Shabana Rehman is dead. She changed Norway and Norwegian freedom of expression – Dagsavisen

She was the girl from Holmlia who had to lift herself out of rigid traditions and structural control in partially closed minority environments. And with that, she lifted herself into everyone’s hearts. For some it was painful, for others it aroused admiration, insight, laughter and a sense of freedom. Shabana Rehman has also reached us all this past year, as we have been able to follow her battle against the disease she was diagnosed with earlier this year, incurable pancreatic cancer. Her fight has been brutal and painful, but we can hardly remember the openness, hope and will to live she has shown us.

Shabana Rehman came with a large family from Karachi to Norway as a one-year-old, without ever having heard Norwegian, the language that was to become her main tool when she first at home, then later in full public, questioned why it should be another and more restrictive set of rules for girls than for boys. As one of the first young brave voices with a minority background, she showed the way to common cultural references which meant that the debates about integration, shameful themes and terms of honor had to be taken afresh.

More than that, Shabana Rehman was the sprout from Holmlia with a commitment as infectious as her exuberant personality. In reality, as well as on stage and through her words, she met you with big smiles, openness and a fervent fighting spirit. She had a sting that went deeper and more accurately than many first realised. She used humor as an unassailable weapon, and with hard-earned lessons about the importance of reaching out to others through empathy, she became an invaluable and eventually unifying cultural driving force.

Just how big a heart she had, and how strong it was in every way, would only become clearer and clearer, until the very end in the bone-chilling public battle for hope and life.

It is hardly possible to imagine what Shabana Rehman’s exercise of freedom of expression cost her personally. The courage and openness were part of an all-encompassing freedom project, a detachment from what could easily have become a victim role, from a troubled childhood where she was not allowed to learn Norwegian at first, then a pitch-black backdrop of violence and abuse that she brought with her from the teenage years and after the child protection service took over care of her from the age of 16. When she published the book “Blåveis” and described the betrayal, it was as if she showed the key to the need she had to represent those who themselves are unable to express themselves. In the book, she talks about violence and psychological terror in a period of life that is decisive for how you live on.

[ Shabana hylles for kampvilje og mot ]

The way she described the first blows, roots of hair being torn out, the trauma and anxiety that followed, driving her in a negative direction, is painful and universal. She was a teenager who fell outside in a country where the debate about the challenges in multicultural Norway had not yet broken the surface. She was to contribute to that herself, as a writer, stand-up comedian from 1999 and as a media personality. It was as if she rose from where she lay, shamed outside Gunerius, and turned the pain, the shame and the understanding of it into a means of struggle both for herself and others against violence, oppression and religious fanaticism.

She was a visible newspaper writer in the late 1990s. But from the moment Shabana Rehman really gave way to her life’s project by painting the Norwegian flag on her own naked body over several Magasinet pages in Dagbladet in 2000, she seized the power of definition like no one else in her generation. She received the Fritt Ord prize two years later for building cultural bridges. The more physical demonstrations of hard-fought sovereignty – which we now know were associated more with fear than with arrogance – made her controversial in the following years on a whole new level.

She became best known, also internationally, for the so-called “mullah lifting” in 2004, when during a debate she lifted Mullah Krekar and was reported for physical insult. And when she bared her bum during a festive film festival on stage in Haugesund the following year, and – as she herself said – showed off her reactions and not her bum.

Shabana pushed boundaries, verbally as well as physically. This was greedily swallowed up in the media image she herself helped to change. She was threatened with death, subjected to acts of intimidation and hate speech from many walks of life. But even for the most intrepid, at least outwardly, the price can be too high. The shots that hit the family restaurant Rehmans in 2005 showed that the involvement had consequences for far more than herself. When Shabana chose to travel out of the country for a longer period, it represented a watershed in her work as an active comedian and social debater.

[ Lager TV-serie om Shabanas kamp mot kreften ]

Not that she in any way dampened her commitment. On the contrary, she remained visible and vocal on many levels, not least for animal welfare through both positions and actions. In 2020, she was appointed as a member of the government’s freedom of expression commission. And twenty years after she received the Free Speech Prize, on 15 November this year she was awarded the Ossietzky Prize by Norsk PEN for “her special and unique efforts for freedom of expression”. Her major life work was to be the foundation Født Fri. There she was a leader from 2017 and actively worked towards a culture of honor and social control in minority environments. Born Free was Shabana’s biggest defeat, one she did not see coming until she stood in the middle of what could turn out to be a power struggle over resources and values, the consequences of which she herself had no idea.

The Stovner revue in 2019, for which Født Fri stood in the breach, was supposed to be a satirical showdown with racism and prejudice, but ended in controversy itself. The same revue was covered by the notices of financial default in Født Fri. The foundation was removed from the state budget and later declared bankrupt. Shabana Rehman was constantly in favor of financial scrutiny and control of the foundation, and her despair at losing what was the seed of a life’s work was bottomless. But that didn’t knock her out either.

Shabana Rehman spent her whole life rising, lifting. It was perhaps most apparent when she lifted others, but primarily she lifted herself. Blow after blow she got up, mental as well as physical and verbal. She had an indescribable strength, whether she put her body on display naked for a cause greater than herself, or she more naked than ever shared her life’s struggle with the whole world in these last months. Now, for the first time, she will not get up again. Shabana Rehman was only 46 years old. She almost got everything she wanted done, but what she did has left lasting traces in the Norwegian public and in the hearts of each and every one of us.

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