From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Mahad would look down and press out of his lips, “Yes, Father.”

  Abeh would shout, “Look at me, look me in the eye!”

  Mahad would turn up his chin, find a spot on my father’s forehead, and glare.

  “Did you do your ablutions?” Father would growl. Ma would position herself between her son and her husband.

  “Yes, Father,” Mahad would say, his voice trembling.

  “But you are dry. Where is the wetness?”

  “I dry fast,” Mahad would stammer.

  Abeh would raise his voice: “Liar! Liar! Little, filthy liar, you will never be a man. You don’t have what it takes. Get away from me! Right behind your mother’s skirt—that’s where you belong.”

  Mahad’s tears would glide out of his eyes and down his cheeks. He would stand and watch my father turn away and leave the room. The next morning Abeh would shake Mahad awake and drag him to the bathroom sink, where he would tower over him as Mahad did his ablutions. Or Abeh would demonstrate how to go about it quickly. Wash your hands, clean your mouth by gargling three times, then your nose. Abeh cupped his hand, filled it with water, and carried it quickly to his nostrils, then inhaled deeply—an act that, when Mahad tried it, had him sputtering, coughing and sneezing like a drowning lamb.

  After a series of scoldings and insults, Mahad would be led to the prayer mat, where Haweya and I would be waiting for him. Then we would all steal back into bed; prayer was at 5 a.m. and we didn’t have to leave for school until 7. At that time, again, my father would have to shake Mahad awake, order him to brush his teeth, wash his face, put on his uniform, and get ready, and to do it all quickly. Mahad never did. Just as we’d be about to leave for school, Father would catch sight of Mahad on a wooden stool, half dressed, clutching both socks in his hands and dozing off, mouth slightly open, eyes closed, head tilted to one side and looking like it would drop off his neck.

  Abeh would sneak up, put his face on the same level as Mahad’s droopy one, slap him, and order him, “Wake up, woman!” He’d catch Mahad’s breath and shout, “The smell of your mouth is foul, you didn’t brush your teeth. You are not my son, you are indeed a wa’al, a bastard child.”

  As Abeh pulled Mahad from the stool, Ma would intervene. She would somehow find her way between the two, and after Abeh gave in she would help Mahad put on his socks.

  When Abeh was absent for weeks on end, I would pine for him. Haweya would ask loudly for him. Ma would cry that she was alone and let down by her husband. But Mahad never asked for our father. He ran around with the boys on the block. Whenever Ma announced that Abeh was on his way home, I pranced and jumped about in joy. Mahad’s face fell into a brooding scowl, a look that didn’t leave his face until Abeh’s departure.

  Other than school, Quran school, and a few visits to relatives, Haweya and I virtually never left the house. We were not allowed to dress up and go out. We were stuck inside, bored senseless in the hot, small flat in Mecca, and later in the much roomier house in Riyadh. But Mahad would dress up and go out with my father to manly locations, such as the mosque or the souk or to some formal Somali lunch or dinner.

  The Friday prayer was another source of sibling rivalry. Every Thursday night that our father spent with us, Ma ironed my father’s and Mahad’s thaubs, the long, white shirt-like robe that Saudi men wear. She set out their imamah headscarves and black igal cords, and during dinner Abeh would instruct Mahad on how to behave and whom he should greet. Ma would call Mahad her prince and tell him that how he behaved would reflect on Abeh’s good name and our own.

  Haweya and I begged to go with Abeh to the beautiful mosque, to listen as the men gathered outside to talk politics and tribal affairs and washed at the communal taps and bent in unison. We vowed that we would put on our best faces and not bring shame to the family. The answer was always the same: a girl’s honor was best preserved at home.

  Every Friday morning we watched Mahad and Abeh leave and felt deprived of the world outside the door that shut in our faces. The world outside was for men. We were born girls. It was Allah’s choice. Our role—or mine really, for Haweya was too small—was to help prepare the elaborate Friday lunch. We would serve it after the men filed out of the mosque and walked to the tribunal of justice, known as Chop-chop Square. There men and boys would take their seats and watch the sinners being punished with stonings, floggings, amputations, or beheadings. Abeh rarely lingered there, but Mahad, in passing, saw enough.

