Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Ayaan lived in the thick of all this. With her fluent English and her secretarial skills, she helped her relatives with their paperwork. The ruling Boqor family of Ayaan’s father’s Osman Mahamud lineage had already established a branch in Canada, while other clansmen had settled in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, which was known to be lenient toward Somali asylum seekers. One Boqor relative whom Ayaan and her brother had rescued from the border camps was a woman named Fadumo. Fadumo had a sister who lived in Switzerland who got Fadumo and her children visas and tickets. Since the sister, however, knew that Switzerland almost never granted asylum to Somalis, she arranged for Fadumo and the children to fly to Switzerland via the Netherlands. When the plane landed at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Fadumo got out and asked for asylum. The plan was obviously risky, but with coaching Fadumo pulled it off, and a week or so after she left Nairobi she sent word back that she and the children were in a Dutch refugee camp.

  Ayaan, at that stage, may have had a plan of her own to reach Europe. She had learned that Mohamud had made it from Russia to Finland and successfully applied for asylum there. Finnish immigration records show that in 1991 Mohamud Mohamed Artan also applied for a residence permit for his wife, “Ayan Hersi Magan,” born in 1969. That was the way Ayaan spelled her name when she lived in Kenya, and 1969 was the correct year of her birth.

  Ayaan, or someone, signed the Finnish documents and sent them back to await a decision in Finland.

  But perhaps Ayaan felt the Finnish route was taking too long. Or perhaps she became angry with Mohamud. She says in her autobiography that she got a letter from a blond Finnish girl who wanted to marry Mohamud herself, asking whether Mohamud and Ayaan were already married. Mohamud, on the other hand, told me he had never had a blond girlfriend or written such a letter—but then he also told me he had never married Ayaan. (Obviously, someone is lying, but what exactly happened between Ayaan and Mohamud is one of those mysteries that I, at least, have not been able to resolve.)

  In any case, Ayaan said nothing to her father about being married when, after a decade away, Hirsi showed up in Nairobi in April 1991. Somalia’s Hawiye clan had driven the Darood out of the important town of Kismayo, and Hirsi and the SSDF were forced to retreat. Ayaan’s mother still couldn’t forgive him for his years of neglect, but he stayed in her apartment anyway.

  At first Ayaan and Haweya were delighted to have the old lion back, and the rest of the clan revered him. Then disappointment set in. Hirsi’s wars had left him penniless. He had no money to pay the agents who were finding other important people tickets and visas to get to the West, and, according to Mahad and other relatives, Asha told Ayaan to stop dreaming about foreign travel and start studying for her A levels so she could get into the University of Nairobi.

  Then Maryan, Ayaan’s overachieving stepmother, turned up in Nairobi with her daughter Ijaabo. Ijaabo even came to stay in Asha’s crowded apartment.

  Ayaan’s mother had given Hirsi the silent treatment in the months since his return. Fed up with the tension, Ayaan’s father took Ijaabo and moved back in with Maryan. To Asha and her children, his decision felt like a public rejection. Ayaan was especially hurt. She had always felt she was her father’s favorite; now he seemed to be siding with her half sisters against her.

  In the midst of these dramas she met a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian named Osman Musse Quarre. As Ayaan tells it in Infidel, her father appeared at her mother’s apartment in a jubilant mood at the end of January 1992. He told his daughter he had met a strapping young Canadian, “fed on North American beef,” who was a member of their own clan. The Canadian, Osman, had come to Nairobi to rescue his relatives—but he was also looking for a wife, and he and Hirsi had met at the mosque. Ayaan says her father offered her to Osman as his bride, and that Osman accepted.

  She also says she told her father that she didn’t want to marry Osman. But Hirsi wouldn’t listen, and the nikhah, or wedding ceremony, was set for the following Saturday.

  Other family members remember things quite differently. Osman himself said years later that he and Ayaan met and liked each other and that afterward their fathers arranged their marriage. Faduma Osman, a relative who later settled in the Netherlands, tells a similar story in more detail: she says Ayaan told her she met Osman when he arrived in Nairobi on his way to the Utangu refugee camp in Mombasa to look for his relatives, and that Osman then returned home to Toronto; but later he returned to Nairobi (in Faduma’s account) after their fathers gave them permission to marry.

