The blind sheikh Omar and Al-Kifah had been subjected to another wave of arrests in the summer of 1993 in connection with the “Landmarks Case,” a plot to bomb the United Nations and New York City’s tunnels. The author Evan Kohlmann feels sure that anyone with Aafia’s exposure to Al-Kifah had to know by the end of 1993 that its members were prepared to kill American civilians. “Everyone at that level knew what they were doing,” he said.
Yet according to Aafia’s family, she sent home a sentimental poem around this time, expressing her love for Boston and the United States. Perhaps she rationalized the contradiction by looking forward to the day when the United States would convert to Islam. In the guide to dawah that she wrote for the MSA, she asked for the strength and sincerity “that our humble effort continues and expands . . . and more and more people come to the [religion] of Allah until America becomes a Muslim land.”
Chapter Twenty
One day in January 1994, Ayaan got a call from the Frankfurt airport. To her surprise, she wrote in her autobiography, her younger sister, Haweya, was in Europe. Ayaan has told several different versions of how the twenty-two-year-old Haweya got there. In her collection of essays and lectures, The Caged Virgin, she said that Haweya had run away from an arranged marriage. Later, in her autobiography, Infidel, she said that her sister was escaping from a love affair with a married man from Trinidad. Neither book explains how Haweya got past the usual obstacles of money, passports, and visas. In Infidel Ayaan implied that the Trinidadian, who worked for the United Nations, paid for Haweya’s passage. In any case, Haweya got to Germany, and it made Ayaan very happy.
She told Haweya to go straight to the station and catch a train to the German border. Under Europe’s Schengen Accord, there were no border controls between the Netherlands and Germany. She arranged for a Dutch friend to drive there and pick her up, avoiding the police. International regulations required asylum seekers to apply in the first safe country in which they found themselves, and Ayaan wanted Haweya to claim that she had entered Europe in Holland rather than Germany. Haweya registered for asylum at the Dutch center in Lunteren.
Once again, Leo Louwé offered to help prepare her for her interview with the Dutch immigration authorities. But, like her sister before her, Haweya said she would rather go on her own. Ayaan wrote in Infidel that she helped Haweya “cook up a story.” Whatever it was, the story worked, and Haweya quickly received A status. Soon she was allowed to share Ayaan’s apartment in Ede, checking in at Lunteren once a week.
The social workers at Lunteren liked Haweya just as they had her sister. “She was as intelligent as Ayaan, but a bit different in her character,” one worker remembered. “She was a little younger, a little bit softer. She was more joyful.” Haweya kept her hair long and never wore blue jeans, but she was as quick to learn Dutch as Ayaan had been. She could be prickly, but when she made the effort, she won people over with her confident wit and mischievous smile. “She was a little bit spoiled,” Louwé recalled. “She behaved like a Somali princess. But that was her power, too.”
Yet, to Ayaan’s irritation, Haweya failed to respond to the marvels of Holland as she had. Indeed, her younger sister seemed disappointed and depressed. She told Ayaan she felt guilty because her affair with the Trinidadian had gotten her pregnant and she’d had an abortion. She would lie in bed for days, watching television. She wouldn’t eat and wouldn’t clean the flat. “My sister, who longed for freedom more than anyone I knew when we were growing up, was appalled when she actually found it,” Ayaan later observed. “She repeatedly said, ‘Is this all? Is this it?’ ”
Haweya was shocked by Ayaan’s distance from the Somali community. When Ayaan held a small party to celebrate her birthday in November 1994, Haweya couldn’t help crying out, “But you have only invited Dutch people!” After several months in the Netherlands, Haweya became pregnant again, this time by a Somali man from the refugee center. Ayaan was furious. Haweya had another abortion—but not before Ayaan accused her of murder.
Ayaan went to see a social worker friend at the refugee center and learned from the man that he was already counseling Haweya. He said one problem was that Haweya feared her sister’s judgmental nature. “I was always telling Haweya what I thought was wrong with her,” Ayaan admitted.
Haweya stopped attending language school. She would stay home for days, crying about how guilty she felt for leaving their mother alone. She still didn’t help with the housework. Ayaan sought help from her foster parents. The Dutch couple recommended that the sisters live apart. They helped Haweya move into her own place. But she was lonely there.
Leo Louwé visited her. She had started wearing a head scarf. She seemed beset by fears that made no sense to him. Once Louwé and his wife invited her to join them in Lunteren so they could all visit the Louwés’ daughter, who had just given birth to their first grandchild. By the time they left the daughter’s house, night had fallen. Louwé knew it was safe, but Haweya was afraid to cycle back to Ede on her own. When Louwé refused to take her by car and told her it would be inappropriate for her to ask his daughter if she could spend the night, she stopped speaking to him for two months.
Somalis who made it to the West were alarmingly prone to mental illness. A 1995 British study found that 14 percent of Somalis living in London’s Tower Hamlets area, where Ayaan’s father would eventually move, suffered from schizophrenia. The figures were astonishing compared with the 1 to 2 percent of the general British population who reported schizophrenic symptoms. By the end of the 1990s, the pattern of Somali mental illness was so blatant that the International Organization for Migration, a refugee assistance group, began including “stress” along with snow and women’s liberation among the novel challenges for which Somalis bound from Kenya for the West needed to be carefully prepared.
The symptoms that teachers in Kenya described to their classes of refugees were just like Haweya’s: “You can’t sleep. You watch TV all the time.” Some people even killed themselves. In Somalia, suicide was practically unheard of, and at first the refugees refused to believe that, having survived war, famine, and homelessness, one might take one’s own life after reaching some of the richest countries in the world. Somalis later said of a refugee who became unbalanced in the West, “The wealth got to him.” But when Haweya started feeling blue, no one knew what was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-one
By early 1994, Aafia Siddiqui was arranging events in Boston for two new charities in addition to Care International: the Global Relief Foundation and the Benevolence International Foundation. Both had recently opened in Chicago, and U.S. prosecutors would later describe both as fronts for al-Qaeda.
The director of operations of Benevolence International was Suleman Ahmer, a balding twenty-six-year-old Pakistani engineer with a raspy voice, a frizzy black beard, and thick glasses. Like Aafia, Ahmer got involved with jihad through his passion for Bosnia. In 1993, he and some fellow students from the University of Nebraska were briefly taken prisoner by Croatian militiamen after they went to Bosnia to deliver relief. Returning to the United States, Ahmer discovered a talent for public speaking on the MSA lecture circuit. Now he traveled the world for Benevolence International, overseeing relief missions to the mujahideen. Aafia arranged for Ahmer to speak in Boston. The title of his talk was “Jihad: The Misunderstood Word.”
Aafia was now doing something that other jihadi women had not. She was standing up before mixed audiences and preaching the virtues of jihad. In fact, according to Rohan Gunaratna, the author of Inside al-Qaeda, and Evan Kohlmann, both experts on terrorism, Aafia is the only woman known to have publicly raised money for Al-Kifah this way. “She’s a very interesting person,” Kohlmann said. “These guys were just so misogynistic, so filled with this bizarre machismo—yet for some reason they prized this woman.”
What made them accept Aafia’s preaching may have been her way of playing on their macho religiosity. She got away with shaming men into discharging what Al-Kifah’s newsle
tter, Al-Hussam, called “the obligation to fight the infidels.” Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the African-American spiritual leader whom Aafia got to know while distributing religious tracts, remembers how effectively she spoke. “She used to encourage Muslim men to be Muslim,” Faaruuq said. “She used to say that you should take care of your families and be the best Muslim you can. She used to say, ‘Where are the Muslim men? Why do I have to be the one to get up here and talk?’ She wanted us to take a more proactive part in advancing the cause of Islam. Her voice was real sweet but piercingly high. Some of the brothers used to say, ‘Man, that sister’s tough!’ ”
Chapter Twenty-two
Ayaan passed her Dutch exams in the autumn of 1994 and began the classes in social work that she hoped would enable her to transfer to a university. She and Haweya had much to celebrate. But it was getting harder to make Haweya smile.
One by one, their whole family was immigrating to Europe. Even their pious half sister Ijaabo seems to have made her way to the Netherlands. Perhaps Ayaan declined to help this relative come up with a winning story for the immigration authorities; in any case, she later wrote that Ijaabo had applied for asylum in the Netherlands and failed to get it. (She eventually settled in England.)
It was while her half sister was visiting that Ayaan learned in her Dutch history class, for the first time in her life, about Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million Jews. The class discussion focused on why so many Dutch people had failed to act while their neighbors were taken away. Ayaan sat quietly during the talk, thinking how similar Nazi propaganda sounded to what she had heard all her life about Jews being agents of Satan who controlled the world. Earlier, during a visit to Antwerp’s Jewish neighborhood, she had been shocked to discover that Jews looked just like other people. It occurred to her in the classroom that “if I had lived in the 1930s growing up as I had done with the belief that Jews are evil . . . I might well have participated. And I know a huge number of people who would have participated.” At home she tried to tell her half sister what she had learned in class, but Ijaabo refused to hear it. “It’s a lie!” Ijaabo cried, according to Ayaan. “Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed.”
Ijaabo’s sister, Arro, was as modern and open-minded as Ijaabo was said to be closed. Arro had become a gynecologist. Like her mother, Maryan, she worked with Somali women’s groups to eradicate female genital mutilation, and their father was said to be very proud of her.
Hirsi Magan still wasn’t speaking to Ayaan. But she pressed on with her studies, and in May 1995 she became Holland’s first licensed Somali-Dutch translator.
As an interpreter Ayaan could make good money. Her goal, though, was to attend the oldest and most famous institution of higher learning in the Netherlands, four-hundred-year-old Leiden University. Leiden was known for its department of political science. And as soon as she earned the credits she needed, she used them to transfer there.
Chapter Twenty-three
Aafia often reminded audiences of a Muslim woman’s duty to wage jihad. The “Godfather of Jihad,” Abdullah Azzam, had said that the modern Muslim community was in such danger that a woman did not need her husband’s permission nor a son his father’s permission. Now that she would soon graduate, she longed to join the action.
If she had been a man, she would have found a job like Suleman Ahmer’s at one of the Islamist charities or front organizations. But the secret army against unbelief never put women in positions of leadership over men. And, as her friend Suheil Laher pointed out on his Web site, Abdullah Azzam had also written that it was impermissible for a woman to travel without a mahram, or close male family member.
From Ahmer, Aafia had heard the story of Kamila, a British Muslim girl who was said to have ventured alone to Bosnia. Although Ahmer admired Kamila’s bravery (“she dared where men hesitated”), he disapproved of her going without a mahram. “I placed that on a lack of a grounded Islamic education growing up in England,” Ahmer wrote in his book, The Embattled Innocence. The happy ending for Ahmer came when Kamila rectified her dangerously incorrect position by marrying a Sudanese aid worker and going to work for his group helping the Bosnians.
The obvious thing for Aafia to do was to marry a mujahid. The wives of these knights of Islam whispered that they made tender husbands, as soft on their families as they were hard on unbelievers. Several of the “Care brothers” were willing. Their families had written to Aafia’s parents asking permission to marry her. But the Siddiquis had turned the offers down. And when they arrived in Massachusetts for her graduation, in February 1995, they told her they had received a more attractive offer at home.
The family of the medical student Amjad Khan, at whose house Aafia had lectured in 1993, had approached them with an offer of marriage. Amjad was about to graduate from Aga Khan University Medical College. He was a brilliant student, at the top of his class, and he planned to do his residency in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. To Dr. Siddiqui, his proposal sounded ideal.
For her graduation ceremony Aafia exchanged her usual hijab for a gown and mortarboard. She was graduating summa cum laude with close to an A average, 4.4 on a 5-point scale, and that included the biology courses she had not wanted to take.
