Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  That night he asked Aafia if she’d been to the bank. She said she had not. Later he searched her purse and found the money in her wallet. He decided to set a little trap to show her that he knew she was deceiving him.

  The next morning he told her he wanted to take some money out of their Habib account to buy a car. Aafia was heavily pregnant, and in the mornings she usually had a ravenous appetite. But after he announced his intention to visit the bank, she said she didn’t want to eat the omelette that her parents’ cook had made her for breakfast.

  At the bank she volunteered to go inside and cash his check while Amjad waited in the lobby. As he watched, she went up to the teller and said something while calmly opening her purse. What she didn’t know was that he had removed the money she had in it. She frantically turned the purse upside down on the teller’s desk. Amjad came up beside her and asked what was wrong.

  “I knew I couldn’t trust our servants!” she burst out. Only then did she admit that she had withdrawn the money the day before.

  The couple later had a terrible fight in front of Amjad’s mother. Aafia claimed she had taken the money out because she was afraid the United States would freeze their accounts. Amjad asked why, if that was true, she had left $2,000 in the account and why she had lied about it.

  “I can’t trust you,” he told her. “You hide things from me! We can’t live together.”

  So Aafia and the children went back to her parents’ house while Amjad stayed with the Khans.

  A few days later, both families organized another session with the mufti, and it was decided that Aafia and Amjad should live apart from both their families.

  They rented an apartment and set it up, but within days they were fighting again and Amjad told Aafia he wanted a divorce. This time he went back to his parents’ house, and Aafia’s mother came to pick her up. His parents tried to call the Siddiquis to arrange another mediation, which is customary in Pakistan. But the Siddiquis now refused to answer the phone.

  On his previous visit Amjad had tried to shield his parents from his marital troubles. But since his return they had pressed him to say more. His stories alarmed them. Aafia struck them as utterly headstrong and reckless. His parents feared that if he went back to her, the two might run off and join one of the militant groups. If he divorced her, on the other hand, his parents told him, they would find him another, better wife.

  Amjad knew that if he left Aafia, the Siddiquis would never forgive him. He had heard Aafia’s father say that anyone who divorced his daughters was committing adultery and had no right to see his children. (Dr. Siddiqui’s view was inconsistent with sharia, which makes divorce easy for men, but he didn’t seem to care.) Amjad’s older brothers, however, told him they knew many divorced Pakistani couples who raised their children amicably.

  Aafia recalled in talking with the FBI in 2008 that while her father had outwardly defended her against the Khans, he had been deeply distressed by what Amjad said about her. Her father had even wondered, in the FBI’s telling of her story, “if it would have been better if she would have died before she was born.” She told the agent that until he said this to her, she had considered her father “a kind and gentle man she was close to,” and she began to cry.

  The Islamic laws put in place by General Zia ul-Haq gave Amjad the right to initiate a divorce unilaterally by saying “I divorce you” three times. Since Aafia and her family had refused to see him or answer his calls, he sent her a letter by courier on August 17 saying precisely that.

  He would need to wait three months before the divorce became final, unless he and Aafia reconciled before then.

  Amjad did not know that only two days before he had sent his letter, Aafia’s father had died of a heart attack. The Siddiquis blamed Amjad for his death, and they refused to have anything more to do with the Khans. “I liked her very much, but she was rigid and stubborn,” Amjad’s mother said sadly of Aafia. “Whatever she wanted to do, she was going to do. She was so crazy to help the world.”

  Chapter Nine

  On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Ayaan was invited to appear on Holland’s most popular nighttime talk show, Barend & Van Dorp. The show sent bodyguards to escort her to various panel discussions she attended earlier in the day. Ayaan noticed an unusually large number of Moroccans at some of the debates, and they booed when she entered.

  The show’s host that evening asked her if she had lied—“as everybody else did”—when she sought asylum in 1992. Ayaan replied that she had because she was fleeing an arranged marriage and she feared for her life if her family found her.

