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Driving back to Heathrow Airport, I thought back to my first meeting with my half sister, Sahra, in Ethiopia in 1992, when she was eight years old and I was 22 and newly married, en route to Europe.
We had ended up speaking in sign language, smiling, holding hands, and misunderstanding one another. Sahra had been a charming little girl, with a bright child's curiosity and my father's way of being physically affectionate. She had sprinted about with the same kind of energy, enthusiasm, and playfulness as my sister Haweya. She was dressed that day in a sleeveless frock, torn and patched up in so many places that I could not help feeling a strong sense of shame that I did not bring her a new dress.
I was not sure whether the state of her frock was the result of poverty or simply acceptance of the Ethiopian approach to children. When we lived in Addis Ababa, most children were dressed in tatters and often seemed neglected by their parents. As a child, I considered this Ethiopian neglect to be the epitome of freedom. I wanted to be left alone, to play as many hours of the day and night as I wanted to, rather than be put to work. Sahra's mother seemed as indulgent as mine had been rigid and forbidding.
But it was not only Sahra's frock that was tattered. The apartment was too. We were in a half room, separated from the other spaces by a thin cotton sheet that had once been white but now was stained by smoke and dust. The cement compound of the apartment building had once been smooth and even, but now, like many other shared compounds, it had cracks and large and small holes that were filled with little puddles of water. None of the tenants could afford to make repairs, and they did not work together to raise the money to maintain and clean the communal areas. By late afternoon fat mosquitoes zoomed and whined by my ears. I decided to marshal my best Arabic and Amharic to campaign for us to dry the puddles of water.
My stepmother had shrugged her shoulders in charming helplessness. "It is as Allah wills," she said. "The puddles will dry when it stops raining. Allah brings the rains and Allah makes the sun shine." My father's third wife accepted her life as it came to her. Like my mother, she was passive, but her passiveness was different from my mother's. Both women were steeped in self-pity; both resigned themselves to their circumstances. But my mother cursed, scolded, screamed, demanded, and insulted those she blamed. Sahra's mom smiled and chided; she cast her eyes down and seemed to be content. Whatever the next day brought was Allah's choice, and she saw no point in defying events, her husband, or her God. Every sentence ended with Inshallah, "God willing." That was her method of survival.
Little Sahra and her mother lived a very communal life. Throughout the day, people walked in and out of the building and its compound. There was a large stone water pitcher in a corner of the courtyard, and men would come in, scoop some water out in the large aluminum ladle, and drink straight from the ladle. Women used the same pitcher to make tea and fill their cooking pots. At one point that afternoon someone said something about hygiene: "Wash your hands before you use the pitcher. We all drink from it."
"What?" a young man responded with an awkward grin. "Wash hands with what? There is no water left." Indeed, the metal ladle hit the bottom of the stone pitcher with a clank, indicating that it was empty, and the older ladies began pleading and crying out for the younger women to fetch more water. Concern about hygiene was lost in the hubbub. Everyone was talking, a friendly clamor of gossip and criticism of the habash, the Somali word for Ethiopians. Every sentence that everyone spoke was punctuated with "Allah willing" or "For the sake of Allah."
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Sitting in the car that was driving me away from what was certainly the last time I would see my father, I thought about what had kept me away from my family, and from him, for so long: the rule that dictates that a man must command obedience from his women, from his wives and daughters -- and they must submit to him. If a man's women stray from submission, they damage him: his good name, his authority, the sense that he is loyal and strong and true to his word. This belief is part of a larger one that individuals don't matter, that their choices and desires are meaningless, particularly if the individuals are women.
This sense of honor and male entitlement drastically restricts women's choices. A whole culture and its religion weigh down every Muslim, but the heaviest weight falls disproportionately on women's shoulders. We are bound to obey and bound to chastity and shame by Allah and the Prophet and by the fathers and husbands who are our guardians. The women along Whitechapel Road carry the burdens of all the obligations and religious rules that in Islam focus so obsessively on women, as surely as their counterparts in East Africa.
I still felt pained by the shame that I had cast on my father's good name. Because I was an apostate, an unbeliever, because I now lived as a Western woman, I had hurt him and harmed him, even defiled him by my rebellion. But I also knew that my rebellion was necessary, was vital.
Sahra had taken the contrary path. She did not rebel. Sahra was deeply religious and that she wore the jilbab, a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face. Sahra's black shroud extended beyond the tips of her fingers and trailed on the ground; she sought with every word and gesture to express her submission to Allah's will and to the authority of men.
The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires -- what small space in your life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.
As we drove down Whitechapel Road I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated, if not endorsed, not just by the British but by so many Western societies where the equality of the sexes is legally enshrined.
At the airport I phoned Sahra to tell her that I had come to see our father and was leaving again to go back the United States. We talked about the hospital, and Sahra told me a funny story. When they took my father to the hospital, her mother told the nurses that she was his wife; then his first wife, Maryan Farah, had come, for she too now lived in England, and she told them that she was his wife. The whole staff seemed amused by the impossible number of people claiming to be his brothers and cousins. I chuckled. "They must think we're all crazy," Sahra said. I told her it was probably not the first time the hospital had seen such a thing.
Like her mother, every phrase Sahra spoke seemed to end with Inshallah, "If Allah wills it." At first it sounded well-behaved and highly civilized, but after so many sighs of acceptance and Allah willing and Sahra's showering me with Allah's blessings, I am ashamed to admit that it began to annoy me. I started to distrust her: She was no longer the skipping, happy child I met in 1992.
Now, before our first real conversation was over, Sahra too began trying to bring me back to Islam, to persuade me to give up my adopted way of life and join her in tradition and the dictates of Allah. As I listened, I pictured her, this little sister whom I had met only once, 16 years ago, who was now sitting with her mother and her baby daughter in a flat in a housing project, dressed in layer upon layer of dark cloth.
- Excerpted from Nomad. ©2010 Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
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MONDAY
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on her father's four wives and six children
