Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Marlene’s baby—a boy she named Bassam after her martyred first husband—was born on August 29. She flew back to Texas with the infant a few days later. Her new husband and the rest of the children drove home via New York.

  In Boston and up and down the East Coast, September 11, 2001, dawned crystalline blue. It was ten years to the day since Aafia had been a student in Houston and President George H. W. Bush had called for a “new world order” in the aftermath of the Gulf War. For those like Aafia who believed that this order was ranged against Islam, the superpower’s comeuppance was about to begin.

  At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. Both planes had taken off from Boston’s Logan Airport. Two other scheduled airliners also crashed, one of them into the Pentagon. Within hours the Boston Globe reported that police were looking for Osama bin Laden’s “cells and sympathizers” in Boston’s jihadi network.

  Amjad was scheduled to start classes that week at Harvard’s School of Public Health. He didn’t show up, according to a spokeswoman for the school. As soon as Aafia heard what had happened, she started crying and praying. All day long, they watched TV and talked on the phone with worried friends. By the end of the day, Aafia had decided that they had to leave immediately for Pakistan. “My life is in danger,” she insisted, becoming hysterical; “my children’s lives are in danger.” Amjad was just a few months away from taking his anesthesiology board exams. He wanted to wait and see what happened. Aafia refused. “You stay here,” she said, “but I must go.”

  If Aafia knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks, Amjad insists she never told him.

  Police in Boston began raiding hotels that the hijackers had stayed in. They also hunted for Nabil al-Marabh, a Boston cabdriver who had worked with Bassam Kanj. They had learned that two of the hijackers who left from Boston were known to these sometime cabdrivers, and that al-Marabh had sent them money. Several other hijackers had spent their last weeks in Laurel, Maryland, living down the street from Moataz al-Hallak, the imam from Arlington, Texas, who had guided Marlene and her Saudi husband and who, prosecutors said, was bin Laden’s U.S. go-between.

  Marlene’s new husband was arrested on September 13. And the FBI questioned Aafia’s friends at Care International.

  Amjad tried to calm her, but she wouldn’t have it. Within hours of the attacks, prominent Deobandis in Pakistan, including General Hamid Gul, began claiming that Israel’s Mossad must be to blame. Aafia told Amjad that a “sister” had warned her that Americans would soon be kidnapping Muslim children. When Amjad asked who this “sister” was, Aafia said she was someone he didn’t know. He argued that they ought to wait and see what happened before abandoning everything he had worked for. But she refused.

  Despite the chaos and the shutdown in air travel, Aafia managed to get tickets for herself and the children on the first day the airports reopened. Amjad drove them to New York, and she left for Karachi from JFK International Airport on September 19.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Ayaan had been working at the Wiardi Beckman Institute for little more than a week when she noticed several of her colleagues gathered around a television set. She could hear them talking about something in America.

  She disliked American television and had written a paper at Leiden about what she considered to be the media hype over President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. She thought the Americans, like the Dutch, tended to get hysterical about trifles.

  But as she joined her new colleagues, she saw first one plane and then another crash into the World Trade Center, and finally each gigantic tower crumble into rubble and smoke.

  She felt terribly afraid. Unlike her coworkers, she understood what these falling Western symbols would mean to many Muslims. She knew it was meant to signal that Armageddon was at hand.

  She assumed the United States would retaliate on a massive scale. Her Dutch friends told her not to get so upset, but for once she thought they were the ones who were underreacting.

  The Dutch were shocked when television cameras captured young Muslims dancing for joy in the streets of Ede, the little town where Ayaan and Haweya had lived. And they were frightened as well as puzzled to learn that an Islamic school in the town of Almere had distributed a calendar, months earlier, that showed a burning plane zooming over the Manhattan skyline in September. But Ayaan knew that Islamist images of Western destruction were everywhere. The imaginary battle with the Dajjal had become a kind of Muslim kitsch.

