Hirsi had already started writing the satirical short stories about Somali politics that later won him acclaim, and people who knew him during those days in Mogadishu remember how charismatic he was, with his urgent talk and flashing wit. Asha was a poet, too, and, like Hirsi, had some knowledge of Arabic. The mutual attraction grew quickly, and within a few months they were married.
For Hirsi, it wasn’t the first time. In fact, he was already married to a woman named Maryan Farah Warsame. Maryan was one of a tiny number of Somali women who had gone to school in the colonial period and continued studying. Indeed, she was studying at Syracuse University, in upstate New York, when her husband married Asha in Somalia, and she had borne Hirsi a daughter, Arro, the year before. Taking a second wife, as Hirsi did, seldom made for a happy household, but there was no stigma attached to it. Islam allows men to marry up to four wives, and Africa has an even older tradition of polygamy.
Asha gave birth to Ayaan’s older brother, Mahad, in 1968, and Ayaan herself was born at Mogadishu’s Digfeer Hospital in 1969.
The name Ayaan means “lucky.” But 1969 was anything but a lucky year for her family. Hirsi had come home from the United States three years earlier feeling that Somalia could become a superpower. As Ayaan has written, he thought that if the Americans had achieved what they had in two hundred years, “then we Somalis, with our endurance and resilience—we can make America in Africa.” But after just a few years the country’s democracy was faltering, and in October 1969 a military officer named Mohamed Siad Barre overthrew the elected government and set up a military dictatorship. Ayaan was born twenty-three days later, on November 13.
Hirsi’s first wife, Maryan, returned from the United States with her bachelor’s degree that same year. She had heard nothing about his marriage to Asha, and she evidently did not take the news well. For a while, Hirsi tried to divide his time between the two women. Maryan’s youngest daughter, Ijaabo, and Asha’s youngest daughter, Haweya, were both born in 1971. But Ayaan claims that eventually Maryan ordered Hirsi to choose between her and Asha. When he refused, she went to live with her children by herself.
A few months later, in April 1972, Somalia’s strongman, Siad Barre, threw Hirsi into prison. Hirsi had mocked the dictator in his poems and short stories, and no Somali leader would stand for that. “Hirsi does not mince his words when it comes to talking,” Mahmoud Yahya, a Somali banker friend, said years later, chuckling. “Hirsi is capable of saying what he thinks without fear or favor.” Ayaan’s father was taken to Mandera prison in the north.
Siad Barre called himself a socialist, and Somalia sided with the Soviet Union. He banned political parties and arrested members of the former government. He also made some changes in the name of “scientific socialism” that elevated Somalia’s women. For example, he granted women equal rights of inheritance and divorce, and when religious leaders opposed the changes, calling them un-Islamic, he had ten of them executed. He opened public schools for girls that Ayaan and her sister, Haweya, attended. And, with Barre’s blessing, Ayaan’s stepmother, Maryan, who belonged to the dictator’s Marehan subclan, and other professional women began campaigning to end the traditional Somali practice of female genital mutilation, or, as it was called then, female circumcision.
Like girls in parts of Ethiopia and Sudan, Somali girls were commonly infibulated, meaning that the clitoris and labia were cut off and the genitals stitched shut. Infibulation was thought to ensure that girls would remain virgins until their fathers married them off. Often it caused lifelong pain and health problems. In Somalia, female circumcision was justified as Islamic, though the practice seems to have originated in Africa long before Islam. As Ayaan’s half sister Arro later wrote, it was called “pruning” in the Somali language and regarded as a sign of cleanliness and beauty.
Hirsi, however, like his first wife, Maryan, became convinced that the custom was not Islamic, and before he left for prison, he left strict instructions that Ayaan and Haweya should not be “pruned” while he was gone. But their grandmother, Asha’s mother, feared the girls would be ostracized as freaks if they weren’t cut. So one day, while Asha was away, she had both girls and their brother, Mahad, circumcised.
