Nomad (29 page)

Itha Shamsu Kuwirat
means “The sun is folding up,” although I did not know that then. The chapter is a description of the punishments of the Last Judgment, but this meaning was not revealed to us. In the madrassa, questions were not welcome; they were considered impertinent.

*    *    *

Violence, as you will have guessed by now, was an integral part of my upbringing. But this was not because I was the victim of a uniquely abusive family or series of schools. My experience was typical of the way most people from all over the non-Western world grow up with violence as a social norm. In one of my experiences as an interpreter in Holland, I was called to an elementary school in The Hague to translate for a couple whose seven-year-old firstborn son, Mohammed, had beaten Mark, another child about his age. Both sets of parents were upset and felt misunderstood; they had been yelling at each other for days, and now the school was trying to resolve the conflict by bringing in a translator: me.

The teacher, fixing a firm and disapproving gaze on Mohammed’s parents, began by saying, “Mohammed is very aggressive. He hit Mark. He kicked him, punched him in the face, and threatened to kill him.”

Mohammed’s mother responded, raising her voice and waving her hand at the teacher, “It is Mark’s fault. He provoked Mohammed by a calling him names, by making humiliating gestures at him and by laughing at him.”

“That is right,” the teacher interrupted. “But it was Mohammed who hit Mark first!”

Then Mohammed’s mother and father raised their hands over their heads and cried in unison, “Of course, you don’t wait to be hit first. We taught him to punch any child in the face who so much as gives him a wrong look.”

The Dutch teacher, stunned and almost speechless, looked at the parents, then at me, and asked in disbelief, “Are you rearing him to believe that violence is the way to solve conflict?”

Given the mutual bewilderment of both my clients as they looked at each other, I asked if I could step out of my neutral role as an interpreter of text alone and venture into cultural interpretation.

I explained to the parents that, unlike in Somalia, the way to resolve conflict in Holland was by learning to talk, to talk until you drop, in search of a compromise solution—or, if that fails, to go to court, where a lot of talking is done by people called lawyers who represent you. All the talking ends in a settlement pronounced by a judge. No special skills in punching, kicking, biting, stabbing, or shooting are
needed. Besides the normal curriculum of math, language, and geography, kids are taught the skills of talking one’s way out of problems and into college, into jobs, into love, out of love, and so on.

To the Dutch teacher I explained that, in Somalia, strong clans teach their children, both boys and girls, the merits of physical aggression: how to be the first to deal a blow; how to respond if you are surprised with a blow; the art of deception in aggression; how to pretend you are down and then strike; how to pretend to apologize and then regroup, change your tactics, and hit back. My older cousin used to take me to “fighting practice” after school when I was about five or six. I was encouraged to pick a fight with a classmate, who was encouraged to pick a fight with me. We poked out our tongues at each other, made faces at each other, and called each other names. We said things like “You are low, accursed, shameful, dishonorable,
kinteerley.”
Then, surrounded by cheering older relatives, we went at each other. We kicked, scratched, bit one another, wrestled until we were covered in bruises, our little dresses torn, our knees scraped from all the falling. You were defeated if you gave up first or if you cried or ran away. In all three cases you would undergo a severe verbal and physical beating from your fighting coach. In my case my coach was my older cousin, the only daughter of my mother’s twin sister.

Throughout the first two decades of my life I got used to the practice of violence as a perfectly natural part of existence. At home Ma hit me and my siblings. My father, whenever he was with us, beat my brother with slaps and shoves and then in long thought-through whipping sessions with his belt. In turn, Mahad beat Haweya and me, sometimes to aid Ma in her crusade to teach us manners and break our spirit for being so disobedient, sometimes as a way of showing us that he was the boss, the vice head of the house, replacing my father’s authority with his. For Haweya and me to take him seriously and acknowledge this authority, he had to use physical violence. This we regarded as quite normal. All of my girlfriends at school feared their brothers and fathers. We whispered about the different punishments we were subjected to. All of them involved corporal punishment of some sort.

