Wanted Women

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by Deborah Scroggins


  Amjad went upstairs with trepidation to give Aafia the news. He knew she would throw a tantrum. The family, downstairs, could hear her screaming. “Why do you listen to your father and your brothers rather than to me?” she yelled. “You should go!”

  Aga Naeem couldn’t believe his ears. Here was a privileged young woman who had everything most Pakistani women only dream of, yet she yearned to send her husband and the father of her children off to live in caves and be cluster-bombed. “I became very angry,” he remembered. He shouted at Amjad to come back downstairs. “This is nonsense,” he told his son. “If you go there, don’t come here again.”

  To the family’s collective astonishment, Aafia came flying down the stairs and into the living room, with its brocade curtains and green velvet settees. Grabbing Amjad by the shirt, she spun him around and started beating his chest with her fists. She demanded that he choose between her and his family. “So what will you do, divorce me?” she screamed. “Then divorce me! Divorce me! Did you hear me? I said divorce me.”

  Amjad’s parents thought she was losing her mind. “Until then, we did not know there was any friction between them,” his mother explained later. Such things happened in Bollywood movies, not in the deeply respectable interiors of the Khan household.

  A servant finally broke the shocked silence by running upstairs to fetch the wife of Amjad’s brother. “Please see about Aafia,” he cried. “Something has happened to her!”

  Amjad knew that if he and Aafia remained another day at his parents’ house, the break between them and his wife would never be repaired. So he decided that he and Aafia should leave and drive north to Islamabad, where they would visit Aafia’s uncle S. H. Faruqi.

  Faruqi, an affable and distinguished geologist, lived in a house filled with rocks and geological records in the capital’s exclusive F-7 Section of treelined streets and large white bungalows, populated mainly by top bureaucrats. Amjad took his degrees and certificates with him, thinking he might apply for a job at a hospital in Islamabad.

  But over the next few days Aafia devised a new plan. She decided she and Amjad should take the children and go to live with a radical new group called Jaish-e-Muhammad, or “Army of the Prophet Muhammad,” in the mountains between Kashmir and Afghanistan.

  Jaish-e-Muhammad had been founded the year before, after some Deobandi jihadis had hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in order to exchange it and its passengers for a comrade, Maulana Masood Azhar, imprisoned in India. When Azhar returned triumphantly to Pakistan, he established Jaish-e-Muhammad. It was fully intertwined with Pakistan’s Deobandi military-religious complex, being financed by the al-Rashid Trust and blessed by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Few outsiders at the time realized how extreme Jaish-e-Muhammad was, but it was essentially the Pakistani arm of al-Qaeda.

  Jaish-e-Muhammad had a women’s wing—Banat-e-Ayesha, or “Daughters of Ayesha”—and Aafia wanted to join it. Banat published a monthly jihadi magazine in Karachi that claimed to have a circulation of 17,000. The November 2001 issue showed the Christian cross, the Jewish Star of David, and the Communist hammer and sickle, all destroyed and bathed in the light of the Holy Quran.

  Like other militant groups, Jaish-e-Muhammad ran schools and clinics for the poor. Aafia now proposed that they live in the group’s compound at Balakot, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The children could go to a Jaish-e-Muhammad madrassa. Amjad could work at one of the group’s medical facilities. And Aafia could preach for the women’s wing.

  As a counterproposal, Amjad suggested they drive from Islamabad to the town of Abbottabad, a former colonial hill station about fifty miles west of Balakot, where Osama bin Laden would ultimately be found hiding and be killed in 2011. There was a teaching hospital there where he might land a job. Abbottabad was also the site of Army Burn Hall School and College, an excellent private school founded by Christian missionaries that several of his cousins had attended. If they lived in Abbottabad, the family could attend Jaish events on weekends, and the children could go to Burn Hall.

  This compromise initially seemed to placate Aafia. They made the journey past the towering maple trees that led to Abbottabad, which had once been a gateway to the ancient Silk Road. They saw the streams, the chattering monkeys, and the glacier-topped mountains at Balakot. Yet the prospect of being close to jihad, while remaining outside its sacred precincts, frustrated Aafia.

