The U.S. government had originally disdained Pakistan’s new strongman, and it briefly suspended aid to the country. But by the end of that pivotal year it changed its mind. Zia seemed to offer an opportunity to help block the Soviet threat in Afghanistan, while Washington’s Saudi allies saw Zia, an authoritarian fellow Sunni, even more positively. Pakistan had already sheltered some of Afghanistan’s Islamist leaders, and now it would promote the first major religious jihad of modern times. The United States could bloody its Cold War enemy while currying favor with the Muslim world, while Saudi Arabia’s royal family pumped up its religious authority, which Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Shiite radicals were challenging.
Thus the United States and the Saudis struck a deal to create a semicovert Afghan resistance movement. They would provide the money and arms, while Zia’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, better known as the ISI, would manage the program. It ended up costing more than $8 billion a year. To make sure the jihad was truly Islamic, moreover, Pakistan’s Deobandi scholars would dictate its ideological content.
Aafia Siddiqui was seven when her family returned to Karachi in this charged atmosphere.
They bought a spacious two-story bungalow in the prestigious E section of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, a new area that was attracting professionals and military officers linked to Zia’s regime. The brother of Zia’s chief of staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg, lived next door. Like others in the neighborhood, the Siddiquis’ house was surrounded with a high “purdah wall” intended to protect the family’s privacy. They planted bougainvillea and built a fountain, and, like other Pakistani upper-middle-class families, they kept a cook, a watchman, and a driver for the family car. Aafia’s mother, Ismat, who considered herself an Islamic feminist, was free to expand the kind of preaching she had taken up in Zambia. Mufti Taqi Usmani and Grand Mufti Rafi Usmani became the family’s spiritual guides, as well as patrons of the UIO women’s organization, which Ismat brought with her to Karachi. Dr. Siddiqui would become so close to Mufti Taqi that he eventually translated the cleric’s book Islam and Modernity into English.
There was plenty for a woman of Ismat’s skills to do. From a population of about 435,000 at the time of independence, Karachi by 1980 had grown to more than five million. Its new arrivals included millions of poor and illiterate women, mainly from Punjab and Sindh, who often came to work as cooks and maids. Aafia would later write that her mother’s UIO set up schools to offer those women and their children an Islamic education. The group also provided them with sewing machines, sewing lessons, and vending carts so they could support themselves by working at home. For more prosperous women, Ismat’s organization put on an annual conference at Karachi’s Sheraton Hotel. This conference in its heyday attracted delegates from Afghanistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.
Today, fashionably conservative female preachers such as Dr. Farhat Hashmi are an established feature of Pakistan’s social landscape. But when Ismat started holding her religious classes and conferences for women, she was a pioneer, and President Zia noticed. The country’s most prominent feminists opposed the Hudood laws that called for the stoning and flogging of wicked women, yet here was an educated woman who said that women should seek their rights through Islam, not against it. Zia’s shy, retiring wife, Begum Shafiq, began attending Ismat’s classes. Zia’s son Ijaz ul-Haq told me that in time his whole family came to respect Ismat as a religious scholar. Eventually Zia took the unusual step of appointing her to a government board he set up to collect and distribute zakat, the annual 2.5 percent tithe required in the Quran for charity.
Ismat’s membership on the board made her one of a very few women linked with the early efforts to produce mujahideen, or “fighters in the way of Allah,” for Afghanistan. The zakat money helped support a Deobandi system of seminaries, charities, and militant groups that would become the engine of jihad. Grand Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani called the growing seminaries “fortresses of Islam,” and soon many of them were literal fortresses, stocked with weapons and ammunition and offering military training. Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, the Deobandi clergy, Jamaat-e-Islami, and some smaller Islamist groups were all deeply involved. Donors in Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf states also contributed. A few numbers tell the story. When Zia came to power in 1977, there were about seven hundred seminaries across Pakistan. But by 2004, Karachi alone had at least 1,800 seminaries, of which 1,500 were Deobandi institutions even though Deobandis made up less than a quarter of Pakistan’s population. Nationwide, some seven thousand Deobandi seminaries were registered as of 2009.
Pakistan’s Shiites, who dominated the feudal class that Zia had sidelined, so fiercely opposed the new zakat system that eventually they were excused from paying it. The Shiites, like the Deobandi Sunnis, made up a quarter of the population, but Shiites weren’t allowed to join the jihad or build new seminaries—and in 2004 they had only thirty-six religious schools in Karachi. In time, the Deobandi-dominated state, military, and religious institutions became known as Pakistan’s establishment, and the jihadi militias that this new establishment nurtured became a whip held over the country’s non-Deobandi majority. Back in 1981, however, when some of Pakistan’s first jihadis left for Afghanistan from the giant Binori Town Mosque, not far from the Siddiquis’ house, most Pakistanis saw them as heroes.
Aafia was only a small girl, yet she was caught up in the fever for jihad. The Siddiquis’ neighbors still remember how Ismat used to send her walking around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and handing out religious leaflets. Well-bred young Pakistani girls didn’t usually expose themselves to the view of strange men. But Aafia seemed so innocent and sincere that her neighbors found it hard to object. After all, she was doing it for Islam.
The girl’s hobby was caring for pets. Years later, when visiting reporters asked her sister, Fowzia, about Aafia’s childhood, Fowzia would pull out photo albums and show them page after page of dark-haired little Aafia cuddling her pet rabbit or feeding her goat. Fowzia said that Aafia, at one time or another, kept dogs, ducks, cats, a turtle, a fish, a lamb, geese, goats, pigeons, and parrots. She called her sister a happy child, sweet and eager to please. She once wrote me, “Aafia loved school, had lots of friends, [and] her favorite pastime was to play with dolls and pets.”
Aafia attended the local English-language school for girls in Gulshan. Ismat told audiences that if Muslims wanted to revitalize Islam, they needed to raise children capable of succeeding in the secular realm as well as in religion. As Aafia later summarized her mother’s views, “Unless our younger generation is given a well-rounded Islamic education, geared both toward material and spiritual success, the problems facing the Muslim world may not be solved. Our youth need to be transformed, Insha’Allah, into exemplary Muslims with knowledge of their rights and obligations, while being the world’s leading scientists, artists, economists and philosophers capable of standing up to all the challenges facing Islam in this secular world.”
She studied English, science, and math as well as Arabic, the Quran, and the Sunna. “She was always very good in school and responsibly did her work,” according to her sister. “She could not bear being yelled at and so was very obedient.” Aafia’s teachers were so impressed that they named her head girl, with responsibility for giving speeches and representing the school at public events.
Like the rest of Pakistan, she and her classmates celebrated the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1988 as a great victory for Islam. It was the first in centuries, but Pakistanis felt certain it wouldn’t be the last. The ISI began laying plans to transform the ongoing struggle against India for the disputed province of Kashmir from a nationalistic fight into a holy jihad. Some of Zia’s officials, such as the ISI chief, General Hamid Gul, saw in the Soviet decline and the opening of Central Asia an opportunity for Pakistan to become the nucleus of a revived caliphate.
At sixteen Aafia enrolled in Karachi’s most prestigious secondary
school for girls, St. Joseph’s College for Women, founded by Catholic nuns in 1948. The campus of St. Joseph’s, with its neo-Mughal architecture, green lawns, and long open walkways, was a bit of old Karachi in a city being swallowed by slums and skyscrapers. The wife of Pakistan’s future president Pervez Musharraf had gone to school at St. Joseph’s, and so had other leading Pakistani academics, doctors, and journalists. Of course, in Sehba Musharraf’s day, the students were unveiled, but in 1972 the school was nationalized, and its students began wearing head scarves.
Then, in August 1988, tragedy struck. The Siddiquis’ patron and the Deobandis’ most powerful friend, General Zia ul-Haq, was killed in a still-unsolved plane crash along with several generals and the U.S. ambassador. The CIA put out the view that the Soviets had killed Zia in revenge for their defeat. But some members of Zia’s inner circle blamed the United States, India, and Israel, which, they believed, wanted to stop Zia from expanding the jihad beyond Afghanistan. For them, the year that had begun in joy ended in gloom.
