CHAPTER 8

Nomad Again

After my father died, memories flooded into me unbidden. Some of them were painful, others sweet, but strangely, most of them were of Holland, the country I had recently left.

Holland was the safest place I had ever lived, and the place where I was happiest. I remember with particular nostalgia the summer of 2001. I had just graduated from the University of Leiden with a master’s degree. I had made enough money, working as a Somali translator for the Dutch social services, to buy a place of my own with my best friend. I had learned the language of the society I immigrated to, and I had just found a meaningful job at a think tank for an important Dutch political party. I had friends with whom I could share the gifts and trials of life.

In those days, when I reflected on what I had achieved and where I was going, I felt a sense of accomplishment. Yes, I was disobeying many of the laws of Allah, and I had taken a huge risk in exiting the world of my clan. Yes, I had plainly hurt my parents and put myself at the mercy of a wrathful God. Yes, I had lost my sister and felt deep pain. But I also felt that I was succeeding at something important, something that my family had always warned me I would fail at.

In every story I was ever told, the girl who left her family—or, even worse, her clan—to pursue her own goals found that her story ended swiftly in horrible depravity and bitter regret. I had not just left my family and clan; I was on my own in an infidel country. But I felt I could still hold my head high. I had not fallen into the pitfalls of depravity; I had hoisted myself onto the road of progress. And I felt that I was still basically a faithful Muslim, just a slightly lapsed one. I didn’t pray, I drank alcohol, and I had sex out of wedlock, but I felt (uneasily) that in essence I still obeyed Allah’s main rules and would one day in the distant future return to his narrow path.

I had been reconciled with my father. He had even acknowledged that he should not have forced me to marry against my will, and he worked for months to get me a divorce. I felt it was proof that not only had he forgiven me, but he had accepted my chosen path in life. I was in constant touch with my mom and sent her a monthly allowance. Mahad had been taken ill, which saddened me, but when he felt well he and I could speak on the phone. Once in a while I exchanged emails and phone calls with my cousins: Hassan, Magool, Ladan, Hiran, and others. The family circle did not by any means embrace me, but as time went by I sensed that my difference was becoming accepted. My professional success in Holland brought me respect, and I felt that I again belonged to my family, but on my own terms.

My life back then was not yet politicized. I had not yet made the public statements about Islam that would bring me notoriety, fame, a seat in the Dutch Parliament, a mission to improve the lives of millions of women I have never met, as well as drama, death threats, and bodyguards. My best friend, Ellen, and I used to take bike rides with friends—a crowd of young women riding our bicycles six or seven miles to the beach, flying down the roads with a picnic as our goal. We splashed in the freezing cold North Sea waves and walked across the sand dunes to get bags of spicy patat-oorlog, “warlike French fries,” in swimsuits that were still covered in sand. I felt full of joy, freer than I had ever been in my life. I looked forward to a future that promised no upheaval, but a safe, steady, and predictable existence surrounded by loving friends, a slightly blurry but undoubtedly wonderful mate, and children, perhaps even an inquisitive little girl who looked like me.

But my life in Holland ended abruptly in May 2006, in an atmosphere of high drama and low farce. Although I was then a relatively prominent member of the legislature, the Dutch Minister for Immigration and Integration, Rita Verdonk, stripped me of my citizenship—only to be forced to restore it a few weeks later, after a debate in Parliament that led to the collapse of the government and new nationwide elections.

When I first arrived in Holland, I was told by refugee advocates that in order to obtain permission to stay, it was not enough to say that I was running away from a marriage that was forced on me. If I said that, I would be sent back to Africa. To receive permission to stay in the Netherlands I had to state that I was being persecuted in Somalia for my political opinions or clan. So, although it was not true, that was what I claimed, and I duly received refugee status.

Years later, when I was asked to join the Liberal VVD, a political party founded on the principles of individual freedom, limited government, a free market, and national security, and to run for Parliament, my party leader asked me if I had any skeletons in the closet. “Yes, I do,” I said. “When I came to the Netherlands I changed my name, I changed my year of birth, and I pretty much lied my way in.” I told him the whole story.

My party leader talked to some of the party’s legal advisers and lawyers, but everyone treated the whole affair as something insignificant, a small lie told years before. They emphasized that I had managed to assimilate to Holland; this, they clearly felt, was far more important than the lie I had once told. They wanted to tout me as an example: if immigrants seriously chose to adopt Dutch values, learn the language, study and work, then they too could succeed as I had. Besides being a role model, I was also seen as an expert on the social and cultural obstacles to integration, and how to surmount them.

Rita Verdonk was my colleague in the Liberal Party; indeed, she and I had been recruited into the party’s proposed parliamentary list at almost the same time. She had run a prison and had been director of a civil service unit, the Department of State Security of the Ministry of Interior Affairs. I had written articles about Islam. It was a time of turmoil in Dutch politics. Pim Fortuyn, a powerfully charismatic speaker and an openly gay man, had recently surged to political prominence, only to be assassinated by a deranged animal rights activist when he was on the brink of taking power. In appointing Rita and me, the Liberal Party was clearly seeking people who might attract some of Fortuyn’s voters.

I was to be the face of the Muslim woman who had sought and found freedom in Holland. Unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labeled racists, I could voice my criticisms of the feudal, religious, and repressive mechanisms that were holding back women from Muslim communities. Rita Verdonk, meanwhile, would be the face and voice of those Dutch men and women who had voted for Pim Fortuyn, who felt that they were disenfranchised in their own country, who felt invaded, their society pushed into mayhem.

A fifty-plus woman who looked her age, with dark, short hair styled around her face, Rita was plump in a muscular way that made her look strong yet warm and even motherly. She was a perfect image of Dutch rectitude, exuding hard work and competence; she had that direct, slightly disapproving clear gaze that is particular to a certain kind of Dutch person. This had intrinsic appeal to Fortuyn’s voters. Moreover, Fortuyn had been an outrageously gay academic who spoke with the haughty vowels of the upper class; Rita more closely mirrored his voters’ mannerisms and values, in addition to sharing many of their views. The plan was clearly that together, behind closed doors, she and I would find consensus, issue by issue. Many in the establishment saw us as rebels; others, as puppets. But the goal was that we would make separate, rebellious parties such as Fortuyn’s unnecessary, for we would gather his now docile voters within the steady embrace of the impeccably well-behaved Liberal Party and all would end well, the Dutch way: in consensus.

Who were these voters of Fortuyn’s? Policemen, teachers, civil servants, owners of small family businesses—the baker, the butcher, the florist—who felt tyrannized by regulations and taxes and saw immigrants from Morocco and Turkey both as competitors (with small shops that could sell cheaper goods because they hired cheap, illegal workers) and as bad employees (unpunctual and disrespectful slackers who could not speak proper Dutch). They perceived immigrants as verloedering, debasing, corrupting. They did not scrupulously separate their recyclable from their non-recyclable trash. Their children did not ride their bicycles only in designated lanes. They had no respect for public or private property. They vandalized shops, committed crimes, molested and harassed women, and turned once pristine neighborhoods into areas both unsafe and unclean. If picked up by police, they would be set free by the judge on grounds of being minors. They were dropouts from school. Their families lied their way into generous welfare payments and out of proper payment of taxes; they jumped the queues for public housing. None of these generalizations was exactly or universally true, but they were true enough for this perception to be widely held.

There was a real tension between this “Rita class” of voters and the elite ruling class. Fortuyn’s voters no longer trusted their rulers, for they had opened the borders of Holland to foreigners. Even though the middle and upper classes could still afford to move to airy, expensive neighborhoods and send their children to safe schools, and could lobby for informal favors to keep from being fully exposed to disruption from immigrants, the Rita class felt that they and their neighborhoods were bearing the brunt. But when they voiced their concerns, they were chastised for being provincial and intolerant.

Having run a prison, “Iron Rita” was plainspoken to the point of bluntness and scrupulously respectful of the law. I rather liked her. She became the most popular politician among the voters of my party. As minister for immigration and integration, she was a powerful member of the cabinet. I was merely a member of Parliament, but I had been appointed our party’s spokesperson for integration and emancipation. (My title did not specify integration into what or emancipation from what.)

It was common knowledge that my views on immigration were different from Rita’s. For instance, I supported an immigration amnesty for the twenty-six thousand asylum seekers who, after more than five years of living and working in Holland, had been turned down for refugee status, and who thus had no further right to live in the country. But on other issues we agreed. We both supported immigration quotas that would favor the entry of people from Poland and other Eastern European countries over those from Morocco and Turkey. Our point was that Holland should attract immigrants who work; we needed nurses, caretakers of the elderly, fruit, vegetable, and flower pickers, workers in restaurants and hotels, electricians, painters, and construction workers. The immigrants from North Africa and Turkey were being admitted on the grounds of family formation and reunion. They went straight into welfare or applied for unemployment benefits after hardly a year in the workforce. Most of them were unemployable or unqualified or had a work ethic that employers found unsuitable.

Like me, Rita also wanted to confront Islam’s treatment of women head-on. I applauded her in 2004 when she walked into a mosque and extended her hand to an imam, knowing that he would reject it. It was an image that produced a great deal of anger and confusion in Holland, but the gesture she provoked—a blatant expression of contempt for a government minister—encapsulated not only what some imams in Holland were saying about women, but their scorn for Dutch values, society, and law. Like Rita, I thought that people needed to see this; once they saw it, they could no longer pretend it wasn’t there.

So Rita and I had a warm working relationship. We had occasional chats on the phone; we exchanged information before a debate; we shared meals; and sometimes we met for drinks.

When our party leader, Gerrit Zalm, stepped down in 2006, Rita decided to campaign for the post. She was running against Mark Rutte, a boyishly attractive, much younger man who was considered a rising star in the party. Just before Parliament broke up for spring break, I was with her in her office, talking about policy. The conversation veered to politics, a very different thing, and she asked me to support her publicly, a request that made me uncomfortable. Gerrit Zalm and Jozias van Aartsen, another leading Liberal, had asked all the members of our party to refrain from openly endorsing either of the candidates in order to avoid making public the splits that had begun spreading through the ranks. Consensus is a sacred article of faith in Holland, and although the media love any sign of dissension and will seize on it and amplify it with glee, any kind of public disagreement within a political party is frowned upon by party leaders, who consider it unprofessional and damaging to the party’s goals.

I told Rita, “I am not doing any public endorsements. You know what Gerrit and Jozias will say.”

Rita’s smile seemed forced. “Come on, Ayaan, don’t give me that! Since when have you respected what Gerrit and Jozias have to say?”

Shifting my weight, I reached for my drink. “You know, there’s enough tension between me and Jozias. Gerrit has been very patient with me. I’m not looking for trouble.”

Rita countered, “Ayaan, you know it’s not about me. It’s about the people. They’re angry. When I go around the country, they take me into their homes, they tell me about their problems. It’s not just the welfare state and globalization, all these lofty themes. It’s about trash on the street. It’s about your daughter being raped. It’s about seeing your earnings disappear. They’re suffering. These are the men and women who voted for Pim Fortuyn, and now that he’s dead they’re politically homeless. Jozias and Gerrit won’t say so in public, but they’re endorsing Rutte. Do you think Rutte is capable of getting that vote for our party?”

I wanted to tell her what I really thought, which was that she and Rutte were both unqualified for the job. They were both beginners in politics (as I was), and neither seemed to have any real clue about how they wanted to change the country; they seemed driven by personal ambition and nothing more. The man I favored as candidate, Henk Kamp, had decades of political experience and had run two ministries. He was a far more skillful political operator than Rita, and yet there was humility about him, and a quiet intelligence. I felt that it was very unfortunate that he refused to run. But I did not want to offend Rita by saying so. I began rambling through a rather uncomfortable soliloquy about the nature of Dutch politics when Rita interrupted me, her gaze now steady. “I’ve lived here all my life. I know this country better than you do.”

I nodded and managed to conceal the instant pain of exclusion this remark triggered. Rita was not the only one who said this sort of thing. People who disagreed with me often invoked their native Dutchness, their instinctively greater understanding of all Dutch problems. It’s an easy way out: you are the outsider, I am the insider, therefore I win.

Her attitude shifted from charming seduction to indignant impatience that I would not give in and give her my support. This job needed to be done—she repeated the phrase more than once—and I was preventing her from doing it.

She grew more abrasive. She confided to me her tension with our colleague Piet Donner, the minister of justice, and the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, representatives of what she saw as a small clique, mainly men, who had attended the same universities, belonged to the same fraternities, spoke with the same accent, and who ultimately, though they might identify with different political ideologies, served only the interests of their common class. Rita often attributed any hostility to her as the snooty, entitled disdain of the upper classes for a woman who did not hesitate to put her hands in the muck of real life, so I had heard this line before. It had some truth to it.

Pim Fortuyn had called the political leadership class of Holland the regenten, the regents, who control real power behind the scenes. The regenten form an elite triangle: the upper class and royalty (although Dutch people are fond of calling Holland a classless society, that is far from reality), leaders of the unions, and directors of corporations. These three groups have divergent interests, but their prominent leaders gather in five-star hotels, elite clubs, and government institutions, and once in a while the queen opens her palace to them. These men and women—mostly men—are immersed in the culture of Holland’s celebrated consensus politics. Whenever there is divergence among them, their positions are staked out at a safe distance, in the media; journalists will report excitedly that there is an impasse. Then, after this ritual saber rattling by proxy, the parties at dispute will withdraw into whatever chamber is available and emerge days later waving an agreement: the breach is healed. Powerful members in all corners of this triangle are trained in academia and the media; it is not at all unusual to see the head of a faculty become a minister, the editor in chief of a newspaper become the head of a faculty and then be appointed mayor.

Pim Fortuyn was a member of the regenten class, a professor in Rotterdam who made a career out of writing books and articles. Rita did not belong to the political class and they disdained her for it. I did not belong either, but I had a degree of friendly support from high-ranking party members and our party’s sage, Frits Bolkestein. This probably made Rita suspicious.

It was time for me to leave. “Rita,” I said, “let me think about it.” My discomfort was acute, for we both knew that, in Dutch politics, this was a clear message, meaning I’ve already made up my mind, and I’m not going to endorse you.

It crossed my mind that I might lose her political support, but that didn’t matter very much. I had already decided to leave politics; in fact I had even confided to Rita that I didn’t plan to run again for Parliament in the next general election.

When I left the room we kissed each other three times on the cheek, as is usual in Holland, and wished each other a happy spring break.

I am certain that Rita knew, and had known for a long time, that I had lied on my application for refugee status when I was twenty-two. Even if she hadn’t read the many interviews and statements I’d given in various local, national, and international newspapers and magazines, in which I had freely admitted the fact, we had spoken of it several times. The last time was just a few days after that uncomfortable conversation in her office. I had phoned to ask her to reverse her decision to deport an eighteen-year-old girl from Kosovo, Taida Pasic, who was due to take her final high school exams.

“She lied,” Rita told me. “My hands are tied.”

“But Rita, you don’t understand,” I pleaded. “Almost all asylum seekers lie. That’s how the system is. I lied too.”

Rita was adamant. She said—and I suppose it should have been a warning to me—“If I had been the minister when you applied for asylum, then I would have deported you as well.”

A couple of weeks later, during the parliamentary spring break, the television program Zembla aired a documentary that prominently featured the fact that I had lied on my refugee application. Just a fortnight away from the election for our party leadership, Rita let it be known that she was now investigating my immigration file and that my status in Holland—not only as a member of Parliament but as a citizen—was in doubt. A few days later she announced that she was stripping me of my Dutch citizenship. To be precise, she claimed I had never had Dutch citizenship in the first place because I had applied for it under false pretences.

Iron Rita’s decision to render me stateless was perceived by many of my colleagues in Parliament (even many who rarely agreed with my policy decisions) as arbitrary, vengeful, and even downright strange. There was certainly something of the action of a banana republic about it. After weeks of very un-Dutch furor in Parliament, the press, and the wider public, the prime minister, along with the cabinet ministers and an overwhelming majority of the members of Parliament, forced Rita to reinstate my citizenship. She finally did so, but only on the condition that I sign a letter stating that I had lied to her about lying about my asylum application. Signing that letter made me lie for a second time, but I had to sign; otherwise, Rita could not save face.

But consensus could not so easily be restored. The D66 party, a small pseudo-libertarian party that was also a member of the governing coalition, deemed this procedure outrageous and demanded that Rita resign or D66 would leave the coalition and the government would fall. She would not resign. She was forced into this situation by a trait of character that was also, at other times, her strength: her inflexibility, which was also an inability to adapt to circumstances or admit a mistake.

The government fell. New nationwide elections were scheduled. Rita lost the race for party leader. A few months later the VVD lost ground in the new elections; it could no longer claim any seats in the cabinet. In September 2007, after she had criticized the party’s “invisible position” on immigration, she was expelled from the Liberal Party by her old rival, Mark Rutte, who was now the party leader, and from that charmed, smooth-sided triangle that is the Dutch political establishment. She founded her own party, which she named “Proud of the Netherlands.” Its public support has slowly dwindled. Rita has become a political outcast.

I learned an important lesson in this about the nature of Dutch politics. Rita, I realized, had violated the most sacred taboo of the political elite, the regenten, not so much by what she said as by the way she said it. A consensus society like Holland’s requires a great deal of conformity: the tone, flavor, timing, and context that you choose to articulate your message will make or break you. When individuals from groups that historically have had no power are invited into the ranks of the regentem, they are taught to express their wishes and grievances in the same way that the regenten do. In Holland you must negotiate and compromise; your freedom of speech is limited by the boundaries of what is viewed by the regenten as acceptable. This was always going to be hard for someone from Rita’s class and temperament, for she could not bear to compromise, and she did not even recognize those subtle perimeters of conformity. Her criticism of immigrants, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the issue, seemed unacceptably rude, parochial, or simply racist.

*    *    *

Another lesson I learned was that it was time, once again, to pack my bags and move on. So I left Holland soon after the crisis about my citizenship erupted. As if to compound the insult of losing my citizenship, my neighbors in the condominium in which I lived had recently managed to win a court case to have me evicted because, they said, my security detail was invasive and the death threats against me were a danger to them too. Now I was not just stateless; I was also homeless. Instead of being perceived as contributing to solving the problems posed by massive waves of foreign immigrants into Dutch society—which I had sought to do—I was now seen as part of the problem.

In fact I had been exploring the possibility of leaving Holland for my own self-preservation even before Rita struck. In Holland I had become too recognizable for my own sanity. Earlier that year I had made up my mind to try to move to the United States, where I thought I would have more freedom, and I had asked a friend of mine, a former U.S. diplomat who is now a university professor, to help me find a job. I had already scheduled a visit to the United States during the parliamentary spring break in order to promote a book of essays I had just published, The Caged Virgin, and my friend had proposed to introduce me to people at think tanks of various persuasions on the East Coast, including the Brookings Institution and RAND, and Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and George Washington universities.

Everyone I met there was effusively polite, but I felt their support for me and my ideas was tentative. The man who interviewed me at the Brookings Institution seemed overly concerned with the possibility that I might offend Arab Muslims and therefore frustrate a series of programs they had just initiated in Doha, Qatar. Then my friend took me to visit the American Enterprise Institute.

The role of American think tanks like the AEI is widely misunderstood. Like their counterparts at liberal and libertarian institutions, such as Brookings and the CATO Institute, AEI scholars do not write policy, they publish their views on policy. These views are often quite diverse. But over the years I had met many people in the media who see the AEI as an arch-conservative club, and I do not consider myself a conservative. (My reasons for not being one are the same as those convincingly put forward by Friederich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty: most essentially, I do not wish to conserve the status quo but to alter it, radically.) So I went to see the AEI with some qualms.

To my surprise, they instantly offered me full support. There was no discussion about what I could and could not say. I was pressed on the need to have empirical data and consistent arguments and to think through the benefits and disadvantages of my proposals. I asked whether my pro-choice views on abortion and gay rights would present a problem, and Christopher DeMuth, the president of the AEI, answered that I was free to have whatever opinions I wanted. There were no restrictions on what I could think, say, or write.

Here was another political lesson, one of the first I was to learn in the United States. American liberals appear to be more uncomfortable with my condemning the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives are. Rather than standing up for Western freedoms and against the totalitarian Islamic belief system, many liberals prefer to shuffle their feet and look down at their shoes when faced with questions about cultural differences. I began to understand that liberal means different things, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on. What Europeans would call Leftists are confusingly termed “liberal,” with a small l, in America, while in Europe liberals are what Americans now call Classical Liberals: they stand for the free market, respect for property rights, the rule of law, limited government, and personal responsibility. European Conservatives support all of these things too. But American Conservatives are more likely to add a list of social and cultural values associated with their Christian faith. Even though their predecessors had once agitated for the rights of workers, the rights of women, and the rights of blacks, American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam. So Brookings said no to me and the AEI said yes.

Following our first meeting in 2006, Chris DeMuth formally invited me to become a resident scholar at the AEI in September. When Rita suddenly took away my Dutch passport, this offer had not yet been formalized; he hadn’t had the opportunity to consult the AEI’s board of trustees. But clearly I could no longer be a member of the Dutch Parliament, for I was no longer Dutch. On the morning of the press conference at which I had decided to announce that I was resigning my seat in Parliament, I received a call from the daily Volkskrant: Was it true I was going to take a job at, of all places, the AEI?

I couldn’t answer. I had no idea whether the AEI would now take its job offer off the table. I called Chris to tell him I was being badgered by reporters and had to answer them; he told me he would have to consult with his trustees before I could formally announce my new job. My heart sank because I thought that the trustees would be bound to say Why import scandal? But only thirty minutes later Chris called back and said I would be welcome at the AEI on September 1.

When the Dutch newspapers wrote that I was headed there, many people warned me that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. They had Googled the AEI, they told me, and it was an evil place, a nest of neoconservatives who had conspired to create the Bush presidency and invented the Iraq war. Why on earth would I choose to consort with this nefarious mob? Well, having just lost my home, my livelihood, and almost my citizenship, I replied that I would take my chances and once again trust in the kindness of strangers.

I was a public figure. Before I left Holland I was given three farewell parties, for at least 150 people claimed to consider themselves my best friends. Some of the speeches my friends made almost compensated for the pain I was feeling. They helped me remember that there were still at least some people in Holland who not only agreed with me but saw past my nonconformist tone and style. I was deeply touched and understood once more why I love this country that I was leaving.

I was born into a political family, and I’ve always understood that, in politics, things are not always as they seem. Compared to my experiences in Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, my collision with power was very benign in Holland. I was neither tortured nor thrown into jail. In fact one of the farewell parties was in the parliamentary building and attended by some of my most passionate critics. In the Dutch way, I received a small gift and three big smacking kisses on the cheek from every single one of them. It was a very consensual leave-taking.

I was a nomad once more.