Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Pellikaan came to believe that she had already decided to join the Liberals by the time she gave the speech that Pauline Sinnema had helped write in his house. “She’s very brave on a macro level but not very brave on a micro, individual level,” he said. “She doesn’t like confrontation.”

  A Dutch reporter phoned her in California to ask if she wasn’t betraying her party. Ayaan responded, “Looking at it from here, all 150 members of the Dutch Parliament may as well be in one party. The Netherlands is a small, emotional country. You can’t run politics on the basis of feelings. . . . I belong to no one, only to myself.”

  Chapter Ten

  Aafia’s father was the parent she had written to about her scientific studies in America. He had tried to mediate between Aafia and her in-laws. Now he was dead, and the family said the stress of Aafia’s breakup had killed him. They blamed Amjad, but Aafia knew that her father had been angry with her, too.

  She had few friends in Pakistan, having been away for twelve years. She had a six-year-old and a four-year-old to care for, and she was eight months pregnant. About two weeks after her father died and she received Amjad’s letter declaring their divorce, she came down with chicken pox.

  When a woman catches chicken pox in the third trimester of pregnancy, she risks a virus that can damage the baby’s brain and even kill both mother and child. Aafia’s due date was a month away, but her doctor rushed her to the hospital on September 3, 2002, for an emergency C-section. Afterward, she and the baby boy, whom she named Suleman Fateh, were put on antiviral treatments. They stayed in the hospital for more than a week.

  Neither she nor her family called Amjad or his parents to let them know about the new baby. Amjad had not seen Ahmad and Maryam since the day in July when he had told Aafia he wanted to separate. The Khans phoned the Siddiquis, but Aafia refused to take their calls. She also refused to talk to the local official who came around asking her to sign a certificate confirming that she was divorced.

  This time Amjad asked his parents to find him a bride “we have known for a long time,” meaning a girl from within their extended family. His mother took him to meet a selection of cousins. The father of the one he liked best accepted his proposal immediately. His impending divorce was no problem: he was a handsome young doctor with the potential to become a wealthy man after he resumed his American career.

  Amjad was now working at a Karachi hospital. He was there on the day that had been set for his wedding dinner when a nurse informed him that he had a visitor. In the waiting room he found Aafia. She was dressed up in a mauve silk cloak and head scarf with matching lipstick. It was just the sort of fashionable but conservative outfit he loved, but she had rarely worn such clothes since she adopted the black abaya and niqab. Amjad had not known that Aafia had given birth—yet here she was, looking so alluring that the nurse who announced her assumed she must be the new bride. Aafia suggested brightly that they go out for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel.

  Dining at one of Karachi’s most expensive restaurants was the sort of extravagance that Aafia usually chided Amjad for, but this time she seemed to enjoy the meal. She told him about Suleman’s difficult delivery, and she said she hadn’t lost her feelings for him. At the end of the meal, she invited him to Gulshan-e-Iqbal that evening to meet his new baby son and to play with the two children he had not seen for almost two months.

  Amjad realized she was offering him the chance to reconcile rather than marry his pretty young cousin. Her behavior reminded him of their happy days, before they had begun to fight about jihad and before their families had gotten involved. He missed Ahmad and Maryam. He missed Aafia, too.

  He barely knew the cousin he was marrying. He had been so depressed by his split with Aafia that he’d lacked the energy to learn much. He was going into this marriage on faith—the faith, this time, that strong family ties and a shared understanding of Islam would carry him through. Now Aafia was testing that faith.

  But he could not go with her, despite the guilt and confusion he felt. They couldn’t possibly live together now. If they tried, he knew, it would only be temporary. And he had given his word to his cousin’s father. Her mother and sisters were already decorating her hands and feet for that night’s wedding.

  So he refused to go to Aafia’s house. He offered instead to visit the children first thing in the morning.

  Aafia backed off at that point, saying her mother and sister might not let him in the house. And she suggested that they go see her lawyer right away.

  The lawyer wrote up a divorce settlement. Aafia agreed to give Amjad access to the children, while he agreed to pay for the children’s maintenance in addition to her recent hospital bills.

  Amjad’s uncle hurried over to act as a witness. After they signed, Amjad and Aafia went out for tea at the Avari Towers, another expensive hotel near the Sheraton. At about 6:30 in the evening, Amjad left the hotel to get married again. His second wedding day was the last time he ever spoke with Aafia.

  She signed a statement confirming the divorce on October 21, 2002. Amjad sent her his first monthly maintenance check the following month. Aafia cashed it but refused to let him see the children.

  When his parents asked Aafia’s mother to intervene, Ismat told them that Amjad was an abusive husband and father who did not deserve to see his children. Then she stopped talking to the Khans, and they never did see the children.

  Amjad attempted to press his case before the town union council, but the Siddiquis and their allies outmaneuvered him. The Jamaat-e-Islami had a majority on the council, and at an angry council meeting packed with party activists, Ismat produced Fowzia’s photographs of Aafia with her split lip as evidence of why Amjad shouldn’t see his children. The council sided with the Siddiquis. Amjad stalked out of the meeting, and Aafia was awarded sole custody.

  The Khan family’s lawyers told the family that the council had no authority to decide matters of custody. Amjad and his father therefore filed a lawsuit claiming his right, under Islamic law, to visit his children and to pay for their maintenance. Fowzia later said that Aafia saw the Khans’ demands as harassment.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ayaan’s switch to the Liberal Party was a major political event in Holland that autumn. The election turned on the question of whether Muslims could or should be integrated into Dutch society, and Ayaan was at the center of it. She wrote in a newspaper piece announcing her decision that there were three things she wanted to achieve in Parliament: “I wanted Holland to wake up and stop tolerating the oppression of Muslim women in its midst. . . . Second, I wanted to spark a debate among Muslims about reforming aspects of Islam so that people could begin to question and criticize their own beliefs. . . . Third, I wanted Muslim women to become aware of just how bad and how unacceptable their suffering was.”

  Her old friends from Leiden and Ede were stunned by her turnaround. But Neelie Kroes and other Liberals pointed out that they were offering Holland and Ayaan benefits that Labor had failed to offer: not just a place on their ticket that could send Ayaan to Parliament but also a chance to get the police protection as an elected official she needed to continue her work of liberating Muslim women. By contrast, they suggested, Labor wanted to send her off to the United States and avoid the question of the oppressed Muslim woman.

  Karin Schagen’s sympathetic portrait of Ayaan, “The Fear in the Back of My Head,” appeared on television on November 1, the day after Ayaan’s article appeared announcing her decision. Solomon Burke’s mournful rendition of the American blues song “Don’t Give Up on Me” was the sound track. But even as her friends were adjusting to her sudden national prominence, Ayaan was taking her first steps onto an even wider stage.

  On November 9, the New York Times published a flattering full-length “Saturday Profile” of the woman it quoted others as calling “the Dutch Salman Rushdie.” Fortunately for Ayaan, the reporter who wrote the piece was Marlise Simons, a Dutchwoman of the same generation as Cisca Dresselhuys and Neelie Kroes.
Although Simons was based in Paris, she had been covering the Dutch debate over integration and was struck by the impact Ayaan was having.

  Her article told essentially the same story about Ayaan’s life and views that Steffie Kouters had told in De Volkskrant a month earlier. But whereas Kouters had helped turn Ayaan into the darling of the Dutch intelligentsia, Simons’s article introduced her as a heroine to a worldwide elite. From Washington to London, readers took note. Simons also took a personal liking to Ayaan, and when Ayaan confided that she was overwhelmed with foreign media requests and needed a literary agent, Simons recommended that she contact the Paris-based agent Susanna Lea.

  Lea was making a name for herself in Paris by introducing American-style marketing techniques to the relatively dowdy European publishing industry. One specialty she was developing was packaging books about women from the Third World for Western audiences. She had sold My Forbidden Face, one of the first books written by an Afghan woman about life under the Taliban, in November 2001. She had followed it up with the memoir of Osama bin Laden’s former sister-in-law Carmen bin Ladin, which had become a bestseller. She agreed to represent Ayaan.

