A tale of two sisters

A yaan Hirsi Ali and her sister, Haweya, grew up in conditions that most western psychologists would consider traumatic. Circumcised as little girls in Somalia, and abandoned by their father, a rebel leader, they were raised as refugees in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Isolated and desperate, their mother would beat them mercilessly. Subjected to harsh Islamic teachings, they were also beaten by their ma'alim - once so badly that Ayaan nearly died. The sisters grew up against a background of tyranny, war, exile, famine and religious dogma.

This story, told by Ayaan in her memoir, Infidel, might seem to allow plenty of room for the view that trauma lay behind the mental illness that would eventually consume Haweya. In 1994, after destroying her honour by having an abortion, she joined Ayaan as an asylum-seeker in Holland. There she had another abortion. In 1996, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with a severe psychotic disorder. She had been smashing her head against walls, screaming, "Allaahu Akbar! Allaahu Akbar!"

Yet, for Ayaan, the idea that her sister became schizophrenic due to religion or upbringing is simplistic. For a start, it is the same type of interpretation that is often used to undermine her own arguments against female oppression in Islam. If Haweya went mad because of hardship, Ayaan's uncompromising views can be explained the same way. Her enemies deride her as a self-hating Islamophobe, incensed by her Muslim upbringing, sexually frustrated by circumcision, and haunted by the death of Theo van Gogh - the director who was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004, after making Ayaan's anti-Qur'anic film, Submission: Part 1. But to use trauma to diminish her critique of Islam is, she says, "just a means of not listening to what I have to say".

Furthermore, Ayaan points out that while she and Haweya might have had a hard life by European standards, by African standards "it was not so bad". As much as anything, what she remembers is laughter and sisterhood. She and Haweya were deeply bonded. They confided in each other, made trouble together, protected one another. At home, Haweya would rage against their mother and Ayaan would intervene, taking on the mantle of maternal care, washing Haweya gently when their mother wanted to scrub her "like you'd scrub the floor". Out in the dangerous streets of Nairobi or Mogadishu, meanwhile, Haweya was the fearless one, standing up for her more delicate older sister. Ayaan still thinks of her as "my guardian angel".

Why, then, did Haweya lose her mind? Ayaan provides the same answer you would get from any honest psychiatrist: "It's mostly guesswork." For sure, the events of their lives contained "stressors". Perhaps Haweya's flight to Holland, which removed the privations of clan life, also removed a psychological safety net. Rates of psychosis increase among migrants and, statistically, African populations are among the most vulnerable. But this doesn't explain why one sister should become a politician and the other a psychotic. Perhaps there was a fault-line of vulnerability in Haweya's childhood defiance that would eventually shatter her mind. This kind of guesswork only heightens the difficulty of the question. How, after all, do such predispositions of character emerge in the first place?

Behavioural geneticists, who study the biological basis of character, would begin where Ayaan begins, with the story of how her nomadic grandmother drummed into the sisters the lesson of who they were: "I am Ayaan ... I am Haweya," they were taught to recite, "the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan, the son of Isse ..." They learned to list their forefathers going back 800 years, to the dawn of the Darod clan.

Yet Haweya's madness seems to have come not from their father's side of the family but from their mother's - with three maternal cousins suffering from similar psychotic illnesses. And therein lies an enigma: in the Somali clan system, matrilineal inheritance is deemed worthless, and nobody recalls the names or characteristics of women. As her grandmother warned the girls, a woman alone is disposable, like a piece of sheep fat in the sun.

Ayaan believes she has inherited the strength of the women in her family, only putting it to a different use. Where her mother and grandmother enforced Islamic traditions, she has fought against them. Yet - who knows? - perhaps she also has something of her father's clan character: born to lead.

Haweya inherited other things. During an electrical storm in Nairobi in 1998, she ran out into the night in a psychotic fit, miscarried and died.

For five years afterwards, Ayaan lost the ability to laugh. The irrepressible giggling of her childhood would never return. "Something has gone for good," she says. "Part of me went with Haweya."

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