Wanted Women
Page 1
Wanted Women
Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror:
The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and
Aafia Siddiqui
Deborah Scroggins
Dedication
For my mother,
Gloria Baker Scroggins
and in memory of my father,
Frank William Scroggins (1933–2010)
Epigraph
Pledge, O Sister
To the sister believer whose clothes the criminals have stripped off.
To the sister believer whose hair the oppressors have shaved.
To the sister believer who’s body has been abused by the human dogs.
To the sister believer whose . . .
Pledge, O Sister
Covenant, O Sister . . . to make their women widows and their children orphans.
Covenant, O Sister . . . to make them desire death and hate appointments and prestige.
Covenant, O Sister . . . to slaughter them like lambs and let the Nile, al-Asi, and Euphrates rivers flow with their blood.
Covenant, O Sister . . . to be a pick of destruction for every godless and apostate regime.
Covenant, O Sister . . . to retaliate for you against every dog who touch you even with a bad word.
—Introduction to a military manual found in the home of an al-Qaeda member in Manchester, England, May 10, 2000
Man is a child wandering lost in the forests of symbols.
—Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” Flowers of Evil, 1861
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Principal Characters
INTRODUCTION: Why I Followed Them
PART I - Regarding the West
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
PART II - Acting
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
PART III - Being Regarded
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Note on Sources
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
About the Author
Also by Deborah Scroggins
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Principal Characters
Aafia Siddiqui’s Story
ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI (aka Ammar al-Baluchi): Aafia’s second husband, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
IJAZ UL-HAQ: Minister of religious affairs from 2004 to 2008; family friend of the Siddiquis’; son of Pakistan’s military dictator Muhammad Zia ul-Haq
GENERAL MUHAMMAD ZIA UL-HAQ: Ruler of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988; friend and patron of the Siddiqui family
AGA NAEEM KHAN: Amjad Khan’s father; Aafia’s former father-in-law
MAJID KHAN: The computer programmer from Baltimore for whom Aafia is alleged to have opened a U.S. post office box in order to further Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 2003 plan to attack gas stations and other targets
DR. MOHAMMED AMJAD KHAN: Aafia’s first husband, a Pakistani anesthesiologist who did his residency in Boston
ZAHERA KHAN: Amjad Khan’s mother; Aafia’s former mother-in-law
KHALID KHAWAJA: A former Pakistani Air Force and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officer who became an advocate for Aafia and other allegedly missing persons in Pakistan
KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED (aka KSM): The al-Qaeda mastermind who planned the 9/11 attacks as well as the 2003 plot to attack gas stations and other targets with which Aafia is alleged to have assisted
SAIFULLAH PARACHA: Uzair Paracha’s father, currently a prisoner at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, accused by U.S. military prosecutors of having helped KSM and al-Qaeda
UZAIR PARACHA: A young businessman convicted of providing material support to terrorists after being found to have helped Majid Khan and Aafia in their scheme to bring Khan back to the United States
YVONNE RIDLEY: A British journalist and convert to Islam who held a press conference in July 2008 alleging that Aafia might be “Prisoner 650” secretly held at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan
GRAND MUFTI MUHAMMAD SHAFI: The highest religious authority in Pakistan and Ismat Siddiqui’s religious teacher
DR. FOWZIA SIDDIQUI: Aafia’s sister, a U.S.-trained neurologist
ISMAT JEHAN SIDDIQUI: Aafia’s mother
MUHAMMAD ALI SIDDIQUI: Aafia’s brother, a Houston architect
DR. MUHAMMAD SUALEH SIDDIQUI: Aafia’s father, a neurosurgeon
GRAND MUFTI MUHAMMAD RAFI USMANI: A son of Grand Mufti Muhammad Shafi and spiritual adviser to the Siddiqui family
MUFTI MUHAMMAD TAQI USMANI: A son of Grand Mufti Muhammad
Shafi, the leading authority on Islamic finance and member of Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s Council of Islamic Ideology
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Story
ASHA ARTAN: Ayaan’s mother
MOHAMUD MOHAMED ARTAN: A cousin whom Ayaan says she secretly married while in Somalia in 1990
MOHAMMED BOUYERI: The murderer of Theo van Gogh
SINAN CAN: A researcher for the Zembla television program that nearly cost Ayaan her Dutch citizenship
LEON DE WINTER: A Dutch novelist and friend of Ayaan
NIALL FERGUSON: A bestselling British historian and Ayaan’s lover
LEO LOUWÉ—A Dutch volunteer who befriended Ayaan and Haweya in Lunteren
HIRSI MAGAN ISSE—Ayaan’s father, a Somali politician and rebel leader
ARRO HIRSI MAGAN: Ayaan’s half sister, a gynecologist
HAWEYA HIRSI MAGAN: Ayaan’s sister
IJAABO HIRSI MAGAN: Ayaan’s half sister
MAHAD HIRSI MAGAN: Ayaan’s brother
HERMAN PHILIPSE: A philosophy professor at Utrecht University who was Ayaan’s friend and lover; later defended her in the wake of the controversy over van Gogh’s murder
OSMAN MUSSE QUARRE: A Canadian man who paid for Ayaan’s ticket to Europe after she married him in 1992
JOS VAN DONGEN: A correspondent for the television program Zembla who made the television program that nearly cost Ayaan her Dutch citizenship
THEO VAN GOGH: The Dutch filmmaker who made “Submission” with Ayaan and was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri
MARCO VAN KERKHOVEN: A science journalist who lived with Ayaan from 1996 to 2001
RITA VERDONK: A Liberal Party member and minister of immigration and integration; ruled in 2006 that Ayaan was no longer Dutch
MARYAN FARAH WARSAME: Ayaan’s stepmother, one of the first Somali women to gain a Western university education and enter government
INTRODUCTION:
Why I Followed Them
It began with a coincidence. On November 3, 2004, I was standing in line for a security check at the Atlanta airport when I read in the newspaper that the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been murdered in Amsterdam.
The article said van Gogh had been bicycling to work when a younger, bearded man wearing traditional Arab clothes and a prayer cap cycled up next to him. Brandishing a pistol, the stranger fired eight shots and then pulled two knives from his robe. With the larger knife he sawed off the filmmaker’s head. With the smaller one he pinned a five-page letter to van Gogh’s body.
The letter was addressed to a Dutch-Somali politician named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had collaborated with van Gogh to produce a short film about how Islam mistreated women. In a kind of incantation, the murderer predicted that Ayaan Hirsi Ali would be destroyed, the Netherlands would be destroyed, Europe would be destroyed, and finally the United States would fall before the might of Islam.
The words made me shiver, and not just because such lurid crimes weren’t supposed to happen in easygoing Amsterdam. The fate of Theo van Gogh, a great-great-grandnephew of the nineteenth-century painter Vincent van Gogh, recalled the beheading two years earlier of Daniel Pearl, a reporter in Pakistan for the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. government had recently announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “superterrorist” who was said to have planned the 9/11 attacks, had also murdered Pearl. I happened to be on my way just then to the very city where Pearl had been killed. My assignment for Vogue magazine was to discover more about a mysterious Pakistani woman named Aafia Siddiqui, whom the FBI had accused of working for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (or “KSM,” as books and newspapers often called him, after the shorthand of the world’s intelligence services).
There was also something else about the story from Amsterdam that focused my attention. The treatment of women in Islam—the subject of the film that was said to have sparked van Gogh’s murder—was a topic I had followed for a long time. I had felt for years that the suppression of women was as basic to the ideology of radical Islam as racism had been to the old American South or as anti-Semitism was to Nazi Germany. Whenever political Islam took power, as I had seen as a reporter in Africa and the Middle East, women were the first victims. Under the banner of Islam, women lost much of the freedom they had once possessed to dress as they pleased, to marry whom they chose, and to travel, work, and generally order their lives without male permission. Men, meanwhile, gained the right, wherever the new theocracies flourished, to police and control women.
