Her directness startled me. No woman of Saudi royalty should speak with me—a commoner, a foreigner—alone on the telephone and so brazenly. Suddenly, I remembered with exact clarity her mesmerizing scent, the rose petal texture of her hand.
“Women like me don’t meet men like you,” Fatima said. “A lifetime could pass first. Men like you have tasted liquor and known women. I have known since I was a little girl that I will marry my fat, ugly cousin. I also know he will not know how to please me. But you have practiced. I could see it in your eyes.”
Now every pulse point in my body pounded. Her voice was like golden nectar in my ear. I imagined the face behind her veil. Remembering the few strands of raven hair that had peeked from her abbayah, I envisioned a thick mane tumbling down her back.
“Come to London,” she said with sudden urgency. “Or Paris. This weekend. I will meet you wherever you like.”
London? Paris? Reality hit like cold water in my face: a trip like that would cost money I did not have. “I cannot come this weekend,” I said. “My budget does not permit.”
The teasing sparkle returned to her voice. “Evidently, my father is not paying you enough.”
Maybe she does know the truth.
“I do not touch that money. That is for advancing the cause of Islam.” My answer was true, and would also serve me well if Fatima was playing the spy.
“In any case, you don’t have to worry about finances,” she said lightly. “My father pays for everything I do and I don’t keep an itemized record of my expenses.”
A long pause filled the line. And then, like a single raindrop breaking the still surface of a pond, it was broken.
“Come to me,” she said.
8
That was on a Wednesday. But it felt as if I waited two years instead of two days for Friday to come. I worked some contacts in the United Arab Emirates, a project involving fake American visas. But even that was torture. I spent most of my time mooning around my apartment and listening to love songs by Ummu Gulsum, the legendary Egyptian singer.
Finally, Friday came. At the British Airways counter in Dubai, I picked up the first-class ticket Fatima had booked for me, boarded the plane, then sipped champagne all the way to Heathrow. A driver met me there in a limousine flying a gold-tasseled Saudi flag, and he whisked me to a grand London hotel overlooking Hyde Park. A smoothly mannered concierge welcomed me personally and ushered me into a café decorated in leather, mahogany, velvet, and crystal.
The concierge seated me at a table, and a waiter appeared with a tall, dewy glass of freshly squeezed lemonade, thin slices of the yellow fruit wedged among the ice. My seat faced a terrace banked in vines and flowers and overlooking the park. I felt like royalty. I had never been treated this way. I did not know how to react. I was thinking that I could quickly get used to it when an earthy scent stole my breath. I whirled to find Fatima standing behind me.
She wore a silk blouse in pale pink and a matching skirt, long and slim, down to high-heeled boots of expensive black leather. A scarf of pink chiffon wrapped her head, but her face was not covered. And it was the face I had imagined hidden behind her veil: Delicate feminine features. High cheekbones, skin golden. Full lips touched in an innocent pink. And those wide, dark eyes, inviting pools in a secret grotto.
There is something beyond a racing heartbeat, when the center of your soul flies outside your body and enters the soul of another. I stood and faced Fatima, grabbed her hand, and kissed it. The kiss was not polite.
A full minute passed before we were able to collect ourselves. Then Fatima glanced around the café and saw that a couple of other parties had come in to dine. “Would you like to go out to the terrace?” she said.
Outside, we settled on a bench facing Hyde Park. A number of diners turned to look at her. That’s how striking she was.
“Would you like to have lunch?” she said, looking into my eyes.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Neither am I.”
I reached for her hand again and now found it cool and trembling. For a long time, we didn’t talk. We just looked. But inside me, a war raged. Am I doing the right thing?
If the sheikh found out, even about this rendezvous that had so far been chaste, it could be deadly for both of us. Many was the outraged Muslim father who had sliced his daughter’s throat for merely sitting with an unmarried man. They did it to preserve their honor, the family’s good name.
“What am I doing here?” I finally said aloud.
