The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [44]
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
I was contracted to marry a distant cousin and start a family with him in Canada. When I ran off, my father disowned me. With the passage of time my father regretted his decision and went to great lengths to get me a divorce. He felt I should marry again; the prospect of me staying childless was unbearable to him. Last summer the divorce was settled, but of course the good news fades once you know I was never faithful to my husband in those years. I have had various boyfriends and lived with someone for five years. I never told my father, but the Somali community in the Netherlands—which keeps close tabs on me—undoubtedly passed on the information. It’s not looking good for me: for committing lechery I should be given ten strokes of the cane, according to the Koran, and for committing adultery I could be stoned.
Outside the religious context I have always been loyal. I have observed that people find it difficult to enter a relationship with me. Marco, the boy with whom I lived for a while, used to say I was elusive. “You don’t express yourself,” he would say. “I never know where I stand with you.” It is true that I find it hard to attach myself to others, but I do it all the same. (It is more likely that I will break up with someone because of an argument.) I am on good terms with Marco now; so good, in fact, that he is wondering why we don’t move in together again. But I know how quickly he flies off the handle, and I just don’t want to have to go through that again. I am not good at expressing my anger. I don’t want to; I come from a family whose members were always squabbling, and now I want the opposite.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
My mother thought exercise classes were indecent. She refused to give me the extra money required by the school, so I stole it. I did the same in order to attend singing lessons and to buy the crayons we needed for school. As soon as she noticed money had gone missing from her purse, she would begin to swear, grab me by the hair, and pull me all the way across the room. I was always covered in bruises. She struck me with her hand, a stick, or anything she could lay her hands on. I also used to steal food from my mother’s pantry to give to the beggars passing our door. The first time this happened, my mother seemed mildly amused, but when she saw a whole crowd waiting outside the house one day—and realized our food for the entire month had vanished from the cupboard—she flew into a rage.
A saint? Me? Not by a long stretch. I have sinned according to the religious principles I was brought up to observe. I’ve also been naughty—teased other girls at school, rung people’s bells and run away, hurt my grandmother’s feelings by questioning her authority. And if that is not bad enough, let me tell you how I was responsible for stigmatizing our Koran teacher. When my mother came to the conclusion that sending us to Koran school was a waste of time, she hired a private teacher to teach us at home. We had to prepare our own ink and copy out passages from the Koran on wooden boards. Then we had to wash the boards and start all over again. Every Saturday. After a while I got fed up and locked myself in the lavatory, together with my sister. The teacher, my mother, or my grandmother—whoever it was that came to the door—we refused to open it. I shouted the most dreadful things at the Koran teacher, that writing on boards was obsolete, even back in the sixteenth century. At a certain point my mother sent the teacher away: “Here is your money, they don’t want to have Koran lessons. I’m exhausted, I’m giving up.” Not much later—I was at home on my own—I saw the Koran teacher approaching our house. I ran to the gate, but it was too late. He dragged me into