Nomad (20 page)

These are serious social and political problems, no doubt. In some cases they are clearly more serious than equivalent problems in European inner cities. But they are not problems that affect mainstream America the way such problems in Africa affect that continent.

What is it that makes America different from Europe and Africa? Clearly it is not just the homicide rate in poor black neighborhoods. To answer that question I need to take you with me to a wedding. In the Stanford Memorial Church in Palo Alto, California, a week before my fortieth birthday, I watched my friends Margaret and John get married.

At thirty-one, Margaret looked exquisite. John had the look of a man about to embark on a serious mission. I had never been to an all-American wedding before. In movies, it seemed to me, brides were always blonde and grooms always had dark hair. Margaret is blonde, John has dark hair, but beyond this nothing about their wedding was like the movies I watched. Weddings in movies are usually comedies: the priest messes up the vows
(Four Weddings and a Funeral);
the bride runs away
(Runaway Bride);
the parents get themselves in a fix
(Meet the Parents)
. This, by contrast, was no comedy. The ceremony was impeccable. The food was plentiful and good, the wine excellent, the church breathtaking, the bride in her grandmother’s wedding dress had tears in her eyes, and the groom was visibly moved. Solemnly they took their vows. I quietly wondered if any human could keep such promises: “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”

I was so stunned by the intensity of the service that I asked the female guest next to me, “This is pretty serious, isn’t it, for so young a couple?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Marriage has little to do with age and everything to do with family, and here in America family is serious.”

That day I learned that the core unit of American society is indeed the family. In theory, of course, the core unit in any truly free society is the individual, who is the starting point in a democratic constitution and in law. Individual responsibility is required and urged at all times. But pretty soon you realize that, to be happy and fulfilled, the individual must be embedded in a family. Americans are constantly asking after one another’s families. The American family is not as extended as in the clan culture I grew up in and not as tightly nuclear as the Dutch model. Nor is there any of the experimentation I encountered in the Netherlands.
^*
In America I have met married couples, single people seeking to marry, engaged pairs on the point of marriage, and divorced ones who constantly talk about how to start the whole process afresh. Cohabitation, except in some circles, is not seen as a long-term option, and often couples who live together tend to be engaged. Only in New York does it seem acceptable to remain single on a long-term basis.

The other thing I learned at Stanford is that families are the building blocks of American society, for it is out of families that the communities grow that form the American nation. Margaret and John’s wedding exemplified for me so many of the characteristics of the United States I had come to appreciate.

America is a country with its own foundation myth, that of a new and virtuous republic, built in a virgin land by brave and hardy pioneers. This founding myth is told and retold in countless ways and through all available media, but for me the American wedding is the most powerful version. It is all there: the optimistic faith in the success of a new partnership; the lofty, Christian ideals and vows; and the patriotism that finds its way into every American family ritual. Most striking of all is the way so many American weddings epitomize the ideal of the unity of diverse peoples.

Margaret grew up in Colorado and is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the president of the United States from 1929 to 1933; her husband’s forebears came from Greece. The guests were even more diverse: the bridesmaids alone were of six different shades of color. In terms of class and religion, the guests ranged from local farmers to Stanford professors. There was not the faintest trace of snobbery. In the various speeches, this cocktail of races, religions, and classes was mentioned repeatedly with unconcealed pride.
Look
, they seemed to be saying to me,
this is who we are: a family that welcomes all peoples who share our family values
. That for me is America: a large family where anyone can belong, so long as you accept those values.

The big question, of course, is: What exactly are those values, and what if you do not accept them, or even take them seriously?

I admit I came to America full of African as well as European prejudices. One of those prejudices was that Americans were hypocrites when they lauded family values, particularly monogamy. In my first three years in America scarcely a month passed without some major public figure being exposed for cheating on his wife. The divorce rate seemed to bear out my suspicion that high-flown talk of family values in America was just that: talk.

But the United States is not utopia, and Americans do not aspire to be perfect. They aspire, above all, to be happy. And that means that if things don’t work out with a new venture, whether it is a marriage or a silver-mining town, Americans are much quicker than people from traditional societies to call it a day and move on, with as few hard feelings as possible.

What Americans are generally reluctant to do—and this is perhaps the most important difference between Americans and Europeans—is to call on the state (or “the government,” as Americans prefer to say) to help them out when things go wrong. They do it, of course, and never more readily than in a financial crisis like the one that struck when I was writing this book. But unlike Europeans, Americans feel instinctively that large-scale government intervention is wrong, is
at best an emergency measure. In an ideal world Americans would form their families and firms, build their homes and workplaces, buy and sell their goods and services, go to a pizza place on Saturday and church on Sunday, and generally get on with their lives with the minimum amount of state interference.

That makes America a very different target indeed for the biggest challenge since Soviet Communism to confront the Western world: the threat of radical Islam.

The more I traveled around the United States, talking to people about my life, the more I was struck by other differences between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The American audiences clearly felt a sense of outrage at the injustices committed against girls, apostates, and infidels in the name of Islam, just as Europeans did, but Americans seemed much more interested in finding solutions, volunteering, mobilizing—and taking action.

On the other hand, although American audiences were hungry with curiosity—everywhere I went, people had to be turned away because the rooms were too small—they also seemed far less aware than Europeans of the problems that I was talking about.

To take one example: in Europe more or less everyone has heard about Muslim families who punish and murder women who trespass their boundaries of custom and faith. Such stories are featured regularly in the newspapers. People in almost every European audience to which I have spoken had heard of at least one brutal murder of a young girl. Thus most European audiences already understand that Muslim immigrants create specific social problems in their countries and that they often involve the oppression of women on European soil. But in America I was constantly surprised that most people in my audiences perceive Islam as largely about foreign policy—an important question for America’s national security, maybe, but essentially about people living
overseas
.

Whenever I spoke, American listeners gasped in indignant surprise at the very concepts of child marriage, honor killing, and female excision. Rarely, if ever, did it occur to these audiences that many women
and girls suffer precisely these kinds of oppression in houses and apartment buildings all over the United States.

Roughly 130 million women around the world have had their genitals cut. The operation is inflicted on an estimated six thousand little girls every day. If 98 percent of Somali women are cut, 95 percent of women from Mali, and 90 percent of Sudanese, how many women does that make in every subway car in New York, on every freeway in Colorado and Kansas? If 97 percent of Egyptian girls are genitally mutilated, what percentage of Egyptian girls born in the United States are cut? None? I don’t think so.
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But my audiences couldn’t believe that.

I had encountered this kind of incredulity before, of course. Ten years earlier, when I began speaking out in Holland against genital mutilation, Dutch people were just as horrified as Americans to learn about it. I was constantly told that immigrants to Europe
knew
that this practice was against the law in Europe, so
it just didn’t happen
to children once they got to Holland. I did not believe that was true. In fact once I became a member of Parliament and helped to pass a law requiring the authorities to actually look into the situation, we confirmed that little girls’ genitals were being cut, without anesthetic, on kitchen tables in Rotterdam and Utrecht.

There are already many genitally mutilated women and girls in America, and many others at risk of mutilation. To take the culture I know best, it is a rare Somali family that will refrain from cutting their daughters, wherever they live. All but the most assimilated parents want their children to marry within the Somali community, and they believe that an “impure” girl, one whose clitoris and vagina are intact, will not find a husband. They may perform the “lesser” circumcision, which involves cutting only the skin of the clitoris, but most of them will do just as our fathers (and mothers and grandmothers) have always done: they will cut off the clitoris and cut the lips of the vagina so that it scars shut, to create a built-in chastity belt. They do not always need to fly back to Africa to do this. Every Somali community has members who can provide this service close to home, or who know someone, somewhere nearby, who will.

There are already Muslim schools in America where girls learn all day long to be subservient and lower their eyes, to veil themselves to symbolize the suppression of their individual will. They are taught to internalize male superiority and walk very softly into the mosque by a back door. In weekend Quran schools girls learn that God requires them to obey, that they are worth less than boys and have fewer rights before God. This too is happening in America.

But on one point my audiences were insistent. Surely honor crimes, the systematic beatings and even murder to punish a daughter or sister or wife whose “misbehavior” casts shame on the family, could not possibly happen in the United States, the land of the free?

As a newcomer to the country, I had no idea whether that was true. But I was soon to find out that this aspect of Islam’s dysfunctional culture had already made its way into the American heartland.

Even though I outraged some Americans with the stories I told about institutionalized Islamic misogyny, I was haunted by the fear that I might instead inspire them merely to pity me. The whole point of my memoir, I tried to explain, is that I have been extraordinarily
lucky
. I managed to make it out of the world of dogma and oppression and into the sunlight of independence and free ideas. I
did
escape, and at every stage of that process of escape I was assisted by the goodwill of ordinary non-Muslims, just like the people in those audiences.

It’s true that I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. For instance, I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me. But because Islam demands that anyone who leaves the religion be punished by death, this constant fear is to some extent shared by
all
Muslims who leave the faith as well as those who practice a less strict form of it.

In my books and talks I want to inspire readers to think of the
others
, those who are still locked in the world I have left behind. I use anecdotes from my life and the stories of women I know or who have e-mailed me or stepped up to speak to me. By drawing verbal pictures of them I try to help audiences relate to them as real people. Behind
the veil are human beings of flesh and blood, mind and soul, and once you perceive the suffering that lies behind that veil, it is harder to turn away.

These are little girls who love learning, but who are taken out of school when they begin to menstruate because their families fear that they may meet improper influences in school and sully their purity. Children are married to adult strangers they have never met. Women long to live productive, working lives, but are instead confined within the walls of their father’s or husband’s house. Girls and women are beaten, hard and often, for a sidelong glance, a suspicion of lipstick, a text message; they have nowhere to turn because their parents, community, and preachers approve of these deadening punishments.

Most American audiences reacted, first, with astonishment, and second with compassion to stories of the routine horrors of a Muslim woman’s life, even as they struggled to believe it was happening in their own country. There was one exception to this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists.