“Then I stop,” one woman cried. Another of the sheltered women sounded as if she was choking back tears. “If you can’t see that you are hurting me, I will not continue this discussion with you any further. There is no use in talking with you.”
Ayaan stood up. “Then, see you later,” she said with a flick of her hand.
It was a very Somali gesture, and Ayaan probably meant no offense. But as the journalist Ian Buruma later wrote, “It may have been this wave, this gentle gesture of disdain, this almost aristocratic dismissal of a noisome inferior, that upset her critics most.”
On the Internet, Moroccan chat rooms exploded with rage. Albert Benschop, a University of Amsterdam sociologist who has studied how the Internet fueled tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the period, said that very few of those railing against Ayaan had actually seen “Submission.” But they had heard that it was blasphemous, and they had heard that she had put down the women at the shelter.
Meanwhile, Islamists were free to stoke the hatred, since the Dutch police and intelligence agencies hadn’t yet discovered how to stop the radicals from flooding Internet chat rooms with their propaganda. “They could publish anything,” Benschop said of the tech-savvy jihad sympathizers. “They could penetrate any site. They penetrated these websites where thousands of people would come.”
“In the summer months preceding the murder, on any Islamic forum, there was heated debate: what are we going to do about this insult?” Benschop recalled. “There wasn’t any discussion about the feminist intentions of the film. It was rejected on a massive scale. There was just the hatred and the feeling that van Gogh and Hirsi Ali had deliberately insulted them again. The wish to do something about this was very great and very broad.”
In this violent atmosphere, the cult leader Abu Khaled and his disciples must have sensed their time had come.
They began writing to one another that they did not need to go to Iraq or Afghanistan to join the jihad. They could fight the unbelievers in Holland. In “Submission” they saw the opportunity to put their bloody fantasies into action.
In September, Bouyeri got into trouble again by screaming and spitting at an officer who caught him riding on a tram without a ticket. Again he went free.
He was reading a book about Zarqawi, and the films he watched on his laptop were getting more macabre and nihilistic. Along with videos of hangings, executions, beheadings, amputations, and tortures, police later discovered images on his computer of a penis being cut off and of a man having sex with a dead woman.
Bouyeri made up his mind. Presumably on the authority of Abu Khaled, he decided to act. He obtained a Croatian semiautomatic pistol and began practicing with it.
It isn’t certain that Bouyeri ever saw “Submission.” It wasn’t among the films on his laptop. And he began writing his “Open Letter to Hirshi [sic] Ali” before the movie came out.
In it he says nothing about the movie—or even about women. He specifically condemns Ayaan for two television interviews. The first was the one in December, when she had asked Muslim schoolchildren to choose between the Quran and the Dutch Constitution, and the second had taken place in June, when she had proposed screening Muslim job applicants on the basis of their religious beliefs. But Benschop thinks that the furor over “Submission” gave Bouyeri the confidence to act. “My hypothesis is that Mohammed Bouyeri saw that there was a climate in which it was possible to kill Ayaan or a substitute and that he must have thought that almost all Muslims would applaud the action.”
Bouyeri wrote a farewell letter to his family. “By the time you receive this, I will already be a martyr,” he said. He expressed regret that he had never been able to persuade them to see things his way. “I have often searched for ways to point out the truth to you, but somehow it seemed as if there was a wall between us all the time.”
In a letter to his comrades, he enclosed a memory stick and asked “all the brothers and sisters” to disseminate his religious and political texts.
The cult leader Abu Khaled made a quiet getaway at that point. On October 27, a fellow Syrian living in a small Dutch town booked a passage for him to Turkey via Greece. The date of his departure was set for November 2. From Turkey, this deeply mysterious man who had been seeking asylum in Europe since 1994 would make his way home to Syria. (He was later reported to have been arrested there.)
The last days of October also led up to the U.S. presidential election. On October 29, Osama bin Laden released a rambling videotape in which he told Americans that, by invading Iraq, Bush had pushed them into disaster. Many Western experts on terrorism agreed with bin Laden when he said that even he found it hard to believe how often “the White House seems to be playing on our team” by alienating Muslims and seeming to vindicate al-Qaeda’s view that the war against terror was really a war to dominate the Muslim world. Most Americans, however, didn’t like hearing that, and this first message in a year from the al-Qaeda chief probably helped a majority rally around their president.