  The host asked if she agreed with Pim Fortuyn that Islam was backward. It was the same question that had landed Fortuyn in trouble the year before, but Ayaan thought she had a clever way to get around it. “According to the Arab Human Development report of the UN,” she answered, “if you measure by three things, political freedom, education, and the status of women—then what Pim Fortuyn said is not an opinion, it’s a fact.” As usual, both she and her Dutch interviewers failed to distinguish between Islam the religion and the sociopolitical environment of various majority-Muslim countries, and her answer failed to appease her critics. But many Dutch viewers saw it as a refreshingly blunt statement of the obvious.

  The next day Ayaan and a Dutch-Pakistani lawyer named Naema Tahir faced off on another program (Rondom 10, or Around 10) against the Saudi-funded imam Mohammed Cheppih and the Moroccan youth activist Ali Eddaoudi. Like Ayaan, Naema Tahir had gone through a stage as a teenage Islamist. The men began shouting at the two women and cutting them off. Ayaan had said on an earlier radio show that she had lost her faith. “Then you are not a Muslim!” one of the men shouted. “You said Islam was backward! You are lying!”

  Without losing her cool for a minute, Ayaan replied, “It’s my religion, too, and if I want to call it backward, I will do so. Yes, Islam is backward.” After the show, Rondom 10 received more than two thousand e-mails, many of them threatening Ayaan and Tahir.

  Her phone was ringing when she got home. Friends feared for her. Her foster father warned her not to get into a slanging match with Holland’s Muslims. Her supervisor, Paul Kalma, advised her to stick to writing opinion pieces. Her housemate told her she had lost her mind. Four days after the broadcast, Ayaan’s father warned the filmmaker Karin Schagen that Ayaan was in danger of being assassinated. Marco took her out for a drive. He begged her to be careful.

  But while they were talking, her phone rang. It was Leon de Winter. Ayaan had never met the famous Jewish writer, but she knew about his books. She had mentioned his criticism of Islam in her first article, “Give Us a Voltaire.” He told her how much he admired what she was doing, and he invited her to dinner with him and his wife, another well-known writer and television personality.

  Schagen was still trailing Ayaan for her documentary, which was becoming more topical than anyone imagined. She filmed Ayaan going to the Leiden police to file a complaint. The police advised her not to stay at home, but they said they couldn’t offer more than advice unless she wanted to file charges against a specific person. That day a reporter from De Volkskrant called. On September 18, the newspaper reported ominously that Ayaan was going into hiding.

  Her former statistics professor Huib Pellikaan was incensed that the police had no plan to keep her safe. He lived in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Wiardi Beckman Institute, and he invited Ayaan to stay at his house. She accepted.

  The news that Ayaan was going into hiding caused a commotion. Commentators noted that Ayaan was the first person in Holland to go underground for a political opinion since World War II. Her photograph appeared on the covers of newspapers and glossy magazines. Some called her “the Dutch Salman Rushdie.” Others preferred “the black Voltaire.” All the talking heads whom Ayaan and Marco had watched for years on Nova suddenly wanted to meet her. But when she rang her father, he hung up on her.

  The memory of Fortuyn’s murder was still raw, and many Dutch we
re outraged to think that another citizen was being threatened for speaking out about Islam. “This was something new in Holland,” said the filmmaker Eveline van Dijk. Tilly Hermans, the publisher who had tried to talk Ayaan into writing her autobiography, rushed to bring out a collection of Ayaan’s articles and op-eds in book form. The historian Geert Mak and other writers organized a petition drive to support her. Opzij took out an ad in her defense. Kalma and de Winter raised 25,000 euros to pay for her protection.

  Years later, Ayaan’s host, Huib Pellikaan, shook his head in disbelief when he recalled the whirlwind that followed Ayaan into his house. She herself seemed unafraid, indeed ready to take the offensive. But being around her felt dangerous, and Pellikaan, a kindly middle-aged academic with a sizable belly, wasn’t accustomed to feeling that way. Afterward, he could never explain quite why he had felt so threatened except to say that Ayaan “can be very intoxicating.”

