Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  When she started at Brandeis, she told people that her ambition was to open an Islamic women’s university in Pakistan under the auspices of her mother’s UIO. It would teach Western science from what she saw as the right perspective. She wrote on an MSA Web site that she wanted to create a “modern, well-equipped scientific institute” that would “serve to establish the supremacy of the Quran and Sunnah in the scientific world.” The institute would teach “Western un-Islamic theories” but “with logical refutations and Islamic alternatives so that students are well-prepared to answer any objections raised against Islam.”

  Like other graduate students, Aafia had to prepare and deliver papers in front of classmates and professors at seminars. One early paper concerned the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. She gave a fine summary of the latest research on how and why a pregnant woman could damage the future cognitive abilities of her unborn child by drinking alcohol. But then she concluded that this science showed why God had forbidden alcohol in the Quran.

  Her professors were astonished and dismayed. Of course, scientists believe all sorts of things they can’t prove. But most students learn in high school if not earlier that scientific knowledge needs to be based on testable hypotheses. That’s close to the definition of science: it can be tested, proved, or shown to be false, whereas other forms of knowledge frequently cannot. Careful observation and measurement showed that a significant number of babies born to women who consumed alcohol during pregnancy suffered from brain damage. But no amount of measurement showed that God had forbidden everyone to drink.

  Aafia’s professors tried to explain that, but Aafia didn’t agree. She told them that the Quran prefigured scientific knowledge and the scientist’s job was to discover exactly how the laws in the Quran worked. “She saw science as a way of celebrating her religion,” one faculty member recalled. “Many people were very disconcerted. A number of her teachers told her that it was inappropriate. She didn’t like that. She didn’t see a boundary there, and we did.” Although Aafia was always “sweet and nice,” in the words of another professor, she continued to bring up the Quran in her papers.

  Aafia’s professors could not imagine how she had graduated from MIT still holding on to this way of thinking.

  Her undergraduate records offered no clue. One Brandeis teacher said later that Aafia had worked in various MIT labs but “there was no hint in her letters of recommendation” of any problem. Perhaps Aafia was becoming more confrontational about her faith, or perhaps no one at MIT had paid attention to her religious beliefs. Finally Brandeis gave her an order: “You can’t turn in a paper that’s all about the Quran. You have to learn to compartmentalize.” Some of the same neuroscientists who criticized her said that apart from her religious absolutism, she performed well. “She was a very intelligent young woman. The only thing that was noticeable, that stood out, was that she wanted to bring fundamentalist Muslim tenets into our work.”

  She bitterly resented their criticism and complained of discrimination to the associate dean of graduate studies. Later she wrote that she had told the dean that “if they would let me graduate in peace, I would not go after Brandeis on any issues I had, but if not, I would be forced to open a can of worms.” The dean apparently smoothed things over. But the tension between Aafia and her department persisted, and the episode seems to have reinforced her private belief that American Jews—or, as she often called them, “Israeli Americans”—were forever intriguing against Muslims.

  Aafia and Amjad moved to Lexington, which was closer to her classes. Amjad was deep in his residency, and they were both very busy. Their landlord in Lexington said they paid their rent on time and minded their own business. “At no time did she discuss anything about politics,” said Gerald Ross. “I’ve got to tell you, if you’re looking for an al-Qaeda person, I think you’d pick her, out of a hundred people, ninety-ninth or something.”

  Aafia’s mother came over for the birth of Muhammad Ahmad on November 29, 1996. Ismat had managed to get a coveted residence permit or “green card” from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, and it allowed her to stay to help with the baby. For a while, Aafia’s troubles seemed to vanish.

  She finished her course work rapidly, earning a master’s degree in a year. She made all As despite bearing her first child during the same period. After that she was allowed to focus on experiments for her thesis, and she began visiting the lab at night and on weekends. She told her supervisors that her family responsibilities made it hard for her to be at the university all day. But her colleagues felt she wanted to stay away. “She became a ghostly presence,” one said.

