The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [39]
Haweya’s death was the hardest moment of my life. When my father gave me the news over the telephone, I burst into tears, at which he said, “Why are you so upset? You know we all return to God.” I jumped on the first plane to Nairobi but arrived too late for the funeral. Presumably she died from exhaustion, but I will never be sure because no autopsy was performed. In our culture it is taboo to ask questions about the cause of death. Every time I brought up the subject, I was dismissed as a tiresome child who keeps asking the same old question. The response was invariably: God gives and takes life away.
My sister and I were still very young when we began to notice that we were always told to respect our brother. He was only ten months older than I, but we realized that only boys count. A Muslim woman’s status depends on the number of sons she has. When people asked my grandmother how many children she had, she would answer: “One.” She had nine daughters and a son. She was the same with regard to our family, said we had only one child. “What about us?” Haweya and I would ask. “You are going to bear sons for us,” she replied. It drove me to desperation. What was I to do with my life on earth? Bear sons! Become a production plant for sons. I was nine years old at the time.
To maximize their potential as producers of sons, girls are taught from early on always to conform—to God, to their father and brothers, to the family, to the clan. The better a woman seems at this, the more virtuous she is thought to be. You should always be patient, even when your husband demands the most dreadful things of you. You will be rewarded for this in the hereafter. But the reward itself is small. Women can look forward to dates and grapes in paradise. That is all.
When we were living in Saudi Arabia, my brother was always allowed to go everywhere with my father. We had to stay at home. But my sister and I were inquisitive children. We wanted to come, too, thought it was unfair. That was a word that touched a chord in my father. We knew this. And he immediately wanted to set the record straight. “Allah has said: ‘I have given woman an honorable position. I have placed paradise underneath her feet.’” We looked down at my mother’s feet, and then at my father’s, and burst out laughing. As always, his were covered by expensive leather shoes from Italy, while my mother’s were bare, the skin badly cracked and peeling from walking on cheap sandals. My father laughed with us, but my mother grew angry, hit us, and sent us out of the room. She was terrified of blasphemy.
In Kenya I went from my primary school to the Muslim Girls Secondary School. The school was attended by girls from Kenya but also from Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and India. There were some very bright girls there, who were good at everything, academic subjects as well as sport. In the mornings our names were called out. You had to say “Present.” But after a certain age there seemed to be a growing number of absent girls. No one knew where they had gone. Later we heard that they had been married off. Some I met again after a year or two. There was nothing left of them. All those girls had become production plants for sons: plump, pregnant, or already holding a child in one arm. The fighting spirit, the light in their eyes, the jittery energy had all vanished. Among these girls, suicide and depression were common. In a way I was lucky that my father was not living with us at the time. Otherwise I would probably also have been contracted to marry someone when I was sixteen, and at that age you cannot run away. Where could I have fled?
From the mid-1980s Islam was becoming more prominent in Kenya. Like many