Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Somalis, for their part, regarded Holland’s large pornographic industry as utterly exploitive of women. Nothing could make them believe that the naked prostitutes standing in the windows of Amsterdam’s red-light district really wanted to be there. (In fact, Amsterdam’s deputy mayor, Lodewijk Asscher, who campaigned to control and roll back the district, argued that most of the prostitutes came from poor countries and were in bondage to their pimps because they were either drug addicts or illegal aliens.) The Somalis and many other Muslims found it hypocritical of the Dutch, who allowed women to be rented openly, to preach to them about mistreating women. And then there was the habit many Dutch people had of letting their dogs defecate on public sidewalks. “The Somalis,” according to my friend, “say there are two reasons to leave this country—han and harag, gossip and dog shit.”

  Ayaan had argued that though female circumcision predated Islam, Islam reinforced it because of the religion’s emphasis on virginity. Yet Somali activists like Ayaan’s own stepmother had discovered decades earlier that the most effective way to persuade Somalis to give up circumcision was not to link the practice to Islam but rather to sever that link. Naleie, for example, said that the single most effective educational device she knew was a video in which a Somali imam explained that Islam did not mandate FGM.

  Ayaan’s friend Yassin, the prince of the Osman Mahmoud clan, had been proud that one of the clan was the first Somali elected to the Dutch Parliament. But after Ayaan made her comments about the Prophet being a tyrant and a pervert, other Somalis called him to protest. As for Holland’s Turks and Moroccans, they were furious at Ayaan for ascribing to Islam what they considered a barbaric custom from Somalia, and they demanded that the Somali community do something about her.

  Yassin described the growing anger: “A woman called, and she said, ‘Ayaan is your family. She has joined the Liberal Party and she has gone to Parliament, and now she is talking about Islam the wrong way.’ ” A man called to say that Yassin should tell Ayaan other Muslims were talking about killing her. “So I called Ayaan several times on her mobile, and I left messages, messages. But she didn’t call me back. I know the problem. She didn’t want to talk to me.

  “She is one of my family,” Yassin told me, “and I would like to tell her, ‘Ayaan, why are you saying the wrong things about the Muslims?’ ” He agreed with her that too many Muslim men mistreated their wives, but he thought they deserved the blame, not Islam. “If someone does wrong, that’s his responsibility, not the religion.

  “But she didn’t pick up the telephone,” he said. “I tried, I tried, I tried, but I can’t get Ayaan.”

  Ayaan’s father called his daughter in May and asked her again to stop criticizing Islam. But Ayaan refused, and they didn’t speak again for four tumultuous years. The prince of their clan tried to mediate between them. “After she came in Parliament,” Yassin said, “I called her father, Hirsi Magan. I said, ‘You have relations with Ayaan?’ He said, ‘I don’t want relations with Ayaan.’ ” Yassin persisted: “You are a sheikh, and you are a very important man. You must have contact with your daughter. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, he had good relations with his family even when they were not Muslims.”

  The old lion Hirsi did not reply.

  “Is that true or isn’t it?” Yassin asked him. “If our Prophet could do it, why can’t you? You must concern yourself with your daughter.”

  But Hirsi told Yassin, “I don’t want to see Ayaan. I don’t want to see her!” And then, more softly, he added, “I don’t want to see Ayaan, because, if I see Ayaan, I’ll kill her and go straight to Paradise.”

  At this, the prince could only shake his head. “I told him, ‘Uncle, I am very sorry. All I can do now is to pray.’ ”

  “Forget it, forget it,” Hirsi said. “Ayaan is a hard problem.”

  Chapter Twenty

  For six months, after Ismat and Fowzia returned to Pakistan in the spring of 2003, nothing was heard of Aafia. The two women lived very quietly in the old family bungalow with the bougainvillea-covered wall in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. Aafia’s picture was still posted on the FBI’s Web site, and the FBI continued to investigate her. The Pakistani authorities knew, as the Americans did, about Aafia’s hasty marriage to KSM’s nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. But the general Pakistani public had no idea why the United States wanted her, and President Musharraf, who preferred to veil all his dealings with the United States in maximum secrecy, was happy to keep it that way.

