Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Fifteen-year-old Mahad began drinking in Eastleigh’s bars. Haweya dropped out of Muslim Girls and started wearing short skirts and hanging out in afternoon discos. Even Ayaan began sneaking forbidden kisses with a friend of her brother. Terrified that Haweya was going to shame the family, Asha enlisted Mahad to discipline the girl. He would haul Haweya out of bars, tie her up, and beat her. “Sometimes in those teenage years, the house would almost explode with the rage it contained,” Ayaan later wrote. To other Somalis, the Magan teenagers were simply running wild. They got a reputation for being brilliant but also stubborn and disobedient. Ayaan says that Haweya “made friends but always ended up fighting with them.” An uncle told me that that was true of all Asha’s children. “This is a genius family,” the uncle said, “very intelligent. But remember, genius is very close to madness.”

  Ayaan and Haweya still loved to read. From Nancy Drew they moved on to Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but they also read Jacqueline Susann, Barbara Cartland, and Harlequin romances. “What we learned was that white people were always having these wonderful adventures that we couldn’t have, either because we weren’t allowed or because we couldn’t afford to,” Ayaan later said. If their mother had known they were reading such racy stories, she surely wouldn’t have approved. Once, when Ayaan made fun of her Quran teacher, the teacher and Asha beat her so badly that she ended up in the hospital. Haweya was even more rebellious. When Hirsi stopped sending money for a while and Asha was evicted from the Kariokor house, she sent Haweya and Mahad to live with relatives in Somalia. Ayaan stayed with her mother and grandmother in a small apartment on Park Road.

  A new teacher of Islamic studies arrived at Muslim Girls. She was Sister Aziza, the product of a new Saudi school for female religious teachers. She was a pretty woman and seemed very kind, and she talked about Islam in a way that Ayaan hadn’t heard before. Sister Aziza said that Islam wasn’t just a religion—it was a blueprint for life, and if a girl wanted to be a real Muslim she had to follow it down to the last detail.

  Ayaan, now sixteen, had never been especially religious, though Nairobi swarmed with preachers of every type. Muslim or not, most Africans believed in the occult. For 30 Kenyan shillings you could buy a pamphlet that described how to discover devil worshippers. Sister Aziza naturally opposed all that, and she invited Ayaan and some other girls to meet after school at a community center across the road, and at her house. There she taught them about “true Islam.”

  Following Sister Aziza’s example, Ayaan began praying five times a day, paying careful attention to the way in which she prayed. She experimented with a head scarf and later with a long black cloak like the one Sister Aziza had come back from Saudi Arabia wearing. Nowadays Somali girls who don’t swathe themselves in such garb are liable to be harassed or worse, but Ayaan was one of the first women in Nairobi to wear one. She later wrote that “it sent a message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim. All those other little girls with their white head scarves were children, hypocrites. I was the star of God.”

  Spiritually, Islam didn’t do much for Ayaan. She once told an interviewer that she had never felt exalted by prayer. “I never reached a transcendental state; there was no inner light.” But as a path to power and glory it had an immediate appeal.

  Sister Aziza told Ayaan and her classmates that Muslims were obliged to wage jihad. Jihad, she told them, had many meanings. It meant the struggle within a person to submit to Allah’s will, and it meant defending Muslims against unbelievers. She showed the girls gruesome pictures of Muslims being killed and tortured in Kashmir, Afghanistan, and other dangerous places. She told Ayaan and her classmates that a cabal of Jews, Christians, and other unbelievers had done those things to the Muslims. She said the same “Zionist-Crusader” conspiracy had worked for centuries to weaken Islam. To regain its rightful place as the one true religion, Muslims needed to restore sharia law and re-create the caliphate.

  Ayaan had never met a Jew; she barely knew any white people. Now, in high school, Sister Aziza encouraged her to hate Jews. “Suddenly we hated Israel with a passion. We didn’t even know where Israel was. I was 16, and I had never seen an Israeli, but we hated them because it was ‘Muslim’ to hate them.” She has often said how deeply the message sank in. “I must confess to a deep emotional hatred of Jews that I felt as a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old living in Kenya. You almost can’t help it. You become part of something bigger.” Hatred became the fire that fueled her religious fervor. “It was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate,” she later told The Spectator.

