Chapter Ten
Ayaan had an uncle in Düsseldorf who was supposed to put her up when she arrived in Frankfurt in the summer of 1992. But after one night he sent her to stay with some other relatives in Bonn. Ayaan says she walked for hours in Bonn, just taking in a world that was new to her. Everything was so clean, so rich, so peaceful. She claims that the idea of running away came to her there. She says she wanted to be free. “I wanted to be a person, an individual, with a life of my own.”
Her first thought was to make it to England. That’s where most Somalis wanted to go. Thanks to her Kenyan education, she spoke fluent English and felt she already knew the country. But she says the son of her Somali hosts told her she would have to get a visa first. Staying in Germany wasn’t an option because Germany wasn’t accepting Somali applications for asylum that summer. Meanwhile, she knew her distant relation Fadumo and many other fellow clansmen had been granted asylum in the Netherlands. She decided to go there.
Ayaan had Fadumo’s telephone number with her. She called and said she wanted to visit. Then she went down to the Bonn railway station and bought a ticket to Amsterdam.
On July 24, 1992, she arrived at Amsterdam’s Central Station. She was twenty-two years old. Later she would call that day her real birthday. A cousin of Fadumo, Muddah Veerman, took her in for the night. Muddah lived in the nearby town of Volendam. Ayaan says she didn’t tell Muddah anything about running away from her marriage; she just asked for advice on how to seek asylum.
Ayaan spent the weekend in Volendam and then went to see Fadumo in the eastern town of Almelo, two hours’ drive away. Fadumo was now an interpreter for other Somalis at a center for asylum seekers there. She knew the ins and outs of the Dutch system. Ayaan later wrote that Fadumo and Muddah told her, “You had to go as quickly as possible [to a refugee center] and say that you were running away from the civil war.”
The closest refugee center was about thirty miles away, in Zwolle. Ayaan found the place, but its facility was already filled with refugees. She took the bus to another center, in the town of Zeewolde, and checked into the center on July 27. While there, she talked with some Dutch volunteers from the Refugee Aid Center who explained how the process worked. She says they told her about the kinds of residence permits an asylum seeker could get. “A status” gave a person the rights of Dutch citizens, including the right to receive help finding a job and a place to live, as well as the right to bring family members into the country. “C status,” on the other hand, allowed a person to stay in Holland, but one had to renew his or her residence permit every year and received no financial aid. To receive A status, an asylum seeker had to claim to be in extreme personal danger because of his or her political views, ethnicity, or religion. “If you just told them that you had terrible things happening in the country you came from, then you would get a C status, a humanitarian status,” Ayaan said later by way of clarification.
She has never said in detail what she told the immigration service when she went for her first interview on August 6. She wrote in Infidel that she had concocted a tale based on the experiences of the real Somali refugees she had met in Kenya, plus her own experiences leaving Mogadishu in 1991. She also told the authorities that her name was “Ayaan Hirsi Ali” rather than “Ayan Hersi Magan”—Ali being her grandfather’s name before he acquired the nickname Magan. She also claimed that her date of birth was November 13, 1967, rather than November 13, 1969, which would make her twenty-four rather than twenty-two.
If Ayaan didn’t already know it, she would soon discover that very few Dutch people knew anything at all about Somalia. The first Somali refugees arrived in the country in 1984. That year there were ten of them. Even in 1991, fewer than 1,800 Somalis applied for asylum. But in 1992, the number shot up to 4,246. Somalia was in chaos. More important, perhaps, from the asylum seeker’s viewpoint, the West was finally beginning to hear the news.
There were so many other competing tragedies at the end of the Cold War that it had taken a while for Somalia’s to penetrate Western consciousness. But the same week she landed in Germany, UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali angrily accused Europe and the United States of “fighting a rich man’s war in Yugoslavia while not lifting a finger to save Somalia from disintegration.” In the weeks to come, shrunken Somali babies and attacks on international relief workers appeared frequently on Dutch television. Time magazine’s international edition, published the very week that Ayaan had her first immigration interview, reported, “For months, the mythical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death—have run wild in Somalia. After 19 months of war and a long drought, 1.5 million of the country’s estimated 6 million people face imminent starvation.” Newspapers everywhere, including in Holland, reported that some 300,000 Somalis had died since the civil war had started.
Dutch immigration officials had only the dimmest grasp of the clan politics behind this suffering. They had no licensed Somali translators into Dutch and therefore conducted asylum interviews in English, with English-speaking Somalis such as Ayaan’s relative Fadumo translating from Somali to English. Yet Somalis seemed to know what the Dutch wanted to hear. Nearly every Somali who applied for resettlement that summer received A-status asylum. A joke went around that all a Somali had to do to get A status was to say, “Ahh.”
Ayaan herself hadn’t witnessed any of the terrible violence and starvation that were consuming her homeland. But she, too, seems to have known what to say.
She stayed in Zeewolde for a few weeks and then learned she was being transferred to another, newly opened asylum center in Lunteren, a small town about forty miles southeast of Amsterdam. She would have her second and final interview there.
Lunteren was a deeply Protestant little place with cobbled streets and quaint thatched houses whose shutters had hourglasses painted on them. A retired Dutch army officer named Leo Louwé lived there, and Louwé had volunteered his services to the Lunteren refugee center. He met Ayaan shortly after she arrived. He liked her instantly. “She was a very lively girl, very open,” Louwé said years later. It was Louwé’s job to help asylum seekers prepare for their interviews. He would tell them what questions to expect and even accompany them to the meeting, so he could help if they had trouble explaining themselves. He could also serve as a witness if they needed to appeal a decision. Naturally, he was eager to help this young Somali woman who seemed somehow special.
But Ayaan said she didn’t need any help. She appreciated Louwé’s offer, but she planned to handle the interview on her own. Louwé explained that this second interview was really important. If she went in without a witness and made a mistake, or if the interviewer misunderstood her, she would have no way to prove it. She could be denied a permit and could even be deported to Somalia. But Ayaan maintained that she preferred to go alone.
Louwé was puzzled. Ayaan was the first refugee to refuse his help in an interview. Yet he wasn’t too worried. “We were convinced that all the Somalis got permission, anyway.” So he let her go alone. “She was just so independent,” he recalled.
A few days later, on September 1, which was record time even for 1992, she got word that she had been granted A status. She could stay in Europe as long as she pleased. Until she found work, she would get an unemployment benefit worth $800 a month. As long as she didn’t break the law, she could do anything she liked without asking anyone’s permission. For a twenty-two-year-old woman who had spent her life under the control of others, the sense of freedom and promise must have been overpowering.
Chapter Eleven
Al-Kifah was a strange organization for a young, unmarried woman to involve herself in—even for a woman like Aafia, who had grown up in a time and place that celebrated jihad.
The Al-Kifah men swaggered through the Islamist circuit of mosques and conferences dressed in what their newsletter called “jihad attire.” This consisted mainly of brown Afghan porkpie hats, camouflage jackets, and combat boots. And, like the Arab
Afghans of Peshawar, they exuded an air of menace.
Only two years before, the group’s first director, Mustafa Shalabi, had helped bring the famous Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to the United States to help spread the word of the need for jihad.
Blinded as a child in Egypt, Sheikh Omar was a scholar of Islam, the spiritual leader (and more) of Egypt’s outlawed al-Gama’a al-Islamiya group, and a deadly opponent of Egypt’s secular presidents. In his books and speeches, which were taped and sold outside radical mosques, Sheikh Omar called upon Muslims to “hit hard and kill the enemies of God in every spot, to rid it of the descendants of pigs and monkeys who have been dining from the tables of Zionism, communism, and colonialism.”
Al-Kifah was known to be violent. In November 1990, not long after the blind sheikh arrived in the United States, one of his followers, El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian janitor who belonged to Al-Kifah, shot and killed the leader of the anti-Arab Jewish Defense League, Rabbi Meir Kahane, at a Zionist gathering in Manhattan. Then, in May 1991, Al-Kifah’s director, Mustafa Shalabi—after quarreling with Sheikh Omar over how to distribute millions of dollars that the group had been raising—was found shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned to death in his Coney Island apartment. Within the Muslim community, Al-Kifah had a reputation for taking over mosques and Islamic schools by force.
The group vehemently opposed female independence. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan warlord whom the group considered its amir, or prince, had helped launch his own career by throwing acid into the faces of unveiled women at Kabul University. In Peshawar, scholars close to Hekmatyar and a like-minded warlord, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, issued a fatwa in 1989 forbidding women and girls to be educated except by close relatives. Another fatwa banned women from “wearing perfume or cosmetics, going out without their husband’s permission, talking with men other than close relatives, walking with pride, or walking in the middle of the sidewalk.” The Arab Afghans who approved such measures openly attacked Western relief workers and journalists in Peshawar, spitting on them and calling them “infidel dogs.” They also assassinated secular Afghan politicians and intellectuals. Such were the models, and indeed some of the leaders, of Al-Kifah in America.
Although most Muslim men have only one wife, the Arab Afghans practiced polygamy as a matter of principle. Indeed, they argued, Muslim men had a duty to marry more Muslim women and produce more Muslim children.
Yet despite all this—or perhaps because of its ruthless glamour—several of Aafia’s friends and MSA acquaintances had fallen under the spell of Al-Kifah, and soon she did, too. Emadeddin Muntasser, for example, a Libyan graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, had been raising money for the group since at least 1991. Mohamad Akra, a doctoral candidate at MIT and an MSA member who taught a night class on Islam, was also active. So was Aafia’s friend Suheil Laher, the MIT student and aspiring Deobandi scholar from South Africa.
The pride, however, of Al-Kifah’s Boston branch was Bassam Kanj, a burly twenty-eight-year-old Lebanese graduate of Boston University.
Back in 1985, Kanj had received a scholarship from Lebanon’s Hariri Foundation to study engineering in Boston. There he had begun attending jihadi conferences. Soon he had met Sheikh Tamim al-Adnani, an obese and apparently good-humored Palestinian preacher who traveled the country from his base in Orlando, Florida, encouraging Muslims to “join the caravan”—just as the “Godfather of Jihad,” the famous Palestinian preacher and Arab-Afghan leader Abdullah Azzam, summoned Muslims to do in the title of his best-known book. Kanj was married to the former Marlene Earle, an American he had met in Boston. Marlene was a Muslim convert and as fervent as her husband.
Then, in 1989, the couple moved with their baby daughter to Peshawar, so that Kanj could work for Azzam.
Marlene, like the wives of other foreign fighters, stayed in Peshawar while her husband crossed over into Afghanistan to fight. Once installed in Peshawar, an Arab Afghan typically stopped using his or her real name and started going by a kunya, or Arabic nickname. They did this both in imitation of the Prophet and his companions and also as a way of foiling Peshawar’s spies. Kanj and Marlene had named their baby daughter after Aisha, the Prophet’s youngest wife and the first lady of Sunni Islam. The baby’s parents became known as Abu and Umm Aisha, or Father and Mother of Aisha.
In Peshawar, Kanj mixed with the jihadis who coalesced into al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden and his future second in command, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. Kanj trained at the same Khalden camp where some of the al-Baluchi family also trained, including Ramzi Yousef, the future leader of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Marlene, meanwhile, explored the even more secluded female side of jihad.
As Abdullah Azzam’s widow, Umm Mohammed, later said, “Everyone who participated in the jihad in Afghanistan brought his wife with him. They would leave them behind in Peshawar and we all lived as one family. They used to consider me a mother figure.” And just as jihadi men tried to model themselves after the Prophet and his companions, so their wives tried to live as they imagined the first generation of Muslim women had lived in Medina.
In 1990, Kanj was wounded fighting in Afghanistan. He and Marlene returned to Boston for surgery, and when he recovered he was off again, in 1991, to Lebanon and then to Bosnia while Marlene stayed behind to raise their growing family.
Marlene was one of the people whom Aafia met when she started volunteering for Al-Kifah. The two women became good friends.