Men often welcomed the changes. It was only later, typically, that the puritanical Islamists made it clear that they also claimed a God-given right to rule other men—sometimes, indeed, while supposedly hastening an apocalypse that the most fanatical Islamists believed in dearly. Any serious struggle against such people, I believed, would have to be based on the principle that universal human rights must not be canceled in the name of some allegedly higher law.
Yet I knew very well that ordinary Muslims were deeply suspicious of Westerners who claimed to want to liberate them. In the nineteenth century, Western imperialists had cited the emancipation of Muslim women as an excuse to invade and conquer Muslim lands. When President George W. Bush’s wife, Laura Bush, said after the United States invaded Afghanistan that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” many Muslims rejected her rhetoric as more of the same. And in fact, neither male nor female Muslims outside the United States seemed to have any inalienable rights in the shadowy war that Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side.”
This darkness seemed to have swallowed Aafia Siddiqui alive. The woman I was going to Pakistan to investigate had been born in Karachi, and she was said to be brilliant as well as pious. She had lived in Boston for a decade while earning degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University. She had married a Pakistani doctor and eventually had three young children by him. But she had also returned to Pakistan and divorced him. And after the FBI named her in 2003 as the only known female operative of al-Qaeda, Aafia and her children had vanished.
Sometimes her family said they thought she was dead. Or they said they believed the United States was holding her and her children in a secret U.S. prison. Washington denied this and kept issuing warnings, some of which mentioned Aafia by name, that Osama bin Laden’s followers might start using women to attack the West and that future attacks might involve weapons of mass destruction.
In a photograph that her family released, Aafia seemed the image of sweet triumph as she graduated from MIT in 1995. She wore a scholarly cap and gown and held a bouquet of red roses as her long black hair blew prettily against her heart-shaped face. Why, I wondered, would a woman who had the freedom to be whatever she wanted join a hate-filled, all-male movement dedicated to controlling women—if she actually had joined al-Qaeda? Why would a first-class scientist with a Ph.D. from a university founded by Jews go to work for a man and a movement who apparently delighted in chopping off Jewish heads—if in fact she had? And why would a woman who had everything that most Pakistani women only dream about choose to throw all that away in order to massacre Americans? Could the FBI’s charges possibly be true?
Muslims, meanwhile, seemed unafraid of Aafia Siddiqui. Instead, it was Ayaan Hirsi Ali who filled them with fear and rage.
Like Aafia, Ayaan was small, even delicate. But while Aafia Siddiqui was demurely attractive, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a striking, pantherlike beauty. The newspaper article about van Gogh’s murder said that she had written the script for the ten-minute film that had apparently gotten him killed. In it, some fictional Muslim women tell God about the rapes, beatings, and incest they have suffered at the hands of Muslim men. Beneath transparent veils, the actresses’ naked bodies are inscribed with verses from the Quran that are used to justify women’s submission.
For the average Dutch viewer, the idea that such verses were still taken seriously probably came as a greater shock than the fact that they were painted on female flesh. But Muslims regar
d the Quran as the literal word of God, and some very conservative Muslims believe they are forbidden to depict the human body. Most Islamic religious art tries to glorify the written Quran, and from a Muslim standpoint it was deeply disrespectful of Ayaan to portray the holy scriptures on naked human skin. As a born Muslim herself, moreover, Ayaan must have known that to use such scenes to blame the Quran for rape and incest would be nothing less than incendiary.
What sort of rage, I wondered, had provoked her to make the film? What kind of bravery, or foolishness, had made her promise to produce a sequel?
Some reports attributed her anger to the traditional female circumcision she had undergone as a child and to the forced marriage she said had led her to seek asylum in the Netherlands. I had spent enough time in Somalia to feel sure that such an explanation couldn’t be the whole story. Nearly every Somali woman is circumcised, yet most of them would defend their religion and their customs to the death—at least against outsiders. What made Ayaan Hirsi Ali different?