  Holland’s political and intellectual celebrities were already clamoring to meet her. Most came away charmed. In the hothouse world of Dutch journalism and politics, it was refreshing to meet someone new, especially a beautiful African woman with such a dramatic background. Ayaan’s imperious style could be an asset in Dutch eyes during this early phase. “You know she comes from nobility,” Neelie Kroes’s husband, the Labor Party politician Bram Peper, often said.

  Ayaan often mentioned the Enlightenment, but she didn’t seem to exhibit the typically Dutch need to qualify every statement and cite studies and statistics. As the left-wing journalist Stan van Houcke said, “She acts by impulse and instinct, and that makes her stronger than an intellectual.”

  She often bonded with other women by suggesting that they shop for clothes together. When she went to meet Neelie Kroes in San Francisco, Ayaan bought a burgundy sweater that Kroes said suited her. Kroes was smitten with her young Somali protégée; later she proudly told reporters that Ayaan “had lived through five civil wars.” In truth, Ayaan could claim to have seen one, briefly, during her 1990 stint in Somalia. Within a month of the meeting, the Dutch newspaper Het Parool was comparing Kroes and Ayaan to mother and daughter.

  Kroes paid for Ayaan to visit an expensive hairdresser in the chic Hague suburb of Wassenaar. The Dutch hairdresser straightened Ayaan’s hair and encouraged her to pull it back in a sleek chignon. When out campaigning, Kroes suggested, Ayaan should wear the kinds of professional suits favored by the Dutch bourgeoisie. It was the Wassenaar look, but Ayaan managed to turn it into her own style. She preferred bold solids to prints and crisp fabrics to soft ones. Even when she had held a job, Ayaan couldn’t have afforded the boutiques that Kroes favored, and soon she was spending more money than she had. Bram Peper said his wife loaned Ayaan the extra money.

  Before the Liberals officially named her their candidate, Ayaan had to make her case to the rest of the party. Not everyone was enthusiastic. Other Liberals who for years had been working their way up the lists to run for Parliament were angry that Kroes and another party leader, Gerrit Zalm, wanted to exalt a newcomer with practically no political experience. The party’s few young Muslim members were especially dismayed.

  In 1998, Fadime Örgü had been one of the first two Dutch citizens of Turkish descent ever elected to Parliament. Now thirty-four, Örgü had entered public life when she was fifteen years old because she wanted to help immigrant women. Attractive, with shoulder-length brown hair, Örgü considered herself a true Liberal. She believed in the absolute separation of religion and state. Her goal was to emancipate Muslim women and make them economically independent. She didn’t think that bringing Ayaan into the party was the way to achieve that. “If you want to represent people, you have to listen to them, and you have to have support among your target group,” Örgü said. “I didn’t see Ayaan doing that.”

  Several Somali refugees approached the Liberals with another complaint. They told party leader Bas Eenhoorn that Ayaan had lied on her application for asylum.

  The Somali complaint presented a ticklish problem for the Liberals. They had adopted Pim Fortuyn’s anti-immigration platform. One of the party’s campaign promises was to kick out the bogus asylum seekers, who the Liberals claimed were making a mockery of Holland’s laws and borders. For the same party to nominate a bogus asylum seeker for Parliament could be disastrous. Gerrit Zalm and other party officials called Ayaan in to ask if she had lied.

  Ayaan has never made it quite clear what she told the Liberals, except that she admitted to having changed her name and birthday and not telling “the whole truth” (as she put it in her autobiography). But she probably said something similar to what she was telling journalists at the time.

  A few days earlier, Marlise Simons had reported in the New York Times that Ayaan, at the age of twenty-two, had narrowly escaped being forced to marry “a distant cousin, a man she had never seen.” Simons had gone on to say that “a friend helped her to escape and she finally obtained political asylum in the Netherlands.”

  The implication was that even if Ayaan did not fit the definition of a refugee under the 1954 Refugee Convention, she had been fleeing danger of another sort when she had come to the Netherlands, just as she was menaced by danger now.

  Whatever Ayaan told them, the Liberals decided that her statements to the immigration authorities should not impede her candidacy.