  The Bush administration knew by now that al-Qaeda was regrouping in Pakistan’s tribal territory of Waziristan with the help of elements within Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies. The Americans also knew that people on wanted lists, such as Aafia, were moving about Pakistan’s cities quite freely and without hindrance. They suspected, in fact, that Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar might be among them.

  But they didn’t know what they could do about it.

  For one thing, the United States had become totally ensnared in Iraq, where al-Qaeda was seeking to lead a Sunni insurgency against it. For another, administration officials from President Bush on down had basically decided that Musharraf’s cooperation—halfhearted and flickering though it was—was the best they could get out of Pakistan. Privately, Musharraf didn’t deny his government’s continuing links with the jihadi movement, a senior administration official told me, but he felt that jihadi groups were so interwoven with the Pakistani state that it would be suicidal for a Pakistani leader to confront them head-on. The official said that Musharraf told the Americans many times, “If we do that, they will tear this country apart.” And since Musharraf was cooperating on other important issues, the U.S. government lived with his refusal to arrest such notorious jihadis as the Jaish-e-Muhammad leader, Maulana Masood Azhar.

  More than once Musharraf nearly fell off the tightrope he was walking between the jihadis and the Americans. On December 14, 2003, militants from Jaish-e-Muhammad and another, even more violent group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, came close to assassinating him not far from his home in Rawalpindi, detonating a huge bomb under a bridge seconds after his motorcade crossed it. On December 25, two suicide bombers got even closer.

  Investigators discovered that a young Jaish leader named Amjad Hussain Farooqi, who had ties to both the ISI and the Taliban, had orchestrated both attempts. Farooqi’s funding, moreover, came from al-Qaeda, and he had coconspirators in Pakistan’s armed forces.

  Farooqi had taken part in the 1999 Indian Airlines hijacking that had freed the Jaish leader, Maulana Masood Azhar; he was an intimate of both Azhar and KSM. A former Jamaat-e-Islami student leader at the University of Karachi, Farooqi had been arrested in connection with the Daniel Pearl murder—but then mysteriously released. It was almost certain that some of Aafia’s new husband’s relatives were also involved in trying to kill Musharraf and that they had the support of some military officers.

  Aafia’s uncle S. H. Faruqi later wrote in a letter to the newspaper Dawn that days after the attempts on the president’s life, Aafia’s sister, Fowzia, went with their old family friend Ijaz ul-Haq (the banker son of Pakistan’s former dictator Zia ul-Haq, who would soon be named minister of religious affairs) to see Interior Minister Faisel Saleh Hayat. Faruqi said that Fowzia wanted to ask the minister to help find her sister.

  Faruqi wrote that Hayat had told Fowzia to go home and wait to hear from Aafia. But if Fowzia later heard from her sister, she didn’t inform Faruqi. Finally, in March, he wrote his letter to Dawn complaining about the government’s failure to produce Aafia. After that, Fowzia and Ismat stopped answering his calls.

  Faruqi was afraid that his letter had landed them in trouble with the government. Ismat often said she had been warned not to talk about Aafia’s case. He traveled to Karachi, and on April 22, 2004, he went to their house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. There was a big lock on the gate. He stayed in Karachi for another three days but never managed to see Fowzia and Ismat. On May 2, he published another letter in Dawn, claiming that Ismat an
d Fowzia were under house arrest.

  The next day Ismat and Fowzia called the newspaper to say that Faruqi was wrong about that. They were not being confined in any way. They just didn’t want to speak to him.

  (Like so many pieces of Aafia’s story, it’s not entirely clear what to make of this episode. My best guess is that Faruqi is telling the truth when he says that Ismat and Fowzia told him they had met with the interior minister and that they stopped talking to him after he wrote his letter to the newspaper because they had been warned to keep their dealings with the government over Aafia out of the press. But the Siddiquis’ lawyer later said that Faruqi had written it out of spite, there had never been a meeting, and the women had never been under house arrest.)

  The Siddiquis may have hoped that the United States’ interest in Aafia would fade. If so, they were in for a shock.

