Sister Aziza
February 2nd, 2007 posted by steveYes. Hello. Thank you for letting me speak. I haven’t seen Ayaan for over twenty years, though I do remember her. Very well, in fact. She was a very bright, very strong-minded girl. One of my very best. But, you know, I remember her as rather a lost soul at that time. That was my abiding memory when she first came to me. A young woman alone, apart from the other young women there. Rather too sensitive for her own good. Someone who because of some nervous fragility or some event that had brought her to my classes in Saudi, found it difficult to fit in with the other girls I was instructing.
This was in the mid-eighties, you must understand. She was a girl from another world. Somalia and Saudi are not so far apart geographically, but culturally there’s a continent’s divide. Saudi is a very conservative and hierarchical society. Somalia is much looser. More outward-looking. More sceptical, too. And of course, when she arrived, her mother tongue was not our mother tongue. So, even to have been in an Arabic-speaking country must have been - at least in the beginning - very difficult for her. And then you must also remember, she came here under highly unusual circumstances: her father was a political refugee, a highly placed member of a political elite opposed to a brutal Communist dictator; one of a small number of dissenters in danger of their very lives. Now that I come to think of it, a bit like she is now! They were not part of some general displacement or exodus. They were mostly alone here. Strangers. Outsiders.
However, she’s a very bright girl. She picked up the language quickly.
She was hungry for knowledge. But, above all, I think she was hungry for clarity. Reading about her since I can now see why. Her father comes here and he immediately throws himself back into his political work. Doubly so, since he’s just seen his opposition to Siad Barre in his own country come to nought. Out of a sense of duty, of not wanting to be beaten, he renews his energies. But his wife is not happy. She feels neglected. She takes it out on her children. And then Ayaan comes to me. She’s in her teen years. She doesn’t see her father. She is distant from her mother. Can’t you see why she is so eager for something to hold on to. To attach herself to.
Of course, now she would want to make it sound as if I were the leader of some strange cult. Islam is not a cult, however. It’s a religion practised by one billion people in every corner of our world. And as for my ‘methods’ - there was nothing sinister in them. She is right. When she first came to me I asked her - and her fellow classmates - as I always do: Do you believe in the Qur’an? Yes. It is meant to throw these young people. I wanted their attention. I wanted them to get them away from parroting the Qur’an without understanding it’s meaning. To me it’s meaning is full of meaning. And true. And beautiful. And I wanted them to reconsider what they’ve had drummed into them - so often, as she says, by old-fashioned men who think the best way of teaching a young child is to give her a smack on the head if she gets something ‘wrong’.
In reality, of course, in many things there is no absolute right or wrong in the Qur’an. Much is open to interpretation. Fiqh. That is a complaint that’s often heard of Islam: that there is no Pope. That in many matters, there is no final authority to tell you what to do, no boss; only interpretation. What Marx would call dialectic. Disagreement. And sometimes, sadly, conflict. Sunna against Shiite. Shiite against Sufi. And within all families, of course, when relatives fall out, the fights are often the bitterest.










