They did marry in the end, of course. And after a year or so of making angellos and renting trucks and trading between Kismayo and Mogadishu, Fadumo and Farah Gouré bought their first truck. Then they bought another, and a real angello stand, with employees. It was the women of the tolka, the closest of our Osman Mahamud relatives, who told and retold the story to us, and each time it became more romantic, Fadumo braver and wittier and Farah even more enchanted by her. When this lovely story was told in the presence of Fadumo herself she would listen silently, with a small smile on her face, saying nothing. She was a big, happy woman with a huge houseful of children and guests, just down the road from Abdillahi Ahmed’s house.
When Fadumo was pregnant with their seventh child, Farah Gouré married another woman, and then a third. But Fadumo never flinched. She told the other wives, “You’re welcome here. But you earn your own money. The money he married you with is mine.”
I don’t know how much of that story was true, but the moral lesson was clear: as a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn’t prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could save some of your dignity if you didn’t have to beg him for financial support.
I suppose that’s why Farah Gouré decided to help Haweya: he liked strong, bold women. He agreed to pay for her trip to Mogadishu and made all the arrangements.
Grandma was proud of Haweya. She was doing what a Darod woman should do, returning to her land to learn the ancestral traditions. But Ma was angry that Haweya had arranged all this behind her back. She knew the Osman Mahamud women would gossip: for a daughter to leave her mother in this way reflected very badly on her upbringing. Still, Ma knew she could not stand in the way of Haweya going to Somalia to visit her father’s relatives—that would look even worse.
Ma had several long, flowing dirha made for Haweya, and pleaded with her to obey her elders and not damage her parents’ honor. When the day came for her to leave, Ma and I walked her over to Farah Gouré’s house with her suitcase. She was excited; I cried. Mainly I felt sorry for myself, left behind to share a bedroom with Grandma and Ma and finish school alone. Father had left years ago, then Mahad, and now Haweya was going, too. Grandma talked endlessly of how much better she would feel if she were back home in Somalia again with the rest of her daughters and son. Our family was disintegrating.
When she got to Mogadishu, Haweya would have to stay with our father’s first wife, Maryan Farah, our closest relative in Somalia. Not to stay with her would have been rude and would have sent a message of jealousy and spite. We were above all that.
We had never met Maryan Farah, but we knew about her and her children, whom we called our sisters. Arro was much older than I; Ijaabo was close to Haweya’s age. Maryan was a small, proud woman, and had not remarried after my father divorced her. She worked in Mogadishu in some important job for the government. Maryan was Marehan—from the same small subclan as the dictator Siad Barré.
There was a constant tug of clan the whole time Haweya was in Somalia. In Kenya, clans had never mattered much to us, but in Somalia they were omnipresent. The Osman Mahamud understood that Haweya had to live with her stepmother, even though Maryan was of another clan, because that is how these things are always done. But they wanted to keep an eye on her. They sneered at the Marehan, the clan of the upstart Afwayne. They didn’t want a Marehan woman saying she had to support an Osman Mahamud child, so they gave Haweya pocket money.
As soon as Haweya would return to Maryan’s house from a visit with our father’s relatives, our stepsisters would fall on her. Arro and Ijaabo would plead and beg and even demand that she share the cash. They took her stuff without asking, things like shampoo and soap. They jeered at her for not knowing the proper codes and for reading all the time. Haweya didn’t like them.
Haweya found more congenial company at the house of Ibado Dhadey Magan, an older sister of my father’s who had taught herself to read and write, earned a nursing certificate, and had risen to become director of the Digfeer Hospital, where I was born. Ibado Dhadey was in her late forties or early fifties, but she was modern. She was married, but she had no children, and she liked my sister’s pluck.
Ibado told Haweya she was lucky to have gone to school at all, and that she needed to study so she could work for her living. She showed Haweya around her house, with its tiled verandah and lush garden, and told her, “Nobody gave me any of this. I worked for it. Go out and get yourself a qualification, and work.”