  And when it looked, a few days later, as if the hospital in Abbottabad might offer Amjad a position, she became furious again. Even with Americans killing Muslims across the border in Afghanistan, she said, Amjad still wanted to send his children to a school founded by Christian missionaries. He was afraid to break with the dunya, the everyday world of corruption and compromises with evil. He was just like his parents. All he cared about was a comfortable life.

  Amjad decided there was no point in moving to Abbottabad. Aafia wouldn’t be happy there or anywhere until he became a full-time jihadi, and he wasn’t ready to do that. So they drove back to Islamabad and then continued south to Karachi.

  Amjad’s parents were angrier than ever when they heard about Aafia’s latest scheme. Aga Naeem told his son he should go back to Boston right away and prepare for his board exams.

  Aafia refused to fly back with him. It was late November. She and the children saw him off at the airport. Once he was gone, they left her in-laws’ house and went to stay with her own parents on the other side of Karachi.

  Chapter Three

  One day in November 2001, Ayaan and some colleagues from the Wiardi Beckman Institute attended a debate at the De Balie cultural center, off the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. The Dutch intelligentsia liked to meet in the cavernous De Balie for coffee and beer and spar over political and cultural issues. The title of this particular debate was “The Enlightenment After September 11.” Ayaan would later recall the topic as “The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire?”

  The ignorance of most Westerners about Islamism before 9/11 cannot be overstated. For example, the Egyptian ideologue of jihad, Sayyid Qutb, was virtually unknown to non-Muslims despite having been the bestselling and most influential Arab writer of the twentieth century. Even fewer Westerners knew how semipublic groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami operated, much less what was going on inside secretive jihadi outfits such as al-Qaeda and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

  After the attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush added to the confusion. Instead of a clear campaign against a specific entity or ideology, Bush announced that the United States would fight a “war on terror.” Vice President Dick Cheney proposed further that the war would be waged on “the dark side,” in secrecy and using unconventional means. Even in Europe, people weren’t sure what the plan was. Debates like the one at De Balie were one way they attempted to get their bearings.

  Ayaan has said she listened to five or six speakers argue that it was the West, not Islam, that needed a Voltaire. “The West was arrogant, imperialist and cruel and took without giving,” she recalled the speakers saying. “America was most evil of all, was under the control of the Jews, and was responsible for all the conflict in the world today.” The only speaker who disagreed, she said, was an Iranian professor of law named Afshin Ellian, who argued that Islam needed a reformation. Ayaan got so frustrated that she stood up to support Ellian.

  “We Muslims are truly living in the Dark Ages—just look at the situation of our women,” she told the audience. “The West has had countless Voltaires. Allow us just one, please.” Everyone present remembered the moment when the striking young African woman seized the floor. “She spoke Dutch with a light accent, and she was black,” Jaffe Vink, the editor of Trouw newspaper, recalled, “and immediately the hall went as still as a mouse.”

  After the debate, Vink asked Ayaan if she would write down her thoughts in an article for his paper. Ayaan wasn’t a polished writer, and Vink said later that the article had to be rewritten four times before he was satisfied. I
t was published on November 24, 2001. The title was “Don’t Leave Us in the Dark—Give Us a Voltaire.”

  What Ayaan wrote after 9/11 resembled what Pim Fortuyn and other Dutch critics of Islam had been saying for years. But her personal experiences seemed to give her critique an authenticity that their words lacked.

  For her, there was no distinction between Islam and Islamism. There was only Islam, and its influence was unrelentingly negative. It was “hierarchical,” “a mind-set far removed from reason,” and “in need of Enlightenment.” Terrorists weren’t holding Islam hostage, as Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair said; on the contrary, terrorists were implementing Islam.

  Leon de Winter, a Dutch writer and strong advocate of Israel who was often criticized for writing scornfully about Muslims, was correct, Ayaan wrote, to make fun of Muslims for believing in “a row of saints, demons and ghosts.” Very few Muslims were “actually capable of looking at their faith critically.” They lived in a world of “colorful dreams and fantasies” and refused to “take responsibility for their own state and their own deeds.” They tended “to be passive in life and guided by a sense of fatalism.”

