From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  My family lived in Saudi Arabia for one year. In the regular school, which was also for girls only, we also learned to read the Quran, and there we attended a class where we learned something about the meaning of what we were reading. Most of what we learned had to do with the hereafter and with rewards and punishments. Another class in regular school taught us about the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. As Muslims we were required to follow his example, but as girls we were required above all to follow the examples of his many wives.

  After Saudi Arabia we lived in Ethiopia, which is a Christian country. There my mother was convinced that we would not get enough religious schooling. My father reassured her that we would, and he was right. We had an extra class in school that was like madrassa, although we sat on chairs and at desks. Using small Qurans, we learned verses by heart, chanting them slowly. In this school too there was no discussion of their meaning.

  In Kenya, where we lived for ten years, we attended another Quran school, where we placed the Quran on our laps and continued to learn it by heart. But this Quran school was for boys and girls together, which troubled my mother. After I began menstruating she decided to hire a private Quran teacher, who was Somali. He took us back to the old method of making our own ink and writing on wooden boards. Although I rebelled against these tedious old-time practices, I didn’t rebel against the Quran. Our teacher severely beat me for my rebellion; once he fractured my skull against the wall of our living room.

  Then the school that I attended hired a new Islamic studies teacher, Sister Aziza. Her method of teaching was much kinder. She didn’t hit us and she didn’t yell at us. She discussed the content of the Quran and urged us to understand its meaning. Sister Aziza was what Europeans and Americans would now call a fundamentalist or an Islamist. At the time I didn’t realize it, but I was undergoing what specialists would now term a radicalization process.

  Sister Aziza did not force us to pray or to fast or to cover ourselves in robes that would hide our (more or less theoretical) womanly attributes. Instead she inspired and stimulated us to what she called “the inner jihad,” a constant struggle to fight temptation and distraction by worldly things, such as listening to music and hanging out with friends. Our struggle was to observe all five daily prayers and to fast for all of the thirty days of the holy Ramadan, compensating for the five days when we were not allowed to fast because of menstruation.

  Sister Aziza allowed us to ask questions. I wanted to know why I couldn’t be friends with non-Muslims. It was an inconvenient rule because it meant cutting ties with some of my best friends. I also wanted to know why men were allowed so much freedom, whereas we girls and women were so constrained. Sister Aziza simply told us, “That is Allah’s wisdom. Allah is all-knowing.” So although we were allowed to ask questions, we did not in fact receive answers.

  Persistent questioning was itself considered to be sinful, a sign that you were under the influence of Satan. You could of course ask for clarification about the exact distinctions of what was acceptable or forbidden, the so-called gray areas between halal and haram. You could ask, “Is it permissible to marry a cousin if your mother suckled him when he was an infant?” You could say, “Today I fasted, but just before nightfall my period came. Is that day of fasting valid, or do I have to repeat it?” The Ramadan fast generated what seems to me now a neurotic amount of such specific queries, such as “As I was brushing my teeth the tiniest amount of water slipped down my throat. Did I violate my fast?” The fear of accidentally swallowing water compelled many of us to avoid brushing our teeth in the morning for the whole month and led others to spit on the ground all day, lest they swallow their saliva.

  Thus my personal experience of what I call the closing of the Muslim mind involved not only fundamentalist individuals such as Sister Aziza and Boqol Sawm (another of my quranic tutors in Kenya), who themselves had been radicalized in Saudi schools, but also non-radical, “regular,” or what some would call “moderate” teachers. Both these groups discouraged meaningful discussion of the Quran; they would just say “Do this” and “Refrain from doing this. It’s in the Quran.” There was absolutely no criticism of the text, no reflection on why we should obey the rules, and certainly no exploration whatsoever of the idea of not obeying one or another of the rules that were dictated in the Quran by the Prophet fourteen centuries ago. Moreover, most people I knew when I was growing up either did not read the Quran or knew it only in Arabic, which very few of them could understand. It is a holy artifact, holy in its totality, even in its language. You approach it not with a spirit of inquiry but with reverence and dread.

