by Ian Buruma
Ayaan’s bodyguards in The Hague were dying to get out of “dish city.” When Ayaan asked the man in the front seat whether we could stop the car, and maybe walk around a little, chat with the people, have a drink, he almost choked on his cold cup of coffee. “No way!” he said. “They’ll recognize you instantly and then we’ll have a serious problem. They’ll spit on you, curse you. Let’s get out of here quick!”
4.
Much of Ayaan’s life has been spent on the run. Born in Somalia, in Mogadishu, she learned the politics of fear early on. These were “the whispering years,” when her father was an absent rebel, and Ayaan and her sister and brother got punished at school for not singing songs in praise of Mohammed Siad Barre, the dictator they had been taught at home to despise. When civil war broke out, the family fled to Saudi Arabia, where Ayaan saw her father for the first time, in Mecca. She never forgot her first impression of the new country: women dressed in black burqas, their eyes peering through tiny slits. The sinister influence of Wahhabism, the Saudi orthodoxy, had already made itself felt in Somalia too, through Saudi-trained imams. The loose, colorful garments of Somali tradition had begun to be replaced by black veils. But here everything was black.
Since the women were kept mostly at home, Ayaan and her sister watched a great deal of television. She recalls the bloody epics showing the Prophet’s army crushing the barbarous world of wicked idolaters who were buried alive in the desert. She recalls the news programs of powerful men entertaining other powerful men, with not a woman in sight. When her brother was invited to accompany their father on hunting trips, she wondered why she wasn’t allowed to take part. But she also remembers watching Egyptian soap operas that revealed glimpses of romance.
From Saudi Arabia, they were forced to move to Sudan, and then Ethiopia, to join other members of the Somali resistance. Ayaan’s mother saw no point in sending her daughters to school, since they would soon be married off anyway. They were educated thanks only to their father’s insistence. A year later, they moved again, to Kenya. Compared to Saudi Arabia, or Ethiopia under Colonel Mengistu, Kenya was a paradise of liberty, although even there the shadow of imported Islamic orthodoxy was beginning to fall. Ayaan’s younger sister, Haweya, always the more rebellious one, liked to wear short skirts, which her mother tore up in disgust. In her teens, Ayaan noticed how the girls in her school began to drop out. Some she saw a few years later, as tired housewives, worn down by their duty to produce sons.
And yet it was in Kenya that Ayaan was swept away herself by the wave of fundamentalism, which had begun in the Middle East and caught up with her in Africa. Sister Aziza, Ayaan’s favorite teacher at the Muslim girls’ school, was her prime inspiration, but she was also attracted to the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood. Becoming a martyr, submitting to the will of Allah, wearing a black hijab over her school uniform, these were part of her teenage idealism. The other paradox of her early life is that she was saved from the fate of her classmates only by the departure of her father, who may have had liberal politics, but was a traditionalist in family matters. So was her mother, but she lacked the authority to impose her views. If her father had stayed, instead of leaving for Ethiopia in 1980 to live with another woman, Ayaan would have been forced into a marriage too, and become, in her phrase, “a factory of sons.” Aged sixteen, there would have been no escape.
It happened instead when she was twenty-two, in 1992. Her father decided that she was to marry a cousin in Canada. After a ceremony in Nairobi, where she met her husband-to-be for the first time, she boarded a flight to Germany, where she would stay with relatives before flying on to Canada. Her first sight of Europe was from the air, over Frankfurt. The landscape she recalls looked “so neat, so planned, so well ordered.”
The uncle who was supposed to take care of her during the stopover in Germany would not let her stay. His German wife didn’t want Somali relatives in the house. So she was passed on to an address in Bonn. After one night, she decided to bolt. “I had always told my father that I wanted to be independent. Now it was no longer theoretical. I had to take the plunge.”