  Their fellow clansmen were thrilled that this helpful young woman should be rewarded with a handsome young husband who would take her to the West.

  In Nairobi, only Ayaan’s sister knew that she was already married. But Ayaan claims she had decided, after receiving the letter from the Finnish girl, that actually she wasn’t married. She says she reasoned that since her father hadn’t given her his permission, her marriage to Mohamud wasn’t valid. Not everyone agreed, however. She says in her autobiography that their cousin Ali Wersengeli, who had witnessed the Mogadishu ceremony, heard the news that she was planning to marry someone else and traveled all the way from Somalia to intervene. She says he showed up unannounced on her mother’s doorstep and informed Asha that her daughter was already married to her own half brother’s son.

  What happened after that is even less clear. Ayaan says her brother, Mahad, demanded to know the truth. She says that she told her brother the story and he tore up her wedding certificate from Mogadishu and rushed to her father’s apartment to tell him not to listen to Ali Wersengeli, who was trying to spoil Ayaan’s good fortune. Perhaps Ayaan’s brother saw the family’s passage to North America about to go up in flames. “Mahad’s goal now,” Ayaan wrote in Infidel, “became preventing Ali Wersengeli from intervening before the nikhah, which was only four days away.” She doesn’t explain why, if she didn’t want to marry Osman, she didn’t simply tell her father that she was already married. Instead, she says, she lied to him and claimed there was nothing to Ali Wersengeli’s story.

  Ayaan’s Somali relatives would later conclude that she had lied because she saw Osman as her ticket to the West and didn’t want to lose him. But the psychological truth may be more complex. Ayaan would later confess, many times, to having a propensity to lie, especially to avoid one-on-one confrontations. She would say she “mastered the art of lying” to escape the beatings that were her punishment as a young girl for the slightest defiance. She would write as an adult that she had sworn off lying. Then later she would admit that her first instinct, still, was simply to tell anyone who confronted her what they wanted to hear. “I lie to get out of conflict situations rather than tell the truth,” she would write when she was forty. “If a real estate agent shows me a rental, I’m embarrassed beyond words to say I don’t like it. I invent ridiculous stories to explain my way out of this rather routine and obvious situation, then take the agent to an expensive lunch to apologize.” If, at the age of forty, Ayaan was afraid to say no to a real estate agent, it must have been much harder to say no, at the age of twenty-two, to a father whose love she longed for and whose anger she feared.

  Ayaan’s brother, Mahad, disputes her story that their father pushed her to marry Osman. Mahad also says that he and his mother and sister disapproved of the marriage and that they didn’t even attend the wedding. “I personally believe girls should not marry until they are self-reliant,” he later told a Dutch reporter.

  Faduma Osman says Ayaan arrived at her house on the morning of the wedding. Her girlfriends had gathered to paint her hands and feet with traditional henna wedding designs. Ayaan seemed very happy, and she told the gathering how she had met Osman. “She said that this boy,” Faduma recalled, “she met him when he came to Nairobi to look for his family in the Utanga refugee camp. She said that he is her boyfriend, and he has come back from Canada to marry her.”

  After they had decorated the bride, Faduma says, the women all went to the house of Farah Goure, a c
lan businessman who had taken care of Ayaan and her family while her father was gone and whose place was big enough for a large party. As is customary in Somali weddings, there were two ceremonies, one for the men and another for the women. Faduma says the women’s ceremony lasted from midday until about three in the afternoon, though she herself left around 2 p.m. She says it was a big clan affair with about a hundred guests. She congratulated Ayaan before she went home. “They had a buffet with different kinds of food. It was very nice.”

  But Faduma noticed that Ayaan’s mother wasn’t present. “They said she wasn’t feeling well, something like that. I thought that maybe her mother wants her to stay in Kenya and go to university and work for the family. Or maybe she doesn’t want to be with Ayaan’s stepmother,” Maryan. Of course, Faduma didn’t know what Asha had just learned—that Ayaan was already married to her nephew.