“I don’t know,” Fatima said. Then, as if she had read my thoughts, she looked around the terrace. “There are a lot of people watching here. Let’s go upstairs and talk.”
An elevator swept us up to a luxurious suite that must have covered an entire hotel floor. The sheikh had apparently rented it for years, or perhaps bought it, because it was decorated in the style of his villa, all silk and leather, mahogany and gold. On one wall of the wide sunken living room, a fire roared in a massive marble fireplace.
Fatima disappeared, and a moment later I heard the voice of Ummu Gulsum floating through the room. Fatima returned.
“I listened to this while I waited for you.”
“So did I,” I said, amazed.
She stepped close to me, so close I could feel the heat from her body. I looked down at her, reached forward, and brushed away her pink hijab. It fell away like air, releasing a burst of myrrh, the scent of her hair.
She reached up, and like a cool fire her hand touched the back of my neck. She laid her head on my shoulder.
“I was dreaming you would dance with me,” Fatima said.
Circling her with my left arm, I pressed my hand against the small of her back and pulled her to me. Her breath caught. I took her left hand in my right, and as we swayed to the voice of Ummu, time stopped and every question in life seemed answered.
We danced until sunlight faded from the windows and only the glimmering fire lit the room. When I kissed her, I drank as deeply as if I had never kissed a woman. And there before the fire, we settled on silk cushions striped in burgundy, green, and gold, where we danced until morning, the flames reflecting off Fatima’s golden skin.
9
Relationships like the one with Sheikh Fahim opened more doors for me, though they would likely have turned into guillotines if Sheikh Fahim had known I had fallen passionately in love—and into bed—with his daughter. Fatima and I spent nearly two years before fireplaces up and down Europe. She kept the suite in London and an apartment in Paris, but wherever I was working, she flew to meet me. Our affair was a mad, secret string of hidden café rendezvouses, extravagant gifts, and ardent nights ending in shared sunrises.
Fatima had been promised to her cousin, Fayed, who worked as some kind of bureaucrat in the Saudi royal government. But she kept delaying the marriage, playing her indulgent father like a marionette with strings of excuses.
Sheikh Fahim and his wealthy friends, meanwhile, loved me and my European connections. They loved me because I appeared “neutral,” a Lebanese who could speak French, English, and Arabic and who could blend in with other cultures. I was a chameleon. Best of all, they knew I could obtain for them—pleasures. You see, many of Saudi’s powerful were drenched in lust. Radical Islam is like a moral straitjacket: do not look, do not touch, do not even wish for the things of the flesh. So, while the oil sheikhs pretended to be strong Islamists up front, they enjoyed the world in secret.
In the sheikhs’ eyes, all this was justifiable, according to the hadith, which teaches Muslims to “seed” the women of infidels. For the Muslim Brotherhood and the PLO, it was a profitable arrangement: the happier the sheikhs, the more money I commanded for the armaments of war. At one point, I had over a dozen regular benefactors who pooled their money to purchase fifty thousand, sixty thousand, even seventy thousand dollars in travelers checks in my name. Once, I received over two hundred thousand dollars at one time. As always, I handed it over to my contact, Samir, a Palestinian accounta
nt who deposited the funds in the PLO’s accounts.
Saudi money was the lifeblood of our movement, along with regular contributions from sheikhs in Kuwait and the Emirates. But to the sheikhs themselves, such donations were less than pocket change. I once saw a Saudi sheikh give a Rolls-Royce to a young British woman who had only helped him when he had a flat tire on the way to the airport.
Gave it to her. On the spot. The whole car.
In early 1979, I was in London and called Fatima at the hotel. She did not answer. And she did not answer the next day or the next. This was unlike her. We had been in constant contact, even when we were in different cities. But since our affair was secret, there was no one I could ask. On the fourth day, I went down to the maibox at my flat and found a letter. The return address was Saudi Arabia.
I opened it and when I saw what was at the top of the letterhead, the breath left my body: it was the Saudi royal seal.
We know who you are. Cease and desist your relationship with Fatima Bint Sheikh Fahim. If you do not, we will cut you down.
Was this a joke? I would have thought so except for the stationery. It looked genuine. I had seen some like it in Sheikh Fahim’s business suite, among his papers. I slammed shut the mailbox, bounded up the stairs to my flat, and called Aamer.
“Is the letter right?” he said, shocked. “Have you been with Fatima?”
“Absolutely not!” I said, still clutching the letter. “I do not know what they could be talking about, what this means. Maybe it is a plot against me.”
“Is the letter signed?”
I glanced at it. “No.”
“Make a copy and send it to me,” Aamer said. “I will find out what is going on.”
A week passed while the mail made its way to my friend. And during that week, I received four more letters from Riyadh. Each was on royal letterhead and blasted the same unsubtle message: Break it off with the sheikh’s daughter or we will kill you.
Who is “we”? I wondered. And where is Fatima?
I called the hotel. I called her Paris flat. I had not heard from her in nine days, when the most I had ever gone was one. Was she safe? Had the letter writers already told Sheikh Fahim of their suspicions? If so, I was already dead. And, perhaps, so was she.
On the tenth day, my phone rang.
“Did you do anything with her?” Aamer said immediately.
My stomach dropped. “What are you talking about?”
“Fatima. She’s here. In Riyadh. Her cousin, Fayed, sent the letters. Her father sent bodyguards to London. They brought her back here and put her on house arrest. She has a lock on the outside of her bedroom door and walks with a guard everywhere she goes, even inside the villa. Fayed found out she had pictures in her Paris apartment of four different men. One of them was you.”
“Me!”
“Kamal, did you do anything with her?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Kamal….” Aamer’s voice grew indulgent, conspiratorial.
“What?”
“How did Fatima get your picture?”
I sighed, pretending to break. “Okay. When you and I first went to the villa, Fatima left me her phone number. One day when I was in London I called her. We went out for coffee. At the café, she took a picture of me. I guess she kept it.”
“Never say that,” Aamer snapped. “Never tell anyone that she took your picture, or even that you met. Deny everything.”
“What am I supposed to say, then?”
“Say you don’t have any idea how she got your picture. Say she’s been living on her own, unsupervised. Say she’s got pictures of three other guys, and why don’t they ask them? Say she’s a woman and who can believe a woman?”
Chino, California
January 2008
It was at a conference on January 11 at Calvary Chapel of Chino Hills that I first told three thousand people that one of Islam’s secret evils had come to America. Ten days earlier, the bodies of two sisters, Sarah and Amina Amin, seventeen and eighteen years old, had been found in Irving, Texas, shot full of holes. The girls were students at Lewisville High School. They shared a favorite color, pink. Sarah loved science and dreamed of a career in medicine. But their father, Yaser Abdel Said, an Egyptian immigrant, was angry that Sarah had gone out with a non-Muslim boy. At one point, the girls’ mother, fearing her husband would harm the girls, took them and fled. But on New Year’s Day, both sisters were found dead, abandoned in the cab their father had been driving.
That’s when I knew. Honor killing had come to America.
After Sheikh Fahim yanked Fatima back from Europe, Aamer convinced him that his daughter was not so much wayward as a silly dreamer with a rich fantasy life. What else could explain pictures of four different men? Surely the sheikh did not think his daughter a whore? And surely he did not think so devout a Muslim fighter as Kamal would jeopardize his mission—and the sheikh’s millions—for one woman, when it was well-known he had lots of women all over Europe. The sheikh believed Aamer, and I lived to see another day. So did Fatima.
