From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  When I worked as a Somali-Dutch translator in Holland, I was often called upon in cases where parents reacted violently to the Westernization of their teenage Somali daughters. I remember one girl at the child protection office close to the city of The Hague. She was about sixteen but looked twenty-five. Her hair had been straightened and colored with red and brown highlights. Her nails were extremely long, curled, and painted in shimmering green. She wore the tightest possible tank top with the lowest possible cleavage and a black skirt that was so short her underwear was visible when she crossed her legs, which were clad in red fishnet stockings and high-heeled ankle boots.

  Her father had to be physically restrained so that he would not hit her. He kept screaming, “She looks like a whore! Look at her mouth! It looks like she fell on the throat of a slaughtered lamb! She has killed me, this girl has killed me!” This was, at least metaphorically, true. I knew that with such a daughter, he was now socially dead to his clan; he had become a thing of mockery and pity. He could leave his house or enter public places only with a bowed head and gritted teeth. But his daughter shrugged in response, waving her hands dismissively.

  The Dutch social worker said to the father, “This is what we call self-expression. Your daughter is not doing anything unusual for her age.” The girl’s mother claimed that her child was possessed, so the social worker added sensitively, “We have done psychological tests on her. She is not mad.”

  This particular scene ended with the girl being put in a foster home. It was a common conclusion and a very common scenario, not only for me but also for my colleagues who translated between Dutch and Arabic, Turkish, Berber, and Persian. All of us worked a great deal with the child protection services, the police, and other institutions that dealt with Muslim teenage girls who fled their homes because their parents and community would not accept their experimentation with what they interpreted as Western culture.

  Later on, when I entered politics and when practices such as honor killings and forced marriages had become public knowledge in the Netherlands, I would often debate with Muslim parents who pleaded with me to understand their perspective. They claimed that Muslim girls dropped out of school so often not because they were forced into marriage, but because they were lured by “lover boys” into prostitution. They argued that child protection agencies could not replace family, because only parents could teach children the difference between right and wrong. At Dutch schools, they said, their children had learned only sin and disobedience. Dutch schools also discouraged them from learning because of their atmosphere of hostility to Islam and discrimination against Muslims, and this was why Muslim students did so poorly and dropped out so often. The solution, these parents reasoned, was to establish Muslim schools so that girls could get an education without learning to disobey.

  They were right about the high dropout rate for children from Muslim immigrant families and their often very low success rate in exams. But I didn’t think the cause of all this was Dutch discrimination. I thought it lay with the parents’ not having properly prepared their children for modern education in a modern country.

  Like my mother and my aunts, these immigrants had refused to give their daughters sex education, to talk to them about how their bodies were changing, or to tell them that it was natural to be interested in boys. Unlike Dutch parents, they could not bring themselves to teach their daughters that self-expression is fine but that it has boundaries, so that their daughters might find ways to express themselves without flashing their genitals. They had not taught them how to gradually manage the challenges of independence. And, perhaps just as important, they had not taught their sons respect for women—and in Dutch schools most of their teachers were women.

  I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Dutch schools, which didn’t seem to be preparing Dutch girls for lives of debauchery and prostitution. On the contrary, most Dutch teenage girls I knew seemed to be just fine, well on their way to becoming self-reliant, productive, law-abiding citizens, with good humor and grace. But the Muslim parents I spoke to did not agree with me. Often they focused on the sex education classes in Dutch schools. These were not classes on how to understand your sexuality and your body, they insisted; they taught you how to have sex. Teachers would place a large wooden or plastic penis on the table, in front of their daughters, and demonstrate how to cover it with a condom. This was abominable, an invitation to prostitution.

  I had not been to schools where they taught sex education, but I had been to asylum-seeker centers where there were programs on hygiene, sex education, pregnancy, prenatal education, and more. I had seen how graphic the Dutch can be, and I had become accustomed to the bluntness with which the Dutch address sexual matters. When the children of my Dutch friends went to their parents to ask about sex—something that floored me at first, considering how unlikely it was that I would have done such a thing—my friends patiently and without panic described sex to the curious child, in detail, using books with very explicit pictures of the body.

  Dutch parents approached drugs and alcohol the same way. When a young child asked, “Mom, what’s a joint?,” his mother would explain what a marijuana cigarette looked like, how it was made, and what it did to your brain. She would talk about the junkies on the sidewalk. All this education didn’t stop some kids from experimenting with drugs or becoming accidentally pregnant, but the majority of the Dutch population has developed an extraordinarily healthy approach to sex, drugs, and alcohol.

  I grew convinced that this calm and very explicit education on the possible dangers of freedom was far more effective in preventing disaster than the mystification that I had been brought up with. This isn’t just some biased opinion I developed; it has been empirically proven. The benefit of an enlightened approach to sex and drugs was something that the Dutch never tired of explaining. My colleagues in Parliament, whose responsibility it was to make health care universal, dependable, and affordable, were unanimous in their conviction that prevention was always better than cure.

  The spokesperson on health for my political party showed me the number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS, and which populations they most affected. The gay community was hit hard; so were immigrants. Within the gay community, those who were immigrants were hit the hardest. We looked also at the number of abortions performed every year. The number of native Dutch women who had abortions was declining steeply, except in small pockets of radical Christian communities, whose attitude toward sexuality is somewhat comparable to that of many Muslims. (Although these Christians prohibit both men and women from having sex before marriage, many accidental pregnancies occur and the women have to sneak off to abortion clinics.) The number of immigrant women and young girls having abortions was rising sharply.

  Drug usage had a comparable pattern, and in Amsterdam’s redlight district it was easy to see with one’s own eyes that most of the clients of prostitutes were not tourists but immigrant men. Many, if not most of them, were Arab, Berber, Turkish, and Somali. Most statistics just referred to “immigrants” as a broad category, but if you dug deeper you would find that the health care workers, researchers, doctors, and epidemiologists did not want to be on the record in reports in which “immigrant” mostly meant “Muslim.” Non-Muslim immigrants from China or Christian parts of Africa were affected too, but Muslims were affected most.

  I did not think that this was just a coincidence. Generally, wherever sexuality is a mystery, where sex and drugs are walled off as unspeakable subjects, people tend to abuse both excessively. Like my cousin Hiran, who became HIV-positive, they cannot face up to what it is they are doing and thus fail to protect themselves from the terrible consequences. For women in Arab Islamic cultures it is a matter of honor, something to boast about, to be able to say, “I do not know anything about matters of sex.” Because to know even the most elementary thing is tantamount to sinning.

  Muslim parents in Europe are justified in worrying about the future of their childr
en, but for the wrong reasons. They are adamant in their conviction that their own way of life has nothing to do with the terrible fates that they fear for their offspring. They are unwilling to consider changing their views and will not question their insistence on virginity until marriage, their insistence on separating boys and girls and on keeping girls dependent and ignorant, and their penchant for forcing girls into early, arranged marriages and harsh punishments. It is easier for them to blame outsiders than to question the Quran, the example of the Prophet, and long tradition. From their perspective the best strategy is to stifle their daughters’ voices, school them in subservience, confine them to their homes, and marry them off as early as possible. This may not make their daughters happy, but family honor is more important than the happiness of children.

  I believe that the subjection of women within Islam is the biggest obstacle to the integration and progress of Muslim communities in the West. It is a subjection committed by the closest kin in the most intimate place, the home, and it is sanctioned by the greatest figure in the imagination of Muslims: Allah himself.

  Many Muslim parents believe that a Western education corrupts the Muslim way of life. In truth, it does. The education of girls in independent thought is a challenge to Islamic teaching, just as it once was a challenge to Christian teaching and Orthodox Jewish teaching. A program of sustained education in curiosity and independent thought is a program of sustained erosion of the Muslim way of life. Developing this program will take a long time in Muslim countries. For Muslims in Western countries, it may not take as long.

  We can take hope from the example of other societies. Christianity too once made a magical totem of female virginity. Girls were confined, deprived of education, married off as property. And yet Christian societies today are largely free of this habit of mind. Cultures shift, often very rapidly. They do this under the influence of critical thought, and this can be taught in school.

  It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others. This happened to me. When my father decided to marry me to a distant cousin he had just met (and whom I had never seen), he thought he was making a wonderful decision for me. This man, my intended, was a relative (we shared the eighth degree of grandfathers) and thus was less likely to behave abusively (at least this was my father’s reasoning); he shared the values of our people (whatever they were) and would keep me safe at a time of civil war and poverty. A match like the one my father found seemed to him to be a blessing.

  I, on the other hand, felt that my father had robbed me of my youth and my body, propelling me into the life of a wife and mother—responsibilities I was not ready to assume—alongside a man I found completely repellent. But I did not have the language and logic to persuade my father of the validity of my position. Even though he had sent me to school and I was one of the few Somali girls in my generation who had learned to read and write in English, I didn’t have the strength of mind and tongue to muster a coherent argument. The strongest points I could make were that my husband-to-be did not read novels and that he was bald. From my father’s perspective, these assertions certified that I needed to be under the authority of someone more reliable and mature.

  So I bolted. Only after I had fled and made my way to the University of Leiden, where I took classes steeped in concepts of individual freedom and personal responsibility, was I able to stand up to my father, mind to mind. I managed to articulate to him that by getting a higher education I was only following his example and learning to make my own destiny. To his protests about the disrespect I was showing and my probable erosion of our religion and culture through selfish pursuits, I was able to respond that he himself had paid less attention to such concerns when he was my age. In my conversations with my father in the spring of 2000 in Germany, where I met with him when he was being treated at an eye clinic, I was aware of his grudging respect and maybe even admiration. He was condescending, and he lectured me in his characteristically lightning-fast, long, unstoppable monologues about the hereafter. But he no longer easily dismissed my wishes or protested as he had in 1992.