  Mahad never had an appetite for lunch on Fridays. He was not cheerful or excited when he returned from the weekly visit to the mosque and Chop-chop Square. He became more silent and brooding. His behavior toward Abeh grew steadily worse. It was as if he deliberately sabotaged every simple instruction. He also became more violent to me, and even to Haweya, for whom he had always had a soft and protective spot. He would beat us. As small children we had often fought, but now his kicks and punches were much crueler, and he had even begun throwing things. It was as if he had lost all sense of restraint.

  Other little boys whom we met while growing up were just as terrified of their fathers as Mahad was of Abeh. The sons of Somali relatives who came to visit us, and those whom we visited, were full of awe for their fathers and older men in general. Our Saudi and Palestinian neighbors in Riyadh and Jeddah were the same. The boys would go out in packs and play on the streets until a father showed up. Then they would all freeze and glide back into their homes with drooping heads. A father’s authority was established through physical violence and harsh scorn for any mistakes his son made. Alternately, the boy would be praised—mainly by the women, but sometimes also by the fathers—in terms that seemed, even to us, unrealistic and overblown.

  For instance, Abeh would tell Mahad, “You will rule a people. You will undo the oppression in Somalia. You will be a just ruler.” Mother would call him a prince and refer to him as the Chosen One. She told him that her father had been a judge and that his grandfather had conquered lands and people, so Mahad’s destiny was to be a great leader.

  Mahad would respond with excitement. He could imagine becoming a prince. The Palestinian ten- and eleven-year-old boys that he played with, refugees from the Israeli conflict, were also told that they would be heroes who would more or less single-handedly drive the evil Jews out of their land. When the boys went outside they played a game of war, driving out evil Jews, until they were called in to lunch or to prayer or told to make less noise.

  At school, Mahad’s reports were outstanding, but his Saudi teachers said that he chose to stand apart and did not care to join in group games. At first Mahad used to tell us girls to explain to Mother that in school he was called “black slave.” Abeh’s response was, “You must give the boy who calls you abid a good reason never to do it again.” He would tell Mahad that he, Abeh, had personally defeated large numbers of men in combat, and he would try to teach Mahad how to fight. He would head-butt Mahad, and Mahad was not allowed to show pain or cry even when Abeh butted his little head with his own heavy one.

  After a time Mahad stopped telling our parents what was going on at school. When we were eating he would pick up his plate and throw it across the room, accompanied by a gut-wrenching cry. He would beat his fists on the table repeatedly. He would pick fights with other boys. His academic results remained excellent, but his brooding was interspersed with violent rage that he mostly took out on me. Then for months he would be so passive that he had to be physically carried out of bed, and only after a great deal of prodding and scolding would he do anything at all.

  We left for Ethiopia, where there was no suffocating Saudi segregation of men and women. In Ethiopia men and women mixed freely, as did boys and girls at school, and this made us much happier. The happiest person of us all was our father. Abeh was completely in his element. The building where his Somali opposition movement was headquartered was huge. There were hundreds of rooms, some for soldiers, others for politicians and intellectuals who contributed to the exile radio station that they u
sed in order to lure more men out of Somalia to join our cause. Father was at the top of that hierarchy. He spent hours in meetings discussing strategy, finding resources, keeping up the morale of the soldiers. He also composed stories called “The Source of Healing,” which he broadcast on the radio every week.

  The least happy person in the whole of Ethiopia was my mother. To her the Ethiopians were sinners (because they were not Muslims), and they were of inferior class and heritage. They were also at war with Somalia. (Abeh was also at war with Somalia, but somehow this did not amount to the same thing. He was opposing a dictator, according to her, while the lowly Ethiopians were our nation’s most ancient enemy.)

  Mahad, Haweya, and I were really quite happy with the change. Mahad in particular could mix with Somali men of our clan, who looked like him, who spoke our language and did not call him abid. Being the son of my father, he was treated respectfully by them. They were kind and indulgent. My mother put a lot of effort into feeding those young men food that they hadn’t had for a long time—lamb, rice, various kinds of spaghetti, spices like coriander and ginger—which reminded them of home.

