Turkish-Dutch author Lale Gül is writing an autobiographical novel about breaking out of the conservative Muslim community. The book becomes a bestseller and she receives death threats. Was it worth it? Yes, she says.
Had to go into hiding: Lale Gül.
When the student stands in front of the mirror one morning and puts the scarf on her head to fasten it with a pin, she drops her hands. She was just thinking about what color would go with her clothes – the red, the beige, the black? Now all she feels is reluctance.
“Why am I still wearing this scarf at all?” she asks herself. “How far am I willing to torture myself to conform to the wishes of my oppressors?” She is the young woman she sees in the mirror, without a headscarf, with tears in her eyes and a snotty nose. She broke up with her boyfriend the night before because she couldn’t stand the secrecy any longer. “There’s a neglected woman hidden under every headscarf,” she thinks, putting on her jacket and leaving the house.
The symbolic gesture of discarding the cloth is the beginning of a liberation that will result in Lale Gül having to go into hiding. The young Dutch author describes the scene in her autobiographical novel «Ik ga leven», which is now being published in German under the title «I will live».
The 24-year-old’s debut sparked an earthquake in the Muslim community Gül grew up in, west of Amsterdam. Gül is the daughter of Turkish conservative immigrants. The father was a postman, the mother wanted above all to give her daughter the right upbringing, so that she would become the wife of a devout Muslim away from the parental home. “Carbuncle”, abscess, is what Gül calls her mother in the book: an illiterate woman who doesn’t speak a word of Dutch and calls her daughter “whore” when she puts on make-up.
Safety Precautions Where It Occurs
When the book was out, Lale Gül was attacked by friends and rejected by her family. She received death threats, no longer dared to go out alone, drove in taxis and only took part in readings or television debates where her safety was guaranteed. She has often been invited to public events in recent months. Her book caused controversy and soon topped the bestseller lists. Now it’s about to be filmed.
Over a year later, Lale Gül is still not moving freely. In order not to be recognized immediately, she wears a cap outside. So also this afternoon on the way to her publishing house in the canal belt of Amsterdam, where she has a video call with the NZZ. Razor-sharp eyeliner, the long hair is cropped from the picture.
She cannot estimate how endangered she is, says Lale Gül. She continues to receive threatening messages: You are going to die. Just be careful. They block the senders, try to live on. “IM getting used to it.”
However, Gül did not reckon with this hatred. When the photos with the pistols and machine guns arrived or the video with the IS song, she got scared. She filed a lawsuit, wondering, “Was it worth it?” Today she answers the question with yes.
She no longer has any contact with her parents. In her indictment, she gives an unsparing insight into the “fanatic household”, as she calls her parents’ house. She became a traitor by criticizing the oppressive morality of the Islamic faith for which her “begetters” live. She does not hold back with mockery.
Sex scenes described in detail
“I will live” makes it clear that this radicalism is needed to break free. Lale Gul’s journey into a secular life is painful. The first-person narrator makes many attempts to break the rules of the Koran and the Muslim community and to live like other young people.
She works in a restaurant, puts on tight skirts, drinks alcohol, has wild sex with her boyfriend, the son of a Dutch family that votes for Geert Wilders’ right-wing populist party. Everything secretly and always with the risk of being caught in front of the parents, who control them with constant phone calls. If she resists, her mother hits her or pinches her until she bruises.
Lale Gül attends elementary school and can at least study. She graduates in Dutch Studies. From an early age she spends a lot of time in the library, watching Dutch television. She begins to question why, as a girl, she is not allowed to do all the beautiful things that her older brother is allowed to do. Lying on the beach, posting selfies. Boys are allowed to date girls as long as they are not Muslim girls. Because in contrast to the unbelieving “sluts” the future bride has to be a virgin. Lale Gul’s parents also watch over their “diamond in the rough”.
Only this rough diamond rebels and describes it in savoring details. “An orgasm was the greatest pleasure I’ve ever known in life,” the book says. “I understood now why Islam talked so much about sex and virgins in paradise. I would also volunteer for it.”
Feminists are silent
With such statements, Lale Gül not only drew the ire of devout Muslims. But with her coming out, she also got caught between the political fronts. The failure of the multicultural integration model that the country has long been proud of is openly discussed in the Netherlands today.
The right-wing populists wanted to use the author for their Islam-critical purposes. Geert Wilders, chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV), praised Gul’s courage and saw her experience as proof that Turkish Islam is not integrating.
On the other hand, leftists and feminists have been reluctant to judge Lale Gul’s experiences. They consider it presumptuous to judge a culture to which they do not belong.
Gül gives an example of this cultural relativism in her book: One day, a member of the Labor Party comes to the Koran school that Gül had to attend on weekends as a child. Before the elections, the woman distributed flyers to the students with the recommendation to their parents to vote “socially”. With her choice of words alone, the author reveals how dishonest she considers this “inclusive left with its rainbow flags to be raised”.
Leftists accused her of playing to the right with her criticism of Islam. It confirms extreme opinions and thus fuels xenophobia and racism. Progressive Islamic writers, on the other hand, found their story of the oppressed woman stereotypical and anti-feminist.
“What should I have done?” says Lale Gül. “I tell my story as I experienced it. I can’t take into account what the right or the left expect from me.”
Parallels to Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Of course, she also had to listen to a lot of xenophobic slogans when she was still wearing a headscarf. But she doesn’t experience the Netherlands as particularly racist, she says. She was welcome in her boyfriend’s family, despite their anti-immigration attitude. They didn’t understand why she wore a headscarf – because she was told that otherwise men would be sexually aroused. They felt this was backwards and encouraged her to show off her beautiful hair. Nevertheless, they respected and tolerated the young woman.
“I was able to discuss everything with them,” says Lale Gül. “My parents, on the other hand, would never have accepted my boyfriend because he wasn’t a Muslim. If anyone is intolerant or racist, it’s my parents.”
Lale Gül’s story and the violent reactions to her book are reminiscent of the Islam critic and native Somali Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lived in the Netherlands in the early 2000s. Because of statements about fundamentalist Islam, she also had to request police protection and go into hiding. She moved to the United States in 2006. Lale Gül, who Hirsi Ali met in a joint Zoom interview, is now moving to a smaller Dutch town where she hopes not everyone knows her anymore.
However, today most people on the street met her in a friendly manner, says Gül. Politicians support them, including leftists. They condemned the hostilities of Muslims and defended them against left-wing accusations of racism. The city of Amsterdam paid for their hiding place. A sign that the city is defending freedom of thought.
She inspires many others
Yes, it was worth it, so says Lale Gül. You have lost your anonymity. But at the same time, she sees how her story encourages others. Young Muslim women, homosexuals, but also Christians and Jews for whom the religion as practiced in their family is a prison.
They read her book or the weekly column she writes for an Amsterdam newspaper and thank her. Or they listen to her podcast, which she runs with a colleague who has also broken with his conservative Muslim family.
After retiring and also remaining silent on social media, Lale Gül soon returned to the public eye. Because she can’t be silent. Not only because otherwise those who want to silence them would have achieved their goal.
Lale Gül’s reckoning is radical and knows few shades. And yet she, who describes herself as an atheist and feels connected to secular Turks, then sounds forgiving. She would not want to persuade anyone to abandon their faith, she says. As long as one critically questions the traditional beliefs, one should be free to use the space that religion offers.
And what would be the most important message you would give your children? That there is not just one truth.
Lale Gul: I will live. Translated from the Dutch by Dania Schuürmann. Suhrkamp, 2022. 349 p.