At the time I did not know anything about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the writer of the book. The cover has a picture of a beautiful black woman. The back cover states that per (=s/he) had had a "traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia." The book is pers autobiography and per refers to perself as an infidel, a non-believer. That had an immediate resonance within me, having been brought up in a very strict evangelical Christian home which I left behind me in more ways than one. That journey from belief to non-belief was a long one for me and not at all as easy as moving from one country to another. I wondered how that journey was for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. So I bought the book although I usually do not read biographies or autobiographies. (One of the few I have read is The Loony Bin Trip by Kate Millett.)
In the Introduction Ayaan tells about the murder of the Dutch film maker who made a film called Submission, Part 1 with Ayaan. The film is "about Muslim women who shift from total submission to God to a dialogue with their deity." In this short film there "is the woman who is flogged for committing adultery; another who is given in marriage to a man she loathes; another who is beaten by her husband on a regular basis; another who is shunned by her father when he learns that his brother raped her. Each abuse is justified by the perpetrators in the name of God, citing the Quran verses now written on the bodies of the women. These women stand for hundreds of thousands of Muslim women around the world." Towards the end of the book Ayaan goes into more details about the film and the murder and what followed. The introduction is very short stating, after the brief mention of the film and the murder, the reasons for writing the book, the summary of Ayaan's life and then a dedication: "This book is dedicated to my family, and also to the millions and millions of Muslim women who have had to submit."
The early years in the lives of various family members are covered briefly in the first part of the book titled My Childhood. As Ayaan writes on the final page of the Epilogue that although it is only two generations from pers grandmother to per "the reality of that voyage is millenial. Even today you can take a truck across the border into Somalia and find you have gone back thousands of years in time." At the age of thirteen Ayaan's grandmother was married off to a much older man who already had a wife and a daughter just a little younger than Ayaan's grandmother. The story of Ayaan's mother's birth is instructive about the life of the grandmother. "My mother, Asha, was born sometime in the early 1940s, along with her identical twin sister, Halimo. My grandmother gave birth to them alone, under a tree. They were her third and fourth children; she was about eighteen, leading her goats and sheep to pasture when she felt the pains. She lay down and bore forth; then she cut the umbilical cords with her knife. A few hours later, she gathered together the goats and sheep and managed to bring the herd home safely before dark, carrying her newborn twins. Nobody was impressed by the exploit: she was only bringing home two more girls."
Ayaan's early childhood was spent in newly independent Somalia, formed after the British and Italian colonizers left in 1960. Because of Ayaan's father's political activities the father was in and out of Ayaan's life and the family moved from one country to another. They moved to Saudi Arabia when Ayaan was only eight. After about a year there the family was deported and the father took them to Ethiopia. About a year was enough there too; Ayaan's father moved the family to Kenya where many of the exiled Somali families lived. Ayaan writes:"That is how, by the time I turned ten, I had lived through three different political systems, all of them failures. The police state in Mogadishu rationed people into hunger and bombed them into obedience. Islamic law in Saudi Arabia treated half its citizens like animals, with no rights or recourse, disposing of women without regard. And the old Somali rule of the clan, which saved you when you needed refuge, so easily broke down into suspicion, conspiracy, and revenge. In the years to come, clan warfare would sharpen and splinter and finally tear the whole of Somalia to pieces in one of the most destructive civil wars in Africa."
Ayaan had not only gone through those different political systems per also had to learn different languages. On moving to Kenya Ayaan could speak Somali, Arabic and Amharic. Now per had to learn Swahili and English. Another difference between these countries had been the calendars and the way time was told. "In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o'clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili.) The months, the days - everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary School did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times. Grandma never learnt to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system."
Religion was a part of Ayaan's life from the beginning. Per learnt it from observing people around per and from attending Quran schools in Somalia and Saudi Arabia. In Kenya pers mother hired a preacher to teach Quran to the girls on Saturdays. Ayaan saw how Islam was practised in different countries they lived in. Per also saw the differences in pers parents beliefs, the father's beliefs being more humane whereas the mother's beliefs were more literal and for example accepting the brutalities in Saudi Arabia as “God's will.” As Ayaan writes: “My father's Islam was also clearly an interpretation of what the Prophet said. As such, it was not legitimate. You may not interpret the will of Allah and the words of the Quran: it says so, right there in the book. There is a read-only lock. It is forbidden to pick and choose: you may only obey. The Prophet said, 'I have left you with clear guidance; no one deviates from it after me, except that he shall be destroyed.'” Although Ayaan questioned what per was taught it was not until per had fled to Holland that per felt able to really study and think and finally declare perself an infidel. That part of Ayaan's journey is told in the second part of the book My Freedom.
Ayaan did not escape because per wanted to get away from Islam. What sparked pers flight to pers freedom was the forced marriage. Ayaan had told pers father who arranged the marriage that per did not want it. Pers wishes were not taken into account and the marriage took place without Ayaan's attendance as neither pers presence nor pers signature was required for an Islamic ceremony. What Ayaan was allowed was the postponement of the consummation of the marriage until a further ceremony in Canada where per was to live with pers new husband. Ayaan travelled to Germany to wait for the visa to Canada as the process was very slow in Kenya.
In Germany Ayaan's frantic ponderings about how to undo pers marriage brought per to a realization “I didn't even have to go to Canada. I could disappear here. ….. I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it, and now I could see it, smell it in the air around me: the kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own.” And in July 1992 Ayaan acted taking a train to Holland where per applied for a refugee status and got it.
In Holland Ayaan worked hard in various jobs and in pers studies until per finally earned a place in a university to study political science as per “wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa. Why there was so much peace, security, and wealth in Europe. What the causes of war were, and how you built peace. …. Why should infidels have peace, and Muslims be killing each other, when we were the ones who worshipped the true God? If I studied political science, I thought, I would understand that.” While studying at the university Ayaan worked as an official interpreter. In both pers studies and in pers work per had to learn to compartmentalize, as per said what conflicted with Islam per had “to stuff it all behind the little shutter in my brain.” After 9/11 attack that shutter broke open and refused to close again but it was not until May 2002 that Ayaan fully realized that per was not a believer any longer. Per realized "I had left God behind years ago. I was an atheist. .... And I felt relief. .... There was no pain, but a real clarity."
Ayaan's work as an interpreter was an education in itself to per. Per was called to interpret in the refugee centres, prisons, police stations, clinics, courts, unemployment offices, schools and shelters for battered women. Many if not all the people that per saw in any of these places were from Muslim backgrounds. This and what per knew from pers own experience informed pers political work as an MP in the Dutch parliament where per was elected in January 2003. Ayaan did all that per could in the parliament to improve the lives of Muslim women and children and to inform the society around per about their situation. After a couple of years per realized that there was nothing else per could do there and decided to accept a position in an American think tank thinking that it would give per a wider audience and per could do more good there.
I want to give the final words to Ayaan:
When I took the train to Amsterdam thirteen years ago, I took a chance at a life in freedom, a life in which I would be free from bondage to someone I had not chosen, and in which my mind, too, could be free.
I first encountered the full strength of Islam as a young child in Saudi Arabia. It was very different from the diluted religion of my grandmother, which was mixed with magical practices and pre-Islamic beliefs. Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence. It is the place where the Muslim religion is practiced in its purest form, and it is the origin of much of the fundamentalist vision that has, in my lifetime, spread beyond its borders. In Saudi Arabia, every breath, every step we took, was infused with concepts of purity or sinning, and with fear. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.
The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts or honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hypocrisy, and double standards. It relies on the technological advances of the West while pretending to ignore their origin in Western thinking. This mind-set makes the transition to modernity very painful for all who practice Islam.
It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. It was difficult for my grandmother, and for all my relatives from the miyé. It was difficult for me, too. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason – from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values.
The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.