  It was perhaps unfortunate that Aafia eventually abandoned neuroscience. Just as she was entering the field, it began witnessing extraordinary discoveries. In the early 1990s, a team of Italian neuroscientists working with monkeys in Parma observed that the same brain cells that the monkeys used to send signals to their muscles to grasp food and then lift it to their mouths also fired when they watched another monkey or even a human being performing the same action. The Italians were identifying mirror neurons, special brain cells that allow human beings and other animals to understand the actions and emotions of others by instinctively and unconsciously simulating them. The eminent University of California cognitive neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran later called this a breakthrough that would “do for psychology what DNA did for biology . . . provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

  The discovery of mirror neurons overturned a paradigm of learning that had dominated Western science ever since the Enlightenment. To be sure, it was still true that humans gained knowledge through deliberate reasoning. But experiments with mirror neurons showed that we learn more of what we know from unconscious and sometimes uncontrollable imitation.

  Aafia’s thesis adviser, Robert Sekuler, was already doing research on imitation. He and his colleagues at the university’s Vision Laboratory were examining how people learn to do ordinary tasks such as drive a car, play the piano, and tie their shoelaces, all through unconscious imitation. Aafia developed her own hypotheses about how the brain accomplished this kind of learning, and she set up experiments to test them. She told her sister she wanted to use the new science to help disabled children learn.

  In her dark, concealing clothes, Aafia must have cut a somber figure, and one professor recalled that Aafia, though pleasant, “was not known for her sense of humor.” Her friend Imam Faaruuq said, “She was not a joke-teller.” Her lawyer once put it this way: “Aafia was very serious about doing the will of Allah, and she irked some people with that.” An Orthodox Jewish professor told the Boston Globe that she was always trying to convert him to Islam. “She was not hostile to me or anything but she kept telling me how I have to learn about Islam and see the light,” the professor recalled. “She kept putting books in my mailbox.” But by all accounts, Sekuler bent over backward to accommodate her and her schedule.

  Aafia’s own research could be tedious, as the scientific spadework of graduate students often is. But the discovery of mirror neurons might have reinforced her belief that science should illustrate the truth of Islam. Mirror neurons could help explain the tremendous emphasis that Islam places on imitation—an emphasis that can be hard to explain to Westerners who see morality as a more rational affair. If, as the new studies seemed to show, imitation is the basis of empathy as well as learning, generations of Islamic scholars might have been correct to believe that inward morality follows outward practice rather than the other way around. She might have found biological evidence to support the hadith that says, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” But Aafia seems not to have made those conceptual leaps. Not long into her work on her dissertation, she seemed to lose her curiosity about neuroscience.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  After Haweya left the hospital in June 1997, she went to live with Marco and Ayaan in
their new apartment. It didn’t work out. Ayaan wrote that Marco and Haweya quarreled. Haweya went to stay with Faduma Osman, the kinswoman who, with her son Mahad, had attended Ayaan’s wedding in Nairobi; both were now living in the Netherlands.

  Haweya was so religious by now that even her Somali relatives found it unnerving. To her cousin Mahad, she and Ayaan had practically exchanged roles. “If you compare the two, Haweya was more liberal when we were in Nairobi. In those days, Ayaan was a very fanatical Muslim. Here they changed. Ayaan became more liberal, and Haweya became very conservative.”

  Another relative, Guled Ahmed Yusef, was also shocked by Haweya’s transformation when he visited her at Faduma’s house. “Usually she was laughing and talking, but this time she was really low. She just sat in the corner with her head down.”

  She was taking medication. After a while it seemed to work, and she returned to university in Nijmegen. Faduma and Mahad thought she was getting back to normal. But to others she still talked about how Holland was making her ill. Her brother says she called him and her mother in Nairobi to complain that Ayaan was busy in Leiden and she had no one to talk to. She told Leo Louwé she needed a vacation.