  Sister Aziza’s classes were only one instance of the way political Islam, stirred up in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, was beginning to be felt in other countries. The Muslim Brotherhood, or al-Ittihad al-Islami, as its Somali branch was called, had already reached Eastleigh in the person of a man named Boqol Sawm, a gaunt Somali preacher who, like Sister Aziza, had been given a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia. Ayaan began attending lectures sponsored by the Brotherhood at the community center near her school. Boys and girls sat separately on folding chairs or on factory-made Persian rugs. Very solemnly they discussed the law that God had laid down for them in the Quran and the Sunna. But Ayaan never became a true believer. For one thing, she was too interested in boys. Even at the height of her infatuation with Sister Aziza and the Brotherhood, she still slipped away with her brother’s Kenyan friend. And, after Haweya returned from Somalia and started cracking jokes about her veil, Ayaan’s zeal began to fade.

  One of the last events she attended at the community center took place in 1989. Salman Rushdie, a British author of Indian Muslim descent, had satirized the life of the Prophet in his novel The Satanic Verses, and all over the Islamic world politicians were vying to show their commitment to Islam by denouncing Rushdie. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that required Muslims to kill the writer. Sister Aziza invited Ayaan to join a group that planned to burn The Satanic Verses outside the community center. Although Ayaan went along, the book burning failed to move her. She didn’t doubt that Rushdie deserved to die, but the small crowd and the way the damp book smoldered struck her as pitiful.

  Ayaan finished high school in 1988. Her scores were too low to qualify for the A level exams required for university, but she was very pretty, with creamy brown skin and her father’s sparkling eyes and narrow forehead.

  Haweya talked her into training to become a secretary. The Valley Secretarial College was several bus rides away from Eastleigh, in Kilimani, a smart section of villas and hotels favored by Westerners. Watching the European and U.S. diplomats and aid workers who zipped into and out of Kilimani’s shopping centers and restaurants in their four-wheel-drive vehicles as she trudged along on foot toward her bus gave Ayaan a window into a Western lifestyle that she had read about and seen in movies.

  Very soon, though, another bright future seemed possible in Somalia.

  The waning of the Cold War meant that the United States felt free to withdraw its long support from Siad Barre, which left him unable to pay his soldiers. Several important clans in northern Somalia, meanwhile, joined Hirsi’s SSDF in rising up against the dictator. When Ayaan and Haweya finished their secretarial course in the spring of 1990, Asha and the clan’s elders agreed that they should join their brother, Mahad, in Somalia’s capital and look for jobs.

  The move seemed tantalizing. If their father and his rebel group succeeded in overthrowing Somalia’s government, the girls wouldn’t need to work. They’d be princesses.

  Chapter Five

  It was snowing when seventeen-year-old Aafia arrived in Houston at the end of 1989, a freak event that seemed to illustrate the sheer strangeness of her new surroundings. Not that Aafia didn’t know about the United States. Ever since she could remember, the arrogant superpower had loomed, interfering in Pakistani politics and luring Muslims off the straight path. One lament of religious leaders such as Grand Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani was that so many ambitious
Pakistanis wanted to go there. The United States might be the Great Satan, but having a foothold in either America or the United Kingdom virtually defined membership in Pakistan’s achieving middle class.

  Aafia’s architect brother, Ali—a trim, quiet man with a neat beard who in the United States went by his first name, Muhammad—had become a pillar of Houston’s 50,000-strong Muslim community since he’d arrived twelve years earlier. By the time Aafia started classes, Ali was busy designing a huge new mosque for the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.

  Pakistani and Indian immigrants dominated the Islamic Society, which was known for its strict adherence to the same Hanafi school of Islamic law espoused by the Deobandis. They were also numerous on the 550-acre campus of the University of Houston, where Aafia started classes in the spring semester of 1990. Aafia wanted to study political science, but her parents insisted that she enroll in the premed program. Like most UH students, she commuted to classes, in her case from Ali’s apartment.