  Ayaan lamented that Muslims weren’t more like Westerners: “Unlike Islamic society, the West places much emphasis on the individual’s independence and personal responsibility and on the necessity of investing in this life. Education and employment, rather than piety, are the measure of success.” Above all, the West didn’t share Islam’s hang-ups about sex. “Homosexuality is not a sin to be punished with death, nor is it considered a threat to the survival of mankind, but is seen as a form of love, normal like that between heterosexuals. Moreover, love and sex are not restricted to marriage but can be enjoyed between two people by mutual consent.”

  She wrote that Muslims were so filled with hatred, especially against Jews, that they couldn’t think straight, and she offered her younger self as an example. Westerners who felt that everything would turn out fine “didn’t know what they were talking about.” The Dutch needed to put more pressure on Muslims to integrate. They needed to let “the Muslim Voltaires of today work in a safe environment on the enlightenment of Islam.”

  In the years that followed, Ayaan’s critics would fault her reasoning and her evidence on every point. In academic terms, she had proclaimed herself an “essentialist,” or someone who believed that Islam and Muslims could be reduced to an essential set of characteristics. To those who knew something of the Islamic world, she had started out on shaky ground by claiming there was something like an “ideal” Islam. Didn’t she see that Islam was whatever Muslims made of it and that it differed greatly across time and space? What about Muslims like Benazir Bhutto who had been fighting the fundamentalists all along?

  Ayaan waved away such objections by saying that “moderate” Muslims were marginal figures, lacking the authority of the Quran. That led orthodox Muslim theologians to oppose her from a different position. One heresy they attributed to the Islamists was that they had introduced or revived takfir, the idea that any right-thinking Muslim is authorized to decide who is and isn’t a real Muslim. To Muslims familiar with the takfiri confusion, Ayaan seemed a kind of reverse jihadi: she, too, claimed that any Muslim who didn’t agree with Osama bin Laden simply wasn’t a Muslim.

  Others, Muslim and non-Muslim, found her generalizations as shallow as they were insulting. For example, her former hatred of Jews and gays was no reason to say that all Muslims felt that way. And who was she to say that all Muslims were hierarchical or incapable of self-criticism?

  The liberal South African Islamic theologian Farid Esack made some of those points in a TV debate with Ayaan and others that was broadcast on Holland’s Muslim network. Esack protested that Ayaan reduced all the problems of the Muslim world to Islam. “To say that ‘Islam is the problem’ is just the reverse of the fundamentalist slogan ‘Islam is the solution,’ ” Esack said. “Certain problems are related to Islam, but others are not. Just like the fundamentalists, you are leaving out all the other factors.”

  Ayaan struck such critics as too admiring of the West. What about the West’s long power over the Middle East? What about the wars that the United States and its allies had backed in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan? And what about the Palestinians? Ayaan also seemed unaware that Islam did have its Voltaires and that Europe, and Holland in fact, had provided some of them with safe havens.

  She appeared, for example, not to know about the teachings of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Sudanese philosopher who argued that Islam should reform the sharia so that it reflected the ethical teachings of the Prophet Muhammed at Mecca, making women equal to men before the law. Sudan’s Islamists saw the group that Taha founded, the Republican Brotherhood, as so threatening that they had him executed in 1985. Yet Taha’s followers, such as Abdullahi An-Naim, have taught in Dutch and American universities about a vision of Islam compatible with modern human rights.

  She also seemed not to know about an Egyptian theologian in Leiden, where she had lived for years. But Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid had fled to Leiden University in 1996. Egypt’s courts and a group of Islamist scholars from El Azhar had declared him an apostate for saying that certain verses of the Quran should be treated as metaphors and that the Islamic courts should treat women as equal to men when apportioning inheritance and crediting testimony. They declared that Abu Zeid was no longer married to his wife, since according to sharia a Muslim woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim man. They also threatened him with death. But he continued to write from Leiden about how religious governments of any description were incompatible with universal values.

