Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Page A

Sometimes she solicited the help of male Somali relatives. For days all we did was look for Mahad. When he emerged from these long hiding periods, Ma would get him into the house and put huge padlocks on the door so he was unable to leave. Then, when she wasn’t paying attention, he would climb over the wall, despite the shards of glass that were fixed to the top to deter thieves.
    In one incident, Ma caught him right on our driveway as he was sneaking out. She threw herself at him. Mahad, now fifteen and almost as tall as a man, kept pushing forward. Ma threw herself on the ground, clutched at his ankle, cried and screamed; she would not let him go. Stiff with embarrassment as the neighbors came out to watch what was happening, Mahad conceded and went back into the house. He stayed as long as Ma played watchman, but in a few days he left again.
    The third thing Ma wanted from Mahad was to be pious: to read the Quran, pray, and one day perhaps even become a religious leader. I was beginning to be attracted to the teachings of Sister Aziza, an Islamic studies teacher at my school. I was covering myself in a
hijab
and praying more; looking back, I see that slowly but surely I was subscribingto the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood, a jihadi movement. But Mahad was more attracted to the lures of the street. He became a chain smoker; there were rumors that he drank beer and perhaps even hard liquor. (At the time I didn’t know the difference.) There were also rumors that he was chewing
qat
.
    It was common knowledge that boys like Mahad, who had dropped out, whose fathers were absent, and whose mothers had no authority over them, grew up to be men with no jobs, no wives, no children. Sometimes they were lucky and their parents arranged a marriage for them, to keep them clothed and housed and fed and off the streets. But the marriages always broke down. There were hordes of such lost young Somali men in Eastleigh, a neighborhood in Nairobi. They spent most of their days sleeping in cramped rented rooms and their evenings chewing
qat
. Then, with borrowed money, they looked for prostitutes. Some of them were involved in crime; they made the streets unsafe.
    Some of these young men later repented and joined the Muslim Brotherhood. They would go to Saudi Arabia on Islamic scholarships and come back as preachers of what we would now call radical Islam. Their own story was compelling, for they had been saved from evil, Westernized behavior when Allah showed them the straight path. My mother actively tried to bring Mahad in contact with these agents. But nothing seemed to work.
    As Mahad sank deeper into the mire, Ma’s next strategy was to mobilize the clansmen one more time and have him sent to Somalia. At the age of about seventeen he set off to meet our paternal uncles and aunts, and even traveled to Ayl, on the northern coast, which had just been captured by my father’s opposition army. He wasn’t just Mahad any more: he was Hirsi Magan’s son—if not a prince, then at least a man with a long and honorable bloodline and a lofty destiny. He deserved to rule. Surely he wouldn’t betray the clan and himself by remaining a street boy.
    While in Somalia Mahad regularly sent my mother letters written in beautiful English. I read them to her, translating them as I went. I ached with sadness that he had dropped out of school. Mahad was so gifted; he could have become a writer. Unfortunately no one had prepared him to set realistic goals and work for them. From his earlydays, his head was filled with vague notions of honor, wrestling lions, and conquering peoples, goals that bore no relationship to his reality and that only confused his sense of himself.
    Then Haweya also dropped out of school, and in 1990 she and I were sent to Somalia too. When I saw Mahad again he was tall and handsome, with a new air of confidence about him. He had enrolled as a student at a Somali-American business school, which I think was paid for by the