The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [62]
Occasionally Muslim girls run away from home in a panic. This can have unfortunate consequences. Often these girls end up in a shelter and remain dependent on public assistance for a long time. In some cases a social worker may try to mediate between the “runaway”—a peculiar term for an adult woman who wants to set up house independently—and her family, which frequently results in the woman’s return home to whatever abuse caused her to panic and flee. Her family will forever treat her as an underage girl, even when she is well over forty. To them she remains a “runaway” woman.
Some Muslim girls and women who have fled their homes go off the rails. Having been brought up under strict conditions, they celebrate their freedom by going out night after night and become addicted to drugs and nightlife. These girls are targeted by the “lover boys,” who entrap them in this low life. Often their lives end tragically: they feel desperately trapped and commit suicide. Some are “caught out” at the moment they decide to leave home, or shortly after, and then the nightmare of abuse begins all over again. Some girls are even lured back to their parents’ place of birth with a holiday invitation, but once they get there, they are stripped of their passports and cannot escape. In the worst scenario they may be killed, as happened to the Turkish girl Zarife from the Dutch town of Almelo.
THE MANY SAD stories of women who ran away inspired me to write the following open letter, which contains ten tips for Muslim women who want to leave.
Dear Muslim Woman,
The tips that follow are not intended for all Muslim women. They are intended just for you—you who would like to have an independent life and are being stopped by your family, your husband, or your congregation. You want to leave your family or your husband because you want to take charge of your life. You want to earn your own money in order to support and maintain yourself. You wish to choose your (life) partner yourself. You are convinced that you—and not your parents, congregation, or anyone else—must decide if, and when, you get married and to whom. Whether you want children, and how many, is your affair. At what age you have them and how you are going to bring them up is something you want to determine yourself. You want to choose your own friends and not feel restricted to the circle you happen to belong to as a result of your birth; you are open to making contacts outside this small circle. You want to travel and discover the world. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life bearing the children of a husband you don’t even love; cleaning, doing the shopping, and cooking three times a day; serving tea and baking cookies each weekend for people who have no interest in you; doing the washing and ironing, talking about curtain patterns, and hemming sheets. You no longer want to spend your free time with women who do nothing but gossip. You are fed up with your sisters and cousins who refuse to use their mental capacities for anything but the creation of yet another perfect recipe for cookies. You have been to enough weddings at which the girls boast not about their artistic and cultural achievements, but about the henna tattoos they applied to the palms of brides who have since disappeared into their arranged marriages. You have seen the trap into which the bride and bridegroom fall after the three days of wedding festivities.
You know you are worth more than this! You think and dream about your freedom. You would like to go outside, feel the sun on your skin and