Nomad (23 page)

The story of Nidal Malik Hassan is in many ways similar to that of Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo van Gogh. There are also some glaring differences, to be sure. Bouyeri was born in Amsterdam; his father had moved from Morocco to the Netherlands as a guest worker, initially intending to go back home after he earned enough money. Morocco is a poor country but relatively peaceful. Malik Hassan, by contrast, was born in the United States to parents of Palestinian origin, who settled in Virginia and opened a restaurant. The Palestinian territories are in perpetual war, and families are exposed to the upheaval of that war. Malik Hassan’s parents had chosen to begin a new life in America and to become Americans.

Bouyeri was only twenty-six when he embarked on his martyrdom mission, while Malik Hassan was thirty-nine. This difference is interesting because it challenges the well-accepted theory that men of Malik Hassan’s age are more likely to enable a suicide mission than to take action themselves. Bouyeri’s career did not go beyond demanding a government subsidy for a community center where he volunteered, while Malik Hassan made it all the way to the rank of major and earned a degree in psychiatry. Malik Hassan killed thirteen people; Bouyeri poured all his homicidal passion into killing just one man, though he also declared his intention to kill me.

The similarities, however, were uncanny. Both men were introduced to radical Islam not in a Muslim country (Morocco or the Palestinian Territories or Jordan) but in secular democracies: America and the Netherlands. Both came to detest their home nation, to the extent that they wanted to kill their fellow citizens. Both invoked the name of Allah as they killed and said that they were motivated to kill as a service to Allah. Both thought they would be killed in the process and become
shaheed
, or martyrs. But both men woke up in hospitals in the hands of the infidel. One is now in a Dutch prison for the rest of his life, and the other will likely end up on death row.

An even more striking similarity between the two is the astonishing reaction to the incidents in both the Dutch media in 2004 and
the American media in 2009—astonishing because it seemed as if all explanations were plausible except the one explicitly stated by the killer, namely his religion.

In both countries the murderers were presented as being fed up with offensive discriminatory behavior. Bouyeri was said to have been compelled to act by Theo van Gogh’s reference to Moroccan youth as “goat fuckers.” In America a similar significance was attached to the military slang terms for Arabs in Iraq, such as “camel jockeys.” In both countries analysts sought answers in the psychological imbalance of the killers. Serious meaning was attached to the fact that just days before Bouyeri committed the murder his mother had passed away of natural causes; the shock and grief he felt at her death were seen as possible motivations to kill van Gogh. Similarly, in the case of Malik Hassan, allusions were made to posttraumatic stress due to combat, until it emerged that he had not been anywhere near combat.

In both countries the debate then turned to whose fault it was that the murderer was not prevented from killing. In Holland the Dutch Intelligence and Security Agency was investigating a radical Islamic cell called the Hofstad Group, but the investigators overlooked Bouyeri’s role in that group. It transpired only after the murder that he was in fact the leader. In America there was information that the FBI had intercepted e-mails between Malik Hassan and his mentor, Imam Al Awlaki, but no action had been taken.

Why, I asked myself, was there such a conspiracy to ignore the religious motivations for these killings? And then I began to understand. First, there is a desperate need for intelligence agencies to recruit Muslim agents and sources in order to penetrate the radical Islamist networks. As all Muslims are offended by the charge that Islam is a violent religion, it is official policy not to say so. The same applies to the military: American and allied soldiers do not go into places like Iraq and Afghanistan simply to fight men in uniform whom they can easily identify as the enemy. Their mission is now a complex mixture of fighting, policing, social work, and “nation building.” They too are in desperate need of cooperation from the locals, and that overwhelmingly means Muslims. Thus the military takes the same line as the intelligence services: It is not Islamic scripture, the Prophet, or the Quran that presents a coherent argument and activism for jihad,
but a misguided few who have usurped the pure and peaceful teachings of Islam.

On the Thursday after the shooting I was catching a flight from New York to Boston. The TV screens at the departure gate were dominated by the image of Nidal Malik Hassan. A woman sitting next to me was staring at the screen.

“Are you worried about terrorism?” I asked.

“I am,” she replied, “but this is America they are messing with, and they won’t succeed.”

“But he was in the military,” I said, “an enemy from within.”

She fidgeted a little and then gave me a line that I would have expected to hear from a policymaker. “We cherish our diversity in this country,” she told me just before we were interrupted by the call to board the aircraft.

Diversity is a wonderful concept, I thought, and
E pluribus unum
, “Out of many, one,” is one of the mottos proudly displayed on the Great Seal of the United States (and therefore on every dollar bill). But Americans still have a long way to go before they really understand the challenge posed to their country by radical Islam, a religion that rejects not only those core principles of the Enlightenment that so inspired the founding fathers, but also the very notion that the diverse many should become one united people.

When I was about five years old, my grandmother would wake me up in the morning, sometimes by prodding me with a stick, other times by yelling out my name. Her aim was to teach me to light the morning fire and make tea for the adults. “Wake up!” she would yell. “At your age my daughters would be milking goats and taking them out to the fields, and you can’t even wake up!”

So I would make the fire. I would sleepwalk to the charcoal brazier, which was in a room that my mother had more or less arbitrarily deemed to be the kitchen. With the door and shutters open, the early morning daylight spilled into the room, whose walls were black with soot. I would take my wooden stool and carry it to the stone stove, which was knee-high, shaped like an hourglass, and the size of a large cooking pot. The lower part of the hourglass held the stove up, while the upper part contained a mound of ash, buried in which were burning embers from the night before. My grandmother taught me how to dig out the embers using a pair of metal tongs and a metal dustpan.