She had the telephone number of a Somali who worked at a center for asylum seekers in Holland. This person told her to contact a cousin in Volendam. With some trepidation, she boarded the train to Amsterdam and took a bus from there. It was an odd introduction to Dutch life. Volendam is a touristy fishing village where people still parade up and down in clogs, a picture postcard of traditional life, a kind of open-air museum. “All the pretty little houses were decorated in the same way,” Ayaan remembers, “with lace curtains and flowers and plants. Everyone seemed to have the same taste.” It was at once more oppressive than Kenya and much freer, a paradox that would continue to haunt her, even in her political career. The planning, the order, like that of the German landscape, the English language, the Dutch row houses, was admirable, yet the conformity and the rules were stifling.
There, amid the black caps and white bonnets, the clogs and the cheese farms, Ayaan was taken in by a Somali woman who had become an outcast in her family by marrying a Westerner. She advised Ayaan to seek political asylum, as forced marriage was not an acceptable ground for asylum. She should pretend to be fleeing from the civil war in Somalia. It was easy for Somalis to get refugee status. At the asylum center, Ayaan was even coached by a person from an NGO for refugees in how to answer questions. She changed her name and her date of birth, and said she had arrived from Mogadishu. A bogus asylum seeker, then? “Yes,” said Ayaan, “a very bogus asylum seeker.”
5.
Listening to Ayaan’s story, I was reminded of another immigrant’s story, that of the Iranian-born newspaper columnist and law professor in Leiden, Afshin Ellian. He had never been a radical Muslim. On the contrary, after the fall of the Shah, Ellian chose the losing side; he joined the leftist Tudeh Party, which was violently suppressed by the ruling clergy in the 1980s. Ellian was smuggled out of the country on the back of a camel and spent seven years in Kabul, where the Soviet-backed Communist regime allowed him to run a propaganda radio station. In Kabul he had to be protected against killer commandos from Iran. By 1989, he had broken with the leftists and had appealed to the UN for protection. With the help of the UN, he was invited to the Netherlands under a program for refugees, which in Ellian’s words “pinned the label on me of an East European-style dissident.” It is how he ended up in the Netherlands. His first impressions are worth recording.
Housed together with thirty Vietnamese in an elegant provincial hotel, the first thing he noticed was the “soft, peaceful greenness of Holland. So much peace and calm. It made me weep. When I saw people in the cafés and streets talking freely and laughing loudly, I lamented the fate of my old friends. For here, at last, was freedom. We had fought for it, but we had never actually seen it.”
It is the typical vision of the type of person whom Arthur Koestler once described as the “internally bruised veteran of the totalitarian age.” Koestler was referring to men such as himself, refugees from Hitler and Stalin, who regarded Britain as a kind of “Davos,” a huge asylum with quiet green parks and naive people who never lived in fear, a wonderful resting place for the survivors of murderous regimes. Then and now, such veterans can appreciate like no others the blessings of freedom and peace, but cannot always hide their contempt for those who take it for granted.
If Ellian is angry at the Islamists, a greater fury is reserved for the West itself, a West that he, like Ayaan, has a tendency to idealize. This is not necessarily a paradox. Like many intellectuals from the non-Western world, Ellian is conscious of double standards. He is old enough to remember life under the Shah, backed by the United States. During the Iranian revolution, he recalls with a certain pride, “we showed how we could defy the most powerful nation on earth with empty hands. The West never gave us democracy. What was good enough for them should have been good enough for us.”
Within a year of arriving in Holland, Ellian had learned fluent Dutch. In a little over f
ive years, he had degrees in philosophy, international law, and criminal law. This feat of will and perseverance was less common in the Netherlands than in the U.S., which would have been Ellian’s preferred destination. He set a standard that very few immigrants could meet. The question that haunted him, though, was not how to get on as an immigrant, or the problem of integration, but “why it was that Americans and Europeans managed to live together without cutting each other’s throats—the question, that is, of liberty and the rule of law.”
