Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now Read Online Free PDF Page B

1969, the year I was born—and had no concept of Arabic. Instead, she worshipped the book, picking it up with great reverence, kissing it and placing it on her forehead before carefully and gently laying it back down. We could not touch the Qur’an without first washing our hands. My mother was the same way, except she had memorized a bit more and spoke a little Arabic. She had learned the prayers by heart and could also recite fearsome incantations, warning me that I would burn in hellfire for any misdeeds.
    My mother was born under a tree and grew up in the desert, and she was a wanderer when she was young, making it as far as Aden in Yemen, across the Red Sea. She was subjected to an arranged marriage and sent to Kuwait with her husband. As soon as her own father died, she divorced this husband. She met my father through her older sister when he was teaching people in the Somali capital how to read and write. My mother was one of his best students, with a quick and clever way with words. My father already had a wife, so my mother became his second. My father was a political man, an opposition leader trying to change Somalia, which was then ruled by the dictator Siad Barre. When I was two, the authorities came for him and took him away to the old Italian prison, otherwise known as “the Hole.” So, for most of my early years, it was simply my mother, my brother, my sister, my grandmother, and me.
    My first real school was a religious dugsi —a shed offering shelter from the burning sun. Between thirty and forty children sat under a roof held up by poles, surrounded by a thicket of trees. We had the only spot of shade. At the front and center of the space was a foot-high wooden table on which rested a large copy of the Qur’an. Our teacher wore the traditional Somali man’s garb of a sarong and a shirt, and he made us chant the verses, much as American and European preschool students learn to chant short poems and nursery rhymes. If we forgot or we were simply not loud enough or our voices dipped too low, he would take his stick and prod or whack us.
    We chanted again when students misbehaved. If you were disobedient, if you failed to learn what you were supposed to have learned, you were sent to the middle of the shed. The worst offender was hoisted high in a hammock and swung back and forth in the air. The rest of us were given little sticks and we raised our sticks above our heads and stood underneath, hitting the disobedient child through the open holes of the hammock, calling out verses from the Qur’an, chanting about the Day of Judgment, when the sun goes black and the hellfires burn.
    Every punishment at school or at home seemed to be laced with threats of hellfire and pleas for death or destruction: may you suffer this disease or that, and may you burn in hell. And yet in the evening, when the sun had dropped below the horizon and the cool night air reigned over us, my mother would face toward Mecca and say the evening prayer. Again and again, three maybe four times, she would recite the words, the opening verses of the Qur’an, and other verses, moving from standing with her hand across her womb, to bowing down, to prostrating herself, to sitting, then prostrating, then sitting again. There was an entire ritual of words and movement, and it repeated itself each night.
    After her prayers, we sat with cupped hands under the talal tree, begging Allah to release my father from prison. These were supplications to God to make life easy, asking Allah to be patient with us, to give us resilience, to convey upon us forgiveness and peace. “I seek shelter in Allah,” she would chant. “Allah the most merciful, the most kind . . . My Lord, forgive me, have mercy upon me, guide me, give me health and grant me sustenance and exalt me and set right my affairs.” It became as familiar and soothing as a lullaby, as far removed as could be imagined from the clashing sticks and taunting words of the dugsi .
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