Many people in Europe and the United States dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege. This minority is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West. It wants ultimately to restore a theocratic caliphate in Muslim countries and impose it on the rest of the world. A larger group of Muslims, most of them in Europe and America, believes that acts of terror committed by fellow Muslims will unleash a Western backlash against all Muslims indiscriminately. (There is in fact little evidence to suggest that such a backlash is happening, but despite this lack of evidence, the perception among Muslim immigrants persists and is fanned by radicals.) With this collective feeling of being persecuted, many Muslim families living in the West insulate themselves in ghettos of their own making. Within those ghettos the agents of radical Islam cultivate their message of hatred and seek foot soldiers to fight as martyrs for their distorted worldview. Unhappy, disoriented youths in dysfunctional immigrant families make perfect recruits to such a cause. With continuing immigration from the Muslim world and a significantly higher birth rate in Muslim families, this is a phenomenon we ignore at our peril.
As an insider, I can illuminate the problem simply by relating the stories of my formative years, which include stories of my siblings and other relatives. In Nomad I try to describe how, in the most intimate sphere of family, my father and mother related or failed to relate to one another; the expectations they had of their children; their philosophy of parenting; the identity crisis they bequeathed to their children; their conflicted views toward sexuality, money, and violence; and above all, the role of religion in misshaping our family life.
There are times when I wonder what I would have done if my father had not left us in Kenya. If he had stayed, I would have been married off at a much earlier age and would never have had the courage or opportunity to flee in search of a better life. If my family had never left Somalia or if my mother had gotten her way and kept me at home instead of sending me to school, the seeds of my rebellion might not have taken root, seeds that inspired me to imagine a life for myself that was different from the one that I was accustomed to and different from the life my parents had in store for me. So many circumstances and decisions in my life were not in my control, and only in hindsight do I see the opportunities that allowed me to take control of my life.
I found out the hard way that lingering between the two value systems, straddling the gap between the West and Islam, living a life of ambiguity -- with an outward presentation of modernity and self reliance and an inward clinging to tradition and dependence on the clan -- stunts the process of becoming one's own person. I felt great mental anguish at the prospect of leaving my father to face the wrath of our clan after I escaped; I was in a state of mental torture as I contemplated the consequences of my leaving Islam, consequences that would not fall on me but on my parents and other relatives. I suffered many moments of weakness when I too entertained the idea of giving up my needs and sacrificing my personal happiness for the peace of mind of my parents, siblings, and clan.
My nomadic journey, in other words, has above all been mental -- even the last stage of that journey, from Holland to the United States. It was a journey not just over thousands of miles, but a journey through time, through hundreds of years. It was a journey from Africa, a place where people are members of a tribe, to Europe and America, where people are citizens (though they think of citizenship in quite distinct ways from country to country). There were many misunderstandings, expectations, and disappointments along the way, and I learned many lessons. I learned that it is one thing to say farewell to tribal life; it is quite another to practice the life of a citizen, which so many members of my family have failed to do. And they are by no means alone.
Today close to a quarter of all people in the world identify themselves as Muslim, and the top ten refugee-producing nations in the world are also Muslim. Most of those displaced peoples are heading toward Europe and the United States. The scale of migration from Muslim countries is almost certain to increase in the coming years because the birth rate in those countries is so much higher than in the West. The "problem family" -- people like my relatives -- will become more and more common unless Western democracies understand better how to integrate the newcomers into our societies: how to turn them into citizens.
I see three main barriers to this process of integration, none of them peculiar to my family. The first is Islam's treatment of women. The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. By the time they menstruate they are rendered voiceless. They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks. They are required to comply with their father's choice of a mate, and after the wedding their lives are devoted to the sexual pleasures of their husband and to a life of childbearing. Their education is often cut short when they are still young girls, and thus as women they are wholly unable to prepare their own children to become successful citizens in modern, Western societies. Their daughters repeat the same pattern.
Some girls comply. Others lead a double life. Some run away and fall victim to prostitution and drugs. A few make their way on their own, as I did, and may even reconcile with their families. Each story is different, but the common factor is that Muslim women have to contend with much greater family control of their sexuality than women from other religious communities. This, in my view, is the biggest obstacle to the path of successful citizenship -- not just for women, but also for the sons they rear and the men those sons become.
The second obstacle, which may seem trivial to some Western readers, is the difficulty many immigrants from Muslim countries have in dealing with money. Islamic attitudes toward credit and debt and the lack of education of Muslim women about financial matters means that most new immigrants arrive in the West wholly unprepared for the bewildering range of opportunities and obligations presented by a modern consumer society.
The third obstacle is the socialization of the Muslim mind. All Muslims are reared to believe that Muhammad, the founder of their religion, was perfectly virtuous and that the moral strictures he left behind should never be questioned. The Quran, as "revealed" to Muhammad, is considered infallible: it is the true word of Allah, and all its commands must be obeyed without question. This makes Muslims vulnerable to indoctrination in a way that followers of other faiths are not. Moreover, the violence that is endemic in so many Muslim societies, ranging from domestic violence to the incessant celebration of holy war, adds to the difficulty of turning people from that world into Western citizens.
I can sum up the three obstacles to the integration of people like my own family in three words: sex, money, and violence.
Excerpted from Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Copyright 2010 by by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Excerpted with permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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