Somali children must memorize their lineage: this is more important than almost anything. Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, “Who are you?” They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.

If they were ever captured they were to say, three times, “Allah be my witness, I want no conflict with you. Please leave me alone.” To be raped would be far worse than dying, because it would tarnish the honor of everyone in their family. If the invocation to Allah had no effect, my grandmother taught her daughters to run around behind a man, squat down, reach between his legs under his sarong, and yank his testicles hard. They were not to let go. He might hit or kick, but they were to tuck in their heads and take the blows on their backs and hope to hang on long enough to cause the attacker to faint. This move is called Qworegoys, and the women of my grandmother’s family taught it to their daughters just as they taught them to make thorn-bush fences to protect the hut from hyenas.

the price of oil was tugging the country’s economy into the modern world, its society seemed fixed in the Middle Ages.

I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of the rules, especially for women. How could a just God — a God so just that almost every page of the Quran praises His fairness — desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the ma’alim told us that a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s, I would think, Why? If God was merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, why did unbelievers have to go to Hell? If Allah was almighty and powerful, why didn’t He just make believers out of the unbelievers and have them all go to Paradise?

My father’s Islam was also clearly an interpretation of what the Prophet said. As such, it was not legitimate. You may not interpret the will of Allah and the words of the Quran: it says so, right there in the book. There is a read-only lock. It is forbidden to pick and choose: you may only obey. The Prophet said, “I have left you with clear guidance; no one deviates from it after me, except that he shall be destroyed.”

Holland came from nothing: mud and poverty and foreign rule. Even the land was constructed by a collective effort. The sea tides roaring over half the country were too powerful to confront individually, so the Dutch learned to be clever and work together. They cut channels through the silt to control the flooding and built new land where the sea had been. They learned to be resourceful and persistent. They learned negotiation. They learned that reason is better than force. Above all, they learned to compromise.

this attitude was much larger than just one imam: it was systemic in Islam, because this was a religion that had never gone through a process of Enlightenment that would lead people to question its rigid approach to individual freedom.

People theorized beautifully about poverty pushing people to terrorism; about colonialism and consumerism, pop culture and Western decadence eating away at people’s culture and therefore causing the carnage. But Africa is the poorest continent, I knew, and poverty doesn’t cause terrorism; truly poor people can’t look further than their next meal, and more intellectual people are usually angry at their own governments; they flock to the West.

the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

Most Muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught it in Arabic, which most Muslims can’t speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant.

Islam influences every aspect of believers’ lives. Women are denied their social and economic rights in the name of Islam, and ignorant women bring up ignorant children. Sons brought up watching their mother being beaten will use violence. Why was it racist to ask this question? Why was it antiracist to indulge people’s attachment to their old ideas and perpetuate this misery?

Reason, not obedience, should guide our lives.

Aspects of Islam did slow a society’s development, by curbing critical thinking and holding women back.

In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that “Islam is peace and tolerance.

alpha males and alpha females declared their support, so the beta males and females mostly subsided into grumbling.

The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hypocrisy, and double standards. It relies on the technological advances of the West while pretending to ignore their origin in Western thinking.