The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (12 page)

I mastered the art of lying. But when I no longer needed to lie—there is no God; I don’t have to tell the truth just because God wants me to—I made a conscious choice never to do so again.

It depends on what you covet. I would like to write philosophic treatises, like Karl Popper, for example. So, paradoxically, this step—going into politics—is not in line with my ideal. What I would like to do best is become a philosopher and develop my own theories. A place where I can write; someone to do the cleaning; no worries about bread and butter; real debates instead of pointless talk about nothing. Ultimately, that is what will make me happy.

A
t the age of fourteen the Ugandan-born Canadian writer Irshad Manji was expelled from school for asking critical questions about Islam. But she was undaunted. She continued to study her religion by herself from her room at home. Thus she became, in the eyes of many Muslims, a traitor. For Irshad Manji is a harsh critic of Islam in newspaper articles, books, and lectures. And she openly admits to being a lesbian.

To mark the publication of the Dutch translation of Manji’s
The Trouble with Islam,
I met with her for an interview.

Yes, I am a Muslim. I want to be one, because I’m convinced that we can reform Islam. Believe me, when I was expelled from school I learned more about Islam on my own than could be learned by all those Muslims on the other side of the school walls. If only more Muslims would do the same—think for themselves, that is—our religion would be very different. I have noticed that many young Muslims are keen to. Whenever I give a talk at a university, students come up to me afterward and say, “Help, we are suffocating; this religion is strangling us.” That is why I wrote the book.

No, it’s not about identity. What I care about are human rights. I can’t keep quiet when I see women who are suffering humiliation in the name of Islam. I constantly urge my fellow Muslims: stop being so selfish. Get up and say something! Women who choose to wear headscarves and face veils always point out to me that it is up to them whether they do or don’t. To which I say, Yes, it is fine for you: you have the choice to wear these garments. But think of your sisters who are living under a tough regime that forces them to wear headscarves and will oppress and abuse them if they don’t. Fight for them. The Prophet Muhammad himself said: religion is the way in which we behave toward others. In other words, if you brush your responsibilities under the carpet, you have no right to call yourself a Muslim.

Of course I do. I don’t know Muhammad, I never met him. I can’t prove he was a feminist, or a misogynist, for that matter. But the Koran contains a number of very modern-sounding statements by him. I always make a point of asking Muslim men: why is it that you have a beard and dress in seventeenth-century Arabian costume, but you won’t take an interest in any of the progressive ideas which Muhammad also included in the Koran?

In theory, Islam is a beautiful and tolerant religion. The problem, however, is that this beautiful religion is weighed down with the pressures of Arabian cultural imperialism, which dictate that women must give up their individuality in honor of the family and become communal property. A raped girl is given one hundred eighty lashes with the whip because she had sex before marriage. We must rid ourselves of such practices.

And that is precisely why any reform of Islam is so hard. Independent thinking is not encouraged in Arabian culture. Yet it is the only chance Islam has. To get millions of Muslims to think for themselves, no, that is not going to happen. But we can try to form a strong, critical voice, which will prevail upon the rest. The important thing is that we don’t allow a small group of mullahs to tell us what to do, but that we Western Muslims—for that is the group I have pinned my hopes on—will have the courage to discover for ourselves how ambiguous and contradictory the Koran is, and to discuss our findings freely.

We need politicians who have the courage to say these things, who aren’t afraid of being called controversial and racist. Just like you can’t interpret everything in the Koran literally, the multicultural society should not be seen as a dogma. The thing to remember is that people, whether they are Muslims or not, only have the right to be respected if they themselves respect others. You can’t deal with human rights and apply double standards.

You tell me! I have been asking myself that question for a very long time. What are you so anxious about? I ask my friends in the West. Why do you not condemn the violation of human rights in Islamic countries, when you regularly speak out against such atrocities in the United States and Israel?

Nobody is forced by journalists to do anything they don’t want. Does your head belong to someone else rather than to you? Everything you do here in the free West is
your
choice. For heaven’s sake, grow up! Take responsibility for yourself. That is the crux of the matter with the Muslims; they have never been good at taking responsibility for themselves. At the madrassas [Koran lessons] we have it hammered into us that Islam is superior. Historically, the Koran was conceived after the Jewish Torah, and therefore it is thought to contain God’s final word. This is a dangerous viewpoint because it condones anything that is done in the name of Islam, even if it seems wrong. No Muslim, not even a well-educated and moderate one, can safely raise any issues related to his faith. Simply and solely because we have never learned to ask a single question about the Koran.