On the night of November 1, Mohammed Bouyeri’s friends gathered at his apartment to break the fast of Ramadan. They ate soup and reminisced about the crazy things they used to do, such as smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, before they’d discovered “true Islam.” Around midnight, Bouyeri took a walk around a park in his neighborhood, listening through headphones to texts from the Quran. Around 2 a.m., everyone went to bed. At 5 a.m., they got up again to eat breakfast and to say their morning prayers. Then Bouyeri left the house.
November 2, a Tuesday, was election day in America, but most Americans were still asleep when Theo van Gogh set off on his bicycle to work in Amsterdam. At about 8:30, he stopped to buy a newspaper and cigarettes. Although he had named his Web site “The Healthy Smoker,” the overweight filmmaker told the tobacconist he wanted to try a new nicotine medicine to quit. Back on his bike again, he was cycling along the bike path of busy Linnaeusstraat when a bearded stranger in a caftan cycled up beside him.
Pulling out a gun, Bouyeri shot van Gogh in the stomach, then fired several more times. The filmmaker managed to crawl to the other side of the street. He begged his assassin for mercy, pleading, “Can’t we talk about this?”
Bouyeri made no reply. Instead, he kicked the filmmaker twice and pulled two knives from the folds of his gown. With the larger knife he proceeded to saw van Gogh’s head nearly off his neck. Blood spewed everywhere. With the smaller knife he stuck a five-page letter to the filmmaker’s chest. Then he calmly reloaded his gun and began walking in the direction of a nearby city park.
“You can’t do that!” screamed one of the dozens of eyewitnesses.
“Oh, yes, I can,” Bouyeri replied. “He asked for it. Now you know what to expect.”
A policeman wearing a bulletproof vest chased him into the park, and a shoot-out began. Bouyeri was shot in the leg and arrested.
Ayaan was in Parliament when she heard the news. Her bodyguards hustled her out of the building and into hiding.
She didn’t learn until later that a woman, who has never been identified, arrived later that morning carrying a copy of one of Bouyeri’s tracts, “The True Muslim.” The woman told Ayaan’s office staff that she wanted to meet personally with Ayaan. She left Bouyeri’s book and a mobile phone number. When Ayaan called a few days later, the woman said she had wanted to warn her about Bouyeri. But then the mobile phone went dead, and apparently the police never tracked her down. Later, when two women in Bouyeri’s group told De Volkskrant that it would be better for a woman to kill her, Ayaan wondered whether that was what her visitor had planned.
Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, called for a public demonstration in front of the Dam, the main square outside the royal palace. Ayaan wanted to attend it, but her security detail said the risks were too great. Although the public didn’t know it at the time, the Jewish mayor and his Muslim deputy had also been on the list of politicians Bouyeri had threatened. (In a strange echo of Ayaan’s technique of quoting the Quran in �
�Submission,” Bouyeri’s letter listed various quotations from the Talmud, concluding that “a mayor is leading Amsterdam who subscribes to an ideology that Jews can lie to non-Jews.”) Cohen and his deputy, Aboutaleb, refused to go into hiding. They insisted on going out and trying to calm the public’s fears. While Cohen attended the demonstration, Aboutaleb visited a mosque and warned Muslims that they had to stop segregating themselves and join Dutch society. “Anyone who doesn’t share these values,” the deputy said, “would be wise to draw their conclusions and leave.”
But Bouyeri reserved his most terrifying curses for Ayaan. He promised in his letter that she would be destroyed, that the Netherlands would be destroyed, that Europe would be destroyed, and finally that the United States would fall. “AYAAN HIRSI ALI YOU WILL BREAK YOURSELF TO PIECES ON ISLAM,” the letter said. “The death you are trying to prevent will only find you out, . . . Oh Hirsi Ali, you too will go down.”
