Now, surely, it was Islam’s turn to be tested.
Humans themselves are the source of good and evil, I thought. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn’t be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion, which are to be a better and more generous person, without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey inhuman rules. I would no longer lie, to myself or others. I had had enough of lying. I was no longer afraid of the Hereafter.
CHAPTER 15
Threats
In March 2002 Pim Fortuyn won a huge victory in local elections in Rotterdam. An almost total newcomer, he booted the Labor Party out of power in Holland’s biggest city, and the world’s largest port, for the first time since the Second World War. National elections were to be held in May, and Labor went into a flutter of panic.
Personally, I wasn’t surprised or frightened by Pim Fortuyn’s popularity. To me, he seemed like a fresh voice, and some of the things he said were the plain truth. Fortuyn could certainly be irritating, but I thought there was nothing racist about him. He was a gay man standing up for his right to be gay in his country, where homosexuals have rights. He was a provocateur, which is a very Dutch thing to be. People called him an extreme right-winger, but to me, many of Fortuyn’s policies seemed more like liberal socialism. Though I would never have voted for him, I saw Fortuyn as mostly attached to a secular society’s ideals of justice and freedom.
Pim Fortuyn was a symptom of the failure of the Labor Party and the other established parties in politics to take a clear look at the social situation of immigrants. Although I didn’t always agree with his views, I was grateful, actually, that it was Fortuyn talking about some of these issues and not some real racist.
It wasn’t clear yet, but a rift was opening within the Dutch Left, and within left-wing parties all over Europe. Former left-wingers, like Paul Scheffer, Arie van der Zwan, and Pim Fortuyn, began criticizing the moral and cultural relativism of the leftist parties. Paul Cliteur, one of my professors at Leiden, a staunch believer in reason and a sharp debater, dared early on to criticize both multiculturalism and Islam. The media dubbed him a right-wing conservative, which simply wasn’t true.
Dutch politics was becoming a mess. Citizens generally felt that established politicians weren’t listening to what they really wanted, which was a better health care system, less bureaucracy, and a response to the social problems of immigrants. The Dutch government of the day had sent troops to the UN peacekeeping force in the former Yugoslavia, troops who turned a blind eye to the Serbian massacres at Srebrenitsa. Yet not one politician resigned over it. What did political responsibility mean, if nobody suffered for a decision that caused thousands of deaths? How could politicians be surprised that people stopped voting for parties that behaved this way?
In May, Fortuyn declared that he would permit asylum seekers who had been living in Holland for a long time to remain in the country, even if their appeals had failed. It was front-page news, and I welcomed it. Paul Kalma and I had been pleading with the Labor Party to agree to just such an amnesty.
Sitting in a coffee shop in Berlin after a symposium on Europe and immigration, I wailed at Paul, “Why didn’t Labor go for this? Pim Fortuyn tells right-wing audiences what they want to hear, which is that the current situation is failing to integrate migrants, and he tells left-wing audiences what they want to hear, which is that an amnesty is inevitable and humane.”
The elections were due in just nine days, and Fortuyn was now so high in the polls that he could even become prime minister. I felt, however, that even if he did take over the government, it wouldn’t last long; he didn’t have the experience to handle the job. His own political party was a mess—it didn’t even have a proper name—and I had learned in Leiden that in party systems, such one-man candidacies are almost always a flash in the pan.
Two days later, Fortuyn was shot dead in a parking lot outside Holland’s largest TV and radio studios. Everyone was appalled. Such a thing hadn’t happened in Holland since the brothers de Witt were lynched in the streets of The Hague in 1672. In modern times, all Dutch politicians cycled or rode the trains or drove themselves to work just like everyone else. The murder of a political leader for his opinions was simply unthinkable, and the scale of the country’s emotional reaction was almost impossible to exaggerate.
The minute I heard about Fortuyn’s murder I found myself thinking again, “Oh, Allah, please let it not be a Muslim who did this.” I was not alone. There was a general sense that if Fortuyn’s assassin was a Muslim, hideous things could happen in reprisal: killings, burnings. When we heard that a white animal-rights activist was apparently responsible for the shooting, it seemed as if the whole country let out a collective sigh of relief. Wim Kok decided to hold the elections regardless, and Pim Fortuyn’s party entered Parliament with twenty-six seats. Labor lost big.
After that, Kok, the Labor leader I had voted for and admired, left politics. He had transformed Labor from a spendthrift, dogmatic, almost communist-style party to a third-way party, pretty much like Tony Blair’s Labor Party in Britain. He was a real coalition builder: he found ways to respond to all kinds of different communities and was skilled at keeping all opposing parties happy. (This is a very difficult thing to do, and I have often fallen short of it.) I felt that Kok’s departure was a blow to the country, and that when he left Dutch politics along with the Liberal leader Frits Bolkestein, a kind of self-evident leadership and thoughtful maturity went with them. The political arena became populated by people of much less stature and was reduced to personal squabbling and infighting of a kind that had not been seen before.
* * *
A few weeks before Fortuyn was killed, a documentary filmmaker, Karin Schagen, asked me if she could do a short film about my life as a refugee in Holland. Over the course of that summer, she drove me around to the office in Zeewolde where I had first asked for asylum, and the places I had lived. It had been ten years since I first arrived in Holland, and I gladly showed her around.
One evening Karin phoned my father. He was visiting my stepmother, Maryan, in London, where Maryan, too, had received refugee status. My father told Karin that he was receiving threats on my life. Somalis from Italy, from Scandinavia, from Holland were phoning him and warning, “Hirsi, if you don’t do something fast to rein in your daughter, she is going to be killed.”
At first Karin didn’t tell me about that conversation. Later, when she did let me know, I didn’t take it seriously. Who would bother to kill me?
* * *
In early August I was invited to appear on a Dutch TV program about women in Islam. There were a number of short items on girls in the Netherlands who had escaped their parents’ abuse, and about girls who chose to walk about veiled even though they were living in Holland.
When I was asked for my opinion, I explained that Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
A week after the show aired, my phone rang: it was my father. He said, “What on earth is happening, child? It’s raining phone calls. In just one week I have been called by twenty people. What is all this stuff I’m hearing about you? What have you said about Islam?”
I told him, “Abeh, there are so many Muslim women in shelters here, who have been beaten. The men who beat them say these women must obey because Islam requires it. I am exposing this relationship between our faith and the behavior of our men.”
My father said, “Islam does not say women should be beaten. Islam is a religion of freedom, and peace. You can fight the oppression of women, Ayaan, but you must not link it with Islam.”
I couldn’t bear to tell him directly that I no longer believed he was right. I spluttered, “No, it’s not that,” but my father cut me off. He t
old me he was praying for me, and he told me to pray; then he hung up.
A month later, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was invited to the most popular talk show on Dutch TV at the time, a live program that aired at 10:15 p.m. Early that morning my doorbell rang, and two huge men told me that the show had sent them to accompany me to work and all my appointments that day. It was a normal courtesy, they said.
I was only going to Amsterdam. The train station was right around the corner; it was a simple commute. I thanked the men and told them I didn’t need their services, but Karin, who was still filming me, was encumbered by cameras; she was glad for the lift, so we accepted.
In the car, looking at all the communications equipment and the heavy doors, and the enormous backs of these two men, Karin went silent. Then she said quietly, “Ayaan, this is not standard procedure. Look at the size of these men. They are bodyguards. There’s something wrong.”
Before we needed to be at the TV studio, they accompanied us to the Felix Meritis discussion house in Amsterdam, where I had been invited to participate in a debate on the integration of Moroccan youth. Someone from the Liberal Party was also speaking, and a Moroccan woman who was alderman of an Amsterdam neighborhood. As the debate went on and we discussed the apathy and hostility of many migrants, it became clear that the Moroccan woman and I disagreed the most, and the Liberal and I agreed in essence.
I often found this to be the case. Especially in public, Muslim opinion leaders loudly denied the truth of what I was saying; yet in private, some Muslim women would agree with me. As for Dutch people, the Labor types usually felt uneasy about my critique of their multicultural tolerance of Islamic practices, but Liberals were often enthusiastic about my emphasis on the rights of the individual.
After the debate, my two drivers took us to Utrecht for another panel discussion about Islam and multiculturalism. This discussion took place in a café full of Moroccan young people. As I came in they booed loudly. I was astonished: Did all these people recognize me? Every time I opened my mouth they shouted, and others shouted back. A fault line seemed to divide the room between the native-born Dutch, who approved of my views, and the Muslims. One after another the Moroccan kids stood up, men and women, and told me, “You’re a traitor. You sound like Pim Fortuyn. You know nothing about Islam. You’re stigmatizing us.”
The atmosphere was thick with personal insults and bad feeling, but I had to leave for the TV studio. In the car, I said, “Karin, what is going on with these people?”
Karin said, “Don’t you realize how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?”
Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practiced, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.
“These people have lived here for years,” I told her. “The girls were all wearing tight trousers and T-shirts—they’re Westernized. They attend debates. They’re accustomed to criticism.”
“You’re wrong,” Karin said, “If your name hadn’t been on the flyers, they wouldn’t have come. With you, there is something to discuss. They don’t attend these things regularly—they’ve heard about you from TV. I don’t think they are accustomed to this kind of criticism—not from someone who is a Muslim, like you.”
We arrived just before the show was scheduled to air. Frits Barend and Henk Van Dorp, the hosts, told me they had received a threatening phone call about my appearance, and the police were taking it seriously. I was startled, but I had no room in my brain to deal with this information right now: it was time to go on the air.
After briefly introducing me, Frits Barend asked, “So, you came to Holland in 1992 as an asylum seeker. Did you lie, like everybody else did?” I answered that yes, I had lied, about my name and about my story, and I explained why: I was afraid of being sent back to my clan. They seemed to accept that, and after more questions, asked the big one of the day: “Do you agree with Pim Fortuyn that Islam is backward?”
I was taken aback, but answered, “According to the Arab Human Development Report of the UN, if you measure by three things—political freedom, education, and the status of women—then what Pim Fortuyn said is not an opinion, it’s a fact.” I thought I had been very deft. I had not actually repeated what Fortuyn had so controversially stated, but I was clear and, I thought, accurate. Aspects of Islam did slow a society’s development, by curbing critical thinking and holding women back.
Next I was asked, “But are you still a Muslim?” Now I felt truly on the spot. And once again I avoided a direct repudiation of Islam, answering instead, “I am secularized.”
I did not feel strong enough to face what would happen if I said, out loud, that I no longer believed. For a Muslim, to be an apostate is the worst thing possible. Christians can cease to believe in God; that is a personal matter that affects only their eternal soul. But for a Muslim to cease believing in Allah is a lethal offence. Apostates merit death: on that, the Quran and the hadith are clear. For a Muslim woman to abjure her faith is the worst kind of disobedience to God, because it comes from the lowest, most impure element in society. It cries out for God’s punishment.
I had been invited to another debate the next day. There really was a public discussion of these issues under way, I thought, as I accepted every invitation to speak; it seemed as if the whole country was churning with debate. Again, this debate was televised, this time with mostly Muslim men and women present. Finally, I thought, Dutch TV is inviting Muslims to participate in discussions.
I was seated next to Naema Tahir, a beautiful young Pakistani woman who had been married off by her father. Naema had rejected that marriage and put herself through school to earn a master’s degree in law. She and I were both dressed in light blue blouses, like schoolgirls, and we felt very much alike. All around us were men, and as the show went on, they began barking at us: screaming, shouting at us, cutting us off. Then one man yelled, “But you’re not a Muslim! You said you’re not a Muslim! You said Islam is backward! You’re lying!”
I sat up and said, “It’s my religion, too, and if I want to call it backward I will do so. Yes, Islam is backward.”
Chaos broke out. As the atmosphere thickened at that debate, I found myself growing more tense. Men were glowering at me; one of them stormed out. I thought back to what Frits Barend had said the night before. There were no bodyguards around me now.
After the show, the moderator said to me, “You’re not safe walking out of here by yourself.” He told me the TV program would pay for a taxi to take me all the way back to Leiden. When I got home, the phone rang: it was Johanna and Maarten. They had watched the program and they were worried; they thought something might have happened to me after the filming and were relieved I was home. But Maarten was also angry. He told me I must be more careful. “What you’re doing is wrong for you,” he said. “You’re putting yourself in danger. Try to find something else to talk about.”
The next day was a Friday, a normal working day. I got up and took the train as usual to the think tank’s office. This was daytime, in Holland: I wasn’t frightened. I was, however, very motivated to prepare a proposal for our institute to put real money into investigating the situation of Muslim women in Holland, and I began working on a draft for a proposal. When I popped into Paul Kalma’s office, he said to me, “I saw the show last night. You should be careful, Ayaan. I would advise you not to do these things any more. Television is too sensational. Writing opinion pieces may not be so bad after all!”
Everyone seemed to agree that doom was nigh and I was too dumb to have spotted it. I began to feel a little intimidated. A friend arrived at the office to escort me home that evening, and as we were talking to
gether, I looked around nervously: Did anyone recognize me? Was I being followed? But no, everything seemed normal: people were cycling, chatting on cell phones, and they paid no special attention to me at all.
That evening Ellen sat me down for a talk. She told me quite frankly that I had lost my mind. I had bought the house with her fourteen months before and I was barely ever home. I worked all the time trying to become the female answer to Bin Laden, and as a result I was ruining my health and our friendship.
The next day, Saturday, Karin came over. We phoned my father again. Again, he told Karin there were threats against me, that he was truly afraid that people were planning to have me killed. Karin took notes on the conversation. But when I spoke to him, he didn’t repeat it: I think my father wanted to protect me from fear. He just told me, “Be very careful.” I asked “Careful of what?” and my father said again, “I’m getting warnings from everywhere. Don’t say anything about Islam.”
When I hung up, Karin said, “Your father wants me to look after you. He thinks you’re going to be assassinated.”
I said, “For heaven’s sake. My father grew up far away, long ago. Come on, what have I done? I’m just a little pawn who earns sixteen hundred euros a month. You don’t murder people for raising a small voice in a small country.”
Then Marco called. He told me he had to see me. I said fine, I would cycle right over, and he said, “Don’t do that—you can’t go out on your own.” I told him this was absurd, but he came by in his car and drove me to a sweet little village called Roelofsarendsveen, where the chance of encountering an angry radical Muslim was next to zero. Marco said, “Ayaan, something could happen to you. You have to be careful.”