  No one, it seems, not even Fadime Örgü, asked in public whether Ayaan might be lying about having had to marry a fundamentalist cousin she had never met. Everyone knew that honor killings were a serious problem in the Turkish community, who made up much of Holland’s Muslims, and the Dutch could easily assume that other Muslims lived under the same threat. The country’s Turkish and Moroccan communities, moreover, may have made a similar assumption about Somalis, especially after learning about their startling custom of female genital mutilation. And in general, it was becoming risky if not taboo to question Ayaan. Those who did so could be accused, as the journalist Elma Verhey had been, of siding with Islamic fascists, who, the Dutch were frequently reminded, in addition to trying to silence Ayaan, wanted to limit free speech and turn the Netherlands into a sharia state.

  Zalm ranked Ayaan as such a positive addition to the Liberal Party that he listed her on the ballot as number 16, well ahead of dozens of long-standing party members. Kroes’s husband, Bram Peper, helped Ayaan write her maiden speech to the party. Peper also edited a slender collection of articles and papers that Ayaan had written that Tilly Hermans was rushing out in time for the election. The book was called The Son Factory—that’s what Ayaan said Islam expected the proper Muslim woman to be.

  Now that she was running for office, the Royal and Diplomatic Protection Service supplied her with armed bodyguards. Ayaan traveled with them everywhere, sometimes in a convoy of bulletproof cars. She had no apartment of her own but stayed with new friends, such as Nellie Kroes and her husband. The filmmaker Eveline van Dijk decided to take up where Karin Schagen had left off and began following Ayaan with a camera.

  One night before the election, van Dijk accompanied Ayaan to a dinner party at the Amsterdam apartment of the talk show host and newspaper columnist Theodor Holman. Marco and Ayaan were still close, so Marco came, too.

  Holman lived on Willemsparkweg, a wide treelined street in the Oud Zuid neighborhood near the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw. As Ayaan’s caravan arrived and her bodyguards took up positions outside Holman’s brick town house, the middle-aged columnist stood outside and narrated for van Dijk’s camera, in a hushed voice, how strange it felt for him to feel threatened in his own home. Holland was so small and safe that even semicelebrities like him rode their bicycles to work.

  But the dinner was a jolly one in Holman’s book-lined living room, with plenty of candles, wine, and Ayaa
n’s favorite rare beef.

  The half-submerged topic that dominated the conversation was fear: what Ayaan feared, and who feared her, and the fear that others felt around her. Ayaan is apparently scared of cats, and Holman had tried to lock up his old white cat for the night. But the cat had gotten loose and prowled around Ayaan, whom the camera recorded looking very fetching as she quivered in a red blouse and black sweater and trousers. In her film, van Dijk made the irony unmistakable: this delicate woman, so personally unthreatening that even a cat could frighten her, had somehow aroused the fury of millions. Holman asked Marco whether Ayaan should be afraid of entering a snake pit such as Parliament, and Marco quipped that, more likely, Parliament should be afraid of her. The party laughed loudly. She was brave, yes, but it seemed absurd to think of Ayaan as scary.

  As the evening wore on, Ayaan brought up the Somalis who had told the Liberal Party’s leaders about the story she had told the immigration authorities. Ayaan was laughing, but she admitted that she was concerned. She said the problem was mainly her safety. “If they keep me out of Parliament, then nobody will protect me,” she said earnestly. “There will be no place for me. If I don’t go to Parliament, then I am outlawed.”

  She didn’t ask (and perhaps it never crossed her mind) whether anyone at the table disapproved of her lying. Back at Lunteren, the social workers hadn’t seemed to care. Ayaan may have thought that since, on the Barend & Dorp show, she had already admitted to lying about being a civil war refugee and no one had seemed to mind, no one ever would.

  But that program was the one where she had called Islam a backward religion. And amid the uproar and the threats that had followed the program, few people had focused on what she said about obtaining asylum. Holman, a professional political commentator, clearly hadn’t, and he was surprised now, and more than a little dismayed, to learn at his dinner that she had lied to the government.