It was all unspeakably depressing. Ayaan decided she wouldn’t be going back. Before leaving, she said, she gave her mother $1,000 so that she could finally return to Somalia and her own clan.
Chapter Thirty-one
Aafia had never given up on her causes, not even when she became a mother and a graduate student. When the war in Bosnia ended, she started raising money for Chechnya and Kosovo.
Her friend Imam Faaruuq at the Mosque for Praising Allah remembered a time when Aafia got up at a fund-raiser and asked how many men there owned two pairs of boots. If they had two pairs, she said, they could afford to donate money for boots to give to the mujahideen in Chechnya. “You don’t need two pairs of boots in this country,” she scoffed. “They’re facing a cold winter there!” The imam said he took his own boots off and gave them to her.
She taught at several Boston-area mosques, and on Sundays she drove across town to teach the Quran to converts. “She used to go to all the places and to our center, too,” said Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Center of New England, in Quincy. “Whenever there is an event, she comes.”
“She was a popular and well-liked member of the community,” said Imam Faaruuq. Faaruuq’s wife later told the Boston Globe that Aafia Siddiqui had given powerful speeches urging women, especially new converts to Islam, to start wearing the head scarf and to refuse to shake hands with men. “She shared with us that we should never make excuses for who we are,” Faaruuq’s wife recalled. “She said, ‘Americans have no respect for people who are weak. Americans will respect us if we stand up and we are strong.’ ”
She was working incredibly hard. She attributed her discipline to a lifetime of fasting, getting up at 5 a.m. for prayers, and avoiding all frivolous entertainment. Yet having a baby, commuting to work, and pursuing two careers added to the usual strains of marriage. Her mother’s long stay created one kind of friction. Then, after she returned to Pakistan, Amjad began complaining about the long hours that their son, Ahmad, was spending in day care. Finally Aafia found a suitable Bosnian “sister” to care for the boy at home. But the tension between them did not abate.
Both looked to Islam for guidance at such times. Unfortunately for Aafia, the Deobandi interpretation to which they both subscribed came down squarely on Amjad’s side: her primary duty was to be a wife and mother, while his was to make money to support their family. The Quran said, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means.” Amjad quoted scholars who said that Allah had established this rule so that households would run smoothly. But Aafia became so offended when he suggested that she postpone her studies until Ahmad went to school that he stopped talking about it.
Her acquaintances in Boston were still puzzled that she had married a man who appeared not to share her zeal for jihad. Amjad struck them as “soft.” He never wore “jihad attire.” He wore Western clothes or, more often, a doctor’s scrub suit. “He was just a busy doctor,” said a Pakistani American. “I never heard him say anything about jihad.”
The couple moved again, this time to be nearer to his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Their new apartment was on the twentieth floor of Back Bay Manor, a redbrick apartment complex in Mission Hill that housed enough Muslims to have its own prayer room. Amjad also helped some of Aafia’s friends from Roxbury start a group to deal with domestic violence. He seemed to be falling into the patterns of conventional American life.
By contrast, Aafia seemed increasingly anti-American. She would study their tax returns for hours, looking for ways to get a refund; Amjad recalls her saying, “Every dollar I give to the U.S. government will be used to kill Muslims somewhere or other in the world.” When one of his cousins argued that Muslims could do a lot of good living in the United States—for example, by being models of moral and professional excellence or by voting for candidates who saw the Muslims’ point of view—Aafia flew into a rage. She said those were just excuses; the truth was that some Muslims would rather chase money than wage jihad. “Yet Allah said, ‘Fighting is prescribed for you, even though you dislike it. It is possible that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knows and you do not.’”
Aafia’s activism was beginning to grate on Amjad. After their second child was born in September 1998—a daughter they named Maryam bint Muhammad, in Arab style, or “Maryam, daughter of Muhammad”—Aafia returned to her commitments outside the home. “She was a very good speaker and she was very fond of giving speeches, but she sometimes neglected the children,” one of Amjad’s relatives told me. “He got upset. His idea was the priority of the children. She was not very interested in family. She was giving speeches, fund-raising, things like that. She used to go to jails—all of these things.”
Her husband’s tepidness toward jihad was becoming worse than embarrassing. Now that she was married, she couldn’t attend mixed gatherings alone. But Amjad was always working at the hospital, and when he wasn’t there he was writing papers at home. His adviser, Dr. Daniel Dedrick, was so impressed with his work that he let Amjad sign up for courses at Harvard’s School of Public Health, leaving him even less time for rallies and conferences. Aafia wanted him to take the family camping with her “Care brothers,” but as much as he liked camping, Amjad had to study on weekends. She argued that the “brothers” were doing important work and he should get to know them; he shot back that his and her first responsibility was to their own family.
Amjad remembers her getting so angry that she would clench her teeth and come after him, beating him with her fists and kicking if he tried to hold her down. She weighed so little that she couldn’t hurt him, and he claims she liked him better after their fights. But two of Aafia’s professors at Brandeis later told the FBI that “at various times” she had bruises on her face. The honeymoon was definitely over.