  The prince of their clan remembers, “Haweya got a little bit well. Then she started to say, ‘I want to go back to Nairobi with my mom.’ Her mom was ill with psoriasis. She said, ‘I want to go, Yassin, you must pay the ticket.’ But I’m not agreeing with it. I said she’s ill. Sometimes she’s laughing and seeing something that is not there. I say, ‘It’s not good, you won’t find medicine in Kenya, please stay here with me.’ ”

  Ayaan said she didn’t try to stop Haweya. She says her foster parents told her that if Haweya wanted to go home, Ayaan shouldn’t prevent her.

  And so, one day in July 1997, Haweya was gone. “I don’t know who paid for the ticket,” Yassin told me.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Aafia and Amjad moved yet again. This time, in the summer of 1997, they moved all the way to Worcester, almost forty miles west of Boston. Amjad began a new internship there at Saint Vincent Hospital. The town was also the home of several “Care brothers,” as the couple called them. Care International’s president, Emaddin Muntasser, owned the local Logan Furniture Store. The imam at the Worcester mosque was Muhammad Masood, a Boston University graduate and former MSA member whose brother was the leader of the Pakistani jihadi group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Aafia liked Worcester.

  Aafia admired Lashkar for its strong women’s wing, which held regular meetings and ran its own publications and girls’ schools in Pakistan. The top woman of Lashkar, Umm Hammad, was a celebrated speaker. She edited the Lashkar magazine, as well as books such as We Are the Women of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Her troops wore the female jihadi uniform of black burkas, gloves, and socks. Yet Aafia disagreed on certain theological points with the Ahl-e-Hadith sect of Lashkar-e-Taiba and thus could not join Umm Hammad. She wished her own Deobandi sect would produce an equally strong women’s group.

  The Western world was just learning of the Deobandis’ views on women, and it did not share Aafia’s admiration. In 1995, with support from ISI and Saudi Arabia, an army of Taliban, or religious students, had wrested control of southern Afghanistan from the warlords who had ruled and terrorized the country since 1992. Deobandi madrassas all over Pakistan sent students to join the movement. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was a mujahid who had lost an eye fighting the Soviets. He and his men were determined to stamp out any signs of female freedom left over from the days of the godless Soviets and their Afghan allies.

  After seizing the Afghan capital, Kabul, in 1996, the Deobandi militiamen forbade women to leave their houses without a male relative. They banned women from working in any public occupation except medicine. Girls were banished from school. Women could not wear makeup, high heels, or “squeaky shoes.” Bathhouses, beauty parlors, and home schools for girls were closed. The young zealots of the Taliban even whitewashed the first-floor windows of houses so that no one could see the women inside.

  The United Nations and Western aid agencies objected, but the Taliban refused to repeal their edicts. “This is a big infidel policy which gives such obscene freedom to women which would lead to adultery and herald the destruction of Islam,” the Taliban’s attorney general told some UN officials. “In any Islamic country where adultery becomes common, that country is destroyed and enters the domination of infidels because their men become like women and women cannot defend themselves.”

  Other Muslims complained that the Taliban gave Islam a bad name, but the group’s leaders told the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid that the women’s issue was too important to their own rank and file for them to compromise.

  When the United Nations cut off development funds to Taliban areas in response to the measures against women, the Karachi fraternity of Deobandi divines formed a charity, the al-Rashid Trust, to funnel new money to the Taliban. Al-Rashid also started a newspaper, Zarb-e-Momin (Sword of the Believer) that Aafia read on the Internet. Zarb-e-Momin’s motto was simple: “News with a Lesson.” Usually the lesson was about the evil designs of Jews, Crusaders, and Hindus on the Islamic paradise that the Taliban had created in Afghanistan. But the newspaper also focused on defending the Islamic emirate’s new gender regulations. Its writers attacked the United States for “ruthlessly exploiting women” by allowing thousands of unwed mothers to raise their children alone and for creating “government-sponsored Old Homes for aging parents.” In a feature for children, the paper praised a boy who refused to let his mother go out fully veiled to buy him some shoes, since “it is better not to go outdoors” and “to leave the shopping” to men.