When Haweya used the money Ibado gave her to buy trousers, blouses, and skirts, Maryan’s household was outraged. Food was another difficult issue. In our house in Nairobi we never ate from one plate, as Somalis do. Ma had long ago adopted the Western manner, using individual plates, though we did mostly eat with spoons or our hands. But in Maryan’s house, like almost everywhere in Mogadishu, all the men ate out of one plate in one part of the courtyard, and all the women and small children squatted and ate at another corner of the courtyard from another dish.
Haweya disliked it; she thought it was unhygienic. It killed her appetite. She had gotten into the habit at home of eating alone, after all of us, while reading a book. It made her miserable to eat without reading, and she lost weight, which Maryan took as a personal insult.
Haweya began going to restaurants with the money Ibado gave her. A young woman, on her own, in a restaurant: this was absolutely unheard of. She would order lunch, and then, in front of everyone, she would eat it, slowly, while reading a novel. Waiters and male clients would badger her, but she just told them off. This was hugely deviant behavior.
Maryan’s relatives began focusing on Haweya, the poor little daughter of Hirsi Magan who had been allowed to grow up a barbarian in Kenya. They sought to influence her. They talked about her, they talked to her—all of them got involved in what she ate, when she ate, how she dressed, why was she reading novels and not the Quran. Haweya wrote me that she had gone to Somalia to be free of our mother, but was being suffocated by an entire cabal.
* * *
I was seventeen, and I was miserable with Haweya away. My friend Fardawsa Abdillahi Ahmed had left Nairobi, too, to live with her younger brothers and sisters in the countryside until she was married off. In school the only subject that interested me was Islamic education. The prospect of taking my O-level exams didn’t interest me one bit. I needed to get to the core of what I believed in. All the other girls were content to accept the rules of our religion at face value, but I felt compelled to try to understand them. I needed my belief system to be logical and consistent. Essentially, I needed to be convinced that Islam was true. And it was beginning to dawn on me that although many wonderful people were sure it was true, there seemed to be breakdowns in its consistency.
If God were merciful, then why did Muslims have to shun non-Muslims—even attack them, to establish a state based on Allah’s laws? If He was just, then why were women so downtrodden? I began collecting together all the verses in the Quran that said God was wise, God was omnipotent, God was just—and there were many. I pondered them. Clearly, in real life, Muslim women were not “different but equal,” as Sister Aziza maintained. The Quran said “Men rule over women.” In the eyes of the law and in every detail of daily life, we were clearly worth less than men.
I was also still attending Quran classes, alongside Muslim Girls’ Secondary. My ma’alim was a young man whom people called Boqol Sawm, He Who Fasts for a Hundred Days. Grandma used to say his belly touched his spine, he was so thin. Boqol Sawm was a fanatic, even by a zealot’s standard. He wore a Saudi robe, cut short so we could see his scrawny ankles. He used to walk around Eastleigh knocking on doors and lecturing people. He told Farah Gouré, “All your daughters are uncovered! All of you will writhe in Hell!” Farah Gouré threw him out of the house.
But in time Boqol Sawm acquired a large following. Most of them were women, and among them was my mother. When he came to the door, women accepted the audiocassettes of sermons th
at he handed out, and they exchanged them with each other. They turned their living rooms over to Quran study, filling them with women listening eagerly to his sermons on tape or even to Boqol Sawn in person, with an opaque curtain separating him from the women, just as the Prophet had ordained.
Boqol Sawm became the most sought-after lecturer in the community, and as time passed, the effect of his sermons became visible in the streets of the Somali neighborhoods. Women who used to wear colorful dirhas with seductive petticoats underneath and Italian sandals that showed off pedicured toes painted in nail varnish or henna began to cloak in the burka. They shrouded themselves in dark brown, black, and dark blue cloth of the roughest cotton fabric possible, with only a little bit of their faces visible. Some even began to cover their faces. There are so many variations in exactly how you must cover yourself; the form of veil that now spread among the Somali fundamentalists was called a jilbab, a thick cloth covering everything from the head to below the knees and another thick skirt underneath. All of a sudden, my black cloak seemed too thin and revealing.