Chapter Thirty-two
Ayaan threw herself into her studies after she returned to Holland from Nairobi. As the only licensed Somali-Dutch translator in the country, she was also in demand at work. “She worked really, really hard,” Marco said. “She would leave early in the morning and drive four hours to Groningen. She would come back at seven in the evening, and she would only have had one cup of tea all day.” Marco told her that her employers were obliged to give her time to eat. She answered that they had usually waited so long for a translator and were so happy to see her that she didn’t have the heart to ask them for a break.
Marco admired Ayaan in many ways. When her teenage cousin Magool ended up in a juvenile home after her parents paid a trafficker to take her to the Netherlands, Ayaan made room for Magool to share their Langegracht flat. But Marco also began to realize that some of the same characteristics that set his stunning African girlfriend apart from her Dutch counterparts made it hard for them to live together.
Marco worried about saving money, getting along with friends and family, and getting ahead in his career. “Here you have everything ready for you from the time you are born—a future, a house. Your only concern is your pension and to take care not to get hit by a bus.” Ayaan didn’t share such concerns at all. When she had money, she spent it. Even when she bought meat, she would insist (to the point of serious anger) that they eat all the meat the same day. She took risks that made Marco’s head spin. If she didn’t like a job, she would quit on the spot. If someone crossed her, she would instantly confront the person.
That didn’t mean she was fearless. Quite the opposite, Marco felt. It meant she had been taught that the world was so dangerous that one had to react quickly to a challenge. “She is always on guard,” he observed.
He could not convince her that she would not be robbed if she went alone to Leiden’s Central Station. Once when she got lost in the car, he told her to follow the road signs back to Leiden. “She really didn’t believe me,” he recalled. He marveled that “her distrust of government and society is jus
t so big.” Sometimes he found it touching that Ayaan viewed the Dutch as absurdly trusting. But at other times her suspicions exhausted him.
He had come to believe that her assumptions about life being dangerous and uncertain—assumptions that may have been realistic in Africa—served in Holland to create some of the danger and uncertainty she sought to avoid. “She would spend money easily, so she was always short-cashed. But if you are short-cashed, tomorrow will always be uncertain. And so tomorrow was always uncertain. If you live each day as if it is your last day, and you never think ahead, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
On the other hand, he realized that what seemed to him reckless imprudence sometimes worked to Ayaan’s advantage in a society like the Netherlands, where everyone else felt so constrained. “We are always worrying about what will happen if we do this or that,” he said. “Ayaan doesn’t worry about that, and she often ends up in very nice and unexpected situations because she is willing to take risks.” But her appetite for drama and excitement was far greater than his.
He found it painful to follow her relationship with her family. Ayaan showed him the letter her father had written that called her a “Deceitful Fox” for backing out of her marriage to Osman Musse Quarre. She told Marco without bitterness that her father’s honor had been at stake, and she could understand why he had written the letter.
Marco didn’t agree at all. “It was such a stupid, childish letter that you couldn’t even use it in a soap!” he said. Ayaan seemed to feel that all the obligations went one way, from children to parents. It was a common view in Africa and Asia, but it made Marco angry. “What about the obligations they had to her?” He couldn’t imagine parents treating a child the way Ayaan said her parents treated her. But he was getting the idea that “it’s unbelievably harsh how people treat each other in Africa.”
Ayaan received a Dutch passport in 1997, and she began joining Marco on his shoestring travels. They visited China and the Middle East. Their trips afforded her another view of the world through Western eyes. Marco gave her a book about Egypt called A Good Man Sometimes Beats His Wife. The Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk had written it about the circle of Egyptian friends he had made while studying for a year at the University of Cairo. Luyendijk had taken the title from an Egyptian woman who told him that a woman couldn’t be sure a man loved her if he didn’t beat her. The book was a Dutch bestseller, largely for the window it opened on the different views of sex held by Egyptian and Dutch young people. Ayaan has said that she read for the first time in Luyendijk’s book about the Quranic texts that men used to justify beating their wives. She later told the Leiden student newspaper that the book had opened her eyes. She had never really thought before about the specific impact of Islam on women.
Luyendijk himself felt that his book’s more important message was the enormous gap in wealth between him and his fellow students and the obstacle it presented to real friendship. “The cultural things, you can get past,” he told me. “The poverty was more important. It’s like me trying to be friends with a millionaire. I can’t do it. I can’t live in his neighborhood, I can’t do the things he does. That’s how it was for them to be friends with me.” The difference between the life he could expect as a middle-class Dutchman and what they had to settle for as middle-class Egyptians was so painful and insoluble that they never talked about it explicitly. The book ends when Luyendijk learns that the brother of one of his friends has died because the family couldn’t afford to take him to a hospital.
With her new Dutch passport, Ayaan had become one of those relative millionaires, and, as time passed, she found it easier to identify with the Dutch point of view.
Her fellow clansmen now saw her as a great success. “Everyone forgot about her marriage,” said Faduma Osman. Somalis called her up to ask favors. Ayaan didn’t mind giving them advice, but she got tired of their endless needs. The clan had set up something called the Kah Foundation (kah means “dawn” in Somali) to help its members in the Netherlands. The prince of her lineage, Yassin Musse Boqor, asked Ayaan to join the board. “I said, Ayaan, you are very clever, you are very intelligent, will you sit on the board and help us?” Ayaan told him she was too busy with her studies, but every now and then she gave him 5 or 10 guilders as a contribution.