When on one occasion in 2005, Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, refused to use his riot police to crush a small but noisy demonstration during a public memorial to the victims of slavery, as a result of which Rita Verdonk, the minister for integration, was unable to complete her speech, Ellian pulled out all the stops. Amsterdam, he ranted, had shown no tolerance for “dissidents.” By dissidents he meant people like Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and himself. Amsterdam, he continued, had become a “free city for Muslim terrorists, left-wing extremists and organized crime. … After the dissidents, it is now the turn of ministers to be barred from the city. As long as the citizens of Amsterdam are unable to bring about a political earthquake and get rid of the socialist mafia, nothing will change.” Shades here, perhaps, of the old radio propagandist in Kabul.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali expresses herself more quietly, and with a great deal more charm, but one can’t help sensing that in her battle for secularism, too, there are hints of zealousness, echoes perhaps of her earlier enthusiasm for the Muslim Brotherhood, before she was converted to the ideals of the European Enlightenment.
6.
Our bulletproof convoy was approaching the area where Ayaan spent her first years in the Netherlands. The countryside was flat and green, the villages prosperous and well maintained. We were in the heartland of strict Calvinism, deeply provincial, traditionally suspicious of outsiders, but with pockets of great wealth—large converted farmhouses and expensive villas. Ayaan’s first home was a trailer in a refugee camp, in a forest near Lunteren, a village that was chosen by the Dutch Nazis as a site for mass rallies in the 1930s. A black boulder still marks the village as the precise center of the Netherlands. There, on sacred earth for Dutch blackshirts, the NSB pledged its loyalty to Nazi Germany in 1940.
But things have changed, even there in the rural center of Calvinism, fascism, and plush retirement homes. Lunteren belongs to Ede, a small town with some industry, mostly steel and technology. Several thousand Turkish and Moroccan workers settled there (fewer than ten live in lily-white Lunteren). Ede’s dish city consists of charmless rows of four-story apartment blocks, only minutes away from the kind of neighborhood, with identical houses, identical lace curtains, and identical gardens, filled with identical garden gnomes, that struck Ayaan as both pretty and oppressive in Volendam. Laundry fluttered outside the windows, next to the satellite dishes. The streets were largely empty. It was there that a bunch of Muslim teenagers caused a national outrage by dancing with joy on the day the Twin Towers came down.
Much against the advice of her minders, Ayaan insisted on taking a walk. “They will know it’s you, and then there’s bound to be trouble,” said the chief minder. He was right about the first part. No sooner had we stepped out of the car than heads appeared at several windows hastily phoning friends and neighbors to spread the word of our presence. Security men in blazers looked nervously about, chattering on their phones. Whichever way the slim figure of Ayaan Hirsi Ali went, she was shadowed by her entourage of bodyguards, a spectacle that no doubt attracted far more attention than if she had been there alone.
Ayaan had really wanted to go to England, but the longer she stayed in Holland, the more she wished to make her life there. Her aim was to learn the language as quickly as she could and study politics. Like Ellian, she wanted to unravel the mystery of a society at peace. Coming from a continent of almost perpetual violence, she wanted to know how a people could live freely without murdering one another. But first she had to fight against the strictures of Dutch bureaucracy. Instead of allowing her to take Dutch language classes, they wanted to get her jobs for which she was unsuited, jobs that required no language ability but a large tolerance for boredom. The government would pay for vocational training so she could be some kind of clerk. She felt that welfare agencies and social workers were stifling her ambition.
For a while, she lived near the dish city in Ede with another Somali woman and worked in a factory. But this was not getting her anywhere either. So she advertised for a Dutch language teacher at a local church. Her request was answered by a married couple, high school teachers, who eventually took her into their home, where she learned not only the language, but the manners, customs, habits, and traditions of the Dutch middle class. Theirs was an orderly household, a microcosm of the country Ayaan had first encountered, both much stuffier and much freer than Kenya, its egalitarianism and individual liberties bound to strict, even rigid rules. Family dinners started promptly at six, appointments had to be kept precisely on time, household chores had to be equally shared.
