A brand-new mosque was built in Majengo with money contributed by a rich Saudi man. One Friday evening I went there to pray with classmates because Sister Aziza said it was important to visit poor neighborhoods. It was after the evening prayer, and the street near the mosque was crowded with Kenyan women clumsy in their new jilbabs. At the entrance of the mosque a Kenyan woman carrying a baby had just sat down on the stone steps. She lifted her jilbab and opened the buttons of the dress she was wearing underneath, then directed a completely naked and voluptuous breast into her baby’s mouth as if it was the most common act in the world. In front of her was a mountain of men’s shoes, and behind her men—strange men—were engaged in prayer, but this young woman seemed shockingly oblivious to these surroundings.
All the girls from Sister Aziza’s class shrieked in unison, and we transported this young woman to a hall in the women’s section. An older woman of Swahili origin, covered from head to toe in black, started to instruct her in the Islamic way of breast-feeding. First you say Bismillah before you put the nipple into the mouth. As the baby is feeding, beg Allah to protect your child from illness, earthly temptations, and the evil ways of the Jews. Of course, no strange man must ever be present: better that the baby go hungry.
* * *
I was never one of Boqol Sawm’s great admirers. I thought his sermons were crude; they didn’t seem to answer my questions. But I was drawn to a discussion group of young Muslims that took place in the community center near my school. These were young people who were dissatisfied with the intellectual level of the teaching at the madrassahs and who, like me, sought deeper religious learning, true understanding of the example of the Prophet Muhammad, the better to walk in his footsteps. They felt Islam should not be something you nodded at a few times a week. They wanted to immerse themselves in it as a minutely detailed way of life, a passion, a constant internal pursuit.
A group of Somali and Pakistani young men had begun organizing weekly Islamic debates in English to discuss these matters. Going there was not like attending the mosque, where sermons were often just a recitation of old texts in Arabic. The speakers at our youth debates talked about relationships between men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims, Islam and Christianity. The talks were lively, and often clever, as well as much more relevant to our lives than the mosque.
The audience was mostly very bright, deeply committed older students, and they were there voluntarily—unlike Quran school, which parents obliged their kids to attend. A speaker stood on a dais. The boys, in front, wore mainly Western clothes, and the girls behind them wore large headscarves. The segregation was voluntary, and the atmosphere was harmonious: we were all good Muslims, striving for perfection.
We were not like the passive old school, for whom Islam meant a few rules and more or less devoutly observed rituals, and who interlaced their Quran with tribal customs and magical beliefs in amulets and spirits. We were God’s shock troops. The Islam that we were imbibing stemmed from the hard, essentialist beliefs of thinkers seeking to revive the original Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and His disciples in the seventh century. The intention was to live according to the ancient ways in every detail of our lives. We weren’t just learning a text by heart: we were discussing its meaning and how it applied to us every day.
We read Hasan al-Banna, who set up the Society of Muslim Brothers to oppose the rise of Western ideas in the lands of Islam and promote a return to the Islam of the Prophet. We read Sayyid Qutb, another Egyptian, who said preaching was not enough, that we must stage a catastrophic revolution to establish the kingdom of God on Earth. We thrilled to new movements called Akhwan (Brotherhood) and Tawheed (the Straight Path); they were small groups of true believers, as we felt ourselves to be. This was the True Islam, this harking back to the purity of the Prophet.
Everyone was convinced that there was an evil worldwide crusade aimed at eradicating Islam, directed by the Jews and by the whole Godless West. We needed to defend Islam. We wanted to be involved in the jihad, a word that may have multiple meanings. It may mean that the faith needs financial support, or that an effort should be made to convert new believers. Or it may mean violence; violent jihad is a historical constant in Islam.
As much as I wanted to be a devout Muslim, I always found it uncomfortable to be opposed to the West. For me, Britain and America were the countries in my books where there was decency and individual choice. The West to me meant all those ideas, in addition to pop music and cinema and the completely silly pen-pal relationships we’d had at Muslim Girls’ Secondary School with girls from Finland and Canada who thought we lived in trees in the jungle. In my own personal experience of the West—which was, admittedly, minimal—it really didn’t seem to be terribly evil. But I stared long and hard at the photos of dead Muslims that were passed around: we had to give meaning to these deaths, and we were told that the West had caused them. We were taught that, as Muslims, we should oppose the West.
Our goal was a global Islamic government, for everyone.
How would we fight? Some said the most important goal was preaching: to spread Islam among non-Muslims and to awaken passive Muslims to the call of the true, pure belief. Several young men left the group to go to Egypt, to become members of the original Muslim Brotherhood there. Others received scholarships from various Saudi-funded groups to go to Quran schools in Medina, in Saudi Arabia.
Sister Aziza became a Shia when she married a Shia man. She was enthralled by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which by 1987 was eight years old. She talked to us about the saintliness of the Ayatollah Khomeini; finally, a voice was standing up to the perversions and guiles of the Western Crusaders. She showed us photos of dead Iranian boys, their lifeless heads still wearing the green cloth bands of martyrdom, who had given their lives to uphold the Iranian Revolution. She took us to the Iranian Embassy in Nairobi. We talked about going to Iran, to do what we could for the Ayatollah, but when my mother found out we had been to the embassy, she was angry. Ma would never let me go to Iran, among the Shia.
At the debating center we had long discussions about how to behave in daily life. There were so many rules, with minutely detailed prescriptions, and so many authorities had pronounced on them all. Truly Muslim women should cover their bodies even in front of a blind man, even in their own houses. They had no right to walk down the middle of the street. They should not move out of their father’s house without permission.
I found it remarkable how many esteemed Muslim thinkers had philosophized at such length about precisely how much female skin could be bared without causing chaos to break out across the landscape. Of course, almost all these thinkers agreed that once a girl reaches puberty, every part of her body except her face and her hands must be covered when in the company of any men who are not immediate family, and at all times outside the home. This was because her bare skin would involuntarily cause men to feel an uncontrollable frenzy of sexual arousal. But not all thinkers agreed on exactly which parts of a woman’s face and hands were so beguiling that they must be covered.
Some scholars held that the eyes of women were the strongest source of sexual provocation: when the Quran said women should lower their gaze, it actually meant they should hide their eyes. Another school of thought held that the very sight of a woman’s lips, especially full ones that were firm and young, could bring a man into a sexual state that could cause his downfall. Yet other thinkers spent pages and pages on the sensual curve of the chin, a pretty nose, or long, slender fingers and the tendency of some women to move their hands in a way that attracted attention to their temptations. For every limitation the Prophet was quoted.
Even when all women had been covered completely from head to toe, another line of thought was opened. For this was not enough. High heels tapped and could trigger in men the image of a woman’s legs; to avoid sin, women must wear flat shoes that make no noise. Next came perfume: using any kind of pleasant fragrance, even perfumed soap and shampoo, would distract the minds of men from A
llah’s worship and cause them to fantasize about sinning. The safest way to cause no harm to anyone seemed to be to avoid contact with any man at all times and just stay in the house. A man’s sinful erotic thoughts were always the fault of the woman who incited them.
One day, I finally stood up and asked, “What about the men? Shouldn’t they cover? Don’t women also have desire for male bodies? Couldn’t they be tempted by the sight of men’s skin?” It seemed logical to me, but the whole room fell about laughing. There was no way I could go on with my objections.
* * *
I was lonely without Haweya and Fardawsa, and many of my school friends were avoiding me, uncomfortable with a religious freak in a black tent. I took to spending afternoons after school at Farah Gouré’s house. A whole gaggle of young women—his teenage daughters and girls from the Osman Mahamud clan who had just arrived from Somalia—lived there, under the keen but benevolent eye of his wife Fadumo. Several of the Somali girls at Fadumo’s house were fresh from the Somali countryside or the provinces and were properly betrothed to good men of the clan. My mother thought they would be a fine influence on me, so she let me go to Farah Gouré’s house as much as I liked. And I did like.
It was my first contact with Somali girls from Somalia. One of these girls was Jawahir, who was quick, pretty, rather excitable. She was about twenty-five and had come to Nairobi to marry one of Farah Gouré’s truck drivers. She was waiting at Farah Gouré’s place for her husband-to-be to return to Nairobi from a five-month trip through southern Africa. Ali was a dependable employee, and Fadumo needed Jawahir to feel happy in Nairobi; if Jawahir were miserable she might persuade Ali to return to Somalia with her. So Fadumo asked me to show Jawahir around town and keep her company.
Jawahir was tiny but exuberant, all airs and graces; she rolled her eyes and flounced her arms around, telling stories in her shrill voice. She inflected everything with so much drama. Jawahir reminded me of the Isaq women who mourned at the funeral of my aunt in Mogadishu, under the talal tree; in fact, along with her Isaq manner, she had even picked up an Isaq accent from living near Hargeisa, where her parents settled for a while. Jawahir didn’t read books—she was illiterate—but she was really amusing.
A whole group of us met for long, giggly girls’ conversations in the afternoons, while the older people napped with the children. The talk centered on Jawahir’s impending marriage and the various prospects for other people’s marriages. And of course we talked about circumcision. All these girls knew they would be married soon; it was inevitable that we talk about our excisions. This was what we had been sewn up for.
The talk was mostly boasting. All the girls said how tightly closed they were; this made them even more pure, doubly virginal. Jawahir was particularly proud of her circumcision. She used to say, “See the palm of your hand? I am like that. Flat. Closed.”
One afternoon, gossiping about another girl, Jawahir said, “If you’re walking past the toilet when she’s in there, you can hear that she isn’t a virgin. She doesn’t drip. She pees loudly, like a man.”
We discussed our periods, too, the essence of what made us filthy and unworthy of prayer. When we were menstruating, we weren’t allowed even to pray or to touch the Quran. All the girls felt guilty for bleeding every month. It was proof that we were less worthy than men.
We never actually talked about sex itself, the act that would take place on the marriage night, the reason why we had been sewn. Somalis almost never talk about sexuality directly. The subject is shameful and dirty. Sometimes, though, as Jawahir and I walked around the neighborhood, we would come across people—Kenyans—making out, in broad daylight. Dainty little Jawahir would recoil: this was a nasty country.
On other afternoons Jawahir used to ask me to read to her out loud from the books I carried everywhere. She had never gone to school, and books were strange to her. These books were mostly thrillers and mushy love stories, but all of them had sex scenes. I would read them to her, and she would sniff and say, “It’s not like that for Muslims. We are pure.”
* * *
Jawahir’s wedding took place at Farah Gouré’s house. All the women had elaborate curlicues hennaed on their hands and were wearing gauze dirha gowns. We danced together to a woman drummer. I don’t think the men danced or had music. We had a huge meal—several sheep and goats were slaughtered—and in the evening little Jawahir appeared, in a white Western dress, with her hair piled up in a beehive. She was enjoying the attention: she loved to perform.
For a week after the wedding Ma wouldn’t let me go to see Jawahir: she said it wouldn’t be proper. So it wasn’t until the next weekend that I visited her. Jawahir sat on the sofa, gingerly shifting her weight from one side of her bottom to the other. Finally I asked her what it had been like, having sex.
She evaded the question. I was holding one of Halwa’s Harlequin paperbacks and she grabbed it and asked, “What is this filthy book you’re reading?” I said, “Come on, you know all about it now, tell me what it’s like.” Jawahir said, “Not until you read this book to me.”
It was a mild enough book, about a man, a woman, a doomed romance, one or two sexy bits. But when the man and woman kissed, he put his hand on the woman’s breast, and he then put his mouth to her nipple. Jawahir was horrified. “These Christians are filthy!” she squeaked. “This is forbidden! For Muslims it’s not like that at all!”
Now Jawahir really had to tell me what sex was like. She said it was awful. After the wedding ceremony, they went into the bedroom of the flat that Ali had rented for them. Ali turned off the lights. Jawahir lay down on the bed, fully dressed. He groped under her dress, opened her legs, took off her underpants, and tried to push his penis inside her. He didn’t cut her with a knife, just with his penis. It took a long time, and hurt. This resembled the stories that Sahra had told me.
