After a time, we moved to Riyadh, where my father was working as a translator of Morse code for a government ministry. We had a house with a men’s side and a women’s, although unlike our neighbors, the five of us moved easily between the two sides. My father did not behave like the Saudi men. He did not do the shopping or handle all the outside transactions. Moreover, he continued to absent himself, returning to Ethiopia, where the Somali opposition was based. The neighbors openly pitied my mother for having to go out of the house alone. In turn, my mother looked down on the Saudi girls for teaching Haweya and me the rudiments of belly-dancing. She wanted us to live only according to “pure Islam,” which to her meant no singing or dancing, no laughter or joy.
A little over a year later, when I was nine, we left as quickly as we came. My father was deported by the Saudi government. The reasons were unclear to me, but they no doubt related to his ongoing Somali opposition activities. We had twenty-four hours to pack and fly—this time to Ethiopia. After a year and a half there, my mother’s antipathy to the country necessitated yet another move: to Kenya.
In Nairobi, Haweya and I went to school. English was not the only thing I learned there. I soon discovered that I did not know the most basic things, like the date and how to tell time. Ethiopia had a sidereal calendar; Saudi Arabia used an Islamic lunar calendar; in Somalia, my grandmother told time solely by the sun and her year consisted of ten months. It was only as a ten-year-old in Kenya that I learned it was the year 1980. For the Saudis, it was the Islamic year 1400; for the Ethiopians, by their way of reckoning, it was still 1978.
My mother nevertheless remained steadfast in her faith: she refused to believe that the things we were taught in school, such as the moon landings and evolution, were true; Kenyans might be descended from apes, but not us: she made us recite our bloodline to prove the point. As soon as I turned fourteen, she enrolled me in the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School on Park Road so that my sister and I could have a more modest uniform. Now we could wear trousers underneath our skirts. Our heads could be covered in white headscarves. At least, those things were permitted. But at that time few girls complied.
I Embrace the Islam of Medina
Then, when I was sixteen, I discovered a way of being a better Muslim. A new teacher arrived to teach us religious education. Sister Aziza was a Sunni Muslim from the Kenyan coast who had converted to Shia Islam following her marriage. She wore the full hijab; almost nothing was visible except her face. She even wore gloves and socks to keep her fingers and toes concealed.
Previously we had been taught Islam as history: dates and caliphates. Aziza did not teach; she preached. Better, she seemed to reason with us, questioning us, leading us. “What makes you different from the infidels?” The correct answer was the Shahada, the Muslim’s profession of faith. “How many times a day should you pray?” We knew that the answer was five. “How many times did you pray yesterday?” We looked nervously at one another.
This was a far more seductive method of teaching than any stick, and Sister Aziza did not care how long it took. As she liked to say: “This is how Allah and the Prophet want you to dress. But you should only do it when you are ready,” adding, “When you’re ready for it, you’ll choose, and then you’ll never take it off.”
Another novelty: Aziza did not read the Qur’an in Arabic, but from English translations, and unlike my previous teachers—including my mother—she said she was not forcing us. She was simply sharing with us Allah’s words, His wishes, His desires. If we chose not to please Allah, then of course we would burn in hell. But if we pleased Him, then we would go to paradise.
There was an element of choice here that was irresistible. Our parents, and certainly my mother, could never be pleased, whatever we did. Our earthly lives could not be changed. In a few years or less, we would find ourselves extracted from school, sent off into arranged marriages. We seemed to have no choices. But our spiritual lives were another matter. Those lives could be transformed, and Sister Aziza could show us the way. And then we, in turn, could show others the way. It is hard to overstate how empowering this message was.
It took me a while, but when I embraced Sister Aziza’s path, I did it in earnest. I prayed without fail five times a day. I went to a tailor to buy a vast, voluminous cloak that clinched tight around my wrists and billowed down to my toes. I wore it over my school uniform and wound a black scarf over my hair and shoulders. I put it on in the morning to walk to school and again before I left the school gates to return home. As I walked along the streets, covered, I had to move very deliberately because it was easy to trip over the billowing fabric. It was hot and cumbersome. In those moments, as my giant black figure moved slowly down the street, my mother was finally happy with me. But I was not doing it for her. I was doing it for Allah.
Sister Aziza was not the only new kind of Muslim I encountered at that time. There were now preachers going from door to door, like the self-appointed imam Boqol Sawm. His name meant “He Who Fasts for a Hundred Days,” and in person he more than lived up to his name. He was so thin that he looked like skin stretched over bone. While Sister Aziza wore the hijab, Boqol Sawm wore a Saudi robe, a bit short, so that it showed his bony ankles. It seemed he did nothing except walk around Old Racecourse Road, our neighborhood in Nairobi, knocking on doors, sermonizing, and leaving cassette tapes for the women who invited him in. There were no Electrolux salesmen with their vacuums going door to door in Old Racecourse Road, just Boqol Sawm and his sermons. He would sometimes come inside, too, as long as there was a curtain to separate him from the women, who listened to the cassettes he left behind and traded them. They played the sermons while they were washing and cooking. Gradually they stopped wearing colorful clothes and shrouded themselves in the jilbab, a long, loose-fitting coat, and wrapped scarves around their heads and necks.
If Aziza’s methods of indoctrination were subtle, Boqol Sawm favored the more familiar verbal bludgeoning I had first encountered back in Somalia. He shouted his verses in Arabic and Somali and highlighted what was forbidden and what was permitted—in a manner so strident that he got himself shut out of the local mosque. Women, he preached, should be available to men at any time, “even on the saddle of a camel,” except during the days of the month when they were unclean. This might not seem a very appealing message for a female audience, yet for many women he was mesmerizing. And for their sons, he was positively transforming.
More and more Somali teenage boys in our expatriate community had started hanging out in the street in proto-gangs, dropping out of school, chewing qat, committing petty crimes, harassing and even raping women, spinning completely beyond their mothers’ control. But Boqol Sawm invited us all to join the Muslim Brotherhood. At first it was hard to see how one itinerant preacher could represent a brotherhood, but it was not long before others joined him in the streets around us. And then, with amazing speed, a new mosque was built and Boqol Sawm was installed as its imam. He went from knocking on doors to being the local leader of a movement.
The Muslim Brotherhood seemed like Islam in action. They plucked teenage troublemakers off the streets, put them in madrassas, taught them to pray five times a day, changed their clothes; in fact, changed almost everything about them. I saw just this transformation in the case of the son of one of my relatives. Looking back, I see now that many people embraced the Brotherhood in the first instance simply because they brought order. They did what everyone else believed could not be done: they found a path for these directionless boys who were growing into directionless men. But how exactly did they achieve this feat?
The overarching message of Boqol Sawm was that this life is temporary. If you lived outside the dictates of the Prophet you would burn in hell for the duration of your real life, the afterlife. But if you lived righteously, Allah would reward you in paradise. And men in particular would receive special blessings if they became warriors for Allah.
This was not the
practice of my mother, much less my father. No longer were we merely people put on earth to be tested, fearing judgment and asking God to be patient with us. Now we had a task and a goal: we were bound together in an army; we were soldiers of God, fulfilling his purpose. Together, in their different ways, Sister Aziza and Boqol Sawm were the vanguard of a militant Islam—a version that emphasized the political ideology of Muhammad’s Medina years (indeed, Boqol Sawm had been trained in Medina). And I fervently embraced it.
Thus, when Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran called for the writer Salman Rushdie to die after he published The Satanic Verses, I didn’t ask if this was right or what it had to do with me as an expatriate Somali in Kenya. I simply agreed. Everyone in my community believed that Rushdie had to die; after all, he had insulted the Prophet. My friends said it, my religious teachers said it, the Qur’an said it, and I said it and believed it, too. I never questioned the justice of the fatwa against Rushdie; I thought it was completely moral for Khomeini to ensure that this apostate who had insulted the Prophet would be punished, and the appropriate punishment for his crime was death.
The Islam of my childhood, though all encompassing, had not been overtly political. During my teenage years, however, fealty to Islam became something that went far beyond the observance of daily rituals. Islamic scripture, interpreted literally, was presented as the answer to all problems, political, secular, and spiritual, and my friends as well as my own family began to accept this. In the mosques, the streets, and behind the walls of our homes, I saw the established leaders who emphasized the importance of ritual observance, of prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage—the kind of people I have called Mecca Muslims—being replaced by a new breed of charismatic and fiery imams, inspired by Muhammad’s time in Medina, who urged action, even violence, against the opponents of Islam: the Jews, the “infidels,” even fellow Muslims who neglected their duties or violated the strict rules of sharia. Thus I witnessed the rise of a political ideology wrapped in a religion.
The Medina Muslims are neither spiritual nor religious in the Western sense. They see the Islamic faith as transnational and universal. They prescribe a set of social, economic, and legal practices that are very different from the more general social and moral teachings (such as calls to practice charity or strive for justice) that are found not just in Islam but also in Christianity, Judaism, and other world religions.
Even this might not be so bad if the Medina Muslims were prepared to tolerate other worldviews. But they are not. Their idea is of a world in service to Allah and governed by sharia as exemplified in the sunnah (the life, words, and deeds of the Prophet). Other faiths, even other interpretations of Islam, are simply not valid.
My Apostasy
My long and winding journey away from Islam began with my own childish propensity to ask questions. In many respects, I was always a kind of “protestant”—in the sense that I began by protesting against the subordinate role that I, as a girl, was expected to accept. At the age of five or six, I remember asking: “Why am I treated so differently from my brother?” That question prompted the next one: “Why am I not a boy?”
As I grew older, I questioned more of what I heard. Had anyone ever been to hell? Could anyone tell me that it was in fact a real place, which appeared to those condemned to it exactly as it was described in the Qur’an?
“Stupid girl, stop asking so many questions!” I can still hear those words from my mother, my grandmother, my Qur’an teachers, sometimes followed by a slap with the back of a hand. Only my father tolerated inquiry. For her part, my mother simply became convinced that I was bewitched. To doubt, to question, made me in her eyes “feeble in faith.” The exercise of my reason itself was forbidden. But the questions never stopped coming, eventually leading to this one: “Why would a benevolent God set up the world like this, marking one half of the population to be second-class citizens? Or was it just men who did this?”
But even those questions were just the first hesitant steps down a long road. My next and perhaps biggest step away from Islam came after an answer—one my father gave—rather than a question.
In January 1992, my father raced to my mother’s flat after Friday prayers at the mosque. A man had offered to marry one of his daughters, and he had named me. The man, Osman Moussa, was a member of our clan who was living in Canada. He had returned to Nairobi to choose a bride from among his extended family members. He had his pick of the Westernized Somali girls living in Canada, but he wanted a traditional girl. And with a civil war then raging in our country, Somali brides in Nairobi could be had for free. I was traded in less than ten minutes; Osman Moussa would establish a bond with the Magan family, my father’s lineage, and my father would now be able to claim relatives in Canada. It was a simple transaction, part of that system of kinship relations that has governed Somalia—and much of the rest of the world—since time immemorial.
When we were introduced, my intended husband told me that he wanted six sons. He spoke in half-learned Somali and half-learned English. I told my father I did not want to marry him; he replied that the date had been set. What I did not have to do was consummate the marriage. That would wait until I had journeyed to Canada. The air ticket was eventually bought, too. I would be going by way of Germany.
I did not leave Kenya until July. When I arrived in Germany, I walked around the clean streets of Düsseldorf, pondered my options carefully, and shortly thereafter took a train from Bonn to Amsterdam, claiming to be a Somali asylum seeker fleeing the civil war, but in reality fleeing my arranged marriage and the wrath of my family and clan for breaking the marital contract my father had made.
I have told my story at length in my memoir Infidel, so here I can be brief. I ended up at a refugee screening camp, was granted asylum, worked hard to get off welfare and learn Dutch, received a university degree, and ended up writing, debating, and then being elected to the Dutch Parliament. What is relevant here is my gradual exit from Islam.
When I arrived in Holland in 1992 I was still a believing and practicing Muslim. I began to shed the practicing part of my faith first. Even so, I was constantly bargaining with myself, finding ways to create circular proofs that I was still a believing, obedient, devout Muslim. When I sent photos home to my family, I made sure to dress with the utmost modesty and to cover my hair. In January 1998, when I rushed back to Nairobi because of my sister’s death, I dug up my old clothes and when I knocked on my mother’s door I was dressed pretty much like all the other Somali women there. With my mother and my brother I prayed the required five times a day for the duration of my weeklong visit. As soon as I returned to Holland I switched back to my nonobservant state.
I didn’t recognize this distancing immediately; it was only clear in hindsight. If you had asked me anytime between 1992 and 2001, I would have told you I was living as a Muslim. Yet even though I still thought of myself as a Muslim, I developed a lifestyle not much different from that of an ordinary Dutch woman in her twenties. I prioritized study and work over worship; when I made future plans I dropped the inshallah (God willing) from my speech. In my free time I pursued fun and recreation.
In addition to neglecting prayer, fasting, and the prescribed Muslim attire for women (the hijab), I proceeded to violate at least two of the six major Qur’anic hudood restrictions. The hudood prescribe fixed punishments for the consumption of alcohol, illegal sexual intercourse (fornication and adultery), apostasy, theft, highway robbery, and falsely accusing someone of illicit sexual relations. For five years I lived together with my boyfriend, an infidel, out of wedlock, and even talked of having children under that arrangement. And I consumed wine seemingly with the same nonchalance as my Dutch friends.
In reality, though, I was leading a double life. I suffered frequent bouts of guilt and self-condemnation, feeling sure that I was doomed. These feelings were always set off by contact with fellow Muslims—in particular, individuals who took it upon themselves vocally to “com
mand right and forbid wrong,” one of the central tenets of Islam (about which more later). My solution was to avoid such people as much as possible, even the Muslims who quietly disapproved. Avoidance was my main strategy to deal with the terrible dissonance between the faith that I purported to believe in and the way I actually lived. It was not easy, but I got better at evasion and, in the years before 9/11, I achieved a kind of peace of mind.
In the months following 9/11, however, it became impossible for me to maintain that fragile balance. I could not overlook the central role the terrorists had attached to the Prophet Muhammad as their source of inspiration, and I was soon openly participating in the debate over Islam’s role in the terror acts. When Dutch interviewers directly asked me on live radio and television if I was a Muslim, I minced my words of reply.
Finally, after much agonizing, I resolved my inner conflict by rejecting the claim that God is the author of the Qur’an; by rejecting Muhammad as a moral guide; and by accepting the view that there is no life after death and that God is created by mankind and not the other way around. In doing so I violated the most serious of all the hudood restrictions. But there seemed no other option open to me. If I could not submit to Islam, I had to become an apostate.
Yet it would be misleading to suggest that it was 9/11 that led me to question my faith as a Muslim. That was just the catalyst. The more profound cause of my crisis of faith was my exposure prior to 2001 to the foundation of Western thought that values and cultivates critical thinking.