"These men were having some difficulty putting their minds around the fact that they would soon be shaking their new Emperor's hand."
Reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali is opening my own eyes to the difficulty that people from authoritarian cultures can have seeing beyond those cultures. Ms. Ali has fled to Holland to evade an arranged marriage. In Chapter 11 of Infidel ("A Trial by the Elders"), she recounts a conversation with a couple of Dutch friends:
Ellen and I started talking about love, courtship, and virginity. To me, as a Somali, being a virgin meant being excised, physically sewn shut. I had already figured out that Dutch people didn't do that [!], so I asked, "How will your husband find out whether you're a virgin or not? Isn't there a test?"The retired Secret Service agent and I wondered together whether America's own secular, democratic culture makes it difficult for Americans not to be foolishly optimistic that we can walk into places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and do anything constructive, even in the short run. He opined that, five years from now, it would be about the same in Afghanistan as it is today.
Ellen replied, "Of course not. He'll know I'm a virgin because I say I am." My question seemed weird to her, so she asked, "You have a test?" I told her: we are cut, and sewn shut, so the skin is closed, and when a man penetrates you there is blood. There can be no pretending.
Ellen and Hanneke were disgusted, appalled. They asked, "And this happened to you?" Yasmin and I both said yes, and Yasmin, who was a snob, added, "If you're not cut, you're not pure, are you?" Very innocently, with her big blue eyes wide, Ellen asked, "Pure from what?"
Pure from what. Pure from what, exactly? I thought about it for a long time, and realized I had no answer. It wasn't completely because of Islam that we were cut: not all Muslim women are excised. But in Somalia and the other Muslim countries, it was clear that the Islamic culture of virginity encouraged it. I knew of no fatwa denouncing female genital mutilation; on the contrary, suppressing the sexuality of women was a big theme with imams. Boqol Sawm and the other ma'alims [Qur'an teachers] had always preached endlessly about how women should become aware of their sexual powers; they must cover themselves and stay indoors. They went into minute detail about this, yet somehow they never got around to saying that it is wrong to cut girls and sew them up.
What were we being kept pure from? Somebody owned us. What was between my legs was not mine to give. I was branded.
I found I had no answer for Ellen. I just gaped at her and said, "It's our tradition." And because Ellen truly was a believer [a Christian], she said, "But you believe God created you, don't you?" I said yes, of course. Ellen said, "So the way God made us is the way God wants us to be. Why shouldn't we stay like that? Why does your culture feel we should improve on God's work? Isn't that blasphemy?" I stared at her. There really seemed to be something to what Ellen was saying.
Ellen said Dutch women were never circumcised, and neither were Dutch men. Yasmin curled up her face in disgust at that. The minute we left, Yasmin started rubbing her skin; when she got home she washed for hours. "I sat in their house and ate off their plates, and they are not purified!" Yasmin said. "She is filthy. This whole community is filthy."
I thought about it. Ellen wasn't filthy, and neither was Holland. In fact, it was a lot cleaner than Somalia or anywhere else I had lived. I couldn't understand how Yasmin could perceive Holland as evil, even though all around us were Dutch people treating us with kindness and hospitality. I was beginning to see that the Dutch value system was more consistent, more honest, and gave people more happiness than the one with which we had been brought up. Unfortunately, many of these Dutch ideas seemed not to be congruent with Islam.
I replied, "Yasmin, you know what? You'd better get used to it. Because your teacher in school is not circumcised, the person cooking your lunch is not circumcised. If you want to remain completely pure here you will have to lock yourself away and never have any contact with a white person."
But Yasmin said, "There is a difference, and that is why the Quran tells us never to make unbelievers our friends." [pp. 216-217]
Tragic that a single day more should go by on which young American service people are sacrificed in Afghanistan (or in any other tribal, patriarchal society) to our own cultural assumption that those societies can be successfully wooed to our wondrous Western ways, even if we don't collaterally kill or mindfully murder their people.
this is interesting as the thing that always comes to my mind when I think about muslim women is why do they allow these things to be done to them / their daughters. I marvel that a grown woman would convert and agree to cover her hair. It is interesting to read about this girl who is PROUD of her genital mutilation and the purity it represents. I can't fathom how she things it, but at least it is some explanation. I guess it is no different than any religious person buying into whatever their religion says is right or wrong. But it is just so beyond the pale I find it incredibly difficult to grasp a woman can buy into it. your friend has a great point that we are not going to bridge this cultural divide anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a question of what it means to "buy in" in cultures whose indoctrination is literally beaten in to children. Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes many, many beatings from her mother, who would actually tie her daughters' hands in order to beat them more easily.
ReplyDeleteAnd equally amazing to me is how routinely the girls were cursed by their mother and their grandmother along the lines of "May Allah make you burn in hell." (Talk about "taking the Lord's name in vain"!)
Young people in these cultures aren't given a choice whether to "buy in" (or not); they are coerced.
They aren't raised in a liberal Western culture in which parents nurture their children. And, even here, you know there are authoritarian parents who use their own methods of beating belief systems into their children, who are not given the choice whether or not to, for example, attend church.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks of children's being born Muslim. Their fates, in that culture, are sealed (as are the fates of many children in our own various authoritarian subcultures).
Thinking that everyone recognizes the idea of personal choice, and has the possibility of exercising personal choice, is part of our difficulty in seeing beyond OUR ("American") culture. On a related feminine topic, an American woman recently gave birth in Sofia, Bulgaria, where ALL deliveries are done with anesthetic. On the one hand one might think, oh how humane (preventing pain), but most Bulgarian mothers-to-be probably don't even realize that there's any other way, and that there's a sense of active participation in the act of giving birth that they are losing by (unknowinging or not) submitting to a choice that has already been made for them. The idea (fact?) that whole societies, even in the US, have and continue to submit to harmful choices made "across the board" and "from above" consistently floors me as new examples come to my attention, most recently mercury, fluoride, and facebook.
ReplyDeleteInsightful, Neophyte! Of course, it is a full-time occupation for even the most enlightened person to exercise his freedom from hour to hour. As a lecturer on creativity put it (about 35 years ago, in San Jose, California), we have to pause between the S and the R in an otherwise automatic Stimulus-Response reaction and look at what the alternative R's might be (if we even have the information required to identify them).
ReplyDeleteBut, as a principle of our American belief system, we tend to think that we do have the freedom to decide for ourselves (even though we fool ourselves in something or other every day of our lives).
I think Ayaan Hirsi Ali's point about Muslim cultures is that, submitted to Allah/Prophet/Qur'an as believers are, they tend to think that they are not free to decide for themselves, but in all things, large and small, must do as commanded by Allah/Prophet/Qur'an/Imam/Parent.
Ms. Ali's triumph is that she was able to struggle free from the weight of that oppression. Her achievement is utterly remarkable.