She and the pious Aafia Siddiqui seemed, at first, to have nothing in common. But when I looked closer, I discovered more and more similarities. They were both in their early thirties. They were both fiercely intelligent. They both came from politically ambitious families. They had both been tossed about among Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States ever since childhood. Both had landed in the West from the periphery of Islam just as the Cold War was ending. And while Westerners were congratulating themselves on “the end of history” and talking about building a “new world order,” Ayaan and Aafia had already experienced the Muslim world’s new order of failed states and wars without end. When it came to dealing with the crises of Islam, they were mirror opposites, but there were hints in their complicated backgrounds that each woman might have gone in a very different direction, perhaps even to the extent of Aafia Siddiqui becoming a Westernizing feminist and Ayaan Hirsi Ali becoming a militant Islamist.
Ayaan, a self-described atheist, had flirted with political Islam as a teenager. Aafia, a fervent Muslim, had studied feminist theory at one of the United States’ finest universities. They shared a kind of warrior mentality. Both prized fearlessness. They were both rebels, though Ayaan rebelled against Islam while Aafia said she rebelled to serve Islam more completely. Both had been indoctrinated at an early age into the obsessive anti-Semitism that is such a disturbing feature of modern political Islam. Ayaan ultimately rejected it; Aafia embraced it. And both women would later speak out about something equally strange in the rise of modern jihadi thought—an elaborate and fantastic millenarian strain that, alas, has escaped the notice of all but a few Westerners.
Once I noticed their weird symmetry, I couldn’t stop comparing them. Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui seemed to occupy the poles of the global war on terror. They were opposites, yet related. Like the bikini and the burka or the virgin and the whore, you couldn’t quite understand one without understanding the other.
And if you could understand both, maybe you’d get close to what drove this whole awful conflict. So I decided to follow them and find out.
I flew to Pakistan. And later I traveled to the Netherlands to write an article about Ayaan. In 2005, I moved to Amsterdam with my family. I finally returned to the United States in 2009 to finish this book.
For a while, Ayaan’s star rose as Aafia remained invisible. Later the spotlight of celebrity focused on Aafia, while Ayaan had to strive to maintain a certain level of visibility. Only one thing remained constant: neither woman would speak to me.
When I first decided to write their parallel lives, I may have been the only person anywhere to see a powerful connection between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui. Ayaan was becoming famous, while on the other side of the world Aafia seemed little more than a face on a wanted poster. But as each woman came to be seen under threat, they both took on an exaggerated political significance. In the West, people rallied around Ayaan and the Enlightenment values they felt she represented. Later, in Pakistan and elsewhere, Muslims mobilized around the figure of Aafia and the Islamic purity she was felt to stand for. Flags were burned, governments fell, presidents and prime ministers were implored to save these idols. And the names, loved or hated, of these two previously unknown women rose to the lips of millions of people like the syllables of some powerful magic.
They became icons of the war on terror. “She’s an innocent victim!” the followers of each woman cried on talk shows and in the streets. “She’s a monster!” the followers of the other muttered in return.
From a distance, anyway—and I came to see my enforced distance from both women as a blessing in disguise—the mythology surrounding both figures became increasingly obvious. And as I tried to sort the truth from a remarkable collection of lies, smoke, and mirrors, I grew more curious about how these two women got under other people’s skin. Countless people followed their stories—breathlessly and furiously at times. They were like Rorschach tests. People saw utterly different things in them, and what they saw told you how they saw the war on terror. I came to believe that if I could crack the code of that dreamlike power, I might understand the deep structure of the defining conflict of our time.
PART I
Regarding the West
Chapter One
When Aafia Siddiqui’s name first appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, in 2003, few Pakistanis had ever heard of her. But within a tight circle of bearded Karachi clerics and retired generals there were smiles of recognition. They knew that Aafia’s mother had raised her to be a hero of Islam.
Her mother, Ismat Jehan Siddiqui, was born in 1939 in the north Indian town of Bulandshahr. Before the British arrived in India, high-ranking Muslim women of Ismat’s class had lived in purdah, veiled and secluded. Men outside their families weren’t even supposed to know their names or hear their voices. But in the nineteenth century, Muslim reformers such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan began arguing that the isolation of Muslim women had contributed to the backwardness of their whole community. And by the time Ismat was born, upper-caste families like hers had begun sending their daughters to school.
The burning question for many Muslim thinkers, dating back to the expansion of Europe’s modern empires, was why Islam, which had once dominated the world, had yielded to the West. Didn’t the Quran proclaim that the Muslim ummah, or community, was “the best community brought out for mankind”? Sir Syed’s answer was that Muslims had forgotten the Quranic injunction to “Go and learn, even if it takes you to China.” He urged Muslims to learn from the British and to master Western science and technology. Ismat’s brother, Shams Ul-Hassan Faruqi, accordingly studied geology at Aligarh Muslim University, the “Muslim Cambridge” that Sir Syed founded in 1875 near Bulandshahr. And Ismat attended Sir Syed Girls College in Karachi after their family left their home and traveled west to Pakistan, “the Land of the Pure,” established in 1947 as a homeland for India’s Muslims.
She and Aafia’s father, Muhammad Sualeh Siddiqui, were married in an arranged match. Ismat was a small, bustling person of ferocious intensity. Aafia’s father was a scholarly, retiring doctor. Not long after their wedding, Ismat and Sualeh (who like many Pakistanis named Muhammad was called by his second name) moved to Britain so he could study neurosurgery. Their first child—Muhammad Ali, but called Ali in the family—arrived in 1961. A girl they named Fowzia followed in 1966. And Aafia, the baby of the family, was born in 1972, after they returned to Pakistan.
Islam, believers emphasize, is a total way of life, and that was how the Siddiquis practiced it. The first words the infant Aafia heard were the verses of the call to prayer that her father whispered in the newborn’s ear. Her parents later impressed on her that the purpose of life was to submit to the will of Allah the exalted and to be grateful for his bounty. They kept the Holy Quran in a high, safe place and never let the name of God’s messenger, the Prophet Muhammad, pass their lips without adding the blessing, “Peace be upon him.” Islam determined what they ate (no pork, no alcohol, only correctly butchered meat), how they ate (with the right hand, not greedily, and with thanks to Allah), and when they ate (after sunset during the holy month of Ramadan, with invocations to God); what they wore (for females, a tunic over baggy trousers with a scarf to symbolize modesty); how they slept (on the right side); how they should treat one another (with respect for elders and love and kindness for all); what they said of their neighbors (no gossip, no backbiting); and what they tried to avoid (pride, arrogance, television, music, romantic novels). They worried about washing properly and getting into just the right position for prayer. They knew that Allah did not accept the prayers of the unclean. And whether greeting people or saying good-bye, expressing sympathy or wishing someone well, they never forgot to thank God, from whom all things flow.
Aafia and her siblings also memorized vast stretches of the Quran and the hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet, and recited them to their parents. The child who did the best job received a prize. By the age of seven, Aafia could perform her five d
aily prayers. Even before that, she learned to examine her intention before committing any act. Was it to please Allah? If so, she should offer her deed to him with the words “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.” But if her action wasn’t intended or likely to please Allah, she simply shouldn’t do it. Charity is one of the pillars of Islam, and Aafia and her siblings were taught to spend their free time helping others. There were rules for everything, but behind the rules stood the unity of Allah and of Islam. Eventually this great system flowed into sharia, “the straight path” of Islamic law, that defined what was right and wrong, pure and impure, and to what degree. Those who followed the path were rewarded with blessings in this life and paradise in the next. Those who failed made themselves and those around them miserable as they headed straight for hell.
All this was fairly standard for observant Muslims. But the Siddiquis went further. They were followers of an Islamic movement known as Deobandism.
The Deobandis began as an anticolonial movement in the nineteenth century. A group of Sunni scholars founded the sect after instigating the rebellion against the British that they called “the Jihad of 1857” and that British historians called the Sepoy Mutiny. The uprising failed spectacularly, costing 200,000 Muslim lives and causing the British to expel the last Mughal emperor and tighten their hold on India. The scholars, however, were undeterred. They retreated to the town of Deoband, in Uttar Pradesh, not far from where Ismat grew up, to survive “the dark night of British imperialism,” as they put it, “and to ensure that the torches of the religion of Islam remain alight.”
Like Sir Syed, the Deobandis wanted to know why Islam had fallen under Western rule. But they rejected the view that Muslims needed to learn from the West. Instead, they argued that Muslims, in their haste to imitate unbelievers, had forgotten Allah and his law, and they sought to purify the religion and return it to its roots.
Most Indian Muslims were not Deobandis. The mostly illiterate Sunni peasant majority belonged rather to the mystical sect of the Barelvis. They worshipped at the shrines of Sufi saints and followed hereditary religious leaders known as pirs. The feudal landlords, for their part, who ruled over the Sunni masses, were usually Shiite—a legacy of Iran’s ancient influence. The Deobandis, who tended to come from the urban middle classes, looked down on both those groups.
Although the Deobandis were few in number their sect was favored by army officers, professionals, and small-business men. Before partition, India’s highest Muslim religious authority, the grand mufti, was the Deobandi mufti Muhammad Shafi. After partition, the same cleric became Pakistan’s first grand mufti, based in Karachi.
Aafia’s mother, Ismat, was a restless, ambitious woman, and rarely content unless she was organizing people. As a rule, Grand Mufti Muhammad Shafi believed that women should stay at home, under the strict control of men. He once wrote, in fact, that at least half of the world’s “disorder, bloodshed, and internecine wars” was caused by “woman and her unbridled freedom.” Yet somehow, during her young married life, Ismat persuaded this exalted cleric to let her study under his personal tutelage. The religion that had kept generations of Indian Muslim women locked in purdah became, for her, a means of self-assertion.
Under the grand mufti’s guidance, Ismat studied Islamic jurisprudence and the life of the Prophet. But she also read the works of twentieth-century writers such as Pakistan’s Abu al-A’la al-Maududi and Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna. Western intellectual historians call thinkers like Maududi and Banna, whose goal has been to create a modern Islamic state, “Islamists.” Maududi had a secular education but came from a Deobandi background. In the 1930s, he began arguing that a “gigantic flood” of Western ideas and customs threatened to obliterate Islam. But Islam was more than a religion, he contended; it was also a revolutionary political ideology and an economic and political system. He also sought to revive the idea of jihad, a religious imperative that Maududi defined as the struggle for political power. “A total Deen,” or religion, he wrote, “whatever its nature, wants power for itself. The prospect of sharing power is unthinkable.”
Like many other Islamists, then and now, Maududi was especially bothered by Western-style efforts to place the sexes on a more equal footing. Asked what had set him on his political path, Maududi once mentioned an incident from the 1930s: “I saw Muslim shurafa [honorable] women walking the streets without purdah [veil], an unthinkable proposition only a few years before. This change shocked me so greatly that I could not sleep at night, wondering what had brought this sudden change among Muslims.” In 1941, Maududi formed a political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which aimed to return women to the strict guardianship of men. Paradoxically, it also offered women from conservative families a socially acceptable way of entering public life, and by the 1970s, Jamaat-e-Islami had more female activists than any other party.
While Aafia was still a baby, her family left Pakistan for Africa. Dr. Siddiqui had been offered a job at the new University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. The Siddiquis quickly became active in the city’s small but lively Asian community, and Ismat began holding religious classes for women, often taking little Aafia along.
