Nomad (41 page)

So, unlike my mother, I shall not chase away your boyfriends.

My dear child, I shall aspire to give you the freedoms that I did not have. Instead of the rote learning and strict punishments of my childhood, my authority and that of your school will be more relaxed; it will be geared toward training you to make choices, to take responsibility for the outcome of those choices and to learn from the mistakes that you make. This may give you the sometimes dangerous sense that perfection is attainable: the perfect toy, the perfect best friend, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect home, the perfect community, the perfect country. Such constant inspiration to innovate, to improve, and to progress is in many ways healthy. But, my child, there is no such thing as perfection. The quest for it leads only to frustration and a vulnerability to utopian ideas. At such times reflect on what happened and what continues to happen to the societies of your grandmothers, where the tribe is fixated upon the theologian’s promise of paradise.

Living in America you’ll be exposed to a stronger promise of the perfect society. You will hear of many isms: socialism and communism and all sorts of cults and collectivisms. The perfection they promise usually comes at the price of mass suffering and death.

Challenging authority, playing cat-and-mouse with the teachers, having secret agreements with the other kids, and keeping my parents and teachers in the dark—these all provided me with a great deal of entertainment. I wonder if giving you too much freedom will suck the spice out of life. What if, in giving you too much, I take away something vital from your life? What if I curb your sense of adventure? You will be born in an America of many
posts:
post—civil rights, postfeminism, post—cold war. You will take so much for granted. Decades ago Oriana had to justify the fact that she wanted to be a single mother. Now there is no such hindrance. What will you fight for? What will you fight against?

My dear child, I do not worry about the bleakness of life. I worry about the bleakness of having no challenges in life. In Holland, for example, I lived in a laboratory of a society, where almost all the challenges in life had been erased. We were taken care of from the cradle
to the grave. We debated on euthanasia, a movement that started by defending the right of terminal patients to end their lives and then morphed into a movement that defended the right of anyone to be helped by a doctor if he was tired of life. And this demand of a right to be assisted with suicide when you are tired of life had to be subsidized by the state. To my astonishment, some of the active members of that right were in their twenties and thirties. They had been protected from life, exposed to too little challenge; every day was the same for them. They had nothing to fight for. They convinced themselves that the world was a nasty crucible and declared themselves tired of life.

I fear that you might become tired of life, and I cannot think of how to prevent that, except perhaps to remind you of the hard lives of your forefathers and foremothers so that you can appreciate what you have. That is your challenge and the challenge of your peers: not only how to keep the freedoms you have, but how to share that freedom with those who don’t have it.

Beware of being brainwashed, my child. Allah and his agents played a big part in my childhood. A man named Boqol Sawm tried to terrify us into being devout. He droned into our ears that we were all headed to hell for sinning. In hell we would be burned in hungry flames, dipped in cooking oil, made whole again and broiled from head to toe. Each time we perished, Allah would remake us, give us back our bodies and skins ever more smooth and sensitive. Then he would give his angels orders to start burning us again. These horrors would go on and on until Allah was satisfied that we had been justly punished.

I came to value the struggle to elude all forms of authority as part of the spice of my life. I have kept the great lessons of duty and perseverance that my mother and grandmother taught, as well as the passion for learning that some of my teachers in high school instilled in me. I was inspired by my father’s resistance to state authority when he opposed the Somali dictatorship from 1969 to 1990. But I resisted his authority to decide for me when and whom to marry. Now, of course, I shall worry about your finding the right person. But unlike my father, I will let you pick your mate. And if I think he is wrong for you, I will swallow my judgment, however hard that may be, and defer to you.

My child, love between you and me is unconditional. Unknowingly, we may hurt one another, disapprove of each other’s choices, friends, and tastes, but whatever happens, you can depend on me. No matter what your age, your sorrows will be my sorrows, your happiness my joy. Love between a man and a woman is not a hoax, as Oriana stated, but it is conditional. It is contingent on chemistry, compatibility, temperament, lifestyle, even income, but if you fall in love and it’s mutual, then it’s a very powerful force. Love between a man and a woman can be generous, and should be generous. Unfortunately, my dear child, you will hear of many love stories where the basic desire is to possess one another, to change one another, to control one another. It’s precisely these things that kill affection and passion. Steer clear of those, if you can.

There are three values I would like to share with you from my journey of freedom, and one pitfall to avoid.

The first one, I am sure, will be drilled into you in your American school. It is the value of responsibility. I have made a lot of mistakes, but I strive to take responsibility for my actions. I am impulsive and impatient and sometimes I agree to things I don’t want to do and can’t do. But when I find a moment to think about my actions or inactions I find that most of the time I am the only one to blame.