It was a slow and rocky process, and assimilation was far from complete. But Ayaan did learn to speak perfect Dutch. She still calls her teacher, a friendly woman in her late forties, “my Dutch mother.” After the minders had checked the area for safety, we dropped by for a cup of coffee. It was a neat and orderly house, with nothing casual or slapdash about it. Everything had its place. A sponge cake was cut into perfect little slices, and the coffee was brewed just right. Both husband and wife made it clear to me that they didn’t wish to be identified, for they were “afraid of reprisals, especially after the death of Theo van Gogh.” Did they really think they were in any danger just because they had taught Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak Dutch? “I’m angry about this myself,” replied the husband, a trim man with close-cropped hair and light blue eyes, “but that’s the way it is. There are many Moroccans in Ede, and they can be quite aggressive. You’ve heard how they cheered on 9/11?”
I couldn’t contradict him. Perhaps he was right. I could not think of anywhere that looked more peaceful and secure than this pleasant provincial suburb in the center of the Netherlands. But even if he was wrong, and there was no real danger, the fact that they felt so intimidated by the threat of Muslim violence was a sad reflection of what one murder of a public figure could do. From the perspective of a modern European couple, connected to the world through television and the Internet, Lower Manhattan and Ede were no longer so very far apart, no farther at any rate than the events in Palestine or Iraq were from the Moroccans in dish city who got their news from Casablanca, Beirut, or Qatar.
Even though she had stopped wearing a headscarf, a bit guiltily, in order to conform, Ayaan was still a pious Muslim when she lived in Ede. Her “Dutch mother” had to be careful about her dietary restrictions, and Ayaan never touched alcohol. This was confided to me in the kitchen. When we were rejoined by Ayaan, she and her “Dutch parents” laughed about shared memories, but once or twice I noticed a certain awkwardness, perhaps about things better left unspoken. Not everything about her experience in Ede had been positive. There was the painful matter of Ayaan’s younger sister, Haweya, the rebel who had worn short skirts in Kenya, the clever one who took a secretarial course and then a job for the United Nations, against her mother’s will. She, too, sought to escape from an unwanted marriage, and joined Ayaan in Ede.
Things went well at first. Haweya learned to speak fluent Dutch in less than two years. But it was as if a life of rebelliousness had taken too heavy a toll. After years of taking the lead, of being ahead of Ayaan in striking out for freedom and independence, she began to retreat even as Ayaan started to feel more at home in the West. Just as Ayaan was discarding her headscarf, Haweya began to wear one. Ayaan was making Dutch friends while her sister withdrew into herself, lying in bed, refusing to eat, watching television for hours. She would have fits of crying, and felt ashamed of having upset her mother. Islam was the way back home, to security, salvation, away
from this cold, shallow country. Standing in the freezing cold one day, she turned to Ayaan and said: “Do you know why these people don’t believe in hell? They’re already living in it.”4
It was terrible for Ayaan to see her sister turn out this way. Just as the freedom of the West was in sight, her sister started yearning for life in the cage. A similar disillusion came over Ayaan when she worked in shelters for battered Muslim wives. Instead of seeing their own culture and religion as the sources of their misery, as Ayaan did, these women often embraced Islam as their only anchor in an otherwise hopeless existence.
When her sister finally returned to Kenya, after suffering a nervous breakdown, she was told to study the Koran, and sorcerers were brought in to exorcise her demons. When she had fits, she was beaten into submission. Paranoia set in, and she stopped eating. In 1998 she died. It was the most difficult moment in Ayaan’s life. Her father told her it was the will of God. But this was becoming harder for her to accept. The knowledge that some women, perhaps many women, couldn’t break their bonds, even under the most favorable circumstances, filled her with disappointment, but also with disgust—a disgust she was not always able to disguise when she met such women face to face.
7.
Ayaan only hinted at the guilt she felt when she discarded the chains that bound her to her own past: the scarf, the ban on alcohol, chastity, and dietary rules. Her conversion from the Muslim faith to a flinty atheism did not take place at once. While studying political science at Leiden University, she lived with a Dutch boyfriend called Marco. The most important taboo had been broken. Their relationship ended, however. He was punctual and orderly, while Ayaan was, in her word, “unstructured.” Though increasingly doubtful, she was still a Muslim believer.