In the days after the killing, the Netherlands seemed to erupt. Dutch nationalists took their revenge by setting fire to four mosques. On November 8, the day van Gogh was to be buried, a powerful bomb exploded outside the school attached to the Eindhoven mosque, where the 9/11 hijackers had attended seminars. On November 10, an Islamic school in the town of Uden was burned to the ground. Altogether, seven schools were subjected to destructive attacks. The Anne Frank Foundation, which had noticed a big increase in arson and racist incidents since 9/11, reported more than 174 threats in the month of November. Only in Amsterdam, where Cohen and Aboutaleb continued to meet with community leaders, were no such threats reported.
A few miles from Parliament, police surrounded Bouyeri’s friends Jason Walters and his brother Jermaine at their house in The Hague. The AIVD had learned that Walters had issued a communiqué taking credit for van Gogh’s murder and promising to kill Cohen, Aboutaleb, and Wilders. Walters threw hand grenades at the police who surrounded him and threatened to blow up the building. After a fourteen-hour siege, during which Walters shot and wounded a policeman, he and his brother were captured, stripped to their underwear, blindfolded, and taken to jail.
Ayaan was told she needed to leave the country for her own safety. A week after van Gogh’s murder, she was flown secretly across the Atlantic to Massachusetts and installed in an anonymous highway hotel north of Boston. She wasn’t allowed to communicate by telephone or e-mail with anyone.
She became as invisible, at this moment of eclipse, as her opposite in Pakistan.
PART III
Being Regarded
Chapter One
The Islamabad Marriott was strangely quiet when I arrived in November 2004 to write my first article about Aafia. It was Ramadan, and the hotel would normally have been full of prosperous guests breaking the fast at nightly iftar banquets, the ladies dressed in a rainbow of silken shalwar kameezes. But there had been an explosion the week before in the Marriott’s lobby that had injured a U.S. diplomat and several Italian tourists. The Pakistani government had blamed the blast on an electrical failure, but everybody knew that a bomb had gone off. I found myself wandering the red-carpeted halls with only the TV chatter of newscasters for company. They were talking about President Bush’s reelection and the murder of Theo van Gogh.
I hadn’t meant to stay in Islamabad longer than a day. I wanted to go straight to Aafia’s hometown of Karachi and interview her family and friends. Instead, I was sent to the Interior Ministry to see a bureaucrat who kept slicking back his thinning hair as he nervously informed me that I needed an internal travel permit to go to Karachi.
It was my first inkling that something about Aafia’s story seemed to rattle Pakistan.
Big, brash Karachi wasn’t a secret installation, after all. As Aafia herself once said, it was “the New York City of Pakistan.” It was the country’s largest city, its main port, its economic heart. It was also the most populous Muslim city in the world, with more than twice as many people as New York. I had visited Karachi several times without any permit, most recently on an assignment for Vogue to write about al-Qaeda’s female supporters.
I had tried earlier, by telephone, to arrange an interview with the Siddiquis through their lawyer in Massachusetts, Elaine Whitfield Sharp. Sharp was pleasant about it, but she warned me that the Siddiquis would not see me. That seemed strange, too. Sharp had emphasized how respectable the family was. She said that the Siddiquis were Westernized professionals and that Aafia’s disappearance and the allegations against her had come as a terrible shock. In my own experience, even in Pakistan, such sophisticated people were usually the first to contact the media if they felt they had been wronged. And what was true of educated people in general was often doubly true of Islamists, though I wasn’t sure yet whether Aafia’s family shared her political beliefs.
I was happy to follow the evidence wherever it led. Whether Aafia was in hiding, as the U.S. government said, or she was being held by the CIA, as some human rights groups were speculating, her story was still a good one for Vogue because Vogue is a women’s magazine and Aafia was the only woman the FBI had named as wanted in the war on terror. For all I knew (and I knew far less in 2004 than I’ve learned since), Annette Lamoreaux, the lawyer whom Aafia’s brother had hired, might have been absolutely right when she scoffed at the idea that a Volvo-driving mother of two could be involved with al-Qaeda. “Is that where al-Qaeda is recruiting now, on playgrounds?” Lamoreaux had asked.
All I wanted to do was go to Karachi and try to persuade the Siddiquis to tell me their side of the story. But the Interior Ministry told me I needed permission from the head of Pakistan’s terrorism and crisis management unit, Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, before I could leave for Karachi. I called Cheema’s office and learned that he had gone home for Ramadan. