Their mother made sure there were as few breakable objects as possible in the house, as few items of any kind, in fact, because the father could fly into a rage when he didn’t find something he was looking for, so it was best to keep things tidy.
Aisha was used to hearing her father scream and shout Whore! Dog! Pig! at her mother. The children were told they were piglets.
By the time she was twelve, Aisha could not take any more. During a quarrel between her parents, she had stood in front of her mother to prevent her father from hitting her. He punched his eldest daughter in the face instead, pushed her out of the way, and let loose on his wife. But her daughter’s protest seemed to give the mother strength. For the first time, after fifteen years in Norway, after fifteen years of abuse, she called the police. A patrol car came around. But nothing changed. The following year, while her husband pushed her to the ground, straddled her, and beat her head against the floor until she thought she would die, while her youngest daughters cried, she made up her mind that if she survived she would report him. The case went before the Mediation Service, where it was noted with regard to Aisha’s father that “he promises never to be violent to his wife again. He will try to understand her better and give her more time. He promises to refrain from swearing—in particular to abstain from references to pigs.”
But nothing changed. One evening, the father was alone with his daughters and, enraged by their bickering, began hitting one of the younger girls while shouting that it was their own fault that he beat them. The children ran to the bathroom to escape his blows but their father chased them. Aisha blocked the doorway, and he first beat her and then her sisters. Aisha’s fingers got caught in the door, and were injured badly enough to require hospital treatment.
When her hand healed, she wrote the text for Uncovered.
* * *
Aisha had become a writer, and Ayan and Emira were rising through the ranks of Islam Net. In the summer of 2011 they were appointed to the group’s organizing committee.
At the first meeting, on a hot, drowsy Wednesday in July, a handful of students sat planning the following year’s big event—the Peace Conference. Who was going to speak? Where would it be held? The previous year’s conference had been held at Sentrum Scene, a concert hall downtown, but holding it at such a central location was expensive. The farther out of the city you went, the cheaper the premises. On the other hand, the more central it was, the more chance of walk-ins. The first two days of last year’s event had been aimed at non-Muslims, who paid no entrance fee. Islam Net was ambitious with regard to conversion of Norwegian youngsters.
Two days after the meeting of the organizing committee, a twenty-thousand-pound bomb detonated outside the government buildings in Oslo. The immediate reaction was that it was the work of Islamic terrorists. Speculation centered around al-Qaida. Two hours after the bomb went off, a blond man dressed in a police uniform shot his first victim on the island of Utøya, where the youth wing of the Labor Party was holding its summer camp. During the course of the evening, it became clear that it was not a foreign terror organization behind the attacks, but Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right-wing extremist. The terrorist act resulted in the deaths of seventy-seven people.
In his manifesto, which was available online, Breivik demanded the eradication of Islam in Europe; all mosques were to be demolished, all traces of Muslim cultural heritage needed to be destroyed, and all Muslims had to either convert, be deported, or face their allotted punishment: death. Arabic, Urdu, Somali, and Farsi were to be banned, converted Muslims had to adopt Christian names, no Muslim was to have any contact with relations in their home state if that country’s population was over 20 percent Muslim, and they were not allowed to have more than two children.
In spite of his declarations of hatred of Muslims, it was the Labor Party the terrorist attacked, not a mosque or Islam Net. The powers that be were the traitors. They were the ones who had let the Muslims in. The act of terror would force them to see the error of their ways and stem the tide of Muslim immigration.
Norway was in shock. People reached out to one another.
“Hi Ela, how are you and your loved ones?!” Ayan wrote straight after the attack. The friends, who had been so close at one time, had not seen each other since lower secondary school. The circumstances that had brought them together in the immigrant gang in Gjettum had dissipated when they no longer needed one another. They had taken separate paths, developed and cultivated new sides of themselves. Sides that no longer seemed compatible.
“Hi you, I’m fine ☺,” Ela replied. “No one I know was hurt. You?”
“Good to hear, I don’t know, haven’t heard of anyone I know so far.”
“Ahh, that’s good!” Ela wrote. “Hey, we have to get together soon! When is good for you?”
“Ehhhh I can meet up any day except Wednesdays and Fridays, hehe ☺”
“What about tomorrow then?”
“Good stuff, what will we do?”
“We can head over to Sandvika, buy strawberries and sit on the quay? Or go shopping?”
“Haven’t been to the mall in ages but I wouldn’t say no to strawberries,” Ayan said.
They arranged to meet at Ela’s. The sun was shining, people were walking around wearing hardly anything.
Ela was taken aback when she opened the door. But she did not say anything other than “Ayaaaaan!”
“Is your father home?” Ayan asked when she