  Houston’s humid climate and flat brown landscape weren’t unlike Karachi’s, but other things took getting used to: the shameless mingling of the sexes, the sinful consumption of alcohol, the forbidden scenes blaring from TV sets even in public places—and, above all, the careless wealth. The average American income was forty times higher than the average Pakistani income. The lack of poverty also made it very costly to hire servants, which meant that American women had to do chores that middle-class Pakistani women didn’t. Aafia had to learn how to cook, clean, and drive a car.

  Several other Siddiqui relatives lived in Houston. All were aspiring professionals—earnest, hardworking, upwardly mobile. One of her brother’s American friends, who felt he knew the local Siddiquis well, said they reminded him of Victorians. “Think of Mary Poppins and throw in a few headscarves,” he wrote years later in an e-mail to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan that appeared on Web sites supporting Aafia. Aafia didn’t drink, she didn’t dance, and heaven forbid that she should date. She read no novels, avoided movies, and stayed away from television except for the news. Ali’s American friend said she wouldn’t have it any other way: “Her interests were pretty much limited to her schoolwork and religion.” The friend saw her roughly once a week at her brother’s house. Her conversation usually centered on Islam. “The living and vibrant Islam she talked about, the Islam of mercy and redemption, the Islam of forgiveness and love, sounded very much like the Catholicism that my mother talks about,” said the friend, who identified himself only as Andrew.

  Her only extracurricular activity was to join the university’s branch of the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada. Then, as now, the Muslim Students Association was the largest such student group in the world. Students from the Muslim Brotherhood had founded it, with Saudi money, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963. The University of Houston had opened an early chapter in the 1970s. It was dominated by Islamists who argued that the Muslim world’s nation-states were for the most part illegitimate and that their former colonizers manipulated their governments in ways that kept the ummah weak and divided.

  Halfway through Aafia’s first year in Houston, a crisis struck that seemed to prove them right. On August 2, 1990, Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait. Within days, the United States dispatched troops to help defend neighboring Saudi Arabia. In November, the UN Security Council authorized Washington and its allies to attack Iraq if Saddam refused to withdraw from Kuwait. Saddam refused, and the United States commenced Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991, a day after the UN deadline expired. Soon a ground assault was launched—from Saudi Arabia—and by February Saddam’s troops were in full retreat. Some were strafed and bombed as they drove the choked “Highway of Death” that led from Kuwait to Iraq. By April, the United States and its allies had won.

  The Persian Gulf War was the first U.S. war to be covered on a twenty-four-hour television-news cycle, and Aafia watched as it unfolded. Before the war started, many Americans feared getting bogged down in another Vietnam. Saddam promised the United States and its allies “the mother of all battles,” and there was much cautious talk about the need for the U.S. government to gain international approval and to keep the war focused on limited objectives. When the bombing of Baghdad began, Americans gathered around their TV sets, listening apprehensively to the sound of sirens. But as the pyrotechnics continued and few U.S. troops were killed, the televised war took on the aspect of a sporting event, complete with instant replays.

  For Aafia and her fellow worshippers at Houston’s Islamic Society, the spectacle was unbearable. Many hated the secular dictator Saddam Hussein, but landing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia struck them as a naked grab for the region’s oil. They also felt the Kuwaitis and the Saudis had violated Islam by inviting Western troops to protect them. They wished Muslims had been able to settle the conflict among themselves. Under the rule of al wala’ wal bara’, or “love and hate in the way of Allah,” Muslims were discouraged from befriending Christians and Jews and were never supposed to side with Christians and Jews against other Muslims.

  The prayer leader at the Islamic Society attributed the crisis to Muslims’ lack of faith. “The lands of the Muslims are splintered into small states,” he sadly told his congregation, “fighting Allah and fighting each other and seeking protection from their enemies.”

  When some American reporters visited the society, days before the bombing of Baghdad, to ask members how they felt, angry men told them to leave. In Pakistan, the army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Mirza Aslam Beg (whose brother lived next door to the Siddiquis in Karachi) denounced the allied attack on Iraq as part of a “Zionist strategy” to undermine Islam. Many Muslims in Houston agreed. After the war ended, President George H. W. Bush gave a speech, on September 11, 1991, describing the peace as a chance to create “a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.” To some Muslims, the term “new world order” sounded suspiciously like the world government that some clerics saw as a sign of the Dajjal, or Antichrist, who Islamic eschatologists say will rule the earth before Jesus Christ returns to kill him and usher in a reign of peace. (Muslims regard Jesus Christ as a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament.)

  Needless to say, Aafia didn’t join the celebration that drew 300,000 Houstonians downtown during the last weekend of May 1991 to welcome home the soldiers of Operation Desert Storm. She already knew she wouldn’t stay much longer in Houston. She had made straight As her first year, and she came close to winning a national prize for an essay she wrote titled “How America’s Intercultural Attitudes Shape a Multicultural World.” The University of Houston wasn’t challenging enough for her. After much prayer and discussion with her mother, Aafia had set her sights on something higher.

  The Siddiquis’ spiritual guide, Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, wrote that mastering Western science and technology was for Muslims “the greatest need of our time.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology seemed the very citadel of that kind of learning. Aafia applied for a transfer, and, to the delight of her family, MIT not only accepted her but offered her a scholarship.

  The Siddiquis felt that Aafia had been offered a chance too good to be missed. And so, in the fall of 1991, she packed her bags and moved from Houston, Texas, to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Chapter Six

  Somalia in the spring of 1990 did not prove to be the refuge Ayaan had hoped it would.

  She and Haweya went to stay with their father’s first wife, Maryan Farah Warsame, and Maryan’s two daughters, Arro and Ijaabo. As the mother of their half sisters, Maryan was considered their closest adult relative. The three women lived in a large white villa in Mogadishu’s fashionable Casa Popolare district. Maryan treated Ayaan and Haweya with perfect courtesy, and Arro and Ijaabo welcomed them as sisters. But Ayaan found herself so jealous of Maryan and her daughters that she couldn’t stand being in the same house.

  In t
he twelve years since Asha had gone to Saudi Arabia with the children, Maryan had become one of the most influential and respected women in Somalia. She ran the department in the Ministry of Education that managed Somalia’s Academy of Sciences and Arts; her group financed and published research in Somali poetry, music, and oral history. She was the foreign secretary of the Somali Women’s Democratic Organization, and she represented Somali women at seminars and international conferences on women’s issues. Since 1984, she had also served as one of only seven women in Somalia’s 177-member Parliament.

  The contrast between her purposeful life and the aimless, self-pitying life that Asha led in Nairobi was extreme. Ayaan’s mother had to beg Hirsi’s relatives for money; Maryan had a paying job. Asha and her mother shared a walk-up flat with a goat; Maryan had decorated her villa with imported Western furniture. Asha quarreled with everyone, while the elegant Maryan was admired even by the powerful men of her clan. Most galling of all, both of Maryan’s daughters were attending university, whereas Ayaan had barely graduated from high school, and Haweya and Mahad had dropped out. Ayaan wrote in her autobiography that the unspoken hurt and envy made her feel tense whenever Maryan was around. “I always felt there was a crosscurrent of something we weren’t supposed to feel, let alone voice.”

  Maryan’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, Arro, was a top medical student at Somali National University, where more than a quarter of the students were women. Ayaan had always felt that, compared with her brother and sister, she herself was most like their father. But Arro looked like him, too, and she radiated his self-assurance. Arro was strikingly beautiful and took a keen interest in clothes. She had a large collection of pastel direhs, the sheer Somali dress worn over a half-slip and brassiere, and she wore her outfits with matching high heels. She liked Italian clothes, too, and she hoped to transfer to an Italian university. The cheap black nylon veil that had made Ayaan feel important in Nairobi failed to impress the stylish Arro.