  A few days after the attacks, she called a television researcher she had been working with over the summer. As they talked about the attacks, Ayaan became very agitated. She told the researcher that she herself had once been a Muslim fundamentalist. “You don’t understand,” Ayaan kept saying. “That could have been me. I could have been one of those hijackers.”

  PART II

  Acting

  Chapter One

  Ayaan was obsessed with the 9/11 attacks. She kept thinking about the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, and his cold, dead eyes. She and the Egyptian were the same age, and they had both arrived in Europe in the summer of 1992. “I felt that I knew him, and, in fact, I did know many people like him.”

  Later she wrote that she identified with Atta’s rage. She felt she understood the hostility and hatred that he felt toward himself and others. She watched a television interview with Atta’s father. The man was angry and despairing. He refused to believe that his son could have committed the attacks. When he insisted that the Jews or the CIA must have done it, Ayaan knew that Atta must have been taught the same hateful version of Islam that she had been taught.

  “Did the 9/11 attacks stem from true belief in true Islam?” she asked herself. The “little shutter” in the back of her brain opened, and her thoughts came tumbling out. She remembered what she had learned about “love and hate for Allah” from her teacher Sister Aziza and the preacher Boqol Sawm in Eastleigh. She had believed what Atta believed, only she hadn’t been given the chance to do anything about it. “This was not Islam,” she decided. “This was the core of Islam.” She felt “enormous fear.”

  She read bin Laden’s statements. She looked at Atta’s will. She heard the note of the Islam she had grown up with. “Every devout Muslim who aspired to practice genuine Islam—the Muslim Brotherhood Islam, the Islam of the Medina Quran schools—even if they didn’t actively support the attacks, they must at least have approved of them.” She asked herself questions: “Was innovation forbidden to Muslims? Were human rights, progress, women’s rights, all foreign to Islam?”

  The dissonance became excruciating. “I realized I could either go mad, join the Bin Ladenists, or step out of the religion.”

  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that a murderous Islamism wasn’t the only way to interpret Islam. For her, as for millions of other believers who had come of age during the oil-fueled “Islamic awakening” of the late twentieth century, Islamism was Islam. The Egyptian theorist of jihad, “Sayyid Qutb didn’t invent anything, he just quoted the sayings of Muhammed,” she later told a reporter. Many Islamic theologians would have disagreed strenuously, but she was no longer close enough to the Muslim community to know about the debates raging within it. Nor did she seem to realize that, even in the Netherlands, many Islamic scholars were still trying to reconcile reason and religion—scholars who believed that Islam was compatible with human rights, progress, and women’s rights. Some of them worked only a few blocks from her house in Leiden, at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. Ayaan didn’t mention them.

  Ayaan has often said how close to madness she felt after September 11. Of course she wasn’t alone. The attacks were meant to arouse great fears and apocalyptic rumors, and they succeeded awesomely. Psychological studies have shown that, several years later, the mere mention of “September 11” or “the World Trade Center” re
minded Americans of death. But for Muslims who were raised as Ayaan was, believing that “if I was not a follower of God, I must be a follower of Satan,” the attacks also conjured up the hellfire that awaited “hypocrites” who pretend to be Muslim but align themselves against the ummah.

  Ayaan felt that bin Laden was forcing her to make a personal choice. Either everything that reality told her was wrong, or else she belonged to the party of the West, the party of Satan.

  She chose Satan.

  Chapter Two

  Aafia Siddiqui had already made her decision. “See you in Paradise,” she told her girlfriends in Boston as she left for Karachi on September 17. As far as Aafia was concerned, the clash of civilizations had begun.

  She was surprised, therefore, and disappointed when she reached Pakistan and learned that most Pakistanis did not seem to understand that life as they had known it was over.

  Amjad’s family was mystified by her unexpected arrival. They had been asking their son for years to bring his wife and children home for a visit, but the young doctor had always refused to splurge on overseas travel while his father was still subsidizing his education. “We were surprised, but I was very happy,” his mother, Zahera, said later. Amjad’s father, Aga Naeem Khan, had never even met Aafia, and Amjad’s parents knew their grandson Ahmad and granddaughter Maryam only from photographs. But custom decreed that their daughter-in-law and the children stay with her husband’s family rather than her own.

  Aga Naeem was proud of his son for working hard and saving money. Those were the virtues that had helped him rise to be director of a large pharmaceutical company after he and his brothers had arrived in Pakistan from India penniless at the time of Partition. He and Zahera still lived in the comfortable white stucco house with the red-tiled roof and neat lawn that he had built for them in the 1960s in a fashionable area of the KDA Housing Scheme. They had raised their three sons in the same house, sending two of them to the Karachi American School just down the street. Aga Naeem’s hair had turned white since he had retired, but he was still slim and fit and still accustomed to giving orders. He and his wife considered themselves good Muslims; they prayed and fasted and gave to charity. But Aga Naeem disapproved of showiness in religion, as in other things.

  Into this atmosphere of quiet restraint, Aafia arrived like an electrical storm. She couldn’t stop talking about the 9/11 attacks, and she seemed quite fearful.

  The Khans knew all about “the event,” as they called the attacks. Like everyone else, they had watched the TV images again and again. They knew the United States was planning to invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, Pakistan’s erstwhile ally. They had watched Pakistan’s military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, make a television statement promising Washington his support. It was a humiliating statement, many Pakistanis thought—and all very sad, especially for the poor Afghans, who had already suffered two decades of war and now faced the wrath of another superpower. What the parents could not understand was what any of this had to do with Aafia and Amjad. Why would Aafia be safer in Pakistan than at home with her husband?

  The answers she gave them didn’t make sense. “Amjad must come back to Pakistan,” she said. “His life is in danger.” But when they asked why, she refused to explain.

  At first they put her behavior down to shock and jet lag. But rest failed to calm her. The United States had given the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, the choice of handing over Osama bin Laden or facing a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The week after Aafia arrived, her family’s spiritual adviser, Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, joined a delegation of Deobandi luminaries who traveled to Kandahar to meet with Mullah Omar. When they returned, the mufti produced a fatwa blaming the United States for the crisis. On October 7, the United States dropped its first bombs on Afghanistan. Aafia followed every twist of the developments, swirling into and out of the house, wrapped in her black abaya and niqab face veil.

  Her behavior puzzled and disturbed her in-laws. Because of her American education, the Khans still thought of Aafia as somehow modern, even though no one else in the family wore the face veil. Amjad’s older brother had been hearing for years about how brilliant she was. He could not believe it when she confided that she had left Boston because she thought the Americans were going to start kidnapping Muslim children. He told her at the dinner table that what she was saying sounded irrational. Aafia’s own nieces and nephews were still in the United States, along with thousands of other Pakistani children, and as far as anyone knew they were fine. No one had reported any missing children.

  Aafia threw down her napkin and ran out of the room.

  Amjad’s mother, Zahera, suffered from osteoporosis and had to walk slowly, but she followed Aafia up to her bedroom that night as quickly as she could. She found her daughter-in-law sprawled on the bed, sobbing. “You people just want to blame me for everything!” she cried. Zahera felt confused and misunderstood. No one had blamed Aafia for anything. What was there to blame her for? The family just wanted to know what was wrong.

  The next night, Aafia came down to dinner wearing her face veil. Amjad’s father and brothers asked her to take it off, reminding her that she was among family, but she refused. They tried to reassure her that no one was blaming her for anything. Was Amjad in some kind of trouble? they asked. Aafia avoided their questions. Then she launched into a lecture about how certain Muslims were hypocrites.

  Aga Naeem was outraged. How dare this young woman, who had been living off his largesse for the last six years, walk into his house and presume to instruct him about religion? That night he called Amjad in Boston and told him he needed to come home and deal with his wife.

  Aafia had also been calling Amjad. She told him it was time for him to choose: would he side with the party of God or the party of Satan? Amjad saw his dream of going to Harvard slipping away, but he argued that he needed to stay in Boston at least until he got his board certification in anesthesiology. His exam was only five months away!

  His wife replied that work wasn’t everything, and she recited the hadith that says the ummah is like one body: “If one limb complains, the rest responds with wakefulness and fever.” The extra money, Aafia said, that he could earn as a specialist after taking his board exams would only tempt him to stay in the United States and shirk his duty.

  A few days earlier, their friend Imam Faaruuq had stopped by their apartment in Malden to pick up some furniture. Amjad described his dilemma. The imam had advised him to stay and take his exams. But the doctor missed his wife and children, and now even his father was telling him to come home. He finally asked the Tufts New England Medical Center for permission to take a month off.

  It was November when he arrived in Pakistan. He found Aafia in a state of great excitement. Her friend Suleman Ahmer from Benevolence International had returned to Pakistan earlier and set up his own charity. Ahmer was now organizing aid to the Taliban, and Aafia told her husband that she had already arranged for him to join Ahmer’s group. Amjad would travel to the border town of Quetta, in Baluchistan. Then he would proceed to Kalat, an Afghan town where an Islamic relief group that Ahmer recommended was running a field hospital. It would be jihad, the highest form of worship. She had already bought the tickets.

  Amjad was deeply conflicted. Like his wife, he had grown up hearing heroic stories of the mujahideen. He believed, as she did, that armed combat on behalf of Allah (under the right circumstances) was the highest form of jihad and thus of worship. But he also knew that orthodox Islamic teaching required a Muslim to master nine other levels of jihad, starting with the struggle against one’s own desires and leading up to the struggle against lies and falsehood, before he reached the state of purity sufficient to make war for Allah. Had he and Aafia done that? He wasn’t so sure.

  Men who made the mistake of engaging in what they thought was religiously sanctioned violence, when they didn’t really know what they were doing, could end up causing corruption and injustice rather than ending it. Amjad
found himself wondering—as he often had lately—whether Aafia knew as much about Islam as she claimed. Sometimes it seemed to him that she understood the surface teachings but missed the inner meaning.

  The 9/11 attacks had made him realize something else, as well. For years he had regarded his wife’s fascination with jihad as mostly fantasy, though one he knew better than to discuss with his American colleagues. Now it had become deadly earnest.

  Of course he agreed with Aafia that Muslim life was far too cheap for the Americans. They were probably killing more innocent Afghans with their bombs, he felt, than had died in the World Trade Center. But he wasn’t sure it was right for him as a Muslim to wage war against a country that had shown him nothing but hospitality. Moreover, Islam said a son should obey his parents. He would need their blessing before he could go to Afghanistan.

  Aafia suggested he leave his parents in the dark. He could say he was going to Quetta, to treat the wounded.

  But Amjad was unconvinced, and, the night before he was supposed to leave, he asked the advice of his oldest brother.

  The brother reacted with alarm. In fact, neither of Amjad’s brothers saw the war in Afghanistan as a legitimate jihad. They found the Taliban barbaric—an embarrassment rather than the world’s only “truly” Islamic government. The brothers didn’t think bin Laden was as innocent as Aafia claimed. And they blamed the Taliban who had harbored him for bringing disaster on Afghanistan and on Pakistan.

  When Amjad showed his older brother the tickets that Aafia had bought, the brother went straight to their father, who exploded.

  “What is this nonsense?” Aga Naeem roared. Like many Pakistanis, especially of the older generation, Amjad’s father was deeply cynical about the jihadi movement. Having watched Pakistan’s jihadi groups grow and develop since they had first appeared under the Zia regime, he considered them a Frankenstein’s monster of the world’s intelligence agencies. The spectacle of the so-called mujahideen cruising around town in their Pajero jeeps, showing off their Kalashnikovs while the police stood by, helpless to stop them, filled him with revulsion. Recently in Karachi those mujahideen had begun murdering Shiite doctors. Aga Naeem wasn’t about to sacrifice his son to their deadly games, and he told Amjad so.