  On May 26, 2004, U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft held a press conference in Washington, D.C. Standing against a backdrop of enormous mug shots, he asked every American to be on the lookout for seven “armed and dangerous” terrorists who, he said, were plotting attacks against the United States. Ashcroft’s “Deadly Seven” included one woman: Aafia Siddiqui. At the press conference, Ashcroft and Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, described Aafia as an al-Qaeda “facilitator” who helped other operatives in the United States. But Newsweek soon reported that she might be “the most immediately threatening suspect in the group” because KSM himself had said she might facilitate al-Qaeda’s next attack. Among the others named were Adnan Shukrijumah, the Saudi-born jihadi from Florida whose name had been repeatedly associated with Aafia’s. Now officials said they believed that Shukrijumah could become another Mohamed Atta and lead a second great wave of terrorist attacks.

  Pakistani officials, meanwhile, continued to issue contradictory statements about Aafia. In response to Ashcroft’s press conference, officials told journalists that they had tried and failed to arrest Aafia in 2003, and that since then she had been underground. The following day, however, a spokesman for Pakistan’s interior ministry denied that, saying that Aafia had been arrested in 2003 and handed over to the Americans. The U.S. government continued to maintain that it didn’t have her and never had.

  Then, on June 1, Elaine Whitfield Sharp held a press conference in Boston on behalf of the Siddiquis. She described Aafia as a battered wife and victim of terrorism, not a terrorist. She appealed to Americans to share any information they might have on her whereabouts. When reporters asked Sharp about Faruqi’s letters to Dawn, which were available on the Internet, Sharp denied that Aafia’s family was being intimidated or under house arrest.

  The fog of rumors and announcements did not let up. The Wall Street Journal reported later that month that UN prosecutors thought al-Qaeda might have sent Aafia to Liberia on a secret mission in the summer of 2001 to trade diamonds. The story was an exciting one. But Sharp had evidence that Aafia had been in Boston when others claimed to have seen her in Liberia, and U.S. officials (while maintaining that they considered Aafia dangerous) quietly told reporters they didn’t believe the Liberian witnesses, either.

  Aafia’s ex-husband, Amjad, followed all the reports from his new home in Saudi Arabia. He had a quiet chuckle over the charge of diamond trading in Liberia. Whatever else Aafia might have done, he knew she hadn’t been in Liberia in the summer of 2001. Yet her legend seemed to grow and grow.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Ayaan’s political party made good on its promise to crack down on asylum seekers. Parliament voted in February 2004 to expel about 26,000 people whose applications for asylum had been denied, including some who had lived in the Netherlands for years. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, a member of Ayaan’s Liberals, was placed in charge of implementing the policy.

  Verdonk was a former prison warden who wore her dark hair in a square-cut bob; her simple slogan was “Rules are rules,” and she prided herself on her tough-mindedness.

  She set to work right away, marking the first three thousand people to be sent back to Iran, Afghanistan, Congo, and other countries before the start of summer.

  The expulsions were the most sweeping in Europe since the 1940s. They caused bitter controversy in the Netherlands. Some were reminded of the deportations during World War II of Jewish refugees from Germany who had sought safety in Holland. For the first time ever, the United Nations, the European Commission, and several human rights organizations cited the Netherlands for human rights abuses.

  Other Dutch voters regarded the decision as an overdue step toward regaining control of Holland’s borders, and Verdonk, with her plain speech and plain shoes, became for them a symbol of Dutch common sense in the face of a sentimental political correctness that still minimized the dangers that immigrants posed to the Dutch welfare state.

  Ayaan opposed the decision to expel the asylum seekers, but she did not make a big issue of it. She remained focused instead on Islam.

  She wanted artists to join her in challenging her former religion. She often said that when a movie like Monty Python’s spoof of Jesus Christ, The Life of Brian, came out about the Prophet Muhammad, it would be a leap forward for the Muslim world. She had told her friend Abigail Esman, an American journalist and art critic living in Amsterdam, about an idea she had for an art exhibit. Ayaan wanted to illustrate one of the Quran’s pernicious effects by copying the Quranic verses that were used to justify the abuse of women onto life-size female dolls. Esman invited her to New York and introduced her to people she knew in the art world, but nothing came of the idea.

  Ayaan found it frustrating to hear well-meaning Westerners tell her that Islam wasn’t to blame for the oppression of Muslim women. “In reality,” she said, “these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse so the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community.”