  This is the biggest misunderstanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. Anyone who identifies himself as a Muslim believes that the Quran is the true, immutable word of God. It should be followed to the letter. Many Muslims do not actually obey every one of the Quran’s many strictures, but they believe that they should. When non-Muslims see Muslims dressed in Western clothes, listening to Western music, perhaps drinking alcohol—people who, in their social lives, are not very different from Westerners—they assume them to be moderate. But this is an incorrect assumption, because it posits a distinction like that between fundamentalist Christians and moderate Christians.

  Moderate Christians are those who do not take every word in the Bible to be the word of God. They don’t seek to live exactly as Jesus Christ and his disciples did. They are actually critical of the Bible, which they read in their own language and have revised several times. There are parts they find inspirational and parts they deem no longer relevant.

  That is not what a moderate Muslim is. A moderate Muslim does not question Muhammad’s actions or reject or revise parts of the Quran. A moderate Muslim may not practice Islam in the way that a fundamentalist Muslim does—veiling, for example, or refusing to shake a woman’s hand—but both the fundamentalists and the so-called moderates agree on the authenticity and the truthfulness and the value of Muslim scripture. This is why fundamentalists manage, without great difficulty, to persuade Muslims who don’t practice much of Islam to begin engaging in the inner struggle, the inner jihad.

  I have heard from so many people, both in Holland and in America, “So-and-so was a good friend of mine. We used to go out together. She had a great job. Sometimes she would drink alcohol. She was just like us, but now she wears the headscarf. She stopped eating pork and drinking wine. She doesn’t want to be friends with us anymore.” Or “We always knew he was a Muslim, but now he has become more pious. He has grown a beard, he dresses differently, and now he distances himself from us.” In the past decade, as fundamentalist Islam has grown exponentially, many Muslims who weren’t strictly observant have suddenly changed. Fundamentalist preaching has turned them around very easily, because those nonobservant Muslims do not have the intellectual tools to refute what the fundamentalists say, which is, basically, If you are a true Muslim and you believe what is in the Quran, then start practicing it.

  Some Muslims do not belong to either one of these categories; they are slightly observant but not extreme in their beliefs. And some of them have made attempts to modernize Muslim scripture through a process of interpretation and reinterpretation. This is an exercise that is encouraged by Western non-Muslims, mostly people in academia.

  I have read books written by Muslim “feminists” who seek to reinterpret the Quran. I have read all sorts of papers and listened to discussions of Muslims trying to reinterpret the fundamentals of Islam, such as jihad, the treatment of women, the rejection of science. The fundamentalists refer to these modernizers as heretics and infidels, confused and corrupted by the West. A famous example of this group is Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian scholar. He has suggested that parts of the Quran could be interpreted in such a way that it would be compatible with modernity. But he was attacked by fundamentalists, labeled an infidel, and forcibly divorced from his wife, a professor of literature, on the basis that he was an apostate (although he insisted that he remained a Muslim), and a
Muslim (such as his wife) cannot be married to a non-Muslim. Ultimately Abu Zayd was forced to flee to the Netherlands.

  An Iranian American Muslim woman, Laleh Baktiar, wrote a new translation of the Quran. This was not a work of critical reexamination of the Quran but a polishing up of some of its more cruel and inhuman passages by deliberately losing their meaning in translation. She too was ridiculed by fundamentalists and threatened with death.