Despite years of propaganda against democracy, the military agreed to hold elections. Benazir Bhutto, the glamorous thirty-five-year-old daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister whom Zia had hanged, decided to run. Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani and assorted other divines waxed apoplectic, warning that no country ruled by a woman ever came to good. But in a stunning rejection of everything that they and Zia stood for, the Pakistanis elected Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party, and she became prime minister. The country that Zia and his men had hoped might spawn a new caliphate instead became, in 1988, the first modern Muslim nation to be led by a woman.
Benazir Bhutto’s success, though, gave Aafia’s mother an idea.
All three Siddiqui children were gifted students, but Aafia was the star. She would graduate from St. Joseph’s in 1989 with an A-I degree in pre-engineering. Like her mother, Aafia was small in stature—at five foot three, as tall as she would ever be—and fair-skinned, with a wide face and brown eyes set under sweeping black eyebrows. Her father wanted her to become a doctor. But Ismat hesitated to send her to a Pakistani university. Girls came under great pressure in Pakistan to marry as soon as they finished secondary school. Ismat wanted Aafia to avoid that trap, and Aafia’s brother, Ali, offered an alternative. Ali himself had gone to university in the United States and was now working as an architect in Houston. Aafia could live with him and attend the University of Houston, a state college with reasonable fees and many students from Pakistan.
Other religious Pakistani families might have balked at sending an unmarried daughter to the United States. But Ismat often reminded listeners that the Quran commanded women, as well as men, to “seek knowledge, even if it takes you to China.” Ismat knew that one reason simple Pakistanis looked up to Bhutto was her degrees from Harvard and Oxford. If Aafia could be armed with similar prestige, she might set an example for a new type of modern Muslim woman—not a corrupt princess like Benazir Bhutto but a true mujahida, after the model of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives. The Siddiquis decided to send her to Houston.
Chapter Four
Asha loathed Eastleigh from the start. Hirsi had installed her and the three children in a concrete two-bedroom flat near the busy Juju Road, with its shoddy little bars and gambling halls. Asha had nothing but contempt for the Christians and pagans who made up most of Kenya’s population, and she feared the impact of Eastleigh’s boozing and prostitution on her children.
Kenya was tacitly supporting Somalia’s opposition groups, including Hirsi’s SSDF, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees gave the Magan family official refugee status. Hirsi wanted all three children to go to the Muslim Girls Secondary School, which allowed boys to attend through the primary grades, and UNHCR agreed to pay their tuition. But only the boy, Mahad, passed the exam. Ayaan and Haweya had to go to the local Kenyan primary school on Juju Road.
Ayaan was ten and started in the fourth grade. Her formal education had been sketchy until then, and she would never make up for what she’d missed in math. But she and her siblings quickly learned English, the lingua franca of educated Kenyans and Somalis. English opened a world of reading for her and Haweya. Ayaan’s first book was Chicken Licken. From there, she moved on to fairy tales, detective stories, and Nancy Drew mysteries. Asha couldn’t afford to buy them books, so Ayaan and her friends passed whatever books they found from hand to hand. Often pages would be torn out, and Ayaan recalled later that she and Haweya would go into bookstores, find new copies of the books, and stand there surreptitiously reading the pages they’d missed.
Her mother tried to teach her children the traditional skills of memorizing and composing Somali verse. All three of them had inherited their father’s phenomenal memory. Relatives later recalled that Haweya could hear a poem just once and know it by heart, making her the quickest of the bunch. But Ayaan could recite a poem after reading it once, and Mahad could recite it after reading it twice. Yet urban Kenya was far from the world of camels and deserts, and Asha found it hard to keep them interested in Somali poetry.
Mahad could do well in school when he made the effort. Their mother wanted him to succeed. “Reach for the stars!” she told him. But she had only the vaguest notion of how one excelled in school. Her ambitions for the boy were traditionally Somali. He should be a warrior, a leader of men, a prince of the clan. He should conquer unbelievers and free Somalia from oppression. She impressed upon all three children the Somali lessons of always being suspicious and ready to fight. She even sent Ayaan out on “fighting practice.” With a female cousin as her coach, Ayaan learned to bite, hit, and scratch an opponent. She also learned how to trick and deceive one, as by pretending to apologize and then hitting back. She was encouraged to pick fights with classmates. If she won, she was surrounded by cheering relatives. If she lost, her coach would hit and criticize her.
But Somalia’s confrontational methods, which could mean survival in the desert, backfired at school in Kenya. After a disagreement with a teacher, Ayaan’s brother, Mahad, set fire to his primary school. He was behaving as he had been taught, but it got him expelled. Later he scored highly enough on a national exam to win a scholarship to the Starehe Boys Centre & School, a British school that was one of the best in Kenya. Yet he was already on the road to trouble.
Ayaan’s father had the authority and knowledge of schools and urban life that her mother lacked. Asha wanted her husband to stay and help raise their children, especially Mahad. But Hirsi would not leave the SSDF, and he kept going back to Addis Ababa, returning to see the family only on short visits. The group’s new leader belonged to Hirsi’s own subclan, and he gave Ayaan’s father the task of broadcasting anti–Siad Barre invective in an hour-long nightly program on the SSDF’s radio station, which was known as Radio Kulmis, or Radio Unity.
In January 1983, Hirsi arranged for his family to rent a large house in a nearby but more affluent area called Kariokor. The new house had a kitchen, a big living room, three upstairs bedrooms used by Asha and the children (Ayaan and Haweya shared a room), and a downstairs bedroom with a separate toilet for Asha’s mother, as well as a garden large enough for the children to play badminton in. By the standards of Eastleigh the house was grand; by the standards of the Somali desert, it was positively palatial. It stood just across the street from a sports field and around the corner from the home of Jinni Boqor, a Somali businessman from Hirsi’s Osman Mahamud lineage who agreed to take care of Asha and the children while their father was away.
“It was the ideal home,” Mahad said. “Easily maintained, close to town, close to schools and to the city center.” The house even included a dining table with matching chairs. These were novelties for Asha and the children, whose only experience of furniture at home had been Somali stools and sleeping mats.
Hirsi was still at loggerheads with his son, and the tension made him and Asha quarrel. One night Asha smashed the dining table to pieces. Later she told Hirsi not to come back. So he returned to Ethiopia when
Ayaan was twelve, and he didn’t reappear in Eastleigh for ten years.
He kept sending Asha money through Jinni Boqor, and Jinni’s nephew Guled Ahmed Yusuf claims that Ayaan never lacked material things. “She was given a lot of love,” Guled said. “The SSDF was taking care of her and her brother and sister because her father was a freedom fighter and we all supported the cause.” But soon thirteen-year-old Ayaan and her siblings learned that Hirsi had taken a new wife in Ethiopia and fathered another daughter. Ayaan says her mother retreated into angry depression: “She began to beat us for the slightest misdemeanor, grabbing our hair, hitting us until she couldn’t lift her hand anymore.” Mahad’s memory of his mother is different, but he agrees that “as a family, we had broken up.” Mahad began skipping school so much that he got expelled. Ayaan later told a reporter that from the age of thirteen to twenty she was “angry at everyone and everything.”
After Ayaan and Haweya finished primary school, they were accepted at the Muslim Girls Secondary School. Ayaan was fourteen. Founded by ethnic Indian Muslims in the 1930s, the school was an oasis of serenity in the middle of Eastleigh’s mayhem. It occupies stone buildings around a neatly trimmed lawn shaded by yellow flowering trees, all surrounded by a wall. The buildings are painted with maxims from the Quran, such as “The best person is the one who benefits others,” “Allah is not merciful to him who is not merciful to others,” and “Do not hate one another.”
At home, though, the situation was deteriorating. Ayaan has written that her mother and grandmother had no concept of adolescence. In the nomadic world of their youth, people were forced to become adults by the time they were fifteen or so. But Asha’s children were in school, an alien world to her. By the time Hirsi left and the children were old enough to evade their mother’s beatings, Asha’s authority had vanished.
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