Thirty years later, the Amin sisters did not. Since their deaths, I have read in American newspapers that honor killing is not a part of Islamic religious tradition. That is a lie. Honor killing is as much a part of the fabric of Islam as is the subjugation of women, their head-to-toe covering, keeping them uneducated, and denying them the right to vote. Koranic scholars teach that if a wife refuses to make herself beautiful for her husband, or if she refuses to have sex with him, to pray, or leaves the house without a good excuse, he should beat her.
Amnesty International reports that over 90 percent of married Muslim women in Pakistan report being “kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, or when the women had ‘failed’ to bear a child or had given birth to a girl instead of a boy.”12
In Islam, a married man can take another wife and ostracize his first wife simply because he has tired of her. He may divorce the first wife with a simple verbal proclamation: “I divorce you.” He only has to say it, and the first wife is out in the street. But if the man chooses to keep the children, he may do so. The woman can fight him in court. But under Sharia law, the court normally views children as the product of the man’s seed. The woman was only the incubator.
In Muslim societies, even a woman who is raped is not a credible witness in the courts. It takes the testimony of four eyewitnesses to convict a man of rape. But only two men, the rapist and a friend, are sufficient to deny a rape, thereby condemning the woman to a public whipping for the sin of fornication. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, if the woman is found to be pregnant out of wedlock, she can be stoned to death.
This is Sharia law, the same law of which Omar Ahmad, founder of the “moderate” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said this: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of Scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
The Amin sisters are not the only victims of violent attempts in America to preserve Muslim family honor. In 2008, Afghanistani immigrant Waheed Allah Mohammad repeatedly stabbed his younger sister because she was a “bad Muslim girl.” Her offenses: wearing immodest clothing, visiting nightclubs, and planning to move to New York City.13
Also in 2008, prosecutors charged Chaudry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant living in an Atlanta suburb, with strangling his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, to death with a bungee cord. Kanwal, a worker at Wal-Mart, had planned to end her arranged marriage of six years and had gotten involved with another man. Rashid was sitting in his driveway smoking a cigarette when police arrived to arrest him. He later told police he killed his daughter because adultery and divorce are offenses against Islam.
In seven months’ time, three Muslim men in America attacked or killed women for religious reasons. And yet some reporters have insisted on trying to divorce honor killing from Islam. Why is this? Do
we think that by softening this connection in the name of “multiculturalism,” we will somehow appear enlightened and that women’s lives will be spared?
In the name of Islam, I befriended messengers of political enlightenment—communists, Baathists, intellectual revolutionaries—from three countries. Then I killed them. Why do so many Americans think today’s Islamists, now teeming through their cities and actively plotting against them every day, will treat them any differently?
Police believe Yaser Abdel Said did not treat his own daughters any differently than I treated those I killed. He has not been seen since the January 2008 killings and is wanted in Texas for murder. Police believe he is armed. I believe he may be hiding with Muslim sympathizers who consider the killings a righteous act.
Afghanistan
1978–1979
1
In 1980, I flew from London to Riyadh to see Sheikh Fahim. Not only was it time to replenish PLO war chests, but for many months I had been monitoring the escalation of a savage attack on Islam. The Soviets were murdering our Muslim brothers and sisters in Afghanistan. I was hoping the sheikh would commit funds to the battle.
I had always hated the Communists. Unfailingly, they behaved as treacherous vipers, and it would prove no different in Afghanistan. In 1978, they took over the country when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) staged a coup commanded by a U.S.-educated former Afghan schoolteacher named Hafizullah Amin.
Amin and the PDPA ousted the regime of Mohammed Daoud and installed as president Nur Mohammad Taraki, who immediately began to uproot the country’s centuries of Islamic law and tradition and replace it with Marxist-Leninist “reforms.” The changes sparked rebellion among the village mullahs and tribal leaders who wished to maintain the old ways. Many Afghan traditionalists, intellectuals, and religious leaders fled to Pakistan, while others waged open rebellion across most of the country. The Afghan government, which by then was receiving assistance from hundreds of Soviet “military advisers,” executed villagers by the thousands—“political prisoners,” they called them.
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