In school the teachers also had the right to cane us. In my class Mrs. Nziani used what was known as a
black mamba
, a hard black pipe. The
impact from that hurt depending on where she hit you and how much force she used. As a math teacher her favorite way of stimulating us to get our sums right was by hitting us on the head for every sum we got wrong. Sometimes I would get only five sums right out of thirty. That meant I got twenty-five strokes of the pipe.

Some teachers used the pencil-and-ruler method. A pencil would be wedged between the index finger and the ring finger, holding down the middle finger. Then the teacher would take a ruler and hit you as hard as she could on the knuckles of the fingers holding the pencil.

Bullying was another nightmare in school. Some of the older children would gang up on the younger ones or weaker age-mates, forming a circle around the poor child and then beating the hell out of him or her. There were times I used to think that children were more cruel than adults. Every week teachers would preach about why bullying was bad and how the bullies would be punished—violently, of course—if caught.

Violence seemed to follow me around. One day in the beginning of 1989 the Kenyan government decided to carry out a large-scale rounding up and deporting of illegal Somali immigrants into Kenya. In practice this meant that police were to stop anyone who looked like a Somali and demand their ID. If you did not have one, you went to a police cell. My mother and I went to buy an ID for me in a neighborhood called Pangani, about a twenty-minute walk from our neighborhood on Park Road. We left the house without IDs and, predictably, were stopped by two policemen. We might have been released had we given them the money that we had for our groceries. Instead Ma decided to get all principled and refused to bribe them. We were escorted to the Pangani Police Station, where we spent two nights. Even though the conditions were abysmal—hard cement floor, urine and excreta on the ground, and about forty people in a 13-by-16-foot cell—we were not physically harmed.

However, in that jail I saw the utmost cruelty. Kenyans charged with mostly petty crimes such as stealing spare tires were brought in. Five uniformed and armed policemen pummeled an alleged criminal. With their heavy boots they kicked him in the head and in the belly
and they kicked all his limbs. It was a ghastly sight. I will never forget the crack of bone as his kneecap was shattered.

In Kenya that was the most common form of state violence. In all the countries where I lived before coming to the West, the use of torture and corporal punishment was so normal that people were surprised if you questioned it. This habituation to violence poses real problems when people from such societies move to the West, as I soon discovered.

My work as a translator frequently took me to the courts and prisons of Holland. Almost all these cases involved assault and murder. All the perpetrators were male. There was one case of a Somali man who neglected to pay his rent for months. One day the landlord came to demand payment and threatened the tenant with eviction. In response the Somali walked into his apartment, grabbed a thick wooden stick, and hit the landlord on the head as hard as he could. The victim survived, but the impact was so hard that the Somali was charged with attempted murder. In court, defended by a pro bono lawyer, the Somali first denied hitting the landlord, then blamed him for making him lose his temper. The lawyer put forth a strong case in his defense, citing the civil war and the psychological toll it had taken on her client. She had lined up all sorts of experts, psychiatrists and sociologists who testified to all the possible causal links between that war and the reason the Somali man attacked his landlord.

The Somali’s extended family, neighbors, and friends all testified that the defendant was a good, polite, charitable man who under normal circumstances would not harm a fly. They agreed that, if the landlord had not provoked him, the whole episode would not have happened. The defendant himself showed no remorse of any kind and was sentenced to a year in prison.

In my time as a Dutch MP I heard numerous possible explanations for the disturbing level of violence among immigrant families. These families came from Turkey, Morocco, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, and Nigeria; people from the Antilles and Surinam were also overrepresented in violent-crime cases. There were first-generation and even third-generation citizens among them. All
who were suspected or convicted of actual or attempted terrorist violence were Muslims. Aside from terrorism the list of indictments was topped by assault, sometimes with firearms, sometimes with knives and other sharp objects, often with bare hands.

I tried to explain to my colleagues why this was. In some Muslim families—though not all—the barrier between violent and nonviolent behaviors is very thin and fragile. In some families it simply does not exist. Children are groomed into unquestioning conformity. Disobedience—especially by boys—is punished with a series of severe reprimands. If these fail, physical punishment soon follows. Husbands who fear disobedience from their wives are permitted to beat them. In school, particularly in the madrassas, mistakes are punished by beatings. Boys may receive lashes and hard slaps across the face; girls may be lashed but more often are slapped or pinched, or their hair is pulled.

The Westerner is surprised to hear a suicide bomber described by all his neighbors and relatives as quiet, charitable, polite, friendly, and smiling. How can a man go from helping an old woman cross the street to plotting or even committing a mass murder? The answer is that, in the Muslim family, politeness, friendliness, and charity are regarded highly, and all families aspire to instill in their children these ideals of universal good behavior, but conformity to Allah’s will is held in even higher regard. And violence is regarded as a legitimate means of enforcing that conformity.

In saying this, I don’t want to create the impression that all people from Muslim countries or tribal societies are aggressive. They are not. But whereas physical violence is now regarded in the West as barbaric, most commonly associated with drunken football hooligans or gangs of drug dealers, in Islamic culture it remains an integral part of the system of social discipline.

If there is an infallible mark of an advanced civilization it is surely the marginalization and criminalization of violence. In order to understand why Islam promotes violence, and indeed terror, as a political tool, we can look a little more closely at my own religious education.

After we left Somalia, my next Quran school was in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Held in a large room with a blackboard, it was for girls only.
We sat on cushions on the floor, a cement floor this time, not sand. There was no spitting; we did not write on wooden boards; we didn’t chew sticks into writing implements; and we didn’t have to make our own ink. But here we were required to cover ourselves from head to toe, and we were not asked about ablutions: it was assumed that our parents had prepared us. Purity was a concept and a practice that was ingrained in even the smallest child. But the biggest difference was that we each had a copy of the Quran.

It was not the whole Quran, just the thirty shortest chapters, which are known as suras. These booklets we called
Juz Amma
, after the longest chapter that they contained, and they came from a high shelf. We were not allowed to put them down on the counter that sat in front of us; they too were holy. We all opened to the same page, and collectively we chanted, slowly, following the teacher’s lead. We spoke each word with reverence, but, as in Somalia, no one bothered to explain the meaning of what we were saying. And again, any impertinence or questioning was punished severely. Before we replaced them on their special shelf we kissed the books and touched them to our foreheads.

My family lived in Saudi Arabia for one year. In the regular school, which was also for girls only, we also learned to read the Quran, and there we attended a class where we learned something about the meaning of what we were reading. Most of what we learned had to do with the hereafter and with rewards and punishments. Another class in regular school taught us about the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. As Muslims we were required to follow his example, but as girls we were required above all to follow the examples of his many wives.

After Saudi Arabia we lived in Ethiopia, which is a Christian country. There my mother was convinced that we would not get enough religious schooling. My father reassured her that we would, and he was right. We had an extra class in school that was like madrassa, although we sat on chairs and at desks. Using small Qurans, we learned verses by heart, chanting them slowly. In this school too there was no discussion of their meaning.

In Kenya, where we lived for ten years, we attended another Quran school, where we placed the Quran on our laps and continued to learn it by heart. But this Quran school was for boys and girls together,
which troubled my mother. After I began menstruating she decided to hire a private Quran teacher, who was Somali. He took us back to the old method of making our own ink and writing on wooden boards. Although I rebelled against these tedious old-time practices, I didn’t rebel against the Quran. Our teacher severely beat me for my rebellion; once he fractured my skull against the wall of our living room.

Then the school that I attended hired a new Islamic studies teacher, Sister Aziza. Her method of teaching was much kinder. She didn’t hit us and she didn’t yell at us. She discussed the content of the Quran and urged us to understand its meaning. Sister Aziza was what Europeans and Americans would now call a fundamentalist or an Islamist. At the time I didn’t realize it, but I was undergoing what specialists would now term a radicalization process.