Heretic

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062333957
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits de l'homme

Continuing her journey from a deeply religious Islamic upbringing to a post at Harvard, the brilliant, charismatic and controversial New York Times and Globe and Mail #1 bestselling author of Infidel and Nomad makes a powerful plea for a Muslim Reformation as the only way to end the horrors of terrorism, sectarian warfare and the repression of women and minorities.

Today, she argues, the world's 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war—are incompatible with the values of a free society.

For centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation—a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity—is now at hand, and may even have begun. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness—not least by Muslim women—to think freely and to speak out.

Courageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. And she calls on the Western world to end its appeasement of the Islamists. "Islam is not a religion of peace, " she writes. It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, not the opponents of free speech.

Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not a call to arms, but a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global toleration. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, with jihadists killing thousands from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world's number one problem.

CHAPTER 1

THE STORY OF A HERETIC

My Journey Away from Islam

I was raised a practicing Muslim and remained one for almost half my life. I attended madrassas and memorized large parts of the Qur’an. As a child, I lived in Mecca for a time and frequently visited the Grand Mosque. As a teenager, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood. In short, I am old enough to have seen Islam’s bifurcation in the latter half of the twentieth century between the everyday faith of my parents and the intolerant, militant jihadism preached by the people I call the Medina Muslims. So let me begin with the Islam in which I grew up.

I was about three years old when my grandmother started teaching me what little she had memorized of the Qur’an under the feathery leaves of the Somali talal tree. She could not read or write—literacy began to be promoted in Somalia only in 1969, the year I was born—and had no concept of Arabic. Instead, she worshipped the book, picking it up with great reverence, kissing it and placing it on her forehead before carefully and gently laying it back down. We could not touch the Qur’an without first washing our hands. My mother was the same way, except she had memorized a bit more and spoke a little Arabic. She had learned the prayers by heart and could also recite fearsome incantations, warning me that I would burn in hellfire for any misdeeds.

My mother was born under a tree and grew up in the desert, and she was a wanderer when she was young, making it as far as Aden in Yemen, across the Red Sea. She was subjected to an arranged marriage and sent to Kuwait with her husband. As soon as her own father died, she divorced this husband. She met my father through her older sister when he was teaching people in the Somali capital how to read and write. My mother was one of his best students, with a quick and clever way with words. My father already had a wife, so my mother became his second. My father was a political man, an opposition leader trying to change Somalia, which was then ruled by the dictator Siad Barre. When I was two, the authorities came for him and took him away to the old Italian prison, otherwise known as “the Hole.” So, for most of my early years, it was simply my mother, my brother, my sister, my grandmother, and me.

My first real school was a religious dugsi—a shed offering shelter from the burning sun. Between thirty and forty children sat under a roof held up by poles, surrounded by a thicket of trees. We had the only spot of shade. At the front and center of the space was a foot-high wooden table on which rested a large copy of the Qur’an. Our teacher wore the traditional Somali man’s garb of a sarong and a shirt, and he made us chant the verses, much as American and European preschool students learn to chant short poems and nursery rhymes. If we forgot or we were simply not loud enough or our voices dipped too low, he would take his stick and prod or whack us.

We chanted again when students misbehaved. If you were disobedient, if you failed to learn what you were supposed to have learned, you were sent to the middle of the shed. The worst offender was hoisted high in a hammock and swung back and forth in the air. The rest of us were given little sticks and we raised our sticks above our heads and stood underneath, hitting the disobedient child through the open holes of the hammock, calling out verses from the Qur’an, chanting about the Day of Judgment, when the sun goes black and the hellfires burn.

Every punishment at school or at home seemed to be laced with threats of hellfire and pleas for death or destruction: may you suffer this disease or that, and may you burn in hell. And yet in the evening, when the sun had dropped below the horizon and the cool night air reigned over us, my mother would face toward Mecca and say the evening prayer. Again and again, three maybe four times, she would recite the words, the opening verses of the Qur’an, and other verses, moving from standing with her hand across her womb, to bowing down, to prostrating herself, to sitting, then prostrating, then sitting again. There was an entire ritual of words and movement, and it repeated itself each night.

After her prayers, we sat with cupped hands under the talal tree, begging Allah to release my father from prison. These were supplications to God to make life easy, asking Allah to be patient with us, to give us resilience, to convey upon us forgiveness and peace. “I seek shelter in Allah,” she would chant. “Allah the most merciful, the most kind . . . My Lord, forgive me, have mercy upon me, guide me, give me health and grant me sustenance and exalt me and set right my affairs.” It became as familiar and soothing as a lullaby, as far removed as could be imagined from the clashing sticks and taunting words of the dugsi.