She would hover over me, urging me to work quickly, for the longer it took for me to find and pile up the embers, the sooner they died. When there were no more burning embers I would carry the brazier a few feet out of the kitchen and throw out most of the ash. Then I would return it to its corner, flatten out the remaining ash, put some of the burning embers on top of the mound, fill the brazier up with charcoal, and put the remaining burning embers on top. Then I would fan the fire and blow into it. Because it had no chimney or window, the brazier was very hard to light, which is why Grandma would scream that I should be quick before the embers died. I would then
pick up an aluminum kettle, fill it with water, balance it precariously on three points of the brazier, and continue blowing and fanning until the water boiled.

As the water came to a boil, I would pick up a packet of Lipton English Breakfast tea and put a scoop of tea leaves into the boiling kettle. Very often the kettle would boil over and kill the fire that I had had such difficulty lighting. The entire time, Grandmother would be cursing and spitting on me for my incompetence. Often she would take over for fear that I would kill the fire or spoil the tea. In fact I was so afraid that the kettle would boil over and kill the fire that I often would put the tea leaves in too soon and spoil the tea.

Grandmother could have done all this on her own, but she was convinced that the oldest daughter should master the skill of making breakfast before she turned six.

Once I was more or less competent at boiling water, Grandmother taught me to milk her goat. First she demonstrated: she leashed the goat and put a wooden stool right behind it, parted its legs, put a bucket underneath its udders, and started pulling at them. But when I first sat on the stool and reached for the udders, the goat kicked me on my forehead, knocking me off the stool. Every day it kicked me again and again, until I had bruises everywhere, including on my bottom, from falling over. On some mornings I refused to go near the goat. Grandmother would pull and prod me and even slap me sometimes, but even that was much more bearable than a kick from that animal.

This was a form of education in subservience. Grandma continually lamented the loss of our nomadic way of life—our soul, as she saw it—and that our culture had begun to give way to a new, decadent way of life. She tried to salvage what she could by making me live according to her wisdom; thus I was required to master all the skills of becoming a good wife. To her, the fact that I cried when the goat hit me, that I made a mess when I tried to light the fire, or that she had a hard time pulling me out of bed were all signs of my corruption, an indication that I was destined for ruin. “Who will ever marry this girl when she becomes a woman?” she would lament. “Ayaan is useless.”

All the little girls I knew in Mogadishu had to learn these skills. When we lived in Saudi Arabia, even though the Saudi girls who were our neighbors had servants working for them, they too had to learn
to cook. In Ethiopia the Somali girls and women were continuously cooking, cleaning, washing, and otherwise serving. When we moved to Kenya, I was glad to find that the charcoal braziers there were different; they were easier to light and were made of metal and had windows, so I did not have to blow as much. Also, by then I was stronger and more able to snatch the kettle off just before it boiled over, without burning myself or extinguishing the fire.

Sometimes I thought life was hard on me, but then I would look at the experience of girls like Ubah, an orphan who lived in one of the houses on our block in Nairobi. Ubah had been brought to Nairobi from Somalia to live with her aunt, who was pregnant every year and worked Ubah like a slave. Ubah had to sleep on a thin mat in the kitchen that was black with soot from cooking and covered in food stains. She seemed to have only one dress, which was full of holes. All day long Ubah looked after the children, did the heavy grocery shopping, washed mountains of cloth diapers, and was yelled at throughout. My mother and grandmother never tired of reminding me of Ubah’s circumstances. “Look! You live in enormous luxury compared to Ubah,” they would point out. “Ubah is a slave because she is not with her mother. You are well cared for.” More important, I went to school and Ubah did not.

Whenever I hear Westerners today say “Education is the answer,” I need only think back to that time to recognize the absolute truth of this statement. The women of the neighborhood would get together and complain that school was corrupting young girls like me and making us rebellious. They saw that Ubah and others who did not attend school simply obeyed. These girls were so accustomed to subservience that they never questioned their status. On a few occasions I caught Ubah trying to stifle the sound of her sobs, because even crying was considered to be a form of protest. The Somali men would also complain, “It’s because they go to school that they now talk back to us. It’s because they go to school that they are now making all of these demands, trampling on tradition and ignoring religion.”

Some girls were pulled out of school just after their first menstruation and kept at home to keep them obedient, or they were forced into early marriages. But for those of us who stayed in school, it was true that education did give us a voice and an awareness of the world outside. My sister Haweya and I spoke to one another in English or
Swahili; both languages were foreign to my mother and grandmother. It gave us power over them that they had not had over their parents.

We also learned something else in our Kenyan schools that girls like Ubah did not learn: sex education. It was nowhere near as open and graphic as that which I later encountered in Holland, but it was enough to intimidate my mom.

Sex education was embedded in our biology book. Actually my teacher, Mrs. Karim, tried to skip the chapter. But like my friends, I skimmed the pages on amoebae, protozoa, and the reproduction of single-celled organisms and went straight to human procreation and the diagrams of fallopian tubes and the uterus, as well as testicles and the penis. It was very scientific, but even so most of the mechanics of sex remained a mystery. Still, at least with this information we began to understand why we were being told to avoid men and the basics of how our bodies worked. Again, this gave us some relative power over our parents. My mother refused to talk about these things and hit me when I first got my period. She hit me out of pure helplessness, for she herself had never been armed with this understanding of how the body functioned, and she feared that my very basic grasp of the simple facts had already in some mysterious way corrupted me.