Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, meanwhile, Care International took over al-Kifah’s Al-Hussam newsletter, and the Al-Hussam Web site became the Care International Web site. Hundreds of thousands of dollars began flowing through Care International, and Boston became “the de facto hub of recruitment and financing” for services “in support of the jihad in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” as Evan Kohlmann, the author of Al-Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe, later testified. Federal prosecutors would eventually estimate that the group raised $1.7 million over the next decade.

  Aafia became one of Care International’s most dedicated volunteers. “She was always talking jihad,” a Pakistani who knew her in Boston recalls. “She would hold iftar [the meal eaten at sunset during Ramadan] parties and fund-raisers. Anywhere she could hold a fund-raiser, she was into it.” The Western press had been flooded with reports that thousands of Bosnian Muslim women were being raped. In articles with titles such as “Bosnia Rape Horror,” “A Daily Ritual of Sex Abuse,” and “Mass Rape: Muslims Recall Serb Attacks,” American, British, and German newspapers claimed that 50,000 Bosnian women had been raped by the Serbs. Later investigations would find those numbers wildly exaggerated. At the time, though, Western feminists especially expressed outrage at reports that the Serbian Christians had established “rape camps” as part of a genocidal campaign to rid Bosnia of its Muslims. Aafia and Care International used the reports to appeal to Muslim men to restore the lost honor of Islam by waging jihad.

  Care International distributed a flier titled “A Call for Jihad in Bosnia.” “Thousands of Muslim girls and women have been kidnapped and kept in Yugoslav army camps for sex,” the document claimed. “Ask yourself what you are doing for these Muslims. Ask Muslim governments what they are doing for these Muslims and their freedom.” It went on to solicit donations for Al-Kifah to provide “the Emerging Jihad Movement in Bosnia with more than Food and Shelter.” (Even after its name change, Care International still occasionally referred to itself in 1993 as Al-Kifah.) Aafia combed the news for gruesome stories of Christian atrocities that she could use in speeches encouraging women to support the mujahideen.

  Her speeches about Bosnia made her one of Al-Kifah’s most successful fund-raisers. They also brought her recognition in the secretive world of American Islamism.

  Chapter Sixteen

  From Finland, where he still lives today, Mohamud Mohamed Artan (Ayaan’s first husband, whom she called “the malest man” she’d ever seen) refuses to discuss the imbroglio of Ayaan’s second marriage and flight to the Netherlands—except to claim he has “nothing in common” with her and indeed was never married to her. (He does say he’s a friend of Ayaan’s half sisters, Arro and Ijaabo.) But those Finnish government records remain. Finland approved a residence permit for Ayan Hersi Magan in 1993. Finnish immigration records also show that another Somali woman entered Finland as Mohamud’s wife, obtained identification and benefits, and lived under the name of Ayan Hersi Magan. Mohamud claims it was just a coincidence that that ex-wife of his, who no longer lives in Finland, has the same name as the famous Ayaan, who just happened to write a book saying she was briefly married to him. Other Somalis speculate that after Ayaan let Mohamud know she wouldn’t be joining him in Finland, he invited another relative to come in her place. Certainly no Somali in his right mind would let a European residency permit (worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over time) go to waste.

  In any case, the man Ayaan called her first brief husband ended up living in Finland, where Ayaan never joined him, while her second brief husband, Osman, ended up living in Canada, where Ayaan never joined him, either. She preferred to be single in Holland.

  She worked as a cleaner in the Riedel orange juice factory. Later she packed cookies at a biscuit factory. But she and Yasmin were having trouble managing. Ayaan, who barely knew what a bank account was, had borrowed the equivalent of several thousand dollars from a bank. She and Yasmin used it to decorate their flat. Ayaan wrote that the security guard they talked into taking them shopping wanted to show them some inexpensive furniture stores, but the two Somali girls wouldn’t have it. “Yasmin and I held our noses and said, ‘Oh no, this is not who we are, we would like something more upscale.’”

  Nor did Ayaan’s jobs fit her sense of who she was. Her half sister Arro had made it to Italy and enrolled in medical school. Ayaan decided she should go to university and study political science. Later she said she wanted to know why so many countries in Africa and the Middle East were in turmoil, while Europe and the Netherlands were at peace.

  Curse or no curse, she would show her father who his real heir was.

  Her Dutch had improved, but it wasn’t yet good enough to get her into a university, and she found she wasn’t speaking much Dutch while living with Yasmin. Leo Louwé, the volunteer at the refugee center, introduced her to a family who agreed to practice with her for a few hours a week. “Martin and Johanna,” as she calls the couple in Infidel (they don’t want to be named, for fear of Ayaan’s enemies), would become much more than Dutch teachers to Ayaan; they would become her foster family in the Netherlands, helping her with everything from disputes with Yasmin to crises over money.

  Chapter Seventeen

  An Internet newsgroup that Aafia Siddiqui subscribed to reported in early June 1993 that the Muslim Brotherhood charity known as Mercy International had prepared “an effective videotape” on Bosnia for “viewing outside the United States.” The e-mail added that a 1991 graduate of MIT, Yusuf Khan, was making copies available for those who wanted to show it at “gatherings in Muslim countries.”

  Mercy International’s Pakistani director at the time was Ramzi Yousef’s uncle Zahid al-Sheikh, and prosecutors in the United States and Europe later described the charity as a front for al-Qaeda. The language in the e-mail about restricting the film to Muslim audiences suggests it portrayed “jihad action,” perhaps including gory scenes of combat against the Serbs. Aafia was getting ready to leave for another summer vacation in Pakistan. She wrote back immediately to say that her mother’s United Islamic Organisation would show the video at its weekly gatherings in Karachi.

  Aafia had no fear of showing the video in Pakistan. Jihad was as popular as ever there. Her mother, Ismat, in fact, had Aafia give her speech about Bosnia at her annual conference at the Sheraton Hotel. Aafia’s fire for jihad so impressed one woman in the audience, the elegant wife of a wealthy owner of a pharmaceutical company, that she invited the MIT student to give the same talk to a group of women at her house. The woman, Zahera Khan, also happened to be looking for a bride for her son. His name was Amjad, and he was a twenty-two-year-old medical student at Aga Khan University whose family hoped he would soon be moving to the United States to begin his residency.

  Like other Pakistani families, the Khans were accustomed to marrying relatives from within their extended families or clans. But this custom was changing as families began branching out around the world. Some of the Khans’ relatives, for example, had moved to the United States, and young Amjad himself had studied briefly at Hamilton College in upstate New York before transferring to Aga Khan’s medical school. Several of Amjad’s American cousins had broken with tradition and married unrelated but highly religious women they had met through Islamist organizations in America. Those educated young wives didn’t waste their time on shopping and gossip. They cared about larger issues and could help their husbands in their businesses. Aafia reminded Zahera Khan of them.

  Amjad wasn’t invited to attend Aafia’s lecture. But Zahera asked her son to pick up Aafia and Ismat at a friend’s house and drive them to the Khans’ two-story bungalow in the affluent KDA Housing Scheme neighborhood. Aafia sat in back. Amjad glanced at her from the driver’s seat. He noticed her soft, high voice and dainty hands—and her mother, Ismat, was certainly lively.

  After Aafia gave her talk, the two mothers stepped aside and Zahera asked Ismat about Aafia’s plans for marriage. Ismat replied that Aafia had received many proposals. Why, the mother of a
Saudi prince who had heard Aafia speak had offered to buy much of Pakistan in return for her hand, she said. But the Siddiquis wanted Aafia to marry a Pakistani. Ismat said she thought Aafia had the potential to become an Islamic Benazir Bhutto.

  Zahera took all this with a grain of salt. She knew that mothers, in such negotiations, tended to exaggerate their daughters’ prospects. But she liked Aafia.

  Her son Amjad had his doubts. His mother let him listen to a tape of Aafia’s talk. He found it disturbing. Aafia had told his mother’s friends that Serbs had cut open the womb of a Bosnian woman, pulled out her fetus, and raped the woman before leaving her to die. He agreed that that was terrible. But he found something ghoulish and unfeminine in the way Aafia dwelled on the details. He told his mother that it was too early to tell if she was right for him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ayaan’s Dutch foster father, a teacher, helped her figure out a way to get into university: instead of applying directly, she should enroll in a vocational school for social workers, the Hogeschool De Horst in nearby Driebergen, and transfer from there.