  Yet the works of these so-called moderate interpreters of the Muslim faith are not helpful in their attempt to present a moderate Islam. Reading them is like putting on a blindfold and trying to find your way around your apartment after someone has rearranged the furniture: everywhere you go, you hit an obstacle. The language is very difficult to understand, the reasoning unintelligible. Clear-cut quranic commands such as “Beat the disobedient wife” and “Kill the infidel” are made obscure, and a lot of fences are built around them. Their reinterpretation is something like “Don’t beat her on the face. Don’t beat her to break her bones. Use only a small stick”—none of which is present in the original Arabic. In one text the word tharaba is interpreted to mean “leave her,” not “beat her,” if you fear she will be disobedient. This “improvement” from beating to leaving is presented solemnly, without a hint of irony. (The translator, so focused on unsaying the word beat, is oblivious to the consequence of the newfound translation leave and its ties to the Muslim man’s breezy right to divorce his wife at any time simply by crying out three times in the name of Allah and in the presence of two male witnesses “I divorce thee.”)

  What is striking about this tortuous struggle to reinterpret Muslim scripture is that none of these intelligent and well-meaning men and women reformers can live with the idea of rejecting altogether the troublesome parts of scripture. Thus, in their hands, Allah becomes a God of ambiguity rather than of clarity. From an articulate transmitter of Allah’s Word, Muhammad is turned into someone who left behind an incoherent muddle of rules. Ironically, this was the position of the Christian and Jewish critics who first heard Muhammad. They found that he stole whole passages from the Old and New Testaments and Jewish scriptures and reshaped them into a contradictory muddle that he claimed to be original. This vision of Muhammad is not at all what the reformers seek. According to them, Muhammad was good; he sought to liberate women, for example, but his words were turned and twisted and now must further be twisted and turned in order to create a semblance of tolerance and equity.

  Fundamentalists do not take kindly to these attempts to reshape the Holy Quran into a modern document; to them, this is a clear degradation of God and Muhammad. And here, I believe, the fundamentalists win, because they are not suffering from what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. The fundamentalists’ God is all-powerful; he dictated the Quran, and we must live as the Prophet did. This is a stance that is clear. It’s the Westernized theologians who are trapped in confusion, because they want to maintain that the Prophet Muhammad was a perfect human being whose example should be followed, that the Quran is perfect scripture, and that all of its key injunctions—kill the infidels, ambush them, take their property, convert them by force; kill homosexuals and adulterers; condemn Jews; treat women as chattel—are mysterious errors of translation.

  It is not only the prohibition against criticizing the Quran and the Prophet that closes the Muslim mind, and not only the life-long socialization of learning by rote. It is also the continuous construction of conspiracy theories about enemies of Islam who are determined to destroy the one, true religion.

  The chief enemy is the Jew.

  When I was a pious Muslim in my teens, I made my regular ablutions. In those days, with every splash of water I cursed the Jews. I covered my body, spread a prayer mat, faced Mecca, and asked Allah to protect me from the evil that is spread by the Jews. I hurried to our local mosque and joined the crowds in prayer. We lined up—in the women-only section—and followed the instructions of the male imam, who was invisible to us. We cried in unison “Amin” to all his supplications to Allah, and when he called Allah to destroy the Jews, I also fervently said “Amin.”

  When I was in secondary school I pored over magazines published in Iran and Saudi Arabia that contained graphic photographs of men and women covered in blood. The captions always identified the dead as victims of the Jews. Even though I was a curious child, and as a teenager was an even more curious student, I never questioned the veracity of the pictures, the captions under them, or the stories of how the Jews killed and maimed Muslims like me.

  In Nairobi after school I attended classes in Islamic centers generously provided to the public by wealthy men from Mecca and Medina. I believed that these wealthy men had built these centers out of kindness and goodness; they were practicing Zakat, or charity, the third pillar of Islam. I listened to one teacher after another talk about how the Jews had declared war on Islam. I learned that the Prophet Muhammad, the holiest of all holy men, in whose footsteps we Muslims all aspired to follow, had warned of the treacherous and evil ways of the Jews. They had betrayed him and tried to kill him, for wherever there is a Jew he plots and plans to destroy Islam. He smiles at the Muslim, but deep inside he hates him. He extends his hand to the Muslim in pretended peace, all the while enticing him toward a trap of debt, debauchery, and sin.