  Most of these young men chewed qat, a drug. They would sit together in a circle, drinking dark tea with lots of sugar, holding twigs and sorting the leaves, throwing away the dry ones and slipping the softer, juicy ones into their mouths. They made pouches in their cheeks, quite openly sucking in the juice of this drug. Certainly Mahad, and often Haweya and I too, were present to witness these gatherings.

  Ma reproached our father: “Look what you’ve done! You have exposed your only son to addiction. He is going to copy these men. He is going to get addicted to qat.”

  Abeh would attempt to calm her. “Mahad is my son. He is a Magan. Don’t underestimate my son. He will never do anything like that. In the entire Magan family, no one chews qat.”

  Ma would list the Magan offspring who did, in fact, chew qat. She would plead to return to Saudi Arabia, for it was clear we could not return to Somalia. “Our name, the traditions of our ancestors, no longer protect us from these evils,” she would remind Abeh. “I sought protection in the house of God. I wanted us to live in Mecca, where we are reminded to pray five times a day, where we can stay pure. You brought us to an evil land. These people never wash. Did you see yesterday, I was walking with my mother and this woman suddenly crawled on the sidewalk and she urinated! She did it before us! In this country, they drink alcohol and they fornicate more than Faadumo Artan’s he-goats. Mahad is our only son. He is going to be corrupted here. This place is too big. I run after him, but he outruns me. He’s almost twelve; soon he will be taller than I am.”

  Mahad now had a choice of more than ten bathrooms to hide out in. The buildings were very long, with lots of rooms. When he was ordered to take a shower, he would say, “Yes, I will go to the one in so-and-so’s room.” Ma would be exhausted and Abeh would be at some late-night meeting, so Mahad would run out and he wouldn’t get back until we were all asleep, or perhaps not until morning, sleeping wherever he liked. Ma was torn between involving my father and dreading the severity of his punishment of Mahad. Most of the time she elected not to involve Abeh. In the morning a driver would arrive in the Land Rover that took us to school, and Mahad would be in the front seat, still wearing the same uniform he had worn for days, looking as if he hadn’t even taken it off to sleep. His eyes were red, encrusted with sleep, there’d be stains on his cheeks from where his drool had dried. His hair, which he refused to have cut, had now grown to a huge afro, and because he slept on one side his bed-head made it appear that he had sloppy cotton candy where a nice, round afro should have been. He often lost his shoelaces or his schoolbag; his breath was truly vile.

  All of this disorder reflected badly not only on Mahad but very much on my father. The driver, Haile Gorgeus, would look at Mahad with contempt, occasionally forbidding him to enter his car in such a state. Ma would come, balancing lunch boxes, and catching sight of Mahad would scream at the top of her lungs. He would cry and beg, “Please, please, don’t tell Father.” Ma would beg the driver to wait while she rushed Mahad back into our rooms, where she and my grandmother would strip him and scrub him themselves, though he howled in pain and shame. My grandmother would hold him by his hair and brush his teeth until his gums bled.

  The three of them wove a conspiracy to conceal these events from Abeh. Haweya would wander off, driving Haile Gorgeus crazy, and immaculate little me, goody-two-shoes, would prattle to whoever would listen, “We shall be late to school.”

  Mahad would reemerge clean, red-eyed, and grouchy as hell. He would demand total silence in the car. It was complete tyranny. And we were, indeed, often late to school, but none of us told Abeh. We were all part of the conspiracy to protect the prince, our older brother.

  Mahad bonded with some of the young soldiers of Abeh’s exile army before they were sent into combat on the Ethiopia-Somalia border. Some of them didn’t come back; others returned missing a leg, or both legs, or an eye. Some lived only a short while before dying from their wounds. Haweya and I were not allowed to go to funerals, but Mahad was obliged to attend. When Haweya and I grew up, we would become wives and mothers; when Mahad grew up, he would have to go to the front lines of battle. If his destiny was to be a leader, he would send his men to their deaths. But no one starts as a leader; everyone starts as an ordinary soldier, and Mahad didn’t seem to be able to accept this idea.