When Aafia was two years old, Ismat formed a group she called the United Islamic Organisation, or UIO. Its aim was to unify Lusaka’s Muslims and steer their worship into channels favored by the Deobandis. They also aimed, more falteringly, to convert the country’s Christian majority to Islam. Aafia later told a friend that one of her earliest memories was sitting cross-legged on the floor as her mother lectured a rapt audience of African and Asian women dressed in colorful veils and head wraps, her voice rising and falling with the cadence of a revivalist. For Aafia, who was still a small child, her mother exemplified the respect and admiration that a woman could gain through her command of religion. It was a lesson Ismat would reinforce when the family moved back to Pakistan in 1980.
Chapter Two
After Theo van Gogh was murdered in 2004, the classically Somali face of Ayaan Hirsi Ali flashed across television screens all over the world. Few Somalis could claim to know her, but nobody was surprised to learn that she was causing a stir. Her father was famous for his audacity.
Ayaan’s mother, Asha Artan, met him at a literacy class in 1966. Asha was born in the white-hot light of Somalia’s northern desert in the late 1940s. She was the daughter of a tribal judge who herded camels and could find rain by smelling the air. At the age of fifteen, Asha walked out of the desert and crossed the Gulf of Aden to find work as a housecleaner for a British woman. After a brief marriage and divorce, she returned to Somalia not long after it gained independence in 1960. With help from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Somalia’s new government was sponsoring classes in the new capital of Mogadishu for adult Somalis to learn how to read. Asha signed up for a class and promptly fell in love with her teacher, a dashing thirty-one-year-old writer and politician named Hirsi Magan Isse.
The parliamentary government that the British handed Somalia before sailing away was entirely new to its people. Traditionally, the Somalis were camel-herding nomads whose only form of government was the clan.
Even today, a typical Somali child grows up memorizing the names of his or her ancestors, stretching back hundreds of years. Armed with this knowledge, a Somali can determine how closely he is kin to any other Somali by placing him on his mental genealogical tree. Under the clan system, close relatives have a duty to support one another against outsiders according to the logic of the old Bedouin proverb, “I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I and my brother and my cousin against the world.” Without an enemy to unite them, Somalis often fell to quarreling among themselves. Bravery and a readiness to fight were the virtues they esteemed. Weakness and cowardice were the worst sins.
Both Asha and Hirsi belonged to the high-caste Darood clan, whose women are legendary for their beauty. (The Somali supermodels Iman, Waris Dirie, and Yasmin Warsame all come from the Darood clan.) Hi
rsi also belonged to a particularly fierce subclan called the Majerteen, warriors who lived on the northern coastline opposite Aden. Within this subclan, the members of Hirsi’s lineage group, known as the Osman Mahamud, were the traditional rulers.
Hirsi’s father—Ayaan’s paternal grandfather—was one of the clan’s leading warriors. His given name was Ali, but everyone called him Magan, or “He Who Protects Those He Conquers.” He was considered great on account of all the men he had killed and the women and camels he had stolen from rival clans.
Ayaan’s father, Hirsi, the youngest son of Magan’s youngest wife, was born in 1935 in Nugaal Province, near the Eyl oasis, when his mother was in her teens and the old warrior Magan about seventy. As a young boy, Hirsi had a gift for memorizing poetry that attracted the attention of the scholar of the clan, who taught him to read and write and had him sent to school.
The clan later sent Hirsi, at the age of twenty-five, to Mogadishu to represent it in the Somali Youth League, a political party organized by the British. In a browned photograph from the period Hirsi has exchanged the traditional Somali sarong for a shirt and tie and a Western suit with wide lapels. He wears a Somali Youth League pin and the bright optimism of a man with a future.
Washington was offering scholarships to young Africans to study in the United States, and in 1960, the year Somalia became a nation, Hirsi left for Ohio University.
He sailed through an anthropology program there and also attended a training course for teachers of literacy at Columbia University in New York. He moved back to Mogadishu in 1966, and he taught there in one of the new schools that the Somali Youth League was setting up. It was there that he met Asha.
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