  Faduma’s son Mahad was at the men’s ceremony next door. “It was the traditional wedding,” Mahad told me. “The bride was not present because the women have their own ceremony. One room is for women, and the other is for men.” The men sat on the ground with the imam, Osman, and Ayaan’s father. When the imam asked whether Ayaan agreed to the marriage, her father said she did, and the ceremony was over. “After that, the women started their dance, and it was going on until the night.” The way Faduma’s son heard it, “Her father didn’t know the guy, but she came with him and said she wanted to marry him, and he gave her his blessing.”

  After the nikhah, Osman returned to Canada. Ayaan says that the plan was for them to have a final celebration in Canada before consummating their marriage and beginning their life together. Osman, on the other hand, has said they spent six days together “as man and wife” before he left for Toronto.

  But the Canadian Embassy wouldn’t give Ayaan a visa. Like everyone else in her family, Ayaan had a UNHCR document showing that she was a refugee with the legal right to live in Kenya. She therefore had no right to claim asylum in a third country, as refugees from Somalia’s civil war were doing. Classifying Somalis like her as potential economic migrants, Canada and other Western countries were refusing to let them visit for fear they would stay.

  Ayaan has never explained just how she got around those obstacles. She says her family decided she should go first to Germany, where they had relatives. Her new husband, Osman, sent the money for her ticket and expenses. She stopped in Ethiopia on the way and was due to continue on to Canada.

  What’s certain is that none of this was legal. The Canadian Embassy in Germany was no more likely than the one in Kenya to grant an entry visa to a Somali who was already a legal refugee in Kenya. If Ayaan had planned to enter Canada legally, she would have had to wait for Osman’s request for reunification to grind its way through the Canadian bureaucracy—just as Mohamud’s request was grinding its way through the Finnish bureaucracy.

  More likely, Osman paid an agent to arrange for Ayaan to travel to Germany from Ethiopia. Once in Germany, she would have had to wait for the agent to find either another Somali with a passport willing to lend it to her or a false passport.

  Whatever the exact plan was, Ayaan was poised to leave Africa. She says that she and Haweya were already plotting how she might leave Osman and run away to the United States. She wrote that her mother overheard the two sisters talking and burst into their room. Asha accused Ayaan of destroying her relationship with her brother, the father of the man Ayaan had married in Mogadishu, and she begged Ayaan to tell her father the truth about her secret marriage to her cousin Mohamud.

  Ayaan says she planned to do exactly that, but when she went to see her father “my tongue stuck in my throat” and she left without saying anything. When she came home, she says, her mother begged her not to leave Kenya unless she planned to be a good wife to Osman.

  She couldn’t do that, either, Ayaan wrote. She says that is why her mother refused to say good-bye when she finally left for Ethiopia in July 1992.

  Chapter Nine

  Aafia spent the summer of 1992 in Pakistan. She had won a $5,000 Carroll L. Wilson Award from MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center to write a paper called “Islamization in Pakistan and Its Effect on Women.” Aafia thought Western criticisms of Islam’s treatment of women were pure hypocrisy. It wasn’t Islam that degraded women, she believed—it was Western capitalism.

  The two largest Western human rights groups, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had recently come out with a report condemning the Hudood Ordinances criminalizing sex outside marriage. Called “Double Jeopardy: Police Abuse of Women in Pakistan,” the report drew largely on the work of Pakistani lawyers who had been fighting the Hudood laws for more than ten years. It argued that “the criminalization of adultery and fornication in Pakistan, when coupled with the discrimination against women in law and in practice, has created an extremely adverse and precarious situation for women, especially for women victims of rape.”

  Those laws had been written by the Siddiqui family’s spiritual guide, Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, and Aafia planned to defend them.

  Strange as it may sound, some of her thinking was probably influenced by American feminism. In Cambridge she had attended Take Back the Night rallies at MIT and other colleges. She had listened, appalled but fascinated, as fellow students, often in tears, testified about what activists claimed was an epidemic of date rape on U.S. campuses. The organizers meant to encourage women to stand up to male sexual violence. But to Aafia the rallies confirmed the truth of what Islamists were saying: that by failing to segregate men and women and by creating a youth culture focused on romance and sex (inflamed by alcohol, besides), Western society had horribly endangered its young women.

  MIT has never released the study that Aafia wrote, so it’s impossible to know exactly what she said. But she later told the FBI that American men had taken advantage of the feminist movement to make women go out to work rather than taking care of their families. Muslim women, she said, were treated with more respect. She claimed she had written a book about all this and that she had begun by interviewing American women about how they had come to be homeless.

  During her 1992 summer break, she had no trouble arranging interviews in Pakistan with the authors of the Hudood laws. The mufti and others were family friends, and they remembered her from childhood. They naturally applauded her approach to the subject. “I was impressed,” said Ijaz ul-Haq, Zia’s son and now a parliamentarian from Lahore. “She was a very intelligent girl.” Ul-Haq had asked his deputy to help Aafia collect some statistics.

  Ul-Haq described her as “a beautiful girl” with a “very charming face” and “fair complexion.” She was “very religious-minded” and wore “a very sort of traditional dress and hijab. She was very keen regarding her studies. She just seemed like a bright and enlightened girl and keen to know and keen to learn. She seemed like a nice, innocent girl.”

  It’s unclear what else Aafia did that summer in Pakistan. But since, within a few months of her return, she would begin volunteering for an Islamic charity implicated in the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, it seems worth exploring the extraordinary ferment in Pakistan that ultimately led to the bombing.

  Benazir Bhutto, hated by the Islamists and charged with corruption, had been ousted by Pakistan’s military-religious complex the year after Aafia left for the United States. Bhutto’s replacement after the 1990 elections was Nawaz Sharif, a relatively pliable Punjabi industrialist. As for Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, the ISI, its new director was Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, a fervent lay Deobandi preacher. Nasir’s vision of Pakistan, as the Pakistani scholar Hassan Abbas has written, “was that of an Islamic state that was obliged to help out Muslims in distress wherever they were.”

  Under Nasir, the ISI’s efforts included secret military aid to Bosnian Muslims who opposed a brutal attempt by Serbian Christians to “cleanse” parts of the former Yugoslavia; secret training of Muslim separatists in the Philippines; secret deliveries of cash t
o Islamists in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia; and support for other restive Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Province.

  The evolving jihad also included “Arab Afghans” operating partly out of the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. These were Arabs, for the most part, who with U.S. and Pakistani help had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. By the early 1990s, with their main objective accomplished, they were casting about to enlarge their jihad against other unbelievers and oppressors of Muslims. One key figure in their plans was a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden. He had helped establish an elaborate system of financing, arming, training, attacking, and propagandizing for jihad that would become known as al-Qaeda. The group also retained close ties with Pakistan’s ISI.

  Less famous than bin Laden, but of great future importance both to Aafia and to the bold attacks that followed over the next decade, were the members of a single, inbred Pakistani extended family known as the al-Baluchi. The al-Baluchi originally hailed from Baluchistan, but in the 1960s the family patriarch and his brother, both of whom were Deobandi preachers, moved the family to Kuwait. The most notorious member of the al-Baluchi is the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, widely known as KSM, but the first al-Baluchi plotter to reach the public eye was his nephew, the man known to history as Ramzi Yousef. It’s still unclear how Aafia first encountered this sinister family, many members of whom had moved back to Pakistan in the 1980s to participate in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. But around the time she was returning to school in Massachusetts, Ramzi Yousef arrived in the United States. His mission was to coordinate the first attack on the World Trade Center a few months later. His troops in that attack were recruited from the Al-Kifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, an organization that was already widely known as the main recruiting office for jihad in the United States.

  Al-Kifah also had a chapter in Boston. And soon after Aafia returned to MIT from Karachi, she began volunteering to work for it.