Inside, though, she seemed to be panicking. She tried to tell her mother later about her dream of finding a partner in jihad, but Ismat brushed her feelings aside.
Aafia knew that Islam gave her the right to turn down any marriage proposal. Some of her friends had used Islam as a kind of liberation theology to marry jihadis in defiance of their more secular parents. But Aafia’s mother and father were neither secular nor impious, and Aafia knew that Islam also said she should obey them unless she had a good reason not to.
The only sign the Khans saw that something was wrong came when Grand Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani asked Amjad and his father to see him. The two men were impressed that Aafia merited the interest of Pakistan’s senior religious authority. But toward the end of their conversation, the mufti asked a question that puzzled them: “If the need arises, would you be willing to go for jihad?” Amjad wasn’t sure what the mufti meant. He was a doctor, not a soldier. But jihad had many meanings, all of them positive to devout Muslims. “Inshallah,” he answered—“God willing.”
Aafia remained at McCormick Hall after she graduated and kept working for MIT’s computer service. For some time now, she had felt she was being watched. She told friends later that beefy American men in suits had started showing up at some of her lectures. She suspected them of being FBI agents, and she was probably right. In 2008, the prosecution of several Care International officers for tax fraud revealed that the FBI had begun wiretapping Care International’s office in November 1994.
Meanwhile, Benazir Bhutto had been reelected prime minister of Pakistan. Under pressure from the U.S. government, her government had embarked on a secret war against the Islamist radicals. One of her first acts was to fire the bearded Deobandi preacher Lieutenant General Javed Nasir as the head of ISI. The United States had given Bhutto the names of ISI officials who had helped Ramzi Yousef enter the United States in 1992 before he had bombed the World Trade Center. Under Bhutto the police had raided the homes of Yousef and his relatives several times, though the suspects were always gone by the time the police arrived. The police official in charge of the investigations, Rehman Malik, suspected that the al-Baluchi clan was being protected by higher officials. Then, just as Aafia was preparing to graduate, Bhutto and Washington finally got the break they were waiting for.
A South African student whom Yousef had tried to draw into one of his terrorist plots went to the police with the information that the world’s most wanted man was staying at a guesthouse in Islamabad. Bhutto hurriedly assembled a team of U.S. and Pakistani troops answerable only to her, and they captured Yousef at the guesthouse on February 7. Bhutto waived the law forbidding the
extradition of Pakistani citizens without a court order, and the Americans quickly took Yousef to New York to be tried, fearing that any delay might embolden his hidden supporters.
Aafia and her friends in Boston were stunned. For them, it was a basic tenet of Islam never to turn over a Muslim prisoner to unbelievers.
Bhutto appealed publicly on March 22—shortly before Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton’s wife, was to arrive on a visit—for U.S. help in uprooting the jihadi networks, which were too powerful, she said, for her to take on alone. She told the New York Times that police were looking for Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, the Mercy International director Zahid al-Sheikh. She described the photographs the police had found of Zahid and his influential friends. “Pakistan, on its own,” Bhutto said, could not just “shut down” terrorist training camps, religious schools, and other facilities used as terrorist fronts without prompting the militants to fan out across Pakistan and step up their violence.
Aafia read about Bhutto’s statement, and she wrote an e-mail to a Pakistani Listserv complaining bitterly. In a comment sprinkled with mocking quotation marks, she wrote that Pakistan under Bhutto had become as cowardly as the United States’ Arab allies:
[The] Pakistani govt. has officially joined the gang of our typical contemporary govts. Of Muslim countries. I mean Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and the likes of them. . . . Here’s what I read in this friday’s issue of the “Muslim News,” something that was confirmed a few days earlier by some articles in local newspapers like The Boston Globe and the New York Times etc: BENAZIR ASKS FOR THE WEST’S HELP AGAINST “EXTREMISM.” Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, called on the west to help her eradicate religious opposition. She said that Pakistan is a “moderate” Islamic country and it is the first defense line against “terrorism,” and hence needs international support. She added that the arrest of Ramzi Yousef and giving him to the United States is a simple proof.
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