Ayaan was five at the time, and she has written that her operation, though extremely painful, was less severe than some other girls experienced. She has never complained in public about the urinary and menstrual blockages that torment some infibulated women. She has said that she enjoys sex. In her autobiography she says her sister suffered far worse. “Haweya was never the same afterward.”
Ayaan says that her grandmother did it out of love. When Ayaan’s mother complained, her grandmother flew into such a rage that Asha ended up apologizing to the older woman. Hirsi and Asha disapproved, but they probably didn’t regard female genital mutilation with the revulsion many Westerners felt. Nearly every woman they knew was infibulated, and Ayaan’s grandmother didn’t have to remind them how hard it was for an uncircumcised girl to find a husband.
In 1975, after three years in prison, Hirsi escaped with the help of the warden, a member of Hirsi’s lineage who was later caught and executed. Ayaan’s father made his way to Saudi Arabia and then to Ethiopia, Somalia’s traditionally Christian neighbor and rival. There, in the Ethiopian mountain capital of Addis Ababa, he helped found a group of mostly Majerteen rebels against Siad Barre. They called themselves the Democratic Front for Salvation of Somalia.
In April 1978, when Ayaan was eight, Hirsi told Asha to leave the country with the children and meet him in Saudi Arabia. The Majerteen were organizing a coup. Asha managed to get passports, and they boarded an airplane for the first time in their lives. After a nerve-racking journey, they landed safely in Jeddah—but Hirsi failed to meet them at the airport. Under Saudi Arabia’s strict Islamic laws, women weren’t allowed to travel except under the supervision of a male relative. Asha feared that if the Saudis noticed her husband’s absence they would send her and the children back to Somalia, where Siad Barre might have them punished for conspiring against him. Fortunately, a Somali man who was one of Asha’s own clan members happened to see her at the airport, and he offered to take them home to stay with his family. Days passed before Hirsi’s kinsmen tracked them down.
The coup had failed, and all over Somalia Majerteen were being killed. In Ayaan’s telling, the disappointment Asha felt about the way in which Hirsi let them down during those first few days in Saudi Arabia became a bitterness that eventually permeated Asha’s life. “Something inside her seemed to snap,” Ayaan writes of her mother. “She cried and cursed and hit at us in a kind of frenzy.”
Hirsi’s clansmen moved her and the children to Mecca, where they rented a two-room flat in one of the shabby cinder-block walk-up buildings inhabited by Saudi Arabia’s legions of guest workers. Being in Islam’s holiest city was some consolation for the devout Asha, but mostly she and the children were miserable. Ayaan remembers the period for its family fights. “Ma saw us pretty much as camels: to tame us, she yelled and hit a lot.”
Months later, Hirsi appeared. It was the first time Ayaan could remember seeing her father. Hirsi picked her up and swung her around, cuddled her, and told her she was pretty. No one had ever done that before, and Ayaan instantly adored him. Hirsi moved the family to Riyadh, the capital, where he got a job in a government ministry.
He was as hard on his only son as he was soft on his daughters. He would mock Ayaan’s brother, Mahad, belittle him, and call him a coward. Ayaan became his favorite. “You are my only son,” he would croon to her.
But Ayaan wasn’t a son, and, as a girl, there were many things she wasn’t allowed to do. Their father argued that Islam honored women as highly as men, and he quoted the hadith that says, “Paradise is at the feet of your mother.” Ayaan drily observed that her father’s feet were shod in expensive Italian shoes while her mother’s bare feet were cracked from washing floors. “There were two examples, my father’s life and my mother’s. My father’s life
was more exciting. He was always going out, he did important things, he gave his life for the country. My mother was always toiling away—cooking, cleaning, taking care of us, being taken for granted.” Ayaan decided she didn’t want to be like her; she wanted to be like her father.
Politically, the American-educated Hirsi was fairly pro-Western before he went to prison. But one of his fellow prisoners at Mandera was a dissident sheikh from the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest modern Islamist group in the Arab world and the counterpart of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami. This sheikh introduced Hirsi to Islamism, which was just beginning to spread.