The supplications seemed to work. Thanks to the help of a relative, my father was able to escape from jail and flee to Ethiopia. The obvious thing would have been for my mother to take us to Ethiopia, too. But my mother would not go to Ethiopia. Because it was predominantly Christian, to her it was nothing but a sea of infidels in an unclean land. She preferred to go to Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, seat of its holiest places, Mecca and Medina. So she got a false passport and airline tickets, and then, one morning when I was eight years old, my grandmother woke us before dawn, dressed us in our good clothes, and by the time the day was over, we were in Saudi Arabia.

We settled in Mecca, the spiritual heart of Islam, the place to which nearly every Muslim dreams of making a pilgrimage once in his or her life. We could enact that pilgrimage every week by taking the bus from our apartment to the Grand Mosque. At eight years old, I had already performed the Umra, the little version of the full pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, the fifth pillar of the Muslim faith, which washes away the pilgrim’s sins. Now, moreover, we could study Islam as it was taught in Saudi religious schools, rather than in a Somali shed. My sister, Haweya, and I were enrolled in a Qur’an school for girls; my brother, Mahad, went to a madrassa for boys. Previously I had been taught that all Muslims were united in brotherhood, but here I discovered that the brotherhood of Muslims did not preclude racial and cultural prejudice. What we had learned of the Qur’an in Somalia was not good enough for the Saudis. We did not know enough; we mumbled instead of reciting. We did not learn to write any of the passages, we just learned to memorize each verse, repeating it slowly again and again. The Saudi girls were light-skinned and called us abid, or slaves—in fact, the Saudis had legally abolished slavery just five years before I was born. At home, my mother now made us pray five times each day, performing the rituals of washing and robing each time.

It was here that I encountered for the first time the strict application of sharia law. In the public squares, every Friday, after the ritual prayers, men were beheaded or flogged, women were stoned, and thieves had their hands cut off amid great spurts of blood. The rhythm of chanted prayers was replaced by the reverberation of metal blades slicing through flesh and hitting stone. My brother—who, unlike me, was allowed to witness these punishments—used the nickname “Chop-Chop Square” for the one closest to us. We never questioned the ferocity of the punishments. To us, it was simply more hellfire.

But the Grand Mosque, with its high columns, elaborate tiles, and polished floors, was more beguiling. Here, in the cool shade, my mother could walk seven times around the Kaaba, the holy building at the center of the mosque. This tranquillity was interrupted only in the month of the Hajj, the Islamic ritual pilgrimage, when we could not leave our apartment for fear of being trampled by the masses of believers streaming down the streets, and when even the simplest conversations had to be shouted over the din of constant prayer.

It was in Mecca that I first became conscious of the differences between my father’s vision of Islam and my mother’s. After my father came from Ethiopia to join us, he insisted that we pray not separated by sex in separate rooms of the apartment, as was Saudi tradition, but together as a family. He did not throw the specter of hell in our faces, and once a week he taught us the Qur’an, reading from it and trying to translate it, infusing it with his own interpretations. He would tell me and my brother and my sister that God hadn’t put us on earth to punish us; He had put us on earth to worship him. I would look up and nod, but then, the next morning or afternoon, if I disobeyed my mother, she would once again revert to hellfire and eternal punishment.

After a time, we moved to Riyadh, where my father was working as a translator of Morse code for a government ministry. We had a house with a men’s side and a women’s, although unlike our neighbors, the five of us moved easily between the two sides. My father did not behave like the Saudi men. He did not do the shopping or handle all the outside transactions. Moreover, he continued to absent himself, returning to Ethiopia, where the Somali opposition was based. The neighbors openly pitied my mother for having to go out of the house alone. In turn, my mother looked down on the Saudi girls for teaching Haweya and me the rudiments of belly-dancing. She wanted us to live only according to “pure Islam,” which to her meant no singing or dancing, no laughter or joy.

A little over a year later, when I was nine, we left as quickly as we came. My father was deported by the Saudi government. The reasons were unclear to me, but they no doubt related to his ongoing Somali opposition activities. We had twenty-four hours to pack and fly—this time to Ethiopia. After a year and a half there, my mother’s antipathy to the country necessitated yet another move: to Kenya.

In Nairobi, Haweya and I went to school. English was not the only thing I learned there. I soon discovered that I did not know the most basic things, like the date and how to tell time. Ethiopia had a sidereal calendar; Saudi Arabia used an Islamic lunar calendar; in Somalia, my grandmother told time solely by the sun and her year consisted of ten months. It was only as a ten-year-old in Kenya that I learned it was the year 1980. For the Saudis, it was the Islamic year 1400; for the Ethiopians, by their way of reckoning, it was still 1978.

