What has induced me to tell my story is because I am tired of others telling it. I have always believed in the inevitability of the triumph of truth. That was my belief. My experience of five decades has however thought me the folly of my belief. The truth is, I am an underdog in this world. “The truth cannot catch up with a lie that escaped,” my nomadic people say. Why have I doubted their wisdom for so long?
I am Ahmed, son of Kooreeye. I want to tell my story. After all, haven’t I got a mouth? I don’t deny that I have a habit of sleeping with different women. At times, randomly. But that is not because I am a womanizer. It is because I am emotionally magnanimous and I can’t let distressed women live through despair. Lust or love for corporeal gratification has never ever driven my carnal pursuit. How can then society lump me together with the customers of red-light streets? Is that fair or even right? Take the first day I cheated on my wife. Was it with a nubile girl who titillated me with pear-sized breasts? Was it a voluptuous spinster who burned incenses and instigated a nasal copulation first?
No! It was Faadumo Geele. A decent, god-fearing mother of seven children: 3 boys and 4 girls. A cutthroat and misanthropic society will judge her, pelt her with bad names, but the fact remains she would never have slept with me if a stroke hadn’t hit her husband a year before we met. She was clear about that. I could see in her eyes she was not lying. She was not sleeping with me out of unfaithfulness, the same way I was not doing it for my body too. I was doing it for my conscience. I saw the thirst in her eyes. Surrounded by a cruel culture that doesn’t make provisions for force majeure in nuptial captivities, and aged 43, she would have perished cursing God, cursing her man. She never smiled, showed signs of gratification, or whispered appreciation after each outlawed consummation. She didn’t show remorse either. She accepted this was her ineluctable fate. That was her unique gift to her ailing man: that she will neither curse him nor relish other men. She loved her husband. She empathized with his ailment and never wanted to blame him for her deprivation.
That was the fated encounter that kick started a life of bed-hopping expeditions for me. I still recall the guilt, the excuse, the blame game. With each act of infidelity since though, my love for my wife grew. Each shameful romp of mine sent her to a higher pedestal and she grew in stature, in dignity, against the diminished frame of my tumbling character, my dying personality. I respected her for her loyalty, for her integrity. My infidelity renewed my love for my wife. It is for this reason that I kept on cheating. Not because of the fascinating anxiety of discovering what you haven’t known before. Not because of the excitement of the conquest.
The other times I transgressed had also been for altruistic causes. Or because of nationalistic fervor. For instance, the night I saw a Somali sister sipping alcohol with a Congolese philanderer, my blood boiled. I cursed the depth of ignominy the civil war plunged our societal name and standing into. How could my mind accept that the same Somali girl whose hand was worth hundred camels is now selling her body for a drink and dinner? So, I rebuked the sister. Explained the shamefulness of what she was doing. Of course, she spent that night and the following two with me. But isn’t it better to sleep with your own than a stranger? After all, would he have given her more than a drink and few bucks? The morning she left me, she went with three hundred dollars and a leather jacket which my younger sister forgot in my apartment before she concluded her African vacation.
Am I not then better than Sheikh Khalif?
By name, he is a man of God. But look what he told me. He told me that after thirty years of marriage to four women, he felt he was atrophying.
“Rather than stare at the passage of times and, with it, your own depreciation through the temporal tilting of the tits of your wife, it is better to get renewed, to beguile the tests of ageing,” that is what he said. For that to happen, he must divorce one of his four wives. He decided that Khayro, his second wife, was the one that should be released. After all, she has given him only three daughters in twenty years of marriage. “Not a single boy”, he decried!
Let me quote his own words. “As soon as I married Nafiso – who was given to me by her father at the tender age of 14 – I realized I didn’t need to be cloned for rebirth.” That is how he describes the bodily transformation he experienced after wedding a girl forty years younger than him. Sheikh Khalif says polygamy offers such a mystic renovation. It spares one the macabre feeling of irrelevance, he says.
In addition to mountains of knowledge, Sheikh Khalif also has a way with words. This is what he said to me. “The body of a man is an edifice. Without recoating, without restoration, it crumbles. That is why men are allowed to marry more”.
When I asked the Sheikh if, in that case, adultery isn’t polygamy with human face – caring and sensitive because no one’s feeling is hurt since the act is hidden from those who would have felt aggrieved, he was incensed.
I said a profound Astaqfurullah and asked for forgiveness for the blasphemy.
By: Ina Dhego-laab
or
Menace2society?
this article wasn't written by a muslim.
