Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  They wanted to know if Amjad or Aafia had ever met Osama bin Laden. The couple said they hadn’t.

  The talk grew more pointed. The agents noted that Aafia had made donations to the Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation. When she asked how they knew that, they showed the couple printouts of their bank statements. Aafia retorted that it was her duty as a Muslim to contribute to charity, and those seemed to be worthy charities.

  The agents asked about their friends. Did they know Emadeddin Muntasser of Care International? Or the Global Relief founder, Mohammed Chehade? Or the Benevolence International fund-raiser Suleman Ahmer?

  They said they did. Aafia had met them through the Muslim Students Association.

  What about Adnan Shukrijumah? Was he a friend of theirs?

  Amjad said no, he didn’t know anyone named Shukrijumah. Aafia also shook her head.

  The agent asked Aafia if she was sure she didn’t know Shukrijumah.

  She repeated that she didn’t.

  The agent gave her a long stare. In that case, he said, why had she e-mailed him?

  Aafia was silent. “May I see this e-mail?” their lawyer interjected.

  The agent just looked at them. The e-mails are classified, he said. But we have them and more like them. Then he asked about some other people that Amjad had never heard of.

  They made an appointment to meet again in a few weeks.

  Amjad thought the meeting had gone pretty well, but by the time they got home Aafia was in a state of agitation. The whole family had to leave for Pakistan, she said. Amjad tried to get her to tell him what she was so afraid of. Who was Shukrijumah? Aafia said she didn’t know. She e-mailed lots of people in connection with her charities. She didn’t know them all.

  Then she had nothing to fear, Amjad told her. But she was already packing.

  Amjad phoned the lawyer, Merberg, and said they couldn’t keep their date with the FBI. Aafia’s father had suffered two heart attacks in recent years, and she needed to be with him. She was also six months pregnant. If she waited much longer to travel, she wouldn’t be allowed on a plane.

  Merberg had been impressed with the young doctor and his scientist wife. He advised them, though, to postpone their departure long enough to attend the second meeting. Nothing the FBI had said made him think its interest was serious, but he told Amjad that if they left the country without answering all the government’s questions, their case would remain open and that this might cause difficulties for them when they returned. It would be better to get it over with.

  Aafia’s brother said the same thing. He and Amjad begged Aafia to go to the meeting. But she told them she couldn’t.

  “Do you want to kill me?” she screamed at Amjad. “Do you want to kill the children? If you make me stay here, that is what you will be doing!”

  Amjad couldn’t understand why she was so frightened. It was true that her father had heart trouble, but there was nothing new in that. He had had the problem for years. Did she know something that Amjad didn’t know? Was she just rejecting Boston again? Sometimes he felt she was determined to destroy his career.

  He decided to return to Pakistan with her. The FBI agents had told them that they couldn’t take their night-vision device out of the country, so Amjad gave it and the survivalist books to Merberg. The lawyer could show the FBI that the couple had left them behind.

  Aafia agreed. But first she photocopied some pages of The Anarchist Arsenal and several other books.

  The Tufts New England Medical Center granted him a one-year leave of absence, and the family left for Karachi on June 26, 2002.

  Chapter Seven

  A filmmaker named Karin Schagen asked Ayaan if she could make a short documentary about her. Ayaan dressed up for the film in a long red veil and played herself arriving at Amsterdam’s Central Station in 1992. Schagen also wanted to interview Ayaan’s father, who had left Somalia and was staying with her stepmother, Maryan Farah Warsame, in London.

  But when the filmmaker phoned Hirsi Magan in August, he told her that Somalis had been calling him from all over Europe to complain about what his daughter had been saying.

  Ayaan later wrote that they had told him, “Hirsi, if you don’t do something fast to rein in your daughter, she’s going to get killed.”

  The mood in Holland was growing ugly. Early in February, Pim Fortuyn, the sociologist turned politician, had called Islam a “backward religion.” When members of his party had remonstrated with him, Fortuyn replied that Muslims were a “fifth column” who could destroy the country. His words had caused such controversy that the party had kicked him off its ticket.

  Two days later he formed his own party, The Fortuyn List. The Labor Party dismissed its members as hysterical right-wingers. But his new party won the local Rotterdam elections by huge margins.

  Ayaan went on TV the night after his victory. The occasion was International Women’s Day, and the Dutch television host and columnist Theodor Holman wanted to ask her and Fatima Onasser, a Dutch judge of Moroccan background, about Fortuyn’s claims that Muslim women were oppressed.

  Onasser began with the argument that Islam called for equality between men and women. Ayaan broke in. She called it ridiculous to pretend that Islam had nothing to do with the condition of Muslim women. As a translator in shelters and abortion clinics, she herself had met abused women who believed that Islam gave their husbands the right to beat them. Moreover, Ayaan said, the oppression of Muslim women was the key to the problem of integrating Muslims into Dutch society.

  She got her first hate mail the very next day. But the overall Dutch reaction was extremely positive. The country’s bestselling historian, Geert Mak, a Labor Party stalwart, watched the program with his wife. “She was fantastic,” Mak recalled. Noting proudly that she worked for the Labor Party’s Wiardi Beckman Institute, Mak e-mailed her. “You are the woman we have been waiting for,” he wrote. “You can make the change!”

  Dutch feminists were even more enthusiastic. As the journalist Alies Pegtel later reported, Jolande Withuis, a columnist for Opzij, Holland’s most influential women’s magazine, had an epiphany: “Finally a Muslim woman saying what I have all these years thought.”

  Steffie Kouters of the newspaper De Volkskrant decided to write a profile of the striking young Somali. “Dare to Clash” appeared in De Volkskrant on April 11, 2002, and Kouters began by quoting Ayaan: “The majority of Islamic women here are oppressed.” A few weeks earlier, fifteen Saudi Arabian schoolgirls had died in a fire in the holy city of Mecca when the country’s religious police had stopped firemen from rescuing them because the girls inside might not be wearing their veils. Ayaan told Kouters there were women in the Netherlands who were kept indoors on the same principle.

  “Take the Amsterdam neighborhood of Bos en Lommer,” Ayaan said. “A group of women live there whom you never see on the street. According to the Quran, they must not go out of their houses unless veiled, chaperoned, and with a good reason. Is taking Dutch lessons a good reason? The husband determines that.”

  Ayaan admitted that not all Muslim women were forced to stay at home. She herself, she said, had escaped Islam’s “mental cage.” But many other women had internalized their oppression. “What does a bird that has grown up in a cage do when the door is opened? It holds itself captive.”

  Kouters asked Ayaan about her own background. It was the first time that anyone of the press had asked Ayaan how she had gotten to the Netherlands, and she seemed reluctant to talk about it. She said that she had been married off to a fundamentalist Muslim and an aunt in the Netherlands had helped her get away. “It’s so personal, and people will think I am a frustrated woman and I’m projecting my own traumas, when in fact millions of Muslim women are oppressed.” Her theme for the next twenty years, she said, would be to draw attention to the plight of Muslim women in the Netherlands.

  Ayaan accused the Left of ignoring Muslim women. “The progressive parties and the media have alway
s condemned the backwardness of women, but they are extremely careful not to blame immigrants for fear of awakening racism. Meanwhile, the discrimination against women by men in the Muslim community is much greater than the discrimination against immigrants by the Dutch.”

  She conceded the existence of modern, educated Muslim women in Holland. But she wanted to draw attention to the “much larger group” who remained oppressed. She said 753 Islamic organizations—most of them run by men—were subsidized by the Dutch government. She wished that Holland would shut the country’s Islamic schools, though she admitted that such an action would be hard to square with freedom of religion. Her advice to the Dutch was “Dare to clash. It is unavoidable.”

  Fortuyn wasn’t afraid to clash, and it didn’t seem to be hurting him at all. By May, he was riding so high in the polls that he seemed likely to become the next prime minister. His rise panicked the established parties that had run the country since World War II, and their attacks, like those of their friends in the media, fed the hysteria of Fortuyn’s supporters. Soon the entire political class seemed to be reaching what the Dutch saw as a deeply un-Dutch state of frenzy. Fortuyn was called a demagogue and compared to Mussolini and Hitler. Even the leader of the conservative Liberal Party, Gerrit Zalm, said, “Fortuyn is a dangerous man. He deceives the people.”