I find this terribly hypocritical. The kind of racism Muslims have to put up with in the West is nothing compared to the treatment non-Arabs in the Arabian world suffer. Nobody here is putting the slightest obstacle in the way of the Muslims. On the contrary: people are careful not to take too firm a line against female circumcision because that is part of “their culture.” Surely, culture is not a reason to tolerate human suffering. Why are the police not allowed to intervene when a father threatens to kill his daughter if she does not want to be circumcised? The standard reply is that Western women are just as much manipulated by the ideals of beauty that dominate their culture. They feel under pressure to have plastic surgery. But there is a big difference: I have never heard of a situation in which parents disowned their daughter because she refused to have her breasts enlarged. But I am aware of such cases if the daughter did not want to be circumcised or enter into an arranged marriage. The worst thing is that this worry about discrimination pushes Muslim women even further down into the pit. Whom do you help by saying nothing? It’s selfish not to want to appear racist.

I am openly lesbian. Muslims are forced to regard this as a sin. We have held this view for hundreds of years, they say. Is that a valid argument for rejecting homosexuals? Because you have been doing it for such a long time? The Koran states that the diversity of nature is a blessing. That should shut them up.

A
t times I end up in an unfamiliar situation that will lead me in a new direction. This has happened a few times recently. I became a politician, for instance; and, stranger still, I joined the conservative liberal VVD Party [People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy]. Now, who would have expected that? Certainly not me.

In 2002, I was having lunch in at a restaurant in the basement of the Dutch house of representatives. Here journalists can have a drink with politicians in a relaxed atmosphere and ask them questions off the record. As I was sitting there, a nice, charming gentleman came up to my table and asked if I would be willing to say a few words on May 4 (Memorial Day in memory of World War II victims) about freedom of speech.

The charming gentleman in question was Caspar Becx, the newly appointed chairman of the Nieuwspoort International Press Centre. He said he found it strange that I had been threatened in the Netherlands as a consequence of using my right to say what I think. Is it not strange to be a member of parliament and not to be able to go anywhere without bodyguards?

He has a point, I thought. And so, on the spur of the moment, I agreed to Mr. Becx’s request.

It was not until later, when I was preparing my speech, that I realized I had to say something on the occasion of May 4, Memorial Day, the most politically sensitive and emotional day in the year. Memorial Day is a symbol of the most gruesome period in Dutch and European history. In the Netherlands alone, 240,000 people were killed, among them more than 100,000 Jews. What had I let myself in for when I said yes? What could I, born in Somalia and having lived scarcely ten years in the Netherlands, possibly contribute to such an important and serious day? Could Mr. Becx not have found someone else to do justice to the symbolism of May 4? A member of the Resistance, for example? Or perhaps a relative of such a person? After all, some 25,000 people were actively involved in the Dutch resistance movement during World War II. The fact that I do my work as a member of parliament surrounded by bodyguards does not really warrant my making a speech in defense of freedom of speech. About 1,200 illegal news pamphlets were published during the war; there are people in the Netherlands who put their lives at risk to produce and circulate these pamphlets. Without the added luxury of bodyguards. Why had they not been invited to say something?

T
ODAY IS
M
AY
4, and I find myself in the peculiar situation in which you, dear guests, expect me to make a meaningful speech. But what can an immigrant add to May 4 [Memorial Day] or May 5 [Liberation Day]? Do I share the collective memory of the Dutch or, for that matter, the European war generation? And why should I commemorate their dead, when in my own country and continent of origin, there are countless people who die every day and will be completely forgotten.

But perhaps, on second thought, the idea to invite an immigrant to speak today is not that strange after all. The war ended fifty-eight years ago, and the majority of the Dutch population feels that it is genuinely a thing of the past. Formally the country has made its peace with Germany. The younger, postwar generations are feeling increasingly far removed from it. Freedom, and freedom of speech, have become a common experience in the Netherlands. In present-day Europe words can still have a strong impact. They touch, hurt, and offend people. But rarely does this lead to prosecution or threats. We undervalue freedom of speech. Maybe we shouldn’t always take it for granted.

Many immigrants have experienced extreme pressure and constraint. I wonder if this might be a useful experience to help turn Memorial Day into more than just a ritual that loses its true meaning as time goes by. The culture of free speech is shaping whole generations of immigrants and forces many to rethink and sometimes dismiss old customs. But it also allows them to ask questions about the collective memory as it developed over the years in the Netherlands, a memory that is resistant to many questions. Some of these were officially acknowledged for the first time when Queen Beatrix made an official speech for the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war: “For an objective account of what happened we must not conceal the fact that the occupier encountered the heroic resistance of some, as well as the passive acceptance and active support of others.”

Indeed, it is true that the Netherlands is still struggling with its colonial past. What is more, if you look at it from an immigrant’s point of view, it was the Europeans who colonized parts of Africa and refused to let go of these colonies even after World War II. And did the Dutch not go on the rampage in Indonesia almost immediately after they themselves had been liberated from the Germans? I still struggle to understand this behavior.

The arrival of immigrants has revived an intense discussion about freedom, safety, and especially freedom of speech. A number of minor as well as major conflicts are going on between Europeans and immigrants from countries where the events of World War II are seen in a different light. And virtually all of these conflicts trigger some association with World War II for native Europeans: statements and political programs of extreme right-wing parties remind us of Hitler’s raids: never again must we repeat Auschwitz. Yet third-generation Arabs, who identify with so-called Arabs in Palestine and march in demonstrations at Amsterdam’s Dam Square, chant enthusiastically: “Hamas, hamas, Jews to the gas!”

Every immigrant struggles with a divided sense of loyalty between his native country, his family and past, on the one hand, and his country of the present and future on the other. As a child I used to hear nothing but negative comments about Jews. My earliest memory dates from the time we lived in Saudi Arabia in the midseventies. Sometimes we would have no running water. I remember hearing my mother wholeheartedly agreeing with our neighbor that the Jews had been pernicious again. Those Jews hate Muslims so much that they’ll do anything to dehydrate us. “Jew” is the worst term of abuse in both Somali and Arabic. Later, when I was a teenager and living in Somalia and Kenya, from the mid-eighties onward, every prayer we said contained a request for the extermination of the Jews. Just imagine that: five times a day. We were passionately praying for their destruction but had never actually met one. With that background experience, and my loyalty to the political, cultural, and religious variant of Islam, which I (and millions with me) inherited from my childhood, I arrived in the Netherlands. Here I came into contact with an entirely different view of the Jews: they are human beings before anything else. But what upset me more was learning about the immense injustice that had been done to the people labeled “Jews.” The Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that led to it cannot be compared to any other form of ethnic cleansing. This makes the history of the Jews in Europe unique.

More understandable is the motivation and determination with which people commit genocide. The Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Serbians against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia are proof of how hatred can organize people and bring them to act hatefully. Such eruptions of aggression are often preceded by oppression and a lack of freedom, sometimes enforced by the government and sometimes—more and more, in fact—because there is no government to take charge. Much time and deliberation is invested beforehand in the process of cultivating and organizing the hatred that gives rise to hostile actions. Dissidents who are aware of the destructive nature of plans try to resist them; they warn others and attempt to dissuade them from joining in. For this, you need a climate with institutions that will guarantee freedom of speech.

I am not the only immigrant who has come to the Netherlands, Europe, or the West in search of freedom. There are millions like me. They come on planes through the mediation of people traffickers, having sold all their possessions to pay for the journey. Immigrants from countries with no freedom escape on trucks, walk for days on end, or float across the sea in fragile little boats. Thousands of people have died on their way to Europe.

What Europe has managed to do in the last fifty-eight years, through remembering the dead and celebrating its freedom, is to realize that freedom and the peace that comes with it demand constant effort to maintain. The enjoyment of personal identity and the acceptance of pluralism are only really possible when the rights of individuals are guaranteed. The realization that civil society means living with conflict; that to do this you need words. And that therefore the word—freedom of speech—is the key to a stable society.

It is here in Europe that immigrants like me can explore the reality of free speech without risking serious repercussions, such as banishment, imprisonment, book burning, censorship, or decapitation. Every day I discover the effect that words can have—this is painful at times. They can be hurtful and offensive, and may cause misunderstandings. But they can also clarify, explain, and generally relieve suffering. For immigrants from countries where there is no freedom of speech it will be difficult to know how to handle this freedom. Difficult but necessary.

We need words to understand the present times. We need words to come to terms with our past. Words to express that clash of loyalties we experience when we move to a new country; that feeling of being torn between two worlds. Words to describe our insights into our culture and religion, which are part of the reason we left our hearth and home.

As an immigrant who has settled in Europe, I am in a position to compare the way of life in my native country with that of my future country. In order to share my observations with other immigrants who find it difficult to adjust, I need words. I need words so that I can say that maybe the standards and values our parents brought us up with, and their religion, are not as wonderful as we always imagined.

As I said at the beginning, lately I have found myself in unfamiliar situations that have turned my life upside down. But I will never forget where that life began: at the Digfeer Hospital, in Mogadishu, now severely damaged by warfare. And I will never cease to ask myself, How many children who were born there at the same time I was have had a good life?