  I swallowed all this propaganda as the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  The other students who joined those lessons were as diverse as any group of students in a city like Nairobi; their families were from Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and various Kenyan regions. But we identified ourselves first and foremost as Muslims; ethnicity was no barrier to our deeper loyalty to our faith. In the name of Islam we digested the anti-Semitic propaganda that was offered to us. It came to us in the mosque, in our religion classes at school, in Islamic centers, and from Islamic radio, magazines, pamphlets, television stations, and audiocassettes (and later, videos, DVDs, and blogs and other online instruments). Jews were bloodsucking, lethal enemies of Islam.

  Some of my fellow students, selected on the basis of their piety and loyalty to Islam, were offered special scholarships to further their study of religion in Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Saudi Arabia, or in Lahore or Teheran. They came back to Nairobi after a few years and, like Jehovah’s Witnesses in the West, went from door to door in their respective neighborhoods. They preached Islam, of course: prayer, charity, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca (if you can afford it). But they also made thousands of believers aware of an enemy that lurked in the shadows, ready to attack them: the Jew.

  When I reflect back on this particular strand of anti-Semitism, I see three distinct features. The first is demographic power: increase the number of people who believe that Jews are their enemies. The second is to use Islam as a vehicle to promote anti-Semitism. The third is psychological: present the Muslim as an underdog fighting a powerful and ruthless enemy.

  A Somali woman poet, Safi Abdi, who is clearly immersed in this same propaganda, recently published a poem in English that is a perfect illustration of this strategic triangle:

  Hamas is a victim of U.S. policy.

  Hamas is Palestine, Palestine is Hamas.

  Hamas was born under Israeli siege.

  Hamas was born at the foot of a Zionist boot.

  In this poem the Jews are a scapegoat for evil and Islam is a unifying force against evil. Muslims are called upon to ignore their local problems of war, poverty, and tyranny and to unite against Israel, the Zionists, the Jews. This is the anti-Semitism of the twenty-first century. A Muslim who questions the existence of this enemy or his motives is either a fool or a traitor and a heretic.

  Europe’s long tradition of Christian and pseudo-scientific anti-Semitism was taken to its logical conclusion by Hitler and the Nazis, with the willing help of many other Europeans who participated in his program of Jewish annihilation. The evil of this “Final Solution” was exposed after the defeat of the Third Reich and combatted thereafter by the r
eeducation of ordinary Germans, the memorialization of the Holocaust, and the stigmatization or prohibition of neo-Nazi groups. As a result, by the end of the twentieth century most civilized people in the West believed that European anti-Semitism was a thing of the past.

  But it is not. It has mutated into something new: Arab Islamic anti-Semitism has replaced European anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semites have borrowed a few tricks from the Nazis. They employ propaganda tools, such as the counterfeit Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that were developed by the Nazis. However, they also have something that the Nazis did not have: a world religion that is growing faster than any other religion, a warrior faith that is espoused by over one and a half billion people. Hitler had Mein Kampf and the might of the German Wehrmacht; today’s anti-Semites, like the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Osama bin Laden, have a holy book, a far greater demographic power, and a good chance of getting their hands on a nuclear weapon.

  Despite outer appearances, the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East is no longer about territory. It may seem to be so to Jews and Americans, but from the Arab Islamic perspective it is a holy war in the name of Allah, and victory will come only if the Jews are destroyed or enslaved, if all the infidels are killed, converted, or “dhimmified” into the status of submissive, second-class citizens.

  Wars are never fought only on battlefields with military means. Israel, America, and Europe may have stronger armies, but Islam has the numbers. The targets of Muslim propaganda—women, gay people, infidels, Christians, atheists, and Jews—are divided among themselves. The more these groups in the West are divided, the better for Islam. Shia and Sunni Muslims may hate one another; Arab Muslims may degrade African Muslims as slaves; Turks and Persians may look down on Arabs. But at the end of the day, when an imam calls for Tawhid, unity in the oneness of Allah, and performs the takbir, “Allahu Akbar,” nearly all Muslims unite.