  Her battles in Parliament continued. The newspaper Algemeen Dagblad asked her to write a weekly column. One of her first, in April 2004, accused Mirjam Sterk, a member of Parliament from the Christian Democratic Party, of promoting “apartheid” by opposing her plan to drop Article 23 guaranteeing public funds for religious schools.

  Once again, Ayaan’s own party leaders were incensed. They told her she had to treat other members of Parliament, especially other members of their coalition, with respect. Ayaan finally agreed to apologize to Sterk, but she refused to take back the word “apartheid.”

  One day Ayaan was invited to lunch with Ebru Umar, a feisty young female columnist of Turkish descent and a friend of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Umar later wrote that she had taken an instant dislike to Ayaan, who struck her as needlessly combative and suspicious. Umar said Ayaan had asked her to write an article denouncing Sterk, but she had refused. She says she told Ayaan that Sterk had promoted integration for a long time and Ayaan ought to work with her, but Ayaan disagreed. “Fighting is good,” Umar quoted Ayaan as saying. “That’s the way to score points in The Hague.”

  Theo van Gogh, for his part, had written a recent column calling the Prophet Muhammad a “rapist” and a “dirty uncle.” Hundreds of Muslims signed an online petition against him. “Something like this breeds hatred and ultimately leads to violence,” the organizers of the petition wrote. “That’s why we have to bring this to an end soon.” Ayaan asked Umar for van Gogh’s telephone number.

  A bit later she flew to New York on a holiday. NRC Handelsblad had assigned their star reporter Jutta Chorus to follow Ayaan for six months and write about her life, so Chorus went along. Ayaan was sitting in a New York taxi when van Gogh called her on her mobile phone from Amsterdam.

  The filmmaker had just left a debate with Dyab Abou Jahjah, a former asylum seeker from Lebanon who had settled in Belgium and formed a political party there called the Arab European League, which was spreading into the Netherlands. Abou Jahjah’s political model was Malcolm X. He traveled with a retinue of bodyguards,
and the head of the Dutch branch of his party was Mohammed Cheppih, the Saudi-educated son of an imam whose televised debate with Ayaan had sparked the first death threats against her a year and a half earlier. Van Gogh told Ayaan that after he and Abou Jahjah had traded insults, several young Moroccans had threatened him outside the theater.

  When Ayaan got back to Amsterdam, she went to see van Gogh at his apartment on Pythagorasstraat and told him about her idea for an art exhibit. He volunteered to turn it into a movie. She agreed and proposed making the film in English; she wanted it to reach an international audience.

  She was seeing a new man. Herman Philipse was the debonair professor of philosophy at Utrecht University who had written the book she credited with changing her life, The Atheist Manifesto. In a country where professors often went to work in blue jeans, Philipse was famous for his Savile Row suits and bow ties. Ayaan first met him at a public lecture he gave in The Hague. She caused a stir when she got there and her bodyguards fanned out around the lecture hall. Afterward, Philipse introduced himself. By the summer of 2003, the two of them were an item.

  Philipse lived in an elegant Amsterdam apartment almost across the street from van Gogh’s friend Theodor Holman. When Ayaan arrived in her black car to spend the night, her guards would get out and stop traffic until she got inside. They did the same when she left in the morning. Philipse found the lack of privacy oppressive and embarrassing, and he didn’t see how Ayaan could stand living the way she did. The only time the two of them really felt free together was when Ayaan left her bodyguards behind to go on vacation in New York with Philipse. Ayaan adored New York and told him she might want to live there.

  Their relationship ended in July 2004, but they remained good friends. Ayaan told Philipse she thought the film that she and van Gogh were making could help her break into the U.S. market. Philipse agreed that moving to New York might be good for her, but he thought making a movie with van Gogh was the wrong way to go about it. For one thing, he doubted Ayaan’s theory that she could wean Muslims from Islam by what he called “desacralizing” the Quran. “You might even call it childish,” he said later of the idea. But mainly he advised against making the film because he thought it would defeat what he saw as the purpose of her moving to the United States—which in his view was to escape her notoriety in Holland. “I warned her against it because I thought it was high risk,” he recalled. “She was trampling on their holy book. I predicted that she would no longer have to be protected just in the Netherlands but all over the world.”