My mother was drawn to Boqol Sawm’s certitude. She encouraged me to listen to his sermons on tape and attend his lectures when he preached at homes in our neighborhood.
With Sister Aziza, there was an atmosphere of trust and intimacy: she let us draw our own conclusions. But to Boqol Sawm, teaching the Quran meant shouting it, loud, in a mishmash of Arabic and Somali, and then yelling out the rules: what was forbidden, what was permitted. He didn’t translate the text properly, or explain its underlying intention.
One day when I was seventeen, Boqol Sawm turned to the verses on how women were supposed to behave with their husbands. We owed our husbands absolute obedience, he told the mothers and teenage girls who had gathered to listen to him. If we disobeyed them, they could beat us. We must be sexually available at any time outside our periods, “even on the saddle of a camel,” as the hadith says. This wasn’t any kind of loving partnership, or mutual giving; it didn’t even sound possible. But Boqol Sawm yelled, “TOTAL OBEDIENCE: this is the rule in Islam.” It enraged me, and I stood up behind the curtain. In a shaky voice I asked, “Must our husbands obey us, too?”
There is nothing wrong with that question, but Boqol Sawm’s voice rose, hard and dry. “Certainly not!”
I dug my nails into my hand to stop myself from shaking and went on, “Men and women are then not equal.”
Boqol Sawm said, “They are equal.”
“But they’re not,” I told him. “I’m supposed to totally obey my husband, but he is not totally obedient to me, and therefore we are not equal. The Quran says on almost every page that Allah is just, but this is not just.”
Boqol Sawm’s voice rose to a shout. “You may not question Allah’s word! His mind is hidden. Satan is speaking to you, girl! Sit down instantly!”
I sat down, but as I did I hissed “Stupid” under my breath. It alarmed the other women in the room; they thought I truly must have lost my mind to a demon. But I knew I had genuinely sought the truth, and Boqol Sawm had shut me up because he didn’t know it. The flaw could not be in the Quran, because that was God’s word. It must lie with the stupid ma’alim, with the whole inept cohort of ma’alims that it had been my unhappy lot to encounter.
I thought that perhaps Boqol Sawm was translating the Quran poorly: Surely Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman’s statement in court should be worth the same as a man’s? I told myself, “None of these people understands that the real Quran is about true equality. The Quran is higher and better than these men.”
I bought my own English edition of the Quran and read it so I could understand it better. But I found that everything Boqol Sawm had said was in there. Women should obey their husbands. Women were worth half a man. Infidels should be killed.
I talked to Sister Aziza, and she confirmed it. Women are emotionally stronger than men, she said. They can endure more, so they are tested more. Husbands may punish their wives—not for small infractions, like being late, but for major infractions, like being provocative to other men. This is just, because of the overwhelming sexual power of women. I asked, “What if the man provokes other women?” Sister Aziza said, “In an Islamic society, that’s impossible.”
Furthermore, she told me, I was not permitted for one second to imagine that perhaps the Quran’s words could be adapted to a modern era. The Quran had been written by God, not by men. “The Quran is the word of Allah and it is forbidden to refute it,” Sister Aziza told me.
You obey, and you serve Allah—that is the test. If you submit to God’s will on earth, you will attain bliss in the Hereafter. The rule is strict and pure. My doubts severely diminished my chances for eternal bliss, but I found that I couldn’t ignore them. I had to resolve this.
* * *
As Boqol Sawm’s following grew, his sermons caused a lot of quarrels between spouses. At first, the Somali fathers and husbands were amused and teased their wives, predicting that after a week the silly, bored women would find some other pastime. After a while, however, irritations arose. The living room, usually well furnished, is the domain of the man. Somali men bring their male friends home and sit with them in the living room having men-talk (honor, money, politics, and whether to take a second or third wife) as they drink scented sweet tea and chew qat. The evenings and Friday afternoons are their preferred times, and Boqol Sawm chose to give his lectures especially at those times.