Marlene’s husband was then fighting in Bosnia, the scene of a humanitarian crisis that transfixed Aafia as it did the MSA. Most of Bosnia’s Muslims were so secular that some people found it inconceivable that Islamism could gain a foothold there. In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, men and women mixed freely, and alcohol was served. Even Bosnian Muslims who were more strictly observant usually followed the Sufi teachings that Deobandis and Wahhabis (who dominated the MSA) abhorred. Yet the fledgling country’s president, Alija Izetbegovi´c, was himself an Islamist with old ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Aafia’s freshman year, as soon as war broke out between Muslims and Christians in April 1992, the MSA swung into action to support Izetbegovi´c.
The MSA in Chicago had set up a charity, Relief International, to ship food and supplies to Bosnia’s Muslims. Aafia was eager to bring Bosnia’s straying Muslims back into the fold of “true Islam,” and she was given the job of printing and distributing a Bosnian translation of the Quran. But she wanted to do more than deliver Qurans. She wanted Bosnia to feel the power of jihad. She therefore started raising money for an Al-Kifah program to relieve the widows and orphans of martyred Muslim fighters there.
Chapter Twelve
If Ayaan had searched the world over, she couldn’t have found a country less like Somalia than the Netherlands. Somalia was yellow brown and bone-dry, and its trees were scrubby thorns. The Netherlands unfolded in a patchwork of soft, wet, gray-green fields. Somalis were historically nomadic; the Dutch were settled farmers and traders who had reclaimed the land they lived on from the sea. They had a saying: “God made the rest of the world, but the Dutch made Holland.”
Instead of the warlike virtues that Somalis like Ayaan’s clan espoused, the Dutch prized cooperation and being gezellig, or cozy. Somalia was one of the world’s poorest countries, the Netherlands one of the richest. Somalis were almost entirely illiterate; the Dutch were among the best-educated people on Earth. Holland was at peace, while Somalia was stricken by war and famine. Still, Ayaan did not feel intimidated. Rather, she was enchanted.
To a Somali raised partly in Africa’s open spaces, the Dutch landscape, with its tidy brick houses and tulip fields under an ever-changing sky, looked almost like a toyland. By some measures the Netherlands was the world’s most densely populated country. But the Dutch managed their tight quarters with ingenious efficiency, often riding bicycles instead of driving cars and building such steep and narrow staircases that they had to haul their furniture up through house windows.
/> Leo Louwé and the social workers at the refugee center were the first of many Dutch to find Ayaan remarkable. “Her will to be someone was amazing, in this society or any other,” one social worker said when I visited Lunteren more than a decade later. “I have not met many people with that kind of drive,” said another. “I always believed she would be successful. If you meet Ayaan one time, you will remember her.”
The Dutch marveled at her quickness. “Within months she was speaking perfect Dutch,” one said. That was an exaggeration, but Ayaan definitely learned faster than the other refugees did. The fluent English she had learned in Kenya helped, but she also did it, the social workers said, “by bothering us. Ayaan was always with the workers, asking questions. She had a good sense of humor. We laughed a lot.” The refugees at Lunteren lived in metal trailers set in a former campsite behind a mansion. When she wasn’t inside the mansion with the social workers, she was outside chatting with the security guards who watched the premises from a white guardhouse at the gate. It was unusual for a refugee to take such an interest in the staff. Ayaan told them frankly that she did it because she didn’t want to be like the other asylum seekers; she wanted to be like the Dutch. Her attitude astonished and flattered the staff at the center. “She was an exception. She wanted to go on to university. She wanted to do all the things that Dutch girls do.”
One of the first things Ayaan did after arriving was take off her head scarf. Soon she got her hair cut in an Afro and began wearing jeans. She signed up to receive municipal housing and learned to ride a bicycle. “Ayaan always came in, every time, to discuss her plans,” one social worker recalled. “The other Somalis were jealous. They wanted her to wear a head scarf and stop riding her bicycle.
“She was not like most Somali women. Somali women are very proud and self-conscious. She had a liberal approach. The Somali men were quarreling with her. They asked her, ‘Why don’t you have a head scarf?’ She talked a lot with the Somali women, but the Somali men were against her.”
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