  But she needed to pass an exam even to get into the Hogeschool De Horst. The test would cover Dutch language, history, and civics. Ayaan signed up for a course to study for it in the autumn of 1993 at Midland College in Ede.

  She learned that the Dutch had helped invent the modern idea of tolerance as a virtue so that Dutch Protestants could live together with the country’s still sizable Catholic minority while winning their independence from Spain. She also studied how the ideas let loose by this new religious freedom had led to scientific discoveries, geographical exploration, commercial success, and eventually Europe’s conquest of the world.

  Somalia could use such lessons. Ayaan’s clan had given up hope that the country would be unified anytime soon. The U.S. admiral in charge of Operation Restore Hope had been using Black Hawk helicopters to hunt down Mohammed Farah Aidid, the Somali warlord they blamed for the murder of twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers in June. On October 2, 1993, Somalis used rocket-propelled grenades to bring down two Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu. The sixteen-hour battle that followed left eighteen U.S. soldiers and five hundred Somalis dead, and dancing Somalis dragged the naked white body of one of the dead Americans through the streets on a rope. The bruised and bloody face of another soldier they captured soon appeared on the cover of Time. “What in the World Are We Doing?” asked the headline.

  Ayaan and Yasmin weren’t getting along. Then Yasmin disappeared with Ayaan’s A-status refugee papers, her bank card, and some money. (Yasmin later wrote Ayaan a postcard from Denmark saying that the money belonged to her because Ayaan had gotten it from the government to act as Yasmin’s guardian.) Ayaan already owed thousands of dollars for the furniture and carpets that she and Yasmin had bought; after her roommate left, she discovered that Yasmin had also run up more than a thousand dollars in telephone bills.

  Leo Louwé helped Ayaan sort out the messes at the telephone company and the furniture store. Obtaining copies of her papers was another headache. Once Ayaan had dealt with all that, the problem of paying for her two-bedroom apartment remained.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Aafia returned to MIT in the fall of 1993 more militant and politicized than ever. She signed up for a course with Noam Chomsky, MIT’s famously radical political writer and professor of linguistics. Chomsky promoted a view of world affairs that was enormously popular in conspiracy-minded Pakistan. The United States’ democratic institutions, he argued, were little more than a facade concealing an inner cabal of greedy elites (including many Jews) who would stop at nothing to control the world. Aafia often boasted of having been his student. Chomsky says he has no recollection of meeting her.

  The professor’s inattention to Aafia and her Islamist friends may have been typical of MIT’s instructors. The year before, Aafia had earned a B in professor Jean Jackson’s introductory course in gender studies. “She was smart, really smart, and willing to learn,” Jackson, an anthropologist, recalled at first, and she thought Aafia might have taken a second reading course with her. But later she wondered whether she was confusing Aafia with another student in the early 1990s who had worn a head scarf. Jackson deduced from their attire that the girls were observant Muslims, but she never asked them about the role of Islam in their lives. “That never came up,” she said. “I wondered about it, but I don’t bring up issues of religion with students unless they bring it up.”

  In this multicultural heyday, Aafia’s professors seemed to see her Islamic dress and promotion of Muslim causes as a proud assertion of cultural identity. Not until a year after she left MIT would the university hold a conference at which the American feminist Susan Moller Okin posed her famous question “Is multiculturalism bad for women?” Most Americans were barely conscious of political Islam as an organized and disciplined political movement, and they knew even less about the Islamists’ involvement in a bewildering array of conflicts breaking out within the world of Islam.

  Just up the street from MIT, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist, was completing what would soon become an article in Foreign Affairs and later a book, The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington had plucked the phrase from an earlier article written by his friend and adviser on Middle Eastern issues, Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, and he had tried out his theory a few months earlier at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank that both Huntington and Lewis frequented. Huntington’s article argued that the State Department policy planner Francis Fukuyama had been wrong when he had claimed in his 1992 book The End of History that liberal democracy was the wave of the future. Instead, Huntington predicted clashes along civilizational lines, especially between Islam and the West.

  What Huntington and Lewis were warning of was a mirror image of what the Muslim Brothers and other pro-jihad forces were actually promoting. Salman al-Ouda, for example—a rising young Saudi cleric who had been a student of Sayyid Qutb’s brother Muhammad and whom Osama bin Laden regarded as a spiritual guide—had written his own rejoinder to Fukuyama. The Saudi’s article (also called “The End of History”) said that liberal democracy, far from being the final form of human government, was in fact in an advanced state of decay and would sooner or later collapse. Bringing about that collapse, which would also stanch Muslim suffering, “exists in one word: Jihad,” Ouda wrote. Huntington, who did not read Arabic, Urdu, or Farsi, seems not to have known about Ouda and discounted the evidence of bitter conflicts within Islam. Muslims were killing Muslims across much of the Islamic world, and jihadists were trying to seize power from Algeria to the Philippines. But rather than recognizing those wars as the product of a specific political movement, Huntington ascribed them to “Islam.”

  Non-Muslims almost never attended the lectures and conferences that the MSA held at metropolitan Boston’s many colleges and universities. When they did, though, they were often shocked by the naked hatred and aggression expressed toward Jews and the West.

  In the same guide to starting an MSA chapter to which Aafia contributed, a Canadian convert named Katherine Bullock described a meeting in 1994 when 1,400 people had shown up at the University of Toronto to hear Imam Jamil al-Amin—the former Black Panther H. Rap Brown—speak about “Social Justice in the Americas.” “The Imam mocked Westerners, Jews and Christians, alienating a large part of the audience,” Bullock wrote. “He also talked about how in Islam men were above women. Naturally the ‘women and Islam’ topic is delicate, but comments like that made in passing without the whole Islamic context, reinforces, rather than challenges, the notion that Islam oppresses women.” Organizers had directed the audience into separate sections for men and women. “Naturally Muslims expect this, but it is a shock for non-Muslims,” Bullock commented. Her advice to the MSA was to warn speakers when non-Muslims would be in attendance, to use “gender-neutral language when speaking English,” and to “be discreet” about seating arrangeme
nts.

  Perhaps the need for discretion that Bullock mentioned was what led Aafia to form a group of her own that she called the Dawah Resource Center, which linked radical speakers to more select audiences. Her future husband later recalled that some of the speakers Aafia invited were “world names” in the field of jihad for whom “America was the enemy.” Aafia also used the Dawah Resource Center to reach out to African-American Muslims and potential converts. She visited Malcolm X’s old neighborhood of Roxbury and got to know the imam of its oldest house of Muslim worship, the shabby brick Mosque for the Praising of Allah on Shawmut Avenue. The imam there, Abdullah Faaruuq, also served as the Muslim chaplain to several Massachusetts prisons. Through the Dawah Resource Center, Aafia ordered hundreds of Islamic books in English, usually from Saudi Arabia, and Faaruuq distributed them to the prisoners he visited. Faaruuq said the books included works by the famous Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb. “She would come and get a box of books as big as she was,” the imam recalled. She also volunteered for mentoring programs that the mosque offered to poor African-American and immigrant children.

  The anonymous writers of the Al-Hussam newsletter that Aafia distributed called for Muslims to shed “rivers of blood.” It reminded readers of the so-called beheading verse in the Quran urging believers in conflict with unbelievers to “smite at their necks.” Aafia did not mention violence in the e-mails she sent out under her own name. But by the end of 1993, she had begun scouring Boston’s used bookstores for old U.S. military manuals and books about espionage that she could donate to the mujahideen. Arguing that women, moreover, had the same religious duty as men to train for jihad, she learned in a self-defense class how to fight hand to hand, and she took the basic National Rifle Association gun course at the Braintree Rifle & Pistol Club, south of Boston. She also organized her girlfriends to head off into the woods for a weekend of paintball games, another way to practice for jihad.