When Boqol Sawm was visiting a house, the men were relegated to the women’s quarters: the kitchen, backyard, and, in some of the bigger houses, the smaller and uglier living rooms usually occupied by the women. And after their wives converted to the True Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood believers, they began saying that chewing qat, smoking, and skipping prayers were forbidden. They actually sent their husbands off, calling them unbelievers. When the men shouted about disobedience, the women replied that in the hierarchy of submission, we must follow Allah even before husband and father: Allah and the Prophet decreed that wives should obey only husbands who themselves obey Allah.
The Muslim Brotherhood believed that there was a pure, original Islam to which we all should return. Traditional ways of practicing Islam had become corrupted, diluted with ancient beliefs that should no longer have currency. The movement was founded in the 1920s in Egypt as an Islamic revivalist movement, then caught on and spread—slowly at first, but much faster in the 1970s, as waves of funding flooded in from the suddenly massively rich Saudis. By 1987 the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideas had reached the Somali housewives of Eastleigh in the gaunt and angry shape of Boqol Sawm.
Within months the first divorces were occurring, and secular Somali men were threatening Boqol Sawm for breaking up their families. Boqol Sawm was chased away by angry husbands from the living room sessions and from the Somali mosques, but copies of his tapes continued to spread even as he was in hiding.
In the tapes, when he wasn’t warning about hellfire and the enemies of Islam, Boqol Sawm was issuing detailed prescriptions on the rituals permitted in Islam and the ceremonies of birth, lovemaking, marriage, divorce, and so on. Celebrating the birthday of the Prophet was forbidden because it resembled Christmas, when Christians celebrate the birthday of Jesus, and Muslims should never imitate unbelievers in any way. Wearing amulets as my grandmother did and asking favors of dead forefathers was blasphemous, as it associated Allah with lesser gods, and for that you could burn forever. Refusing to sleep with your husband if he didn’t observe the obligations of prayer and fasting was permitted. When entering a bathroom to use the toilet, start with the left foot, and when coming out, put the right leg out first. The only greeting permitted among Muslims is Assalamu-Allaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakaatuhu, “Peace be to you and the mercy of Allah and His blessings.” If you are greeted in any other way you must not answer.
Boqol Sawm wasn’t the only preacher who had come to our neighborhood to guide the lost back to Allah’s Strai
ght Path after a stint in Medina or Cairo. More and more young men of the Muslim Brotherhood, dressed in ankle-length white robes and red-and-white checked shawls, were striding through the streets. People who converted to their cause started to collect money from family; some women gave their dowries, and all kinds of donations came in. By 1987 the first Muslim Brotherhood mosque was built in Eastleigh, and Boqol Sawm came out of hiding to preach there every Friday, screaming at the top of his lungs through the loudspeakers behind the white minaret topped with a green crescent and a single star.
Boqol Sawm shouted that the men who rejected their wives’ call to Islam would burn. The rich who spent their money on earthly things would burn. The Muslims who abandoned their fellow Muslims—the Palestinians—were not true Muslims, and they would burn, too. Islam was under threat and its enemies—the Jews and the Americans—would burn forever. Those Muslim families who sent their children to universities in the United States, Britain, and other lands of the infidels would burn. Life on earth is temporary, Boqol Sawm yelled; it was meant by Allah to test people. The hypocrites who were too weak to resist the worldly temptations would burn. If you did not break off your friendships with non-Muslims, you would burn.
I had questions about Boqol Sawm, but at age seventeen, I mostly believed in the Brotherhood’s values. And, as the movement swelled, there were two clear benefits. Fewer young men were getting addicted to qat and other drugs. At the time, AIDS was just starting to kill people; many Muslim families thought the best answer was abstinence, and abstinence was exactly what the religious zealots of every stripe were preaching.
Another benefit was a curbing of corruption. In Muslim Brotherhood enterprises there was virtually no corruption. Medical centers and charities managed by the Brotherhood were reliable and trustworthy. If non-Muslim Kenyans converted, they, too, could benefit from these facilities, and in the slums many Kenyans began converting to Islam.