The Closed Circle by Lorenzo Vidino

Author:Lorenzo Vidino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

CHAPTER VIII

Pernilla Ouis

Born in 1965, Pernilla Ouis grew up in a large Swedish family with four siblings.1 When she was six, her mother died and her older sister “became a mother” to her. It was that sister who, years later, introduced Pernilla to Islam. A “spiritual person, a searcher,” as Pernilla describes her, she had gone to study Buddhism in China; but after meeting Muslim students there, she became fascinated with Islam, which she found “more natural and egalitarian.” In 1984 she came back to Sweden, “a veiled convert,” and soon married an Egyptian Islamist who lived in Stockholm. “I was a teenager and I remember that my family and I thought the whole thing was very stupid,” Pernilla remembers. “We were also horrified when she and her husband burned her books about Buddhism; the act of burning books recalls such bad images.”

In November 1985 her sister had her first baby, and Pernilla, who lived in the university town of Lund, went to visit her in Stockholm. “In the span of a few weeks I went from thinking that this whole Islam thing was nonsense to marrying an Algerian Islamist,” she says with a sardonic smile. Her brother-in-law had introduced Pernilla to a young Algerian physics student and told her that he needed to get married in order to obtain a permanent permit to stay in Sweden and avoid going back to Algeria, where he would have been drafted to serve in the army.

Pernilla lists many superficial reasons why she lightheartedly decided to marry the Algerian student: he was “nice looking, kind, and exotic”; she was “bored with university life” and this was “a fun experience”; and she thought that “Arabs were misunderstood” and this was a nice way of helping one. On a deeper level, she now believes, “I was subconsciously doing so to please my sister, to whom I had always looked up.” On December 28, 1985, the couple were married in an Islamic wedding ceremony even though, from Pernilla’s point of view, “it was clear it was not a real marriage.”

Yet after the wedding her husband moved in with her, as he had no other place to stay, and after a few months she became pregnant. Pernilla had been adamant about her intention not to convert to Islam, but she succumbed to increased pressure from her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law to raise the child Muslim and therefore be a Muslim herself. “Confused,” she converted and adopted the name Soumaya shortly before her first child’s birth.

In the summer of 1987 she traveled to Algeria for the first time to meet her husband’s family. He asked her to wear the hijab, arguing that his family would not accept her if she did not. She complied but made it clear this concession was just temporary. But upon returning to Sweden, he told her that it would be a great sin to take the veil off, and she begrudgingly assented to begin wearing it permanently. “It’s like the story of the boiling frog,” she says.

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