a key to unlock the door and came back when she was finished. Sometimes she just went to the back of the classroom, faced Mecca, rolled out her prayer mat, kneeled, and mumbled her supplications. She followed the clock slavishly and interrupted both pupil presentations and tests in order to pray.

  If music was played, she would leave the classroom. If a film was shown, she went out too. When they were role-playing, she declined to participate because she could not pretend to be someone other than who she was. That was also haram. She deleted the account she’d set up as Leila on Facebook and established a new profile, calling herself Bintu Sadiq—Sadiq’s daughter—and posted exclusively religious texts.

  A staff meeting was held. The principal was very much in favor of inclusivity: “That has always been our focus here.” There was a desire to display tolerance and cultural understanding, and discrimination was the last thing anyone wanted to be party to, but eventually it was decided the situation could not continue.

  Leila was summoned to the principal’s office. She was informed she was not allowed to leave the classroom to pray. Doing so caused undue disruption and meant she’d miss out on lessons. Could she not just pray at break times instead?

  Leila had no respect for the new requirements and continued putting up her hand when her alarm clock vibrated. At other times, she just walked out when it went off.

  Arguments with teachers were not uncommon, and she didn’t hesitate to speak her mind when she felt offended or misunderstood. Beyond that, she did not s
how much concern for school, and her grades sank from quite good to average.

  The unfamiliar terms she used in religion class either impressed her classmates or provoked them. In their final year of lower secondary, the pupils were to deliver a talk on a topic of their choice. Sofie had picked “religious headgear in school.” She was well prepared, having gathered material from newspaper articles and books. The talk sparked a heated discussion, as the issue of women’s headwear often does, creating a front line in the debate on Islam.

  “I can understand you wanting to wear it,” Sofie said. “But when you do, you are submitting to the man!”

  “Allah has created us differently and has ordered women to cover themselves!” Leila retorted.

  Sofie continued to argue that it served to make women invisible and represented a desire to hand over hard-earned power. It wasn’t long before Leila had the whole class against her.

  “Allah distinguishes between two types of people,” Leila said. “Those who obey and those who don’t. The punishment for those who do not do as he commands is harsh!” she said in conclusion, fighting back tears.

  “I think we’ll leave the discussion there,” the religion teacher said.

  * * *

  “Do you think she’s lonely?” Sofie asked Emilie one time when they were talking about how Leila was on her own so much, even during break times. “God, imagine,” Sofie added, “just standing on my own for a second makes me feel self-conscious.”

  They decided to talk to her. But that didn’t happen often. The two friends had so much else to discuss.

  On the whole, the rest of the class knew little about Leila. They never saw her outside of school and did not miss her if she was not there. Prior to the first lesson in the morning, she sat alone at her desk while the others hung around in groups talking. On Monday mornings people rarely inquired how her weekend had been because she was never where it was all happening, where the teenagers had begun testing out adult life: Parties. Sex. Alcohol.

  Now and again Leila spent break time with a girl from a different classroom in the same year. Amal was also Somali and had known Leila since they were small. Their mothers were acquaintances, although they were quite different. Amal’s mother was quick on her feet, slender, and muscular. She had begun working in Norway as soon as she could, often juggling two jobs. Mostly manual labor, cleaning, heavy lifting. She was now taking long shifts as an auxiliary nurse at a residential care home.

  “Amal, you know you live two lives?” Leila said during a break. “This life and the afterlife. This life is a test. You either pass or fail. Every night God takes your soul, an angel comes, then God decides whether or not to give you a new chance. In a sense every time you fall asleep you’re dying. You are blessed to wake up each day, remember that, you have been given a fresh chance, but you have to be prepared to die at any time.”

  Amal accompanied Leila and Ayan to meetings at Islam Net and was influenced by Leila’s constant appeals. “Amal, you need to wake up! You need to open your eyes! You have to get closer to Allah,” she urged.

  Amal began to immerse herself in the Koran, not just learning it by rote, as she had at Koran school, but reading and understanding it in a new way. It was as though Allah were speaking to her directly. She clicked on links Leila sent to her—about Islam being the right path, the only path, and about how harsh the punishment would be for those who did not follow the message of Allah. She stopped wearing trousers.

  At home, Amal had begun criticizing all things Norwegian. “Racism and discrimination is rife in this country, Muslims are constantly being harassed,” she told her mother. She put less effort into schoolwork, opting instead to read the Koran or watch videos on YouTube. Finally she announced she wanted to quit school because she was being bullied.

  “What is going on? You’re with the same kids as before, the same teachers, why would they suddenly be bullying you? If someone is bothering you, then tell me or let the teachers know and we can sort it out.”

  But all Amal would say was that she hated school.

  “Sweetheart, please, this is the final year. You can’t drop out now!”

  “I want an exemption from gym at the very least.”

  Her mother, whom Amal had outstripped in height and build long ago, lost her temper.

  “Here I am, running around for you, killing myself with work, taking care of all of you from primary school to secondary and on so that you can have a future here! And you want to drop out! What is wrong with you? I’m phoning your teacher.”

  The telephone conversation gave Amal’s mother more to think about, as the teacher was also concerned. The change in Amal’s behavior had coincided with her spending more time with Leila. The two of them kept to themselves, had become difficult to relate to, and habitually denounced anything Norwegian.

  “I hate Norway” became a constant refrain, along with “Norwegians don’t like Muslims.” Amal spoke about feeling trapped in a society where she did not belong.

  “Norway is not trapping you!” her mother shouted at her only daughter. “As long as you don’t bother anyone, then Norway won’t bother you!”

  Amal was caught between her mother, who watched her every move like a hawk, and Leila, who coaxed her with thoughts of what paradise had to offer.

  But Amal could also be embarrassed by Leila’s need to assert herself. One morning on the bus, Leila was more covered up than usual, wearing a black gossamer veil over her niqab. It was sufficiently thick that no one could see through it but thin enough for Leila to discern the world around her. Leila received some oblique looks from Bærum’s blue rinse brigade, who, in addition to schoolchildren, were the ones whose rides kept the county buses running. Leila grew exasperated with them gawking and stood up in the aisle and said, “You think I can’t see you! Well I can, I see you staring. And what’s more, I see a lot clearer than any of you!” Then she sat down in a window seat. Amal wanted the bus floor to open up and swallow her.

  Leila had frequently expressed the desire to live in a Muslim country. She and Ayan had begged their parents to allow them to move to their grandmother’s in Somalia, because they could not live how they wanted to in Norway. Their parents had told them they had to finish their education first.

  Leila could not care less about her education, it was worthless. She had other dreams, she told her friend.

  “I want to get married as soon as possible,” she said when she turned fifteen. “As soon as I am married I’ll have completed half of my deen, half of the righteous way of life, my good deeds,” she explained.

  “You’re too young!” Amal protested.

  “I’m enough of a grown-up. I want to get married and have children now.”

  “With who?” Amal asked.

  “Whoever, as long as he’s a practicing Muslim.”

  Amal was taken aback.

  “I want to have eight children,” Leila said one day.

  “I want to move to a desert,” she said the next. “I want to live where nothing grows, where there is only wilderness. I’ll live on sand and water. Get closer to God. Prove that I don’t need anything else.”

  “Hmm. Right,” Amal responded.

  16

  SEPARATION

  Dilal rarely went out, but on this evening a bazaar was being held on behalf of Al-Furqan in an apartment near Grønland Square. The women of the ummah could not stand on the street with collection boxes, so they sold clothes and jewelry to one another. They were to meet at the home of a Norwegian convert married to a Moroccan. Dilal had thought about her appearance and had chosen to wear a Pakistani outfit given to her by her new mother-in-law. She had applied makeup, fixed her hair, and put on her favorite perfume. She was going to be out among people.

  She was welcomed with reverence. That’s Ubaydullah’s wife, women whispered. Everyone knew about his secret marriage, although few had seen his bride. People turned their heads to look. Now she was there, in the flesh, the scandal.

  Was she
actually a proper Muslim? How is it possible that the wife of Ubaydullah does not wear a hijab? Muttered questions and comments abounded. Surely a more modest wife would better suit the spokesman for the Prophet’s Ummah.

  The women in the apartment were a mix of Islam Net members and wives of men in the Prophet’s Ummah, or had a crush on them, or simply sympathized with the organization. Aisha, heavily pregnant, headed straight toward Dilal, clearing her way through the crowded apartment.

  “Still? I figured you must have changed your style by now.”

  But Aisha did not belabor the point. She was preoccupied with another scandal: that before leaving, Bastian and Emira had embezzled the collection money for Syria, the cash intended to alleviate the plight of victims of the war.

  Ubaydullah had also been incensed about Bastian helping himself to the funds and betraying them, Dilal told her. It was nice to see eye to eye on something.

  “So, what’s it like being married to Ubaydullah, then?” Aisha asked. It was a year since she herself had proposed to him, then gotten married to Arfan and divorced from him. Now she was expecting his child. And was back alone.

  As soon as the women heard the question, Dilal sensed them drawing closer to her. She was soon facing a barrage of questions.

  “How can a Kurd be married to a Pakistani?”

  “What does he think about you going outside dressed like that?”

  “What’s he like?”

  Later on that evening, Ayan arrived with Leila. Ayan rushed over and embraced Dilal. It had been so long since they had seen each other!

  “Tell me! Tell me everything that’s going on in your life!”

  Dilal obliged, then asked, “What about you?”

  Ayan looked perplexed. “Dilal, I’ve met a man I want to marry.”

  “That’s great!”

  “But my father won’t accept him.”

  “Who is he?” Dilal asked.

  “His name is Abdi. A relation, from Canada, he’s gorgeous, but my parents won’t allow us to marry. He’s gone now, but I want so much to go after him, get married, live in Somaliland, in a country where I feel at home, a Muslim country. I can’t take much more of Norway.”