Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Leiden’s student magazine interviewed Ayaan in May 1998, five months after Haweya’s death. The headline read, “Soon I Will Go into Politics.”

  She appears not to have had any special cause to fight at the time. But she was her father’s daughter, and politics ran in her veins.

  She had joined the Labor Party, which was ruling the country at the time in a so-called “purple coalition” with the more conservative parties. Yet her political party wasn’t part of her identity the way it was for many others in Holland. In Infidel she wrote that she never really liked social work. She didn’t want to save Africa. According to her boyfriend, Marco, she wasn’t especially interested in women’s rights.

  In her last years at Leiden, however, she noticed a possible political niche for an immigrant like herself.

  For much of the 1990s, many Dutch people felt that the Netherlands possessed a great secret of government in its devotion to consensual decision making. Under the country’s unusual “pillar system,” the population was divided according to religion and political affiliation. The government gave each of these “pillars” the money to run its own schools, television stations, newspapers, and even sports clubs, and by 1998 an astounding 80 percent of the country’s citizens were satisfied with their government. The reigning attitude was a jaunty tolerance summed up in the Dutch phrase “Anything goes.”

  But beneath the surface, cracks were showing.

  Muslims made up 5 percent of Holland’s sixteen million people. They were poorer and less educated than the native-born population, and there was an undercurrent of hostility toward them. In 1991, the chairman of the opposition Liberal Party, Frits Bolkestein, expressed his fears that the country was admitting more Muslim immigrants than it could absorb. He argued that the Dutch should set aside their traditional separate “pillars” and work toward integration instead. But he warned that integration would fail if Muslims refused to accept homosexuality and the equality of women.

  The Left pilloried Bolkestein and accused him of pandering to racists. But the tensions that he noted were real.

  A few years later a Rotterdam sociologist and columnist named Pim Fortuyn picked up the theme with more bite, railing against Islam as “a backward religion” that was hostile to women and gays. The title alone of his 1998 book, Against the Islamicization of Our Culture, suggested the alarm that more than a few Dutch citizens felt.

  Fortuyn argued that sexual freedom was essential to Dutch culture and worth defending. He assailed what he called “the left church,” or the politically correct establishment, that, he claimed, made it impossible in Holland to talk frankly about Muslims and immigration. He pointed out that Moroccan youths committed much of the crime that plagued immigrant neighborhoods. He called for a crackdown.

  Fortuyn’s arguments startled people. As a former Catholic and former Marxist who was also gay, he had benefited from the country’s tolerance. But now he seemed to be saying that if the Netherlands wanted to keep its culture of “anything goes,” it would first have to exclude entire ethnic and religious groups. He clearly struck a chord, and Fortuyn and Bolkestein together made it seem that the Dutch had to choose: either they could support the Muslims, or they could support women and gays.

  Their arguments put the Labor Party in a bind. On the one hand, the party refused to descend to Muslim bashing. But it also worried that the conservatives (including Bolkestein’s Liberal Party) might steal Labor’s defense of liberal values. On January 29, 2000, the left-leaning Dutch intellectual Paul Scheffer published an article called “The Multicultural Drama” in NRC Handelsblad. In it, he played on the Dutch fondness for Calvinist self-flagellation. It wasn’t the Muslims who were to blame for Holland’s predicament, he wrote, it was progressive Dutchmen like himself; they had turned a blind eye to the failures of multiculturalism and allowed an underclass to develop in the country’s cities.

  Either way, the message was the same: it was time to get tougher on Muslims.

  Ayaan found the whole kerfuffle overdone. In her view, the Dutch tended to turn little problems into crises.

  Nearing graduation, she took Marco to Germany to meet her father. Hirsi was in Düsseldorf to have an eye operation, and the two visitors spent a pleasant afternoon with him. Marco was touched to see how happy it made Ayaan to be with her father. “They were really cuddling all the time, and Ayaan was kissing him.” But he also found the meeting painful to watch.

  Ayaan had often told him how liberal and broad-minded her father was. To Marco, though, Hirsi seemed a real Muslim patriarch. Even Ayaan seemed surprised by what a stickler he had become regarding Islam. “He was always preaching,” Marco said. It made the young Dutchman furious to see that, despite all Ayaan’s accomplishments, Hirsi and her other male relatives still treated her like a child because she was a woman. “Some nephew came in,” Marco recalled. “Without even saying a word to Ayaan, he started telling her father that she should wear a scarf. If you are a woman in their society, you are nobody, really nobody.”

  Marco didn’t try to hide his irritation, but Ayaan kept it from her father that she and Marco were living together. She said they were just friends. Yassin, however, and other relatives knew about their relationship.

  In any case, Hirsi tried to release his daughter from her marriage to the Canadian Osman Musse Quarre, who, Faduma Osman says, had, out of spite, refused Ayaan’s requests for a divorce. Hirsi wrote a rather groveling general letter to the Osman Mahamud lineage in Europe and North America asking his fellow clansmen to help Ayaan free herself legally from the husband she had not seen in eight years.

  “My dear fellows,” Ayaan’s father began, “I would like to inform you that eight years ago Mr. Osman Muse Qaare [sic], himself of our clan, married Ayan Hirsi [sic] under the auspices of the Osman Mahamud community in Nairobi.” He admitted that although Osman had “met all the marriage expenses plus Ayan’s travel expenses to Kanada [sic], she went to Europe, ignoring all her sacred obligations of the marriage. This was a wounding, heart-breaking betrayal of Osman and [an] indelible shame on our family. I expressed to Osman my outrage and tried to console him.” Still, he appealed “to you, my brothers and sisters, to your grace and sympathy in an attempt to resolve this awkward problem.”

  Around the same time, Prince Yassin says, Ayaan also asked his help in persuading Osman to divorce her. “Ayaan says to me, ‘Can we talk, can I tell you something?’ And then she tells me, ‘When I’m in Nairobi, my father, Hirsi, he gave me to one of my family. I don’t want him, that guy.’ . . . She said, ‘I need help. You are our prince. Can you help me?’ ”

  Yassin told her, “Just talk to him, and say you don’t want him. If you still cannot find a solution, I can make an announcement. I can call all the men in my family, and we can have a meeting to decide what to do.”

  Yassin says he told the elders—including his brother, the prince of the Canadian branch of the clan—that they had to help Ayaan. Approached this way, Osman finally agreed to let Ayaan go. “After that,” Yassin said, “Ayaan, she’s not married. This is our culture.”

  Ayaan graduated from Leiden University with a master’s degree in September 2000. A nephew and one other man were the only Somalis at her graduation party. Yassin says she called him later to tell him she had taken her degree. “I would have come,” Yassin says, “but she didn’t give me the invitation.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  It was spring 2001. Aafia Siddiqui e-mailed her friend Salma Kazmi, a Wellesley graduate and fellow MSA member, to say she would be running a children’s playgroup that summer. Her sister, Fowzia, was moving to Boston to do a fellowship at Brigham and Women’s in neurology. She rented an apartment two floors below Aafia’s. Her two children would be in the group, Aafia’s, too.

  Fowzia and Amjad had never gotten along, and when Fowzia arrived in Boston she noticed something was wrong with her sister. “Aafia was not happy,” she said later. “She had lost her contagi
ous smile.” Amjad says Fowzia aggravated the tensions already evident in their marriage.

  Fowzia says her children spent a blissful summer in Aafia’s care. “It was perfect for me,” she said. “I couldn’t get a better babysitter. She did games, songs, and different activities.” Aafia’s American neighbors found her and her charges rather glum. A man who lived on the same floor said the children played outside in the hall while Aafia worked on the computer. When he asked young Ahmad, in the elevator, what he was learning at his preschool, the four-year-old said, “The Quran.” Another time Aafia quarreled with the building management when the fire sprinkler system caused a flood in her apartment. She accused the management of mistreating her because she was Muslim.

  One night she got so excited at one of her fund-raisers that she tossed a ring—an expensive one that Amjad had given her—into the collection basket for the mujahideen. Amjad and the children were at the fund-raiser that night, and Amjad could tell that Aafia was tired. Then two-year-old Maryam began to cry that she was hungry. Amjad told Aafia it was time to go home and feed the baby, but Aafia insisted that she needed to stay. “She said, ‘No, no, I still want to see how many people are giving funds,’ ” a relative of Amjad’s told me later.

  Taking both children, Amjad left the hall. Aafia followed, but in the car she complained that he failed to appreciate what she was doing for oppressed Muslims.

  Their argument continued once they got home. According to Amjad, he was trying clumsily to feed the baby a bottle. Aafia shouted that he was doing it wrong. Furious, Amjad spun around, and, he says, the milk bottle slipped from his hands and struck her on the mouth. (Aafia told the FBI that he had thrown the bottle at her “out of frustration.”)

  Amjad took her to the emergency room and asked a friend there, a plastic surgeon, to stitch her up. Back home again, he apologized and made some chocolate milk for Aafia before they went to bed.

  The next morning, after Amjad went to work, Fowzia stopped at the apartment to drop off her children. Seeing Aafia’s face, she insisted that her sister take the children and stay in her apartment.

  Amjad found his apartment empty when he got home. Realizing that Aafia must be at Fowzia’s, he knocked on her door. But Fowzia wouldn’t answer, and Aafia wouldn’t come to the phone. Normally he brought home milk and food for breakfast at the end of his workday. The next morning he left the things outside Fowzia’s door and left for work.

  After four days, Aafia decided to return. But Amjad says that before she agreed to stay, she showed him a photograph that Fowzia had taken of her bruises and told him that if he ever laid a hand on her again, Fowzia would take the picture to the police.

  Hoping a change of scenery might improve matters, he proposed yet another move, away from those unpleasant memories. He could afford a bigger apartment now. The Tufts New England Medical Center at Tufts University had offered him a full-time position as an attending physician, and he wanted to move back to Malden, the northern suburb where they had been happy early in their marriage. In June 2001, he and Aafia signed a lease in a complex called Granada Heights, with a lake and a swimming pool, and after subletting their Back Bay apartment to a Saudi whom Amjad had met at the hospital, they moved to Malden on July 1.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline offered Ayaan Hirsi Ali a job selling Imigran, an antimigraine drug, to doctors. Despite her political ambitions, she took the job. She couldn’t resist the lure of a company car. And she wanted to leave the council flat on the Langegracht.

  At thirty-one, she felt that she had lived like a student long enough and, now that she had a full-time job, she could afford to buy a house. She found a nice one near the train station in Leiden. When Marco said he didn’t want to buy a house with her, she talked a girlfriend into joining her instead.

  She and Marco were on the verge of breaking up. They were always arguing about money and other things. Ayaan says she got tired of it. They were still very fond of each other, but “in the end,” she wrote later, “it did not work out because we are both strong-willed and neither of us are inclined to give in. That always led to arguments. Moreover, I am rather scattered, while he is meticulous and strict.”

  She called Prince Yassin and said she wanted to visit his mother, a grand old lady who was in the hospital in Groningen. “I said, ‘Tell me—what’s your life?’ ” Yassin remembered asking Ayaan. “She said, ‘I’ve got the good job and new car and a petrol pass.’ ” Ayaan told Yassin she would visit him soon and they would go to the hospital together. “I am very happy at that time.” But she didn’t come. That was the last time they spoke.

  The Glaxo job didn’t work out. After two weeks, Ayaan quit. She took a job working for the small town of Oegstgeest, but she didn’t like that, either.

  The soaring popularity of Pim Fortuyn had turned the subject of Muslim integration into a hot topic in the press. Other Dutch politicians could no longer avoid taking a stand on what more and more people seemed to agree was the problem of too many Muslims in Holland.

  Through her work as a translator for the immigration service, Ayaan appeared in a couple of television debates on immigration. The views she presented were middle of the road, but she showed a definite talent for the medium, sometimes stealing the show with a quick riposte. When, in March 2001, Marco read in the newspaper that the Labor Party was looking for a research assistant at its think tank, the Wiardi Beckman Institute in Amsterdam, he told her the job sounded perfect for her. It would start in the autumn and focus on immigration and integration. Ayaan decided to apply.

  Several of her former professors at Leiden offered to vouch for her. She also impressed the institute by entering and winning a national debate competition in Utrecht. (“She comes from an oral culture,” Marco commented, “and she is much better than the average Dutchman at thinking on her feet.”) But with more than a hundred applicants, the competition for the job was stiff.

  While the selection process inched along, another TV show about Muslim immigrants focused on gay teachers being harassed by Moroccan schoolchildren. A conservative imam from Rotterdam opined that homosexuality was “a contagious disease.” Fortuyn seized on the man’s words as proof that Muslims didn’t respect Dutch values.

  Later commentators noted that the Dutch acceptance of homosexuality was actually quite new and more tentative than most outsiders imagined. (Only a few weeks earlier, in fact, the new mayor of Amsterdam had officiated at Europe’s first same-sex marriage.) Moreover, it wasn’t exactly true that Dutch Muslims were untouched by Dutch attitudes. They were less approving of homosexuality than non-Muslim Dutch, but they also were less critical of gays than Muslims in other countries. At the time, though, the whole country seemed to agree with Fortuyn that, citizens or not, people who said they didn’t want their children to be gay simply didn’t belong in Holland.

  Ayaan sat down and wrote an article for NRC Handelsblad blaming Islam for the imam’s prejudice. “I wrote that this attitude was much larger than just one imam: It was systemic in Islam, because this was a religion that had never gone through the Enlightenment that would lead people to question its rigid approach to individual freedom.” It was her first article, and it appeared in May 2001. It positioned her as a perfect defender of the Labor Party. Here was a Muslim woman who wasn’t afraid to criticize Islam. Here was an immigrant who embraced the “Enlightenment,” a term that neatly allowed a person to be Western without being Christian, and one that Fortuyn was making a totem of “Dutchness.”

  A few weeks later, Ayaan learned that she had landed the job at the Wiardi Beckman Institute, starting in September.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  A few weeks after Aafia and Amjad moved into the Granada Heights complex, a professionally produced video began circulating on the Internet chat rooms Aafia frequented.

  In the video, which was two hours long, Osama bin Laden, dressed in white robes, read a poem recalling the victory of the Muslim hero Sala
din over the Crusaders in the Middle Ages. The film then showed familiar footage of Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian women and a young Palestinian boy being shot outside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a city that Muslims call al-Quds. “Jews are free in al-Quds to rape Muslim women and to imprison the young cubs who stand up to them,” bin Laden said. “The blood of Muslims is the cheapest of all blood!” He ranted against the Jews who he said ran the U.S. government. “We speak of an American government, but it is in reality an Israeli government, because if we look at the most sensitive departments of the government, whether it is the Pentagon or the State Department or the CIA, you find that it is the Jews who have first word in the American government.”

  Peter Bergen, a CNN correspondent who had interviewed bin Laden in 1997 and had just finished writing a biography of him, saw the video and reacted with alarm. Bin Laden’s statements clarified something that had puzzled Bergen: why had the jihadi leader, whose speeches condemned Jews and their supposed conspiracies, never attacked Jewish or Israeli targets? “I came to realize that for bin Laden, the Pentagon was a Jewish target,” Bergen said later. He wrote to a friend at the New York Times on August 17 and urged him to look into the possibility that a plot was in the works.

  The Al-Kifah circle also seems to have heard the message that something sensational was about to happen. Aafia’s friend Marlene was heavily pregnant in Texas by her new Saudi husband, Mirabi, and in late August the couple piled her five children into a car and drove 1,500 miles from Arlington to Boston. Marlene said she wanted a friendly midwife there to deliver her baby. The FBI later suspected that she and Mirabi had some knowledge of what was coming and may have wanted to deliver the message to friends or even meet with the hijackers, who were already taking up positions along the East Coast. Marlene’s Boston circle put on a reception for her that Aafia attended. Yet Aafia said nothing special to her husband about the occasion, and he noticed nothing different about her behavior afterward.