  On May 6, 2002, the editor in chief of the country’s most respected newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, wrote of his fear that Fortuyn would be elected. It would be a “huge disgrace” for the Netherlands to have a prime minister who failed to understand the lesson of World War II that it simply wasn’t permissible to fan the flames of hatred against a religious minority. That afternoon, Pim Fortuyn was shot dead while leaving a TV studio in Hilversum. Everyone feared the assassin would turn out to be a Muslim. Instead, he was a Dutch activist for animal rights named Volkert de Graaf—a loner, like so many assassins, who wanted to be a hero.

  Fortuyn’s stricken followers accused the Left of stirring up hatred against him, while those who had led the charge against the professor slunk away in guilty silence. Ever since the seventeenth century, the Left had been seen (or had at least seen itself) as the defender of Enlightenment values such as rationalism, secularism, and individual rights, while the Right had been linked with the Christian churches and traditional family roles. Now Fortuyn’s vegan assassin appeared to turn three hundred years of Dutch politics upside down. The Left was blamed for the murder of a politician who was proudly gay and a defender of Muslim women. The Right, meanwhile, claimed to be defending the Enlightenment.

  Ayaan continued to wrap her calls for the liberation of Muslims in the banner of the Enlightenment. But her supervisor at the Wiardi Beckman Institute wondered whether she understood the principles that underlay Holland’s tolerance and freedom. Ayaan proposed shutting down the country’s Islamic schools. Paul Kalma, her supervisor, said that doing so would violate Holland’s freedom of religion and belief, as laid out, for example, in Article 23 of the Dutch Constitution, which guaranteed citizens the right to send their children to state-supported religious schools or other schools of their choice, as long as the schools met government standards.

  If the government closed down Holland’s Muslim schools, it would be discriminating against Muslims, Kalma argued. Ayaan’s response was to suggest that Holland rid itself of Article 23.

  Kalma tried to explain how strongly the average Dutch person felt about Article 23. But Ayaan brushed him aside, saying, “The arrival of migrants in this country is going to affect the heart of Dutch society, and it’s time to face that.”

  Her former statistics professor at Leiden, Huib Pellikaan, shared Kalma’s concerns. Ayaan had been assigned to work with Pellikaan on a book he was writing for the institute on multiculturalism, but she failed to produce any studies or other empirical evidence to support her contention that Islam was threatening the Dutch. “I told her, ‘You can write your political manifesto someplace else, but my book is going to be a work of comparative analysis,’ ” he said.

  She and her housemate went away to Greece that summer. Ayaan took the book that Marco had once given her, Herman Philipse’s The Atheist Manifesto. After reading it, she realized that she had stopped believing in Allah years before. She had simply been afraid to admit it to herself.

  When she got back, she began studying Enlightenment thinkers. She also decided to give up lying. “I would no longer lie to myself or to others. I had had enough of lying. I was no longer afraid of the Hereafter.”

  The Trouw editor Jaffe Vink had introduced Ayaan to Tilly Hermans, the head of the Dutch publishing house Augustus. Ayaan told Hermans that she wanted to write a book about her policy prescriptions for immigration. But Hermans wanted to hear her personal story. When Ayaan told it, Hermans said, “That is the book you are going to write,” and she gave Ayaan the autobiographies of earlier feminists to read.

  In the summer of 2002, she wrote her first piece for the Dutch women’s magazine Opzij. The magazine’s fashionable red-haired editor, Cisca Dresselhuys, was the Gloria Steinem of the Netherlands, an icon of 1960s Dutch feminism, and she would become one of Ayaan’s most influential mentors. Dresselhuys remembered later that Ayaan had contacted her first. “She called and asked, ‘Can I come and meet you?’ ” Dresselhuys believed that all religions were basically hostile to women’s liberation. Well before 9/11, she had announced she wouldn’t hire a female editor who wore a head scarf. Ayaan struck her as having the potential to lead the “third wave” of feminism, which would liberate African and Asian women. “She spoke in a free and open manner about Islam and the threatening side of Islam. We didn’t know such a person in Holland.”

  Dresselhuys introduced her to the work of the American feminist Susan Moller Okin, who argued that multiculturalism placed the rights of cultures above the rights of women. Ayaan seemed to bring out the older woman’s motherly side. “Sometimes,” Dresselhuys said, “she is a very powerful woman, and sometimes she is a giggling little girl.”

  In early August, Ayaan appeared on another TV show about women and Islam. She told her audience again that Muslim women who claimed not to be oppressed were the victims of false consciousness. Again she used the simile of the imprisoned bird. The broadcast struck many Muslims as condescending. Her father called to say he was hearing complaints again.

  Ayaan told him she was trying to expose the link between Islam and women’s oppression. Her father disputed the relationship. “You can fight the oppression of women, Ayaan, but you must not link it with Islam.”

  She didn’t have the courage, she wrote, to tell him that she no longer agreed.

  Chapter Eight

  When Aafia and Amjad reached Karachi at the end of June 2002, the Khans were furious with her. They felt she had wrecked their son’s budding career. The younger couple took the children and went to stay at her family’s house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, but Amjad was anxious and unhappy. He still loved Aafia, but he felt she was forcing him to choose between her and his family. The meeting with the FBI had also shaken him. Either her judgment and reasoning were skewed, or she was hiding things from him. Who, for example, was Shukrijumah?

  Aafia prayed all the time now and insisted on their duty to join the jihad. But Amjad’s parents were more opposed to that than ever. At length Amjad decided that the only solution was to seek advice from a higher authority. Grand Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani was the highest Deobandi cleric in Pakistan. Amjad persuaded her that they should ask him what to do.

  She went to the meeting, properly veiled and covered, at the grand mufti’s house in the Darul Uloom seminary complex. After greeting the mufti’s wife and daughter-in-law, she joined Ahmad and the cleric on the lawn. The mufti was a heavy man, with smooth olive skin and a fluffy white beard. He listened attentively as Amjad explained their problem: Aafia felt their duty was to fight the infidels, but Amjad’s parents were against it and Amjad himself believed he could best serve Islam through his work as a doctor. Amjad agreed with Aafia that
a Muslim’s whole life should be an act of worship, but he did not believe that he had reached the level of self-mastery necessary to engage in the highest form of worship, holy combat.

  The mufti thought about it before giving his opinion. It was commendable, he said, that Aafia’s heart burned so brightly for the ummah, but he did not agree that jihad was now an obligation for her and Amjad. Given their circumstances, the mufti said, it was more important for the two of them to serve the ummah by sharing the knowledge they had gained in America.

  Getting the grand mufti himself to consider their problem was a great honor in Pakistan, and a petitioner’s normal reaction would be to thank him profusely and ask for a blessing. Instead, to the astonishment of both men, Aafia piped up from behind her niqab and began arguing in her high, sweet voice with the country’s highest religious authority. What about the view of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam? she demanded. Hadn’t he called jihad a community obligation incumbent on every Muslim?

  The mufti repeated his advice and was visibly irritated. By the end of the meeting, his tone toward Aafia had cooled considerably. She said that one reason she wanted to go and live with the Jaish-e-Muhammad was to raise their children in a truly Islamic environment, but he corrected her again. It was quite possible to raise truly Muslim children in Karachi. The city now had excellent English-speaking schools that followed the strictest Deobandi interpretation of Islamic law. The mufti’s own grandchildren attended one, called Nakhlah.

  Aafia realized she had made a mistake and later telephoned the mufti to apologize. Considering the matter settled, Amjad began looking for a job in Karachi. But Aafia still seemed distracted. A few weeks after they returned, she came home late one afternoon with the children. Amjad asked where they had been; she replied that she had gone to the beauty parlor. But their driver later mentioned to Amjad that he had taken Aafia to the Habib Bank earlier in the day. Amjad visited the bank the following day. There he learned that Aafia had withdrawn $6,000.