  Human rights activists in every Muslim country risked their lives and the lives of their families to stand up to the Islamists, but Ayaan didn’t acknowledge that fact. Nor did she acknowledge the work of Fatema Mernissi, the Moroccan feminist whose books questioned male interpretations of the Quran; of Khalida Messaoudi, the Algerian mathematics professor who was hunted by her country’s radical Islamists because she opposed their power over schools; of the Iranian former judge Shirin Ebadi, who was imprisoned for investigating the murders of Iranian intellectuals; or of the Pakistani lawyers Asma Jahangir and her sister Hina Jilani, who continued to defend women under the Hudood laws even after an assassin burst into Jahangir’s office and killed a client in front of her.

  Obviously most of Ayaan’s readers had never heard of those Muslim liberals, either. Nor did they note a possible contradiction in the idea of fighting a war for enlightenment on “the dark side.” But what Ayaan said in her article and in subsequent TV appearances did coincide with what many Dutch and other Westerners suspected about Muslims. And they were delighted to hear a feisty and attractive Muslim woman endorse their suspicions.

  Chapter Four

  Amjad’s mother, Zahera, felt terribly guilty. She had chosen Aafia for him, and now look what had happened: Amjad was back in Boston, while Aafia and their two precious children were holed up across town.

  The more Zahera thought about it the more she attributed her daughter-in-law’s behavior to stress. Finishing her Ph.D. in such a hurry, having two babies in quick succession, being far from home, the mysterious attacks on the United States, the turmoil in Pakistan, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—it was enough to upset anyone. And Aafia was a brilliant girl, sensitive and religious. Zahera urged her son to make up with her. She told him that such things sometimes happened to women.

  Amjad wasn’t so sure. He had seen this behavior in Aafia before. He knew her craving for jihad wasn’t a passing whim. He had never quite understood why she had insisted on leaving Boston so suddenly after 9/11. He hadn’t believed her when she said she feared that their children would be kidnapped.

  Had her fund-raising for Care International and other jihadi charities made her a target for the FBI? Or had she used the attacks as an excuse to run away from a troubled marriage?

  He was lonely by himself in the icy Boston December. Even a visit to the supermarket reminded him of how
he and Aafia had used to push Ahmad and Maryam in the cart when they shopped together. He phoned Aafia and asked her to come back to him. Aafia’s father told her that her duty as a Muslim was to try to save her marriage.

  The anti-American jihad in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appeared to be sputtering. Within six weeks of the U.S. invasion, the Taliban collapsed. Osama bin Laden and his fighters began streaming back into Pakistan, and hundreds of militants regrouped in Karachi, where Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), was waiting to receive them.

  Unfortunately for the Americans’ war on terror, however, the U.S. government didn’t yet understand how important KSM was. The CIA had mislabeled KSM and his nephew Ramzi Yousef as freelance Arab terrorists. Thus, in the summer of 2001, when the CIA received tips that the rumpled, round-faced KSM was planning a major terrorist operation, the tips weren’t matched with concurrent warnings that al-Qaeda had an operation in the works. Two months after 9/11, Washington still didn’t understand that the same al-Baluchi family that had planned the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was also behind the 2001 attacks. And the Bush administration’s focus was moving away from Pakistan because plans were being made to attack Iraq.

  As the various foreign jihadis from Afghanistan sought refuge in Pakistan during the autumn of 2001, the women of Jamaat-e-Islami were apparently enlisted in finding hiding places for al-Qaeda leaders. It may be that Aafia’s mother, Ismat, was part of that network. She had been a speaker for Jamaat and, according to Aafia, would eventually rent part of her house to KSM’s al-Baluchi family. KSM himself, meanwhile, was desperate to land another blow that would show Muslims that al-Qaeda was still in the fight, and he began looking for U.S. citizens and visa holders who might carry out a new round of attacks. Aafia later told the FBI that she hadn’t met the al-Baluchi family until 2002 and that she had never met KSM at all; but several of the Americans he succeeded in recruiting had links with people whom Aafia did know and with whom she would later be accused of conspiring.

 

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