  Aafia considered it far more important that the Taliban had made parts of Afghanistan safe for women and children than that females could no longer hold jobs and go to school. She trusted that they would be allowed to return when the war ended, but under properly Islamic conditions. About jihadi groups in general, says Amjad, “She thought the ones blowing up schools, throwing acid [into the faces of unveiled women], are a few misguided black sheep. Otherwise the movement is noble, i.e., to establish the law of God in the land, and end injustice by it.”

  She also agreed with another Taliban decision that the United States criticized: to play host to the multimillionaire Saudi militant Osama bin Laden.

  U.S. investigators first became conscious of bin Laden during the trials of the Al-Kifah conspirators for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The FBI learned that he had contributed to Sayyid Nosair’s defense fund after Nosair had assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane. When Ramzi Yousef was captured, they found that Yousef had stayed in some guesthouses owned by bin Laden. The Americans had only the dimmest understanding of the network of banks and charities that the Islamists had established—in some cases right under their noses—and they began to suspect bin Laden of personally financing this jihadi movement. It was under strict secrecy that the U.S. attorney’s office in New York empaneled a grand jury to begin investigating bin Laden in 1996. Equally secret was a special unit that the CIA set up that year to investigate the same man. It was the first unit the agency had ever created dedicated to collecting intelligence on a single person.

  Aafia thought of bin Laden as a great Islamic hero, modeled after the Prophet Muhammad himself. TV interviews of him sitting on the ground in his camouflage jacket, eating with his hands, and sharing a tin cup with his fellow mujahideen moved her to tears. Here was a man who could be living like a prince. Instead, he had given it all up for Islam.

  Chapter Thirty

  In Kenya, Haweya stopped taking the medicine she had received in Holland. Her brother, Mahad, said she seemed okay for about three months. Then all of a sudden she became disturbed again. There were times when she lost control. “She would be talking the whole day complaining about hearing voices,” Mahad said. She began raving about religion.

  Ayaan wrote later that their mother summoned mullahs and an exorcist to drive out Haweya’s psychoses. Their brother, Mahad, said th
at Haweya herself, in desperation, sought out faith healers—“but there was no change in status.”

  Ayaan talked with Haweya every ten days or so. By October, Haweya begged her sister to come to Nairobi and rescue her. She said their mother had taken her to an exorcist, who had beaten her with sticks. But Ayaan was behind in her studies, and she spent the Christmas break writing overdue papers.

  On January 8, 1998, her father called to say that Haweya was dead. Again, Ayaan has described this event differently at different points. In The Caged Virgin she said she never found out exactly what happened. In Infidel she wrote that her sister ran outside in a lightning storm, suffered a miscarriage, and died a week later. Haweya had told her she was pregnant; Ayaan did not write by whom. Other Somalis in Nairobi say Haweya committed suicide. But they don’t want to talk about it.

  Ayaan later said that Haweya’s death was the lowest point of her life. She flew to Nairobi but missed the burial. Ayaan found her mother alone, living in “utter squalor” in a small room with a cement floor and smoke-stained walls. Mahad had recently married a Somali girl from a respectable clan and fathered a baby. Their mother disapproved and was refusing to acknowledge either the wife or the child. When Ayaan went to see the baby, Mahad’s new wife broke into a tirade about how selfish and ungrateful she was not to help her relatives in Africa. “You drive around in a fancy car; you make money from the misery of the refugees in Holland, translating for the infidels. And yet you did not bother to bring the little boy anything. You are rich and you don’t share a penny.”

  In truth, Ayaan said, she had been sending her family money for almost six years—ever since she had arrived in Holland. She asked Mahad what had happened to it. He shrugged and said he had invested it with a man who had stolen it.