It began in the Arab world as it did on the Indian subcontinent, as an anticolonial movement. The Egyptian teacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Banna later described his rage at what Great Britain had done to his country. The British lived in walled cantonments of “beautiful bungalows,” he wrote. They treated Egyptians “like slaves” and raised a “tide of atheism and lewdness.” Like Maududi, the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, Banna and the Brotherhood called on Muslims to establish new states based on Islamic law, or sharia. Membership in the group was secret, and members pledged: “Allah is our way. His Messenger is our leader. The Quran is our law. Dying in the way of God is our highest hope. Jihad is our way.” During World War II, the Brothers received support from Nazi Germany because of their anti-British activities, and, when the war ended, they led the popular Egyptian and Arab resistance to the state of Israel. They became obsessed with the idea that the Jews had laid siege to Islam itself.
The Saudis discovered their form of Islamism by another and older route. Since the eighteenth century, the ruling Saud family of central Arabia had been allied with the followers of an earlier puritan, the Arabian preacher Muhammad Ibn abd al-Wahhab. They called their interpretation of Islam Salafism, but other people called it Wahhabism and still do. Like the early Deobandis, with whom they became close, the Wahhabis were intent on destroying what they saw as idolatry. They wanted Muslims to return to imitating the salaf, or Companions of the Prophet, right down to such details as how the salaf cleaned their teeth and used the toilet. Keeping women out of sight and under the control of men was another preoccupation.
When the al-Saud conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1920s, they imposed the Wahhabi-Salafist faith on what soon became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. At the time, Wahhabis made up less than 1 percent of the world’s Muslims. But as custodians of the sacred Kaaba (which every Muslim was and is expected to visit), the Saudis multiplied their influence by preventing other sects from teaching their versions of Islam at Mecca. Then oil was discovered. By the time Ayaan and her family arrived, in the 1970s, the Saudis were earning billions of dollars a year, and they used part of their enormous wealth to try to mold Islam everywhere according to their Wahhabi beliefs. A political scientist, Alexi Alexiev, later called this project “the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever known.” The kingdom spent more than $75 billion on it between 1970 and 2001, trying to convert the Muslim world to its doctrine.
One tool the Saudis used was the Muslim Brotherhood. The many schools, for example, that the Saudis built were staffed by teachers who were Muslim Brothers. The Deobandi religious movement was another tool and ally in the Saudis’ vast missionary effort. To reach the workers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere who began flocking to the Persian Gulf for jobs, the Saudis built Deobandi mosques and schools and financed the Deobandis’ missionary group, Tablighi Jamaat. The South Asian targets of this largesse learned to view Salafi Islam as “true Islam” and their own more eclectic and forgiving traditions (such as Sufism) as heretical.
One writer whose books the Saudis printed in many languages was Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s most radical thinker. If Banna and Maududi might be called the Marx and Engels of revolutionary Islamism, perhaps Qutb was its Lenin. This sensitive and withdrawn Egyptian began his career as a secular poet and literary critic. But after Egypt’s defeat in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, he gravitated toward the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1955, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had Qutb and hundreds of other Brothers arrested. Qutb was convicted of treason in 1966 and hanged. But before he died, his sisters managed to smuggle his jihadist manifesto, Milestones, out of prison. These sisters and Qutb’s brother, Muhammad, later moved to Saudi Arabia, where Muhammad Qutb gave weekly lectures at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. The future al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was an occasional student of Muhammad there. So was Ayaan’s father, Hirsi, according to his friend Mahmoud Yahya.
In 1979, however, the Saudis asked Hirsi to leave. Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, had switched sides in the Cold War and joined with Saudi Arabia in the anti-Communist, pro-U.S. camp. The Saudis no longer wanted to support Siad Barre’s enemies, including Hirsi’s rebel group. As Ayaan’s brother, Mahad, later told a reporter, “They asked him to take his war activities elsewhere, not to use Saudi [Arabia] as a staging camp.”