  Mahad’s academic reports remained perfect. He was by far the brightest of us children. He picked up the Amharic language with ease. His speech, his writing, his grammar, his handwriting, his grades in math, geography, sciences—all were excellent. But his teachers in Ethiopia, like his teachers in Saudi Arabia, complained that he was silent and brooding.

  When my mom gave birth to a stillborn baby, the house was engulfed in sadness. My mother’s unhappiness grew until it filled the entire household with a silent, bitter hostility. Finally Abeh gave in and agreed to move us out of Ethiopia.

  When we moved to Kenya, Mahad was a month shy of his twelfth birthday. I was ten. Abeh was absent most of the time. He would walk out of the house after the morning prayer, at sunrise, and rarely returned before we were all in bed again. Sometimes he left on trips for a week at a time. His relationship with Mahad continued to deteriorate; his relationship with Ma was even worse.

  Abeh wanted us all to attend the Nairobi Muslim Girls’ Primary School, a misnomer, because the primary section of that school was coed. It cost a huge amount of money, and you had to pass an admission exam and an interview to get in. Abeh took all three of us to take the exam. Only Mahad passed. He obtained not only excellent marks but compliments on his behavior during the oral interview. Haweya was told that she was promising; she could come back and take the exam again next year. I failed utterly, having performed poorly in every subject. On the morning we received the results, Ma whacked me on the head and scolded me with the insults I had long ago become used to. But Abeh’s behavior toward me did not change. He hugged me, stroked me, and called me his “only son.” He played chess with Haweya and me. He took us out on a boat. His behavior to Mahad also did not change; he told him that although he did well on the exam, he could have done better. According to my father, Mahad stood in the wrong way, made the wrong eye contact, held his pencil wrong. Nothing Mahad could do was worthy of being Abeh’s only son.

  Abeh began to visit Ethiopia for longer periods. On the rare occasions he was with us, he never wasted a moment to tell Mahad that he must be the man of the house. “You are in charge. Your sisters will soon become women. If they shame the family, it’s your responsibility. They will take away your honor. If your mother spends one unhappy night in her bed, it’s your responsibility. Be there for her. Listen to her. Obey her. Do not bring her undue trouble.” Mahad nodded and nodded and nodded. If he didn’t understand what Father was asking of him, he didn’t express it. If he felt it was unfair that Father made huge, adult demands on him, he didn’t express it. He
just kept nodding and saying, “Yes, Abeh. Yes, Abeh. Yes, Abeh.” Mahad was obliged by Father to stand in a sort of military pose as these conversations occurred: feet shoulder-width apart, hands folded quietly in front of him, eyes up, staring blankly between Abeh’s eyes. It was unclear to me whether Mahad even registered what Father was asking of him. Every time we saw Abeh, he drilled Mahad in this way. Finally, after a last, terrible row with my mother, Abeh left for Ethiopia. Mahad was almost thirteen.

  Abeh didn’t return for ten years. After he left, Mahad’s problems with authority became far more visible. One day he came home in a brooding frame of mind, head down, kicking stones, and threw himself on the mattress, arms and legs wide, which my grandmother, who had come with us to Kenya, considered to be very disrespectful. She chased him off the mattress. He went into a corner and pulled out a novel and started reading it. On the cover of the novel was a longhaired white woman in a bikini with her legs wide open; her face was held by a man, also white, who was staring deep into her eyes. This picture offended my grandmother even more than Mahad’s pose on the mattress, and she went screaming for my mother.

  After Abeh left, the quarrels between Mahad and Mother and Grandmother became a constant part of our lives, as irritating and inevitable as the dust in the streets of Nairobi.

  After the usual scolding and shouting and name-calling, Mother offered Mahad food that he refused to eat.

  MA: What’s the matter? What happened?

  MAHAD: I think I’m going to be expelled from school.

  MA: Why? What have you done?

  MAHAD: I got ninety-seven percent on my math test.

  MA: Surely you’re not going to be expelled for getting ninety-seven percent on your math test? You’ve done much poorer in the past. (Ma had no idea what school grades meant. To her, any mistakes meant you were doing badly.)

  MAHAD: It’s different this time. I burned the school.