  To resist subjugation and the denial of rights, an expression of resentment and anger are not enough. You must speak the language of the oppressor and have the clarity of mind to identify the principles that justify the oppression and to dismantle them intellectually. Slaves must be aware of the fact that they are slaves, and then transcend anger and pain to convince their master of the wrongfulness of their slavery. If you cannot win by might, you may in the longer term be able to win through an appeal to reason.

  Girls like my cousins Hiran and Ladan, who, in a powerful urge for freedom, do manage to shake off the control of their parents often end up in disastrous circumstances because they do not have those vital skills or awareness. Such girls become the examples deployed by traditional Muslim parents when they argue that adopting a Western lifestyle leads to horrific results. Fundamentalists whose agenda is to revive an imagined past of pure Islam win much sympathy from Muslim families when they point to girls like Hiran and Ladan.

  If they had grown up in the West, perhaps it could have been different. In all Western countries, laws exist requiring girls to attend school even after they reach the age of puberty; those laws can be enforced. Special programs can be devised to fill the vacuum created by Muslim parents regarding knowledge about sex, drugs, and financial independence. The more Muslim girls do succeed in getting an education, the more likely they are to become financially independent and successful, allowing Muslim parents to see that emancipating their daughters through good schooling is in their material interests, even if it collides with their traditional values.

  * * *

  One final point needs to be made on the subject of the sexual complexes of Muslim immigrants. To claim that the oppression of women has nothing to do with Islam and is “only” a traditional custom is intellectually dishonest, a decoy. The two elements are interwoven. The code of honor and shame may be tribal and pre-Islamic in its origins, but it is now an integral part of the Islamic religion and culture. Honor killing asserts what Islam also asserts: that women are subordinate to men and must remain their sexual property.

  In the text of the Quran and in Shari’a law, men and women are self-evidently not equal. Muslim women are considered physically, emotionally, intellectually, and morally inferior to men, and they have fewer legal rights. The Quran decrees that daughters inherit half a son’s share: “Allah prescribes with regard to your children: To one of masculine sex falls [in the division of an estate] just as much as to two of the feminine sex” (4:11). The value of their testimony in a court of law is fixed as half that of a man’s. Even in the case of rape, the victim’s testimony is worth half that of her rapist.

  The Muslim father’s authority over his daughters is comparable to that of a feudal sovereign over serfs. Marriage transfers that authority to the girl’s husband, and ultimately to his father. A wedding is a pact between men, implying mutual assistance and debts in the future. It can be a significant financial transaction and an act of alliance to solidify clan relations. The bleating of the reluctant bride delivered to the hands of a stranger is an incidental annoyance. The Quran and the Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet, considered scripture) concur that a woman’s consent to marriage is not essential; only her guardian’s consent is.

  The Quran teaches that a husband may confine his wife within the home—even until she dies there, if he so wishes it: “And if some of your women do something despicable, then summon four of yourselves as witnesses against them; if they give testimony to this, then shut them up in the houses until death overtakes them or Allah gives them an escape” (4:15).

  Women living under Islamic
law cannot travel, work, study, marry, sign most legal documents, or even leave their home without their father’s permission. They may not be permitted to participate in public life, and their freedom to make decisions regarding their private life is severely, often brutally curtailed. They may not choose with whom they have sex nor, when they are married, when or whether to have sex. They may not choose what to wear, whether to work, to walk down the street.

  The rule is that a woman must obey her husband, unless, of course, he asks her to leave the Muslim religion. He is her guardian, and if she disobeys he may beat her: “As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them” (4:34). It is always instructive to read transcripts of televised discussions by imams on exactly what kinds of punishment (such as beating on the limbs, or only with a small stick) are acceptable when husbands chastise their wives.

  When well-meaning Westerners, eager to promote respect for minority religions and cultures, ignore practices like forced marriage and confinement in order to “stop society from stigmatizing Muslims,” they deny countless Muslim girls their right to wrest their freedom from their parents’ culture. They fail to live up to the ideals and values of our democratic society, and they harm the very same vulnerable minority whom they seek to protect.

  CHAPTER 12

  Money and Responsibility

  The challenges of becoming a citizen are different from the challenges that a member of a tribe faces. In many ways, the challenges of citizenship are far easier than managing the complexities of traditional societies’ taboos and superstitions. But what makes modernity so elusive, even treacherous to some, is precisely that it looks so easy. It isn’t. If you are not prepared—if no one teaches you a fair approach to sexuality, for example, or new ways of dealing with aggressive impulses short of violent revenge—then naturally you will fall back on what you know. Your habits and attitudes have been ingrained by clan and faith. But these values of the bloodline are not compatible with those that underlie citizenship in the modern world. If one is to succeed in modern society, one must unlearn anachronistic, out-of-place attitudes. This unlearning applies to money as much as it applies to sex.