Every night it was almost as painful, and always the same: Ali would push inside, move up and down inside her, and then ejaculate. That was it. Then he would stand up and take a shower to purify himself; she would get up and shower, also to purify herself, and apply Dettol to the parts that were bleeding. That was Jawahir’s sex life.
This was nothing at all like the scenes I used to linger on in books. I was about to turn eighteen. I had reared myself on Harlequins and kissed Kennedy. What Jawahir described fell far short of the thrilling sex I had imagined. I was crestfallen, and told her I would never get married.
Jawahir laughed, and said, “Wait until your father comes back one day—you’ll see then.” She seemed perfectly resigned to her life. Ali appeared to be a kind man, not violent or mean, and a decent provider. Jawahir seemed convinced that good women were forbidden by God to feel desire.
I already knew what Sister Aziza would say about sex and marriage. She counseled many young married couples. Women often told her how horrible it was for them to have sex. Sister Aziza used to respond that they were complaining only because they had read licentious, un-Islamic descriptions of sexual experiences in Western books. We Muslim women were not to copy the behavior of unbelievers. We shouldn’t dress like them, or make love like them, or behave like them in any way. We should not read their books, for they would lead us off the straight, true path to Allah.
A woman couldn’t break a marriage because it was awful or boring: that was utterly forbidden, and the way of Satan. “If your husband hurts you,” Sister Aziza would tell these women, “you must tell him that, and ask him to do it differently. If you cooperate it will always be less painful. And if he’s not hurting you, then count yourself among the lucky ones.”
* * *
At Abdillahi Ahmed’s house, relations between Ma and Hanan were deteriorating. They had had a couple of spats early on, but Ma restrained herself: she knew if there was a big quarrel we would have to leave the house. Then, in early 1988, we heard that once again open warfare had broken out in Somalia. In May, Siad Barré’s forces began bombing Isaq territory. Hanan turned into a witch. She was Isaq, and she ye
lled that she didn’t want a Darod woman in her house.
We had certainly never considered Siad Barré a kinsman. Siad Barré was a Darod, but he was from the Marehan, nothing close to my father’s Osman Mahamud family or my mother’s subclan, the Dhulbahante. My mother tried to reason with Hanan. What Siad Barré was doing to the Isaq in 1988, he had already done to my father’s people ten years before. “All of us are victims of Siad Barré,” Ma said. “That’s why we left our home, that’s why I’m a beggar in this country, with my children.”
But to make matters worse, as he was attacking the Isaq, Siad Barré offered an amnesty to the Macherten fighters of the SSDF. Several prominent SSDF members took up the offer, some of them my own Osman Mahamud relatives. Jim’o Musse’s brother capitulated and became Siad Barré’s Minister for Telecommunications. Hanan became impossible.
Every day at five o’clock, just as I got home from school, the Somali service of the BBC would be turned up loud in the kitchen, announcing to Hanan how many Isaq had died and how many were fleeing. In our bedroom my mother and grandmother would be listening to the same thing. Hanan would start screaming—cursing the Dhulbahante, the Macherten, and all Darod to Hell and high places—and sometimes my mother would lose her cool and step out of our bedroom to confront her. These two wrinkled women would shout at each other among the pots and pans, my mother spitting out a poem she’d invented on the spot, accusing Hanan of cowardice, and Hanan howling that my mother was a far worse coward, because she’d left Somalia so much longer ago. My grandmother would be in the kitchen, too, pleading with them to stop it. And I would just creep out of the house to get away from the whole howling mess.
Jawahir had been pleading with me to move in with her, to keep her company while Ali was away on long hauls and to help her in the house. Fadumo knew about the situation at home—nothing any Somali does is a secret—and interceded on my behalf. She told Ma that a young Somali matron like Jawahir would be the perfect companion for a growing girl; even Ma could see how difficult it was for me to study at Abdillahi Ahmed’s house. So I moved in with Jawahir, just for a few months, to prepare for my exams.