Karl Marx.
My next course, Western Political Thought, included a discussion of the Catholic Church, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. We examined the debate over man-made versus God-made laws. I remember listening, half fascinated and half terrified, because at the time I didn’t even want to entertain the idea that man-made laws could supersede God’s. I sometimes justified this fascination by saying, well, if it wasn’t God’s intention for me to be at Leiden then I wouldn’t be at Leiden, so I might as well read on.
The more I considered the world around me, the more I began to take issue with all that I had been taught in my previous life. In the Netherlands, for example, I was stunned by the near-total absence of violence. I never saw Dutch people engaging in physical confrontations. There were no threats or fear. If two or three people were killed, it was considered a crisis of the social order and spoken about as such. Two or three violent deaths in my Somali homeland were considered completely ordinary and unremarkable.
Along with the absence of violence, I was overwhelmed by the level of human generosity. Everybody in the Netherlands had medical insurance. In the early 1990s, when I first came to Holland, the Dutch centers where asylum seekers were received were like resorts, with tennis courts, swimming pools, volleyball courts. All our needs—food, medicine, shelter, warmth—were attended to. And on top of that we were also offered psychological assistance and support as part of the universal health-care package that covered every Dutch citizen. The Dutch, I saw to my amazement, took care of everyone who ended up inside their borders, including people who had no connection to Holland, other than hoping it would be a place of refuge.
But the thing that stunned me the most was Holland’s approach to gender relations. There were women on television, and they did not wear headscarves, but instead donned fashionable clothes and makeup. Parents raised their girls in exactly the same way as their boys, and girls and boys mingled in school and on the streets. It was the kind of gender mixing that, in the culture I came from, was deemed to be a catastrophe and a sure sign of the approach of the end of days. Here it was so routine that the Dutch people I knew were surprised at my surprise.
Life in the West wasn’t perfect, of course. I saw people who were unhappy: white, wealthy people who were disgruntled with their lives, with their work, with their friends, and with their families. But I wasn’t much interested in abstract notions like happiness back then; I was simply fascinated by how it was even possible to achieve this level of political stability and economic prosperity.
After 9/11, I began to reexamine the world I had grown up in. I began to reflect that all over this world—in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and even inside the Muslim immigrant community in Holland—Islam represented a barrier to progress, especially (but not only) for women. Besides, expressing my doubts about Islam meant that I had no spiritual home: in Islam you are either a believer or a disbeliever. There is no cognitive room to be an agnostic. My family and some of my Muslim friends and acquaintances gave me that stark choice: you are either one of us, in which case you quit voicing your thoughts on Islam, or you are one of the infidels and you get out. And ultimately that was why I could not stay in the religion of my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and my grandmother.
I was not surprised at all that the Medina Muslims condemned me and wanted me to suffer the “appropriate” punishment for leaving the faith: namely, death. Twelve years before, after all, I had wanted no less for Salman Rushdie. What was far more confusing and grating was the outright hostility of individuals who, just like me prior to my apostasy, had routinely violated other central tenets of the hudood in their personal
My next course, Western Political Thought, included a discussion of the Catholic Church, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. We examined the debate over man-made versus God-made laws. I remember listening, half fascinated and half terrified, because at the time I didn’t even want to entertain the idea that man-made laws could supersede God’s. I sometimes justified this fascination by saying, well, if it wasn’t God’s intention for me to be at Leiden then I wouldn’t be at Leiden, so I might as well read on.
The more I considered the world around me, the more I began to take issue with all that I had been taught in my previous life. In the Netherlands, for example, I was stunned by the near-total absence of violence. I never saw Dutch people engaging in physical confrontations. There were no threats or fear. If two or three people were killed, it was considered a crisis of the social order and spoken about as such. Two or three violent deaths in my Somali homeland were considered completely ordinary and unremarkable.
Along with the absence of violence, I was overwhelmed by the level of human generosity. Everybody in the Netherlands had medical insurance. In the early 1990s, when I first came to Holland, the Dutch centers where asylum seekers were received were like resorts, with tennis courts, swimming pools, volleyball courts. All our needs—food, medicine, shelter, warmth—were attended to. And on top of that we were also offered psychological assistance and support as part of the universal health-care package that covered every Dutch citizen. The Dutch, I saw to my amazement, took care of everyone who ended up inside their borders, including people who had no connection to Holland, other than hoping it would be a place of refuge.
But the thing that stunned me the most was Holland’s approach to gender relations. There were women on television, and they did not wear headscarves, but instead donned fashionable clothes and makeup. Parents raised their girls in exactly the same way as their boys, and girls and boys mingled in school and on the streets. It was the kind of gender mixing that, in the culture I came from, was deemed to be a catastrophe and a sure sign of the approach of the end of days. Here it was so routine that the Dutch people I knew were surprised at my surprise.
Life in the West wasn’t perfect, of course. I saw people who were unhappy: white, wealthy people who were disgruntled with their lives, with their work, with their friends, and with their families. But I wasn’t much interested in abstract notions like happiness back then; I was simply fascinated by how it was even possible to achieve this level of political stability and economic prosperity.
After 9/11, I began to reexamine the world I had grown up in. I began to reflect that all over this world—in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and even inside the Muslim immigrant community in Holland—Islam represented a barrier to progress, especially (but not only) for women. Besides, expressing my doubts about Islam meant that I had no spiritual home: in Islam you are either a believer or a disbeliever. There is no cognitive room to be an agnostic. My family and some of my Muslim friends and acquaintances gave me that stark choice: you are either one of us, in which case you quit voicing your thoughts on Islam, or you are one of the infidels and you get out. And ultimately that was why I could not stay in the religion of my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and my grandmother.
I was not surprised at all that the Medina Muslims condemned me and wanted me to suffer the “appropriate” punishment for leaving the faith: namely, death. Twelve years before, after all, I had wanted no less for Salman Rushdie. What was far more confusing and grating was the outright hostility of individuals who, just like me prior to my apostasy, had routinely violated other central tenets of the hudood in their personal
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