My mother nevertheless remained steadfast in her faith: she refused to believe that the things we were taught in school, such as the moon landings and evolution, were true; Kenyans might be descended from apes, but not us: she made us recite our bloodline to prove the point. As soon as I turned fourteen, she enrolled me in the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School on Park Road so that my sister and I could have a more modest uniform. Now we could wear trousers underneath our skirts. Our heads could be covered in white headscarves. At least, those things were permitted. But at that time few girls complied.

I Embrace the Islam of Medina

Then, when I was sixteen, I discovered a way of being a better Muslim. A new teacher arrived to teach us religious education. Sister Aziza was a Sunni Muslim from the Kenyan coast who had converted to Shia Islam following her marriage. She wore the full hijab; almost nothing was visible except her face. She even wore gloves and socks to keep her fingers and toes concealed.

Previously we had been taught Islam as history: dates and caliphates. Aziza did not teach; she preached. Better, she seemed to reason with us, questioning us, leading us. “What makes you different from the infidels?” The correct answer was the Shahada, the Muslim’s profession of faith. “How many times a day should you pray?” We knew that the answer was five. “How many times did you pray yesterday?” We looked nervously at one another.

This was a far more seductive method of teaching than any stick, and Sister Aziza did not care how long it took. As she liked to say: “This is how Allah and the Prophet want you to dress. But you should only do it when you are ready,” adding, “When you’re ready for it, you’ll choose, and then you’ll never take it off.”

Another novelty: Aziza did not read the Qur’an in Arabic, but from English translations, and unlike my previous teachers—including my mother—she said she was not forcing us. She was simply sharing with us Allah’s words, His wishes, His desires. If we chose not to please Allah, then of course we would burn in hell. But if we pleased Him, then we would go to paradise.

There was an element of choice here that was irresistible. Our parents, and certainly my mother, could never be pleased, whatever we did. Our earthly lives could not be changed. In a few years or less, we would find ourselves extracted from school, sent off into arranged marriages. We seemed to have no choices. But our spiritual lives were another matter. Those lives could be transformed, and Sister Aziza could show us the way. And then we, in turn, could show others the way. It is hard to overstate how empowering this message was.

It took me a while, but when I embraced Sister Aziza’s path, I did it in earnest. I prayed without fail five times a day. I went to a tailor to buy a vast, voluminous cloak that clinched tight around my wrists and billowed down to my toes. I wore it over my school uniform and wound a black scarf over my hair and shoulders. I put it on in the morning to walk to school and again before I left the school gates to return home. As I walked along the streets, covered, I had to move very deliberately because it was easy to trip over the billowing fabric. It was hot and cumbersome. In those moments, as my giant black figure moved slowly down the street, my mother was finally happy with me. But I was not doing it for her. I was doing it for Allah.

Sister Aziza was not the only new kind of Muslim I encountered at that time. There were now preachers going from door to door, like the self-appointed imam Boqol Sawm. His name meant “He Who Fasts for a Hundred Days,” and in person he more than lived up to his name. He was so thin that he looked like skin stretched over bone. While Sister Aziza wore the hijab, Boqol Sawm wore a Saudi robe, a bit short, so that it showed his bony ankles. It seemed he did nothing except walk around Old Racecourse Road, our neighborhood in Nairobi, knocking on doors, sermonizing, and leaving cassette tapes for the women who invited him in. There were no Electrolux salesmen with their vacuums going door to door in Old Racecourse Road, just Boqol Sawm and his sermons. He would sometimes come inside, too, as long as there was a curtain to separate him from the women, who listened to the cassettes he left behind and traded them. They played the sermons while they were washing and cooking. Gradually they stopped wearing colorful clothes and shrouded themselves in the jilbab, a long, loose-fitting coat, and wrapped scarves around their heads and necks.

If Aziza’s methods of indoctrination were subtle, Boqol Sawm favored the more familiar verbal bludgeoning I had first encountered back in Somalia. He shouted his verses in Arabic and Somali and highlighted what was forbidden and what was permitted—in a manner so strident that he got himself shut out of the local mosque. Women, he preached, should be available to men at any time, “even on the saddle of a camel,” except during the days of the month when they were unclean. This might not seem a very appealing message for a female audience, yet for many women he was mesmerizing. And for their sons, he was positively transforming.

More and more Somali teenage boys in our expatriate community had starte...