Related to responsibility is duty. How boring, you might think. Duty: what a tedious four-letter word. There are things in life that are not exciting, that are not fun, that are not fair and do not feel right. But we must do them. Whenever I could, I have supported my family. I did it knowing they would not support me in return, and I rarely enjoyed the tasks. But those tasks gave me a personal reward, a sense of pride and accomplishment. Duty might seem selfless, altruistic, but the outcome, at least for me, has been a selfish pleasure.

The third value is that of critical thinking. I learned about it at the University of Leiden. My professors there gave us the works of different men and women to read. They called those works theories, ideas that could be right or wrong. Our main task for five years was to sort the good ideas from the bad ones, not only to learn to refute the theories of others but to come up with better ones ourselves. The process was to teach us to think and to recognize thoughts, even big complicated ones, as the product of the human mind. There was
nothing divine in Leiden except the human faculty of reason. I was very fortunate to have gone to university, to have been exposed to the exercise of critical thinking. If you are lucky, you shall be educated in this valuable skill too. But beware of zealots of any flavor. Beware of proselytizers of religious utopias. And beware of professors who confuse teaching students how to think with teaching them what to think.

Many people in your life will tell you of all the emotional pitfalls that lie waiting for a young a girl to tumble into. Let me touch on one: the trap of resentment. It is probably the worst mental prison in the world. It is the inability to let go of anger and the perceived or real injustices we suffer. Some people let one or two, or maybe ten unpleasant experiences poison the rest of their lives. They let their anger ferment and rot their personality. They end up seeing themselves as victims of their parents, teachers, their peers and preachers.

People always ask me if I am angry at my mother or father, at the Quran teacher who fractured my skull, at the Dutch politician who tried to take away my citizenship, at any number of people who have slighted me or gone out of their way to hurt and humiliate me. I am not. I know that my parents loved me unconditionally in their own way. I know that those who seek to hurt and humiliate me want to trap me in a prison of anger and resentment and there is no point in rewarding them with success.

I have discovered life for what it is: a gift from nature. For those who believe in a benign God, it is a gift from God. It is a gift we enjoy for just a brief period of time. Some of us get to hang around longer than others, but we all pass. In that brief period it is a tragedy to trap our minds in a toxic cage of bitterness and rage. Such a snare shifts our energies from focusing on how to make the best of our lives to becoming vengeful, apathetic victims of others.

Life holds so much promise for you. Please take it with both your little hands, and live it well. Live, laugh, love, and give back with a broad grin.

I shall not bring you up in the Muslim faith, the faith of your forefathers and foremothers, for I believe it is fatally flawed. I will, however, introduce you to different religions, their founders, and some of their followers. I will bring you up to have faith
in yourself
, in science
and your own reason and the force of life. And I will never seek to impose my own beliefs or unbelief on you.

Whenever I rebelled against my mother’s values she would blackmail me and even curse me with fearsome Somali maledictions. “I wish you a child that will reject your God the way you have rejected my God!” was one. She told me I would never know how painful that rejection is unless I went through it myself. So I fully expect it will be terrible to accept your independence. But even if it is so, I will try to hide my pain.

At my father’s deathbed, I knew that his values and mine would never be reconciled. He could never understand my unbelief. He prayed for me until his last breath. And I could never re-adopt his belief in Allah, in prophets, in holy books, angels, and the hereafter. But our unconditional love for one another, the love between a parent and a child, was so much more powerful than that belief. And the proof was the way we clutched each other’s hands at the end. That earthly love is my faith. It is the love I shall always give you.

The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation was set up in 2008 as a charitable organization to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West, especially in the United States, against militant Islam and harmful tribal customs. Its aim is to investigate, inform, and influence against several types of crimes against women including the denial of education for girls, genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor violence, and restrictions on girls’ freedom of movement.

The AHA Foundation seeks to raise awareness in America that some of these violent practices against women are increasingly carried out in the United States. The foundation also exists to provide girls and women in distress with information and assistance, by creating a database of people and institutions qualified to deal with cases of maltreatment and abuse.

www.theahafoundation.org

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, raised a Muslim, and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. In 1992 she went to the Netherlands as a refugee, escaping a forced marriage to a distant cousin she had never met. She learned Dutch and worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and shelters for battered women. After earning her college degree in political science, she worked for the Labor Party. She denounced Islam after the September 11 terrorist attacks and became a member of the Dutch Parliament, fighting for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam, and security in the West. She went on to work for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. She established the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation (
www.theahafoundation.org
), which aims to combat several types of crimes against women, including female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and honor violence, through education, outreach, and the dissemination of knowledge.

Her book
Infidel
has been a #1 bestseller in Europe, and she continues to receive honors from around the world. She was named one of
Time
magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2005, one of the
Glamour
Heroes of 2005, and was
Reader’s Digest’s
European of the Year. She has also received Norway’s Human Rights Service’s Bellwether of the Year Award, the Danish Freedom Prize, the Swedish Democracy Prize, the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Unsung Heroes Award.