  His biggest concern at first was to get his waifish guest to consume something more than gallons of coffee while she talked a mile a minute on the phone. Within a few days, however, he was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, and he had decided to shave off his curly gray hair and start wearing a black leather jacket to intimidate anyone who might threaten her. “It seems crazy when I look back on it,” Pellikaan said with a sheepish laugh. “I look more like a nutty professor than Bruce Willis in Die Hard. My friends took one look and said, ‘Nobody is going to be afraid of that.’ ”

  Paul Kalma at the Wiardi Beckman Institute asked the government to provide bodyguards for Ayaan. He was told she wasn’t entitled to government bodyguards because she wasn’t a government official. So Kalma decided to hire some privately. He called the TV station that had briefly provided her with guards and hired two from the same company the station had used for 50 euros an hour each. At that rate, it would cost the Labor Party five times as much to protect Ayaan as to pay her, but Kalma saw no alternative.

  Meanwhile, a good deal of related politicking was under way in Holland. After Pim Fortuyn’s murder, the new political party he had formed got enough votes to join the governing coalition. But the coalition was so unstable that everyone expected a call for new elections. The threats against Ayaan frightened Labor not only because its members liked and esteemed her but also because they did not want to be branded as soft on terrorism. And people across the political spectrum feared what might happen if another public figure died after criticizing Islam.

  Marco arrived to stay with Ayaan in Pellikaan’s house. He and Pellikaan urged her to lie low. “This is supposed to be your hiding place,” Pellikaan pleaded, but she paid them no mind. Reporters kept phoning and ringing the doorbell. “Within three weeks, she had turned the whole place into some kind of press conference center,” Pellikaan recalled. Every conversation was about Ayaan’s future. Pellikaan felt the drama was going to her head.

  The three of them sometimes sat up late drinking wine. Ayaan would give her opinions. She thought religion was the root of all evil and should be abolished. “She has absolutely extremist ideas about how to solve problems,” said Pellikaan. “She hates consensus politics. We Dutch are all wishy-washy idealists in her view. She’s the toughest girl I have ever seen.”

  Her former professor was fascinated to learn how ambitious—and how radical—she was. He told her only half jokingly that she thought like a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang. She had never heard of the left-wing German terrorist group of the 1970s, so she wasn’t offended. But she did get cross when Pellikaan and Marco told her she was dreaming if she thought that she—a junior researcher with a year’s experience working for the Labor Party—might be elected head of the party in time for the coming elections. “She had even selected the leaders of the fraction,” Pellikaan remembered. “We talked about it for about three hours. Finally I told her, ‘Ayaan, this is never going to work.’ ” She and Marco went downstairs, but Pellikaan could hear them still arguing late at night about whether she could lead the Labor Party.

  Cisca Dresselhuys, the editor of Opzij magazine, invited Ayaan to her house in Hilversum, and Ayaan arrived with the two bodyguards that Labor had hired. Privately, she told Dresselhuys they were “amateurish.” “Please, Cisca, do you know how I can get better guards?”

  Dresselhuys decided to speak about Ayaan’s plight to some politicians she knew. One of them was Gerrit Zalm, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party.

  The Liberals were planning to use the issue of immigration to take a serious chunk out of the Labor Party vote in the next elections. Rescuing this threatened Somali beauty became part of their strategy.

  Labor itself had invited its researcher to speak before Parliament on October 2. A few days beforehand, the Opzij columnist Pauline Sinnema stopped by Pellikaan’s house and offered to help Ayaan write the speech. Pellikaan let her use his computer. But the speech that Sinnema helped Ayaan write surprised him as much as it would other Labor Party members.

  Ayaan rounded on her own party in the speech for treating Muslim women as second-class citizens. A day after she gave the speech, it appeared as an op-ed piece in NRC Handelsblad under the headline “Labor Party Underestimates Suffering of Muslim Women.” By the following week, leading Liberal Party women such as Cisca Dresselhuys’s friend Neelie Kroes, a businesswoman and former cabinet member, were calling on the government to protect Ayaan.