The family moved to Ethiopia. But Asha had a miscarriage there, and Mahad says she asked their father to take them to Nairobi, in nearby Kenya. Other members of their father’s clan had already settled in Nairobi, where the schools were better than Ethiopia’s. So they moved again in July 1980 and settled in Nairobi’s Eastleigh area—a raucous, formerly Asian suburb that had been built in the 1920s by Indian workers under the British. Now it was fast becoming known as “Little Mogadishu.” Eastleigh would be Ayaan’s home for the next ten years. It would also be the scene of her family’s unraveling.
Chapter Three
A new century dawned for Islam before Aafia Siddiqui’s family returned from Zambia to Pakistan. By the Muslim calendar, the West’s 1979 was really 1400, and events surrounding that year did seem to portend momentous changes. In neighboring Iran, a revolutionary Islamist government had taken power. In Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, a fellow Deobandi, had seized the government two years earlier with a promise to put Pakistan under “the system of the Prophet.” The Siddiquis were soon swept up in the fervor.
They had left for Africa in a very different mood. The year before they left, in 1971, the Bengali-speaking provinces of East Pakistan had risen up against the country’s military dictatorship. With the help of Pakistan’s nemesis, India, the Bengalis won independence for a new country they called Bangladesh. The citizens who remained in what was left of Pakistan, especially those like the Siddiquis who had left their homes in India for the new Muslim homeland, were badly shaken. Each one of them had sacrificed to make Pakistan a reality. Now they saw their dream collapsing
After the loss of East Pakistan, the military called elections in 1973. The prime minister who was elected, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was a wealthy feudal landlord. His wife was a Shiite and thus a heretic in Deobandi eyes. His campaign slogan—“food, clothing and shelter”—had nothing to do with serving Allah. He tried to appease the country’s religious parties, but they were unmoved. Then, in 1977, their prayers were answered when General Zia took power in a military coup.
Grand Mufti Muhammad Shafi had died by then, but his son Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani became a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology, which Zia established to make the country’s laws conform to the Quran and the hadiths. Later another son, Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani, was named Pakistan’s grand mufti. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was jailed and later hanged, elections were canceled, and political parties were banned except for Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami.
One of Zia’s first pledges was to return Pakistani women to “chador and chardiwari,” or the veil and the home’s four walls. Since Mufti Taqi Usmani agreed that the worst development of recent times was “the modernity that had engulfed the whole world in a tornado of nudity and obscenity and provided an excuse for fornication,” he agreed to help Zia write a set of laws meant to unwind the tornado.
Called the Hudood, or “Lawful Boundary,” Ordinances, the laws that Mufti Taqi Usmani helped write were a fundamental legacy of Zia’s r
ule. They redefined sexual crimes. Zina, or sex outside marriage, became a crime against the state, whether consensual or not. To prove rape henceforth required the testimony of four male Muslim witnesses.
The implications were sweeping. The new law made it possible for the male guardians of a woman who engaged in sex without their permission to charge her with zina, which was punishable by lashing, imprisonment, or death. To be sure, Pakistan’s authorities had never really barred Pakistani men from deciding whom their female relatives married or how they behaved. The idea that men had the right to control the sexuality of the women in their families was too deeply ingrained in the culture for that. But what had been custom now gained the force of law. As the Pakistani sociologist Afshan Jafar wrote, “The message was clear—women were men’s property and men could do with them as they pleased.”
The new sex laws went on the books in February 1979, along with a host of other Deobandi innovations. Within months the world was experiencing so many Muslim-related crises that Pakistan’s clerics began speculating that the new Islamic century might portend the coming of the Last Day. In Iran, Islamic fundamentalists overthrew the shah and took U.S. diplomats hostage. In Saudi Arabia, Muslim radicals briefly seized the Kaaba at Mecca’s Grand Mosque. In Pakistan, Islamist students assumed that the United States and Israel had plotted the attack on the Grand Mosque and burned Islamabad’s U.S. Embassy to the ground. Then, in July, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that its Skylab satellite would fall to earth; Pakistani television announcers began issuing bulletins on the satellite’s progress, along with pleas for prayers suggesting that this object from the skies might herald Armageddon. By December, the Soviet army had invaded Afghanistan.
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