The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [14]
To avoid this cruel fate, Muslim families do everything possible to ensure that their daughters’ hymens remain intact before marriage. The methods vary according to the country and specific circumstances in which people live and the means available to them. But everywhere the measures are aimed at girls, the possessors of the hymen, and not at the men who could break it.
Not long ago the spokesman for the Turkish Ministry of Justice, Professor Dogan Soyasian, stated that all men want to marry virgins, and that men who deny this are hypocrites. A raped woman is still advised to marry the man who raped her, the argument being that time heals all wounds. In time the woman will be able to love her rapist, and they may become very happy together. But if the woman has been raped by several men, a marriage like that will have a lower chance of success because her husband will see her as a dishonorable woman.
When it concerns their sexuality, men in Islamic culture are seen as irresponsible, unpredictable, scary beasts who immediately lose all self-control upon seeing a woman. This reminds me of an experience I had when I was still quite young. My grandmother had a billy goat. We were playing in front of the house, and in the evening, just before it got dark, all the goats in the neighborhood returned home in a long procession. It was a charming sight. But as soon as Grandma’s billy goat saw the other goats, he galloped over to them and mounted the first goat he could get hold of. We children thought this was very cruel. When we asked Grandma what her goat was doing, she answered that it was none of her business: if the neighbours didn’t want their goats to be mounted, they should lead them home along another path. Islam represents its own men as though they were like that billy goat; when Muslim men see an uncovered woman, they immediately leap on her. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; a Muslim man has no reason to learn to control himself. He doesn’t need to and he isn’t taught to. Sexual morality is aimed exclusively at women, who are always blamed for any lapse.
From a very young age, girls are surrounded by an atmosphere of mistrust. They learn early that they are untrustworthy beings who constitute a danger for the clan. Something in them drives men crazy. To illustrate this attitude, let me tell you of an exchange I had with Achmed, a father I met at an Islamic school last year who told me that in the past he had been a nonpracticing Muslim. He drank, committed adultery, and paid virtually no attention to the pillars of Islam. A few years ago he had been converted, as he himself put it. He read the Koran and decided to raise his daughter in the Islamic way. I asked him why his daughter, a child of seven, had to wear the hijab, the headscarf. “I know Islam,” I said to him. “The hijab isn’t needed until a girl reaches puberty.” “Yes,” he said, “but she has to learn to wear it, so that later it will seem natural.” He explained to me the rules of Islam concerning the hijab and said, “Here in the Netherlands women wear very little in the summer. That leads to accidents.” Achmed had himself witnessed such an accident, he told me. Last summer he saw one truck collide with another. “The truck driver who caused the accident wasn’t watching the road but was looking at the bare legs of a beautiful woman who was walking by.”
For this reason girls have to cover themselves, make themselves invisible. And for this reason they feel constantly guilty and ashamed, because it is almost impossible to live a normal life and be invisible to men. Girls constantly think they’re doing something wrong. Not only is their external freedom to choose where to go or where not to go inhibited, but so is their inner freedom. My aunt once put a piece of mutton out in the sun. It attracted columns of ants and swarms of flies. Auntie said, “Men are just like these ants and flies: when they see a woman they can’t restrain their lust.” I saw the fat melt in the sun as the