  Not everyone in the Labor Party disagreed with Ayaan’s criticism. Many thought the party had turned a blind eye to the rift between Holland’s natives and immigrants. Huib Pellikaan told Ayaan she had the gifts to become a political leader but needed to learn more. He began trying to get her into graduate school at Harvard. Leon de Winter proposed she go stay at a writer’s retreat in California. De Winter also wanted to get her together with friends in the United States about the possibility of her studying under Bernard Lewis, the famous historian of Islam who had inspired Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the clash of civilizations. Some Labor Party members helped set up a foundation to raise the needed cash, and in October the foundation flew Ayaan to the United States. It was her first trip there.

  Soon after she left, an article in the magazine Vrij Nederland suggested that the threats against her were exaggerated. The author, an investigative journalist named Elma Verhey, had interviewed not only a high-ranking police officer but also some of Ayaan’s Somali relatives in Nijmegen, who had claimed she wasn’t in any special danger. Verhey tried to reach Ayaan’s father, but the former Somali rebel leader was avoiding reporters. Relatives said later that he had washed his hands of Ayaan. Yet he may have had another reason to stay out of the public eye. He was applying for asylum in Great Britain and using another name—possibly to conceal the fact that he already had refugee status in Kenya.

  VARA Television had a program called De Leugen Regeert (The Lie Prevails) on which journalists and the people they criticized were invited to duke it out on the air. The show’s producers asked Verhey to defend her article. Verhey expected to face Ayaan herself or perhaps one of Ayaan’s media friends. She planned to say that it made journalistic sense to check and see if the police and other Somalis took the threats against Ayaan as seriously as she did.

  To Verhey’s astonishment, it wasn’t Ayaan or another journalist who showed up but Neelie Kroes, the highest-ranking woman in the Liberal Party. Kroes proceeded to accuse Verhey on national TV of selling out not just Ayaan, a vulnerable and threatened young Somali, but Muslim women generally. Kroes didn’t call Verhey a “Muslim hugger”—as Fortuyn’s followers called those they accused of weakly handing Holland to the Muslims—but plenty of Web sites soon did.

  On October 16, the Dutch government fell. By that point, Ayaan had been talking quietly with the Liberal Party for more than a month. NRC Handelsblad reported the result of its wooing two weeks later: Ayaan planned to leave Labor and join the conservative Liberal Party.

  The Liberal Party was often called the “party of businessmen,” and it tended to avoid social issues, callin
g instead for less government regulation of the free-market economy. But Pim Fortuyn’s example had presented conservatives such as the Liberals with an irresistible temptation. By appealing to the government to liberate Muslim women and gays, he had shown that it was possible to appeal to the Dutch xenophobic vote in a socially acceptable way, while at the same time drawing feminists and homosexuals away from the Labor Party. Fortuyn’s rise had also revealed that the anti-Muslim vote was much bigger than anyone had realized: between 5 and 15 percent of the population, or as much as three times the size of the entire Muslim vote.

  As Ayaan herself later wrote, she became the face of the Liberals’ new electoral strategy.

  She had said nothing to the Wiardi Beckman Institute about her plan to join Labor’s opponents. Harry van den Bergh—who had headed Labor’s fund-raising effort to protect her—couldn’t believe the news of her switch. He called Ayaan in the United States to ask if the report was true. When she said it was, van den Bergh told her he saw no reason why the Wiardi Beckman Institute and his foundation should continue financing her stay in California. Ayaan answered with the “historic words,” as van den Bergh later told the magazine HP/De Tijd, “Okay, I will come back, but first I’m going on vacation to Hawaii.”

  “And then Ayaan, at our cost, went to Hawaii.” Van den Bergh said he never heard from her again. “Ever since then, I have found her to be a terribly clever opportunist.”

  Ayaan’s former professor and host, Huib Pellikaan, also read about her plans. Pellikaan had been pulling strings to get Ayaan into Harvard. He had even booked a ticket to New York, where the two of them planned to meet before going on to Cambridge. She never called him, and she never apologized.