She still considered herself a Muslim, but has written that she kept that part of her brain separate. When she read or heard something that conflicted with Islam as she understood it, “a little shutter in my brain clicked” and she mentally closed her faith against whatever she was hearing. But she grew tired of the way other Muslims—including total strangers—would approach her in a bar or on the street and tell her she was sinning. And when Marco lent her The Atheist Manifesto by Herman Philipse, a philosophy professor at Utrecht University, she didn’t read it, she says, because she feared the book might convince her.
Chapter Thirty-three
The turn of the world’s calendars from 1999 to 2000 excited as much superstitious hope and apprehension among jihadis as it did among other people. They speculated that the dawn of a new Christian millennium might presage the coming showdown between Muslims and the followers of the Dajjal.
The new year also brought the news that the husband of Aafia’s friend Marlene—Bassam Kanj, a leader of Al-Kifah in Boston—had been martyred in his native Lebanon.
The newspapers said that Kanj, a Boston University graduate and sometime Boston taxi driver, had been trying to establish an Islamic state. But his friends at Care International said the shooting had started when Lebanese government troops tried to raid one of the training camps Kanj was trying to build for aspiring Lebanese jihadis. Some reports added that, before he was killed, the burly Kanj had threatened to behead two Lebanese soldiers whom his followers had taken hostage. Kanj’s former comrades were sure he had gone to paradise. The “Care brothers” were recorded at the time talking about it at the office. One had recently visited Kanj in Lebanon. “I was very affected by the brother,” he told the other members of the group while the FBI bugged their conversation.
Aafia visited Marlene, who had been shown a picture of her husband with a bullet through his head. She felt sorry for Marlene but also in awe of her friend. Marlene was now the widow of a shahid, whose passage to paradise was almost guaranteed. The “brothers” soon arranged for Marlene to marry a Saudi jihadi named Anwar al-Mirabi, who had fought in Afghanistan and attended a mosque in Arlington, Texas, that was run by an imam named Moataz al-Hallak. During the embassy-bombings trial in New York in 1999, prosecutors alleged that Hallak had been the Texas go-between for bin Laden and his followers in the United States, though Hallak was never charged with any crime. Marlene and her five children soon trooped off to Arlington with her new husband.
For the next year, Aafia was busy around the clock. She had a tiny baby and a toddler to care for, she had started teaching a new class at the mosque in Sharon, and she was writing her dissertation. She finished her thesis in February 2001. It was called “Separating the Components of Imitation.” An article based on her master’s thesis had been published the month before in a prestigious scientific journal. She had completed the requirements for both her master’s and her Ph.D. in less than four years—record time, especially considering that she had meanwhile borne two children. In the dissertation’s acknowledgments, she wrote that she “would like to thank my mother, Ismat Siddiqui, for my dissertation is a direct result of her motivation, strong encouragement and support. . . . Nothing in the universe can replace her!” One of her advisers asked about her career plans. She replied that for the time being her religion required her to concentrate on her family.
After so much work, the change was abrupt. Finally free to wear what she liked, she started pinning her black veil so that it covered everything except her eyes when she left the apartment.
As for Amjad’s career, it was taking off. He graduated as the best in his class of residents in anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In February
2001, the American Association of Anesthesiologists named him editor of its national newsletter. Now that he understood how the U.S. medical system worked, he thought he could someday branch out into health care management. He applied to study for a master’s degree in public health at Harvard, and Harvard accepted him. His adviser at Brigham and Women’s, Dr. Daniel Dedrick, was proud of him—but Aafia seemed not to share Dedrick’s pride. She often quoted the Quranic verse that said, “Oh you who believe! Let not your riches and your children divert you from remembrance of Allah.” Amjad tried to mollify her by finally growing a beard again.
With the millennium still hovering, many Muslims felt that something awesome and ordained would happen. After the leader of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party sparked an already planned Palestinian uprising by visiting Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock in September 2000, groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood began holding wildly emotional rallies in the United States. The Salafist scholar and spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden, Safar al-Hawali, wrote a treatise called “Day of Wrath” predicting that the intifada could be the precursor to the final battle with the Dajjal.
Since finishing her Ph.D., Aafia had been translating The Lovers of the Paradise Maidens by Abdullah Azzam (“the Godfather of Jihad”) from Arabic into English and posting the chapters on a jihadi Web site. The book consisted of short biographies of about 150 martyrs who had died in the Afghan jihad.
Aafia also participated in Islamic discussion groups on the Internet. The arguments she got into sometimes made her very angry. She thought Muslims who said Islam required them to live peacefully with unbelievers and confine themselves to dawah were probably U.S. agents.
She was also growing more rigid in her personal life. When Amjad’s brother and his family visited Boston, they all went to see a science museum. One exhibit included background music. Aafia backed away. Music was haram—forbidden.
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