Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  “Our relationship was always strained,” Ayaan later said of Arro. “That she was from another mother is in itself a source of tension: polygamy leads to enormous jealousy.”

  Arro’s younger sister was more like the girls Ayaan knew at home in Nairobi. Seventeen-year-old Ijaabo liked the Brotherhood. She wore the all-concealing jilbab gown and was about to start classes at a Somali university where the Muslim Brothers exerted great influence. She saw it as her religious duty to show her newfound half sisters affection. Ayaan found her sweetness cloying and false.

  She would have liked to join their father in the coastal town of Eyl, where the SSDF had set up its own administration in their clan’s historic territory. But it was too dangerous. The civil war wasn’t going as the rebels had planned. Rather than surrender to the SSDF and its allies, Siad Barre’s army seemed to be dissolving. Soldiers from southern clans such as the Hawiye were forming their own clan militias and attacking the Darood.

  Ayaan struck up a relationship with a young imam, then broke it off. “I was violating all the codes.” She could belong in Somalia, as she hadn’t in Kenya and other places where she had lived, but there was a price to pay for belonging. “Everyone was involved in everyone else’s business. The complete lack of privacy, of individual space, and the social control were suffocating.”

  She and Haweya left Maryan’s house to move in with an aunt on their mother’s side of the family. This aunt was the director of Digfeer Hospital, where Ayaan had been born, and she found both sisters jobs as secretaries with the United Nations. Ayaan’s new position was with a small office of the UN Development Program, where her boss, “a rather bewildered Englishman,” gave Ayaan her first picture of Western bafflement in the Third World. Despite the warfare creeping ever closer, the Englishman was helping the government lay down rural telephone lines. He spoke no Somali, and Ayaan ended up translating for him. He couldn’t understand why the Somalis kept tearing up his phone lines and selling them. Ayaan saw him as timid and unwilling to assert his authority.

  Order in the capital started breaking down. As President Siad Barre’s fellow Marehan clansmen came under attack in the countryside, they poured into Mogadishu looking for safety. Maryan, being a successful Marehan, was expected to house her refugee kinsmen. But it was getting dangerous to be Marehan even in Mogadishu, and Maryan’s relatives brought machine guns with them and set them up outside her villa.

  Some Somalis thought about getting out. Somalia was so poor that even before the civil war, thousands of Somalis drowned each year trying to reach Yemen in small boats hoping to find jobs in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The ultimate dream destinations, however, were Europe and the United States. Everyone had seen pictures of the Westerners’ beautiful houses and cars.

  Yet the West was unreachable for all but a handful of the richest and luckiest Africans. Western countries granted visas only to those who had scholarships, guaranteed jobs, or large overseas bank accounts. Ayaan’s half sister Arro said she would get a visa through her university to study medicine in Italy. For Ayaan and Haweya, the doors to the Western paradise seemed closed.

  Then one day Ayaan went to visit her mother’s stepsister, Khadija. Khadija introduced her to a young man. Ayaan writes in her autobiography that he was her first cousin, the son of her mother’s half brother Muhammad. The young man himself, Mohamud Mohamed Artan, denies that relationship. But, cousin or not, young Mohamud had discovered a promising route out of Africa.

  He was two years older than Ayaan, and he had received a scholarship to study medicine in Russia. Many elite Somalis had been granted such scholarships during the Siad Barre years, but lately they had become more valuable. Ayaan wrote that Mohamud was “utterly gorgeous, the malest man I’d ever seen,” and that she fell in love with him.

  Mohamud’s free pass to Russia offered him a route to the West via Finland. During the Cold War, Finland had established a rule that anyone who made it out of the Soviet Union into Finland would receive political asylum. Now the Iron Curtain was gone and the Soviet Union was about to dissolve, but the Finnish rule on automatic asylum remained in force. Somalis discovered that if they could get to Russia and make their way to Finland, they would automatically have the right to stay—along with free health care, free education, and a monthly stipend.

  Years later, after Mohamud became an emergency room doctor in a hospital outside Helsinki, he recalled the allure of the West for Somalis of his generation. “All the things they like and see—the cars, the beautiful clothes, everything that is very good—are in the West. Everyone wanted to go there.”

  Ayaan wrote that Mohamud asked her to marry him and she agreed. But since he was leaving soon, and there wasn’t time to get her father’s permission, they decided to enter a secret marriage. A distant cousin named Ali Wersengeli and another man whom Ayaan didn’t know were the only witnesses to the ceremony, though she says she and Mohamud had their picture taken after an imam pronounced them man and wife. Somalis disapprove of such marriages, especially in the case of virgins, who ought to be given away by their fathers. But secret marriages aren’t uncommon. “As for my father’s family,” Ayaan wrote, “they wouldn’t really like it, but nobody could really oppose a marriage between maternal cousins.”

  According to Ayaan, she and Mohamud spent one night together in a cheap motel. Mohamud, for his part, has told different stories. Once he told the Finnish reporter Juha-Pekka Tikka that there was more to their relationship than that. Later Mohamud told me that he and Ayaan had never married at all and she had made the whole story up. Ayaan wrote that losing her virginity was painful and disgusting, and that Mohamud dropped her off in the morning at her great-aunt Khadija’s house and left for Russia the next day. She washed and prayed that she wasn’t pregnant. She has said that the only people she told about her marriage were her sister and Khadija.

  Her father’s rebel group, meanwhile, was losing its bid to take over the country. The SSDF had weakened Siad Barre, but it couldn’t take the capital. Hirsi’s people saw themselves as members of the Osman Mahamud lineage and of the Majerteen subclan and thus as distinct from Siad Barre’s Marehan subclan. But the rival Hawiye clan viewed both President Siad Barre and the Majerteen rebels as fellow members of the same big Darood clan. One or another Darood group had ruled the country since independence, and the Hawiye had had enough.

  Unpaid Hawiye soldiers began robbing and killing unprotected Darood civilians on the streets of Mogadishu. One night Ayaan and Haweya were held up by a man with a knife; they got away by pretending to be members of another clan. The United Nations decided to close its offices in Mogadishu. Ayaan’s boss was evacuated, and she lost her job.

  Asha, in Nairobi, heard that Darood girls were being raped, and she begged her children to come home to Kenya. Their brother raised clan money for Ayaan and Haweya to ride out on the back of a pickup truck. He also found a cousin to escort them. They left in November 1990, taking a roundabout route to avoid the Hawiye. Ayaan didn’t feel safe until they had crossed into Kenya. When they reached Nairobi, Asha was so glad to see them that Ayaan didn’t want to spoil her mother’s rare good mood, so she said nothing about her secret marriage.

  Other Darood clansmen streamed out of Somalia by the tens of thousands, and soon Hawiye militias were chasing not just the Darood in the capital but also those who lived in the fertile Shabelle valley, where much of the country’s food grew. The Darood exodus would strip the country of much of its educated class, and it came to a head on January 27, 1991, when Siad Barre, who had ruled Somalia since Ayaan was born, landed in Nairobi. After all the years that Ayaan’s father had opposed him, Somalia’s strongman ended up as another Darood refugee like Hirsi and his family.

  Chapter Seven

  Aafia had requested a room at McCormick Hall. The luxurious university tower overlooking the Charles River was MIT’s only all-female dormitory. Her first semester whizzed by in a blur. Hoping to get quickly beyond her premed requirements (her parents were
still insisting that she become a doctor), she had signed up for nine science and math courses, and she passed them all splendidly. But in the spring she reduced her load to three classes, including one on her favorite subject, Asian religions. Seemingly reserved, she impressed professors and fellow students alike as pleasant, hardworking, and superbly organized.

  Conservative Christian and Orthodox Jewish women also sought out McCormick Hall, but Aafia formed no close friendships with them. Mindful of representing Islam, she was invariably polite and helpful to non-Muslims—and alert to any chance of making a convert, an act that she and other pious Muslims believed was sure to gain a believer a rich reward in paradise. Otherwise she kept her distance.

  She often privately reminded other Muslims of the Quranic verse that says, “Let not the believers take unbelievers for their friends.” The Americans she met liked her, though they never felt they knew her well. “She was religious, but that wasn’t unusual at McCormick,” one former resident told Boston Magazine later. Marnie Biando, who worked at McCormick’s front desk, remembered Aafia as unassertive: “She was just nice and soft-spoken.”

  Her mother’s daughter, Aafia gravitated toward volunteer work. At MIT’s Public Service Center she helped clean up public playgrounds. As a junior she received a $1,200 fellowship to work forty hours a week setting up science fairs and “discovery clubs” for a poor elementary school. She even won the center’s award for public service—twice. (“They couldn’t award me any more, because two times was the limit for one person,” she recalled.) She was so good with computers that other residents and even the staff at McCormick turned to her for help in navigating the emerging World Wide Web, and she wrote several articles showing fellow students how to download free programs from the Internet.

  In Cambridge as in Houston, though, most of her nonacademic activities revolved around the Muslim Students Association. One MSA member from neighboring Wellesley College wrote later that she became “the heart behind the MSA of Greater Boston.”

  On behalf of MIT’s MSA, Aafia helped persuade the university to provide a separate prayer room for Muslim women next door to McCormick at Ashdown House. She also asked the cafeteria to provide a wider array of halal food. (Until then, Muslim students had been eating from the kosher menu.) She organized a Muslim study group to meet in the dorm’s penthouse conference room, with its views of the Boston skyline. By the time she had finished, the MSA was recommending McCormick Hall to incoming Muslims as a comfortable environment that also “caters to your needs as a Muslim woman.”

  Aafia met a fellow Deobandi in the MSA who became a close friend. A slender, delicate-looking Muslim of Indian descent who was raised in Zimbabwe, Suheil Laher was an engineering student so serious about his religion that he wanted to become a Deobandi alim, or scholar. The MSA’s executive board invited Aafia and Laher to contribute to a package of materials (which the national organization published in 1996, a year after she graduated) on how to start a new MSA chapter.

  Suheil Laher described how new MSA chapters could run Friday prayers. One good topic for preaching was “supporting our suffering and persecuted Muslim brothers and sisters in other parts of the world (jihad).”

  Aafia’s article dealt with setting up a dawah or “preaching” table inviting people to learn more about Islam: “First make sure the intention for this effort is only to please Allah,” she wrote. “We need to ask ourselves this question over and over again. While we may have many shortcomings, still, the power of dua [prayer] is great. Imagine our humble, but sincere daw’ah effort turning into a major daw’ah movement in this country! Just imagine it! And us, reaping the reward of everyone who accepts Islam through this movement, through years to come. . . . Think and plan big: Allah’s powers are not to be underestimated.”

  She proposed making the table look attractive. The best lure, she said, would be free English translations of the Quran. Students could find places on the Internet that would mail them dawah literature and translations of the Quran to give away. A Muslim sitting behind the table should always “use hikmah (wisdom), be cheerful and friendly, and never be rude or get upset at anyone.” She conceded that the topics of “jihad and women in Islam” were the hardest to explain to non-Muslims. Yet she urged MSA members not to “water down” the divine teachings to suit Western sensibilities. “Our job as da’ees is only to honestly convey the message in the best manner using hikmah, but not changing the message in doing so. It is up to Allah, and not to us, to make people accept Islam.”

  When she first arrived at MIT, Aafia wore the ordinary Pakistani shalwar kameez—a tunic and loose trousers, often with a scarf tossed across her shoulders. But in time she adopted the long coat and nunlike veil favored by the Muslim Brotherhood.

  More liberal Pakistani students steered clear of her and her tables. The figure of the “hijabi sister” who goes around instructing Muslim slackers wasn’t as common then on campus as she is now, but the Pakistanis recognized the type. One man described Aafia as “well brought up, in the manner of Pakistani girls,” but a “busybody.” Another recalled Aafia and her friends as people who would stop Muslim strangers and say, “Hello, brother.” “They were the ones with scarves who used to get after us to come to the association meetings,” he told the BBC years later. “I remember Aafia as being sweet, mildly irritating but harmless. You would run into her now and then distributing pamphlets.” Some Muslim girls at McCormick found her more than irritating. “She was a maniac,” one said, recalling how Aafia used to nag her to pray and wear a head scarf.

  Chapter Eight

  For the first time in a long time, Ayaan’s mother, Asha, felt needed. Somalia had fallen violently apart, and by the spring of 1991 she had a dozen relatives camped on the cement floor of her small Nairobi apartment. Ayaan and her siblings were also in demand, especially for their precious Kenyan residence permits and knowledge of Swahili and English. In February, Ayaan impressed the clan when she and her brother, Mahad, extracted more than twenty relatives from a UNHCR border camp and drove them to Nairobi. Ayaan also made the rounds of jails, trying to free refugees who had been caught outside the camps without permits. “She was a sweet girl, nice and caring, and she was helping the people who came from Somalia,” recalled Faduma Osman, a relation on Ayaan’s father’s side who got to know her during this crisis.

  The Somali refugees soon doubled Eastleigh’s population. Rents more than doubled, from 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month to 7,500. The new arrivals included former high government officials as well as canny merchants. Those people weren’t about to hang around Kenya, dodging policemen. The trickle of Somalis bound for North America and Europe turned into a flood.

  As the Refugee Convention of 1951 was interpreted during the Somali crisis, a nation violated international law if it returned refugees to a place where they had “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular political group or political opinion.” Displaced Somalis therefore learned that if they could set foot on Western European or North American soil, they stood a good chance of receiving asylum. As in Finland, once there, they could legally send their children to school and collect welfare benefits. But since the only safe way to reach the West was by airplane, only the wealthiest Somalis could afford to try it at first.

  The Somalis who obtained asylum sent money back to their relatives and clan militias. They also served as “anchors” for other family members, who then applied for visas and residence permits that were granted to reunite families. The exact rules varied by country; they took time to understand, and they shifted unpredictably. All over Eastleigh, though, Somalis began figuring them out.

  The first problem was to obtain a passport and a visa. Somalia no longer had a government, much less a passport office, and Western countries had stopped giving Somalis visas because they seemed unlikely ever to go home. Only Somalis with foreign passports, especially Western ones, were truly free to travel. And so Africa’s
trapped Somalis began begging their overseas relatives to “lend” their passports to other family members of roughly the same age. Then, after the borrower reached his destination, he would discard the passport or mail it back to its owner and apply for asylum as a refugee.

  What started as a kind of family charity soon became an industry. For a fee, overseas Somalis known as mukhali, or agents, would help their countrymen in Eastleigh get fraudulent passports and visas. The agents would direct them to countries likely to grant them asylum at any given moment. They would also advise their clients what they should tell officials, procuring intelligence on effective stories by paying other Somalis who sat in on immigration interviews as government translators. The total fee for an agent’s help could range from $750 for the loan of a valid passport to $10,000 for a full-service trip to the West. “If you could raise enough money, usually with the help of one of your relatives already in one of these countries, then you belong to the lucky few who will have access to a life without hunger and with free health care and housing and the opportunity to smuggle in more of your relatives now in refugee camps or some other limbo land,” Ayaan wrote later in her memoir, Nomad.

  Many Somalis who arrived that way were in fact refugees under the rules of the 1951 Refugee Convention because they had no legal right to stay in Kenya and their lives would be at risk if they returned to Somalia. But their passage to the West was often greased with fraud. Studies would later show that, of the roughly 50,000 Somalis who applied successfully for asylum in Europe during the 1990s, fewer than 10 percent arrived legally, on their own travel documents, with proper visas. Of course the Somalis felt they had no other choice, and the rules and regulations of alien Western states meant nothing to them.