“Your wife will soon return,” his friends said, to comfort him. “Your daughters too.”
There was little sign of that happening.
But his sons wanted to come home. In Hargeisa they spent most of their time in front of the PlayStation in the living room. Or they played football using a dented plastic bottle. Their parents had argued the previous summer about where they should live. Sadiq had been prepared to compromise. One more year, then they had to come home, in plenty of time for the next school year. Fine, Sara had said.
She kept her word. A month before school finished for the summer, she and the boys landed at Oslo airport. The very next day Isaq and Jibril were back at school in their old classes. They were given close follow-up from the school and Child Welfare. The goal was for them to continue at their age level.
Ismael returned from college and took a summer job at a local supermarket. The three boys shared the bedroom while Sara and Sadiq slept in the living room. Ismael whispered to his little brothers at night: “Norway is where we belong.” Isaq and Jibril nodded in the darkness.
Ismael had no contact with his sisters any longer. The last time he had heard from Leila was the message before New Year, when he had sent back a question mark. And received no response. From Ayan he hadn’t had any news for a year.
In August he took a break from his supermarket job. He had been picked as one of a hundred participants in Emax, an entrepreneurial program for young people organized by Innovation Norway. The program aimed to inspire and enable “young entrepreneurs to continue developing their dreams and striving to realize their goals and visions.” The course concluded with a weekend in Lillehammer, where the young people would get the “tools to develop themselves and create their own, and Norway’s, future.” The hundred who were picked out were divided into ten groups to undertake tasks set by different companies. Their ideas and their development would be evaluated and a winner chosen; previous winners had been invited to London, Silicon Valley, and Shanghai to “network and learn more about building and scaling a business.”
Ismael’s group did not win, but it had been a memorable weekend. He posted a photograph of his new friends on Facebook, all of them standing with their arms around one another. Ismael was dressed in the same style as the blond boys with him, in a light blue shirt and jeans, looking the part of a young businessman. “@emaxnorway fantastic experience!” he wrote.
When summer was over, he boarded the train back to college to start the second year of his automation engineering course. When he got back, he changed the background picture on his iPhone. The white writing on a gray background summed up his situation: Be willing to walk alone. Many who started with you, won’t finish with you.
* * *
Being back together again as mother, father, and children was not all rosy. They had lost the old and spacious apartment, and the one-bedroom unit that Sadiq had been allocated by the county when he was alone was overcrowded. Neither was Sara happy with the location or the neighbors. The apartment was in a block of flats for social welfare clients and most of the residents were single. There were alcoholics, drug addicts, and a lot of noise. People could be heard making dinner at three in the morning, playing loud music all night, or arguing. Sara complained to a friend that there were syringes and broken bottles everywhere. “It’s no place for children,” she stressed. She went to NAV and asked for a new apartment. The family was told to look for one themselves. The local authority could subsidize the rent, but they would be responsible for finding a place themselves. Sadiq searched online and they went to viewings, but they were refused as tenants at each turn. Norwegians don’t like Somalis, Sara concluded.
But Somalis like Somalis, and as soon as Sara returned to Norway she got back in touch with her circle of friends in Bærum. After fifteen years in the country, she had built up a large network of female compatriots, many of whom were members of the Somali Women’s Association.
On her return, Sara had wanted to lance the boil. Sadiq had made the Somali community aware of his anger at Mustafa, the young Koran teacher, whom he held responsible for the radicalization of his daughters. “He is the start of our nightmare,” he used to say. The association viewed Sadiq’s accusations against Mustafa as criticism of them. They were the ones who had hired him, after all, and had chosen to keep him on as a teacher—even after the girls left. If their radicalization and journey to Syria had anything to do with him, then surely others would also have departed, they argued.
Sara had attempted to get hold of Mustafa after the girls left, but the young man, whose salary had been partly financed by her household budget, refused to meet her.
Eventually he sent her a message via one of her friends saying, “I had nothing to do with their journey to Syria. Their leaving came as a shock to me. May God protect you all.”
Well, so it wasn’t him, then, Sara concluded.
Sadiq, on the other hand, was reprimanded on social media for having accused the Koran teacher of terror recruitment, thereby bringing shame on all Somalis. It was time to close ranks.
Rumors abounded. When the criticism in the media had come out, the Tawfiiq Mosque had asked Mustafa to stay away for a while. The religious leaders were worried. The mosque, like others in Oslo, was occupied with fronting the fight against radicalization. They dispatched a young religious leader named Abdibasid Ali Mohammed, a handsome, well-spoken, well-educated Somali, to participate in panel discussions on how to combat extremism. He was a willing participant, as long as he
