Nomad (24 page)

Like my grandmother, the other Muslim women in my life, mothers of my classmates and of other Somali girls in my neighborhood, felt that the best strategy was to keep girls at home, to cover them, to circumcise them, and, if the girls rebelled too much, to engage their brothers and fathers and even cousins to punish them. These punishments varied from thrashings to forced marriages. We also heard stories of girls who were killed by their families.

Long ago, in the desert, nomads in clan societies bound themselves together by family ties, through old lineages that gave them protection and assistance across great distances. Outside the clan lineage lay danger and chaos, every man for himself. In a clan society, every kind of human relationship turns on your honor within the clan; outside it, there is nothing—you are excluded from any kind of meaningful existence. This was the most precious lesson that Grandma tried to teach her grandchildren.

A man’s honor within a clan society—and these societies are, largely, about men—resides in his authority. Men must be warriors; shame consists in being seen as weak. Women are the breeders of men, and women’s honor lies in their purity, their submission, their obedience. Their shame is to be sexually impure, and it is the worst shame of all, because a woman’s sexual disobedience defiles herself, her sisters, and her mother, as well as the male relatives whose duty it is to control her.

No Muslim man has any standing in society if he does not have honor. And no matter how much honor he builds up through wise decisions and good deeds, it is destroyed if his daughter or his sister is sexually defiled. This can happen if she loses her virginity before she’s married, or if she engages in sexual intercourse outside of the marriage—and that includes rape. Even the
rumor
that she may have had sex is reason enough to label her “defiled” and lead to loss of honor for her whole family. A father who cannot control his daughters, a brother who cannot control his sisters, is disgraced. He is bankrupt socially and even economically. His family is ruined. The girl will not fetch a bride-price, and neither will her sisters or her cousins, because the mere suspicion of independent feeling and female action in their family taints them too. Such a man suffers a social death, exclusion from the mutual assistance and respect of the clan—the worst possible fate that could befall a person, whether child or adult, male or female.

Controlling women’s sexuality and limiting men’s access to sex with women are the central focus of the code of honor and shame. Muslim women are chattel, and every Muslim girl must be a virgin at marriage. Once wed (with or without her consent), she must be faithful to her husband, who, in traditional societies, she will never refer to by his first name but only as
rajel
, my lord. In case of divorce or widowhood, the job of monitoring her sexual activities is assumed by her new guardians: her sons, if they are adults, or her husband’s father and his male bloodline. These men may select a new husband for her. Few Muslim women are ever free to choose whom they will have sex with.

An element as powerful and potent as a Muslim girl’s virginity also has great commodity value, which means that virginity is above all a man’s business. Daughters are bait for attracting alliances, or they can be reserved for the highest bidder. Power, wealth, and the solidifying
of clan relations may hinge on marriage alliances, so raising daughters of quality who are modest and docile is important. Using violence to ensure their obedience and to warn them against straying is a perfectly legitimate reminder of the law in a system of values in which women have only a little more free will than livestock. There must be blood on the wedding night from her broken hymen or she will be condemned as a slut.

This ancient code of sexual morality is derived from tribal Arab culture. It dates from long before the Prophet Muhammad began receiving revelations from the Angel Gabriel, which were written down by his disciples on pages that have long since become dust. At that time, in that place—the desert towns of Mecca and Medina, whose distant tribes worshipped many different idols and gods—honor and shame were the central ideas that governed life between men and women. Islam cemented this into an everlasting rule. As Islam grew and spread, it brought its sexual mores to other countries, from Mali to Indonesia. Under Shari’a, a Muslim woman is effectively the property of her father, brothers, uncles, grandfathers. These men are her guardians, responsible for her behavior, in charge of her choices. Above all, she must remain sexually pure.

An inextricable mass of traditional dictates and rituals has been incorporated into Islam, and it is being further amplified by the Islamic revivalist movements that are sweeping through the Muslim world today. The fundamentalists seem haunted by the female body and neurotically debate which fractions of it should be covered, until they declare the whole thing, from head to toe, a gigantic private part.

When and why did Arab, and subsequently Muslim, societies become so obsessed with controlling women’s sexuality? Perhaps there was once some logic to it. For a tribe to be strong, its warriors need to be loyal to each other. Maybe independent female sexuality undermined that. Maybe fighting over women was even more divisive to a male society than fighting over camels, and so, once upon a time in the desert, it was resolved to control the women, to confine them to their homes, banishing them from the public sphere, or to veil them so they became invisible, to cut their genitals to limit their sexual desire and sew them shut to make sex unbearably painful.

Grandma did not busy herself with such questions. She understood
only that we had to follow the rules as if our lives depended on it—as, perhaps, her own life once had. She explained and enforced that code in our household. As she never tired of saying, “All I am trying to teach you is to survive.”

Even today virginity is the linchpin of a Muslim girl’s education. Growing up, I was taught that it is more important to remain a virgin than it is to stay alive, better to die than be raped. Sex before marriage is an unthinkable crime. Every Muslim girl knows that her value relies almost wholly on her hymen, the most essential part of her body, far more important than her brain or limbs.

Once the hymen is broken, a girl is a thing used, broken, filthy, her filth contagious. This is how my cousin Hiran felt about herself when she succumbed to desire and then was diagnosed with HIV. This is how Ladan felt about herself and how she lost her self-esteem. She saw herself through the eyes of those closest to her, people like my grandma, and those old ghosts seemed to blame her and scream at her, “Whore!”

Muslim cultures have evolved various means to police and guarantee women’s virginity. Many confine their women, depriving themselves of their labor outside the home, and monitor their movements obsessively. This constant whisper of gossip, the continual surveillance of every untoward gesture and raised eye, is also a form of confinement, strangling every movement. When a woman leaves the house, she veils, another form of confinement: every breath of air you take outside your four walls is stifled by a thick, heavy cloth; every stride is hobbled, every centimeter of skin enclosed from the sun. Even out of doors a veiled woman is inside all the time. The air she breathes is stuffy; thick material presses against her eyes, her nose, and her mouth. Everything she does is hidden and furtive. Blindfolded and reduced, erased from public contact, Muslim women often lose confidence in their ability to undertake independent action. Even independent
motion
seems strange. Every woman who has worn such a veil for years and then taken it off will attest that it is difficult to walk at first. It is as if, uncovered, your legs do not work the same way.

After a girl first menstruates, she must have as little contact as possible with men outside the immediate family. In Saudi Arabia women are shut in their homes by law; this is not the case in other countries, but
confinement is still common everywhere that there are Muslims. Even after they are married many Arab women are not permitted contact with an unrelated male. It is an offense even to look a man in the eye.

Other societies, too poor to do without their women’s labor out of doors, must police their chastity by other means: it must be built into their bodies. This may be the origin of female excision, the only possible incontrovertible proof of virginity. And chastity must be built into their minds. Victims of rape do not report it if they survive it; unmarried women who get pregnant are banished or put to death. Too often girls take their own lives after losing their virginity in a way deemed to be illicit.

Although Muslim doctrine has certainly amplified and confirmed this attitude, the tight web of restrictions on women that characterizes Arab and Muslim clans goes back further than Wahabi Islam, the most common school of Islam in Saudi Arabia. The very word
harem
, the section of the house where the women dwell (in Arabic,
hareem)
, is derived from
haram
, forbidden. In most Muslim cultures people still retain memories of the old, pre-Islamic beliefs in
jinn
and ghouls. (This is sharply disapproved of by most Islamic purists, who believe it raises the possibility of deities other than Allah.) Those ghouls are most often withered old women or sexually voracious young women, who inspire fear and disgust in equal measure. Defiled every month by menstruation, the female is naturally closer to evil.

When I worked as a Somali-Dutch translator in Holland, I was often called upon in cases where parents reacted violently to the Westernization of their teenage Somali daughters. I remember one girl at the child protection office close to the city of The Hague. She was about sixteen but looked twenty-five. Her hair had been straightened and colored with red and brown highlights. Her nails were extremely long, curled, and painted in shimmering green. She wore the tightest possible tank top with the lowest possible cleavage and a black skirt that was so short her underwear was visible when she crossed her legs, which were clad in red fishnet stockings and high-heeled ankle boots.

Her father had to be physically restrained so that he would not hit her. He kept screaming, “She looks like a whore! Look at her mouth!
It looks like she fell on the throat of a slaughtered lamb! She has killed me, this girl has killed me!” This was, at least metaphorically, true. I knew that with such a daughter, he was now socially dead to his clan; he had become a thing of mockery and pity. He could leave his house or enter public places only with a bowed head and gritted teeth. But his daughter shrugged in response, waving her hands dismissively.

The Dutch social worker said to the father, “This is what we call self-expression. Your daughter is not doing anything unusual for her age.” The girl’s mother claimed that her child was possessed, so the social worker added sensitively, “We have done psychological tests on her. She is not mad.”

This particular scene ended with the girl being put in a foster home. It was a common conclusion and a very common scenario, not only for me but also for my colleagues who translated between Dutch and Arabic, Turkish, Berber, and Persian. All of us worked a great deal with the child protection services, the police, and other institutions that dealt with Muslim teenage girls who fled their homes because their parents and community would not accept their experimentation with what they interpreted as Western culture.

Later on, when I entered politics and when practices such as honor killings and forced marriages had become public knowledge in the Netherlands, I would often debate with Muslim parents who pleaded with me to understand their perspective. They claimed that Muslim girls dropped out of school so often not because they were forced into marriage, but because they were lured by “lover boys” into prostitution. They argued that child protection agencies could not replace family, because only parents could teach children the difference between right and wrong. At Dutch schools, they said, their children had learned only sin and disobedience. Dutch schools also discouraged them from learning because of their atmosphere of hostility to Islam and discrimination against Muslims, and this was why Muslim students did so poorly and dropped out so often. The solution, these parents reasoned, was to establish Muslim schools so that girls could get an education without learning to disobey.

They were right about the high dropout rate for children from Muslim immigrant families and their often very low success rate in exams. But I didn’t think the cause of all this was Dutch discrimination.
I thought it lay with the parents’ not having properly prepared their children for modern education in a modern country.

Like my mother and my aunts, these immigrants had refused to give their daughters sex education, to talk to them about how their bodies were changing, or to tell them that it was natural to be interested in boys. Unlike Dutch parents, they could not bring themselves to teach their daughters that self-expression is fine but that it has boundaries, so that their daughters might find ways to express themselves without flashing their genitals. They had not taught them how to gradually manage the challenges of independence. And, perhaps just as important, they had not taught their sons respect for women—and in Dutch schools most of their teachers were women.

I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Dutch schools, which didn’t seem to be preparing
Dutch
girls for lives of debauchery and prostitution. On the contrary, most Dutch teenage girls I knew seemed to be just fine, well on their way to becoming self-reliant, productive, law-abiding citizens, with good humor and grace. But the Muslim parents I spoke to did not agree with me. Often they focused on the sex education classes in Dutch schools. These were not classes on how to understand your sexuality and your body, they insisted; they taught you how to have sex. Teachers would place a large wooden or plastic penis on the table, in front of their daughters, and demonstrate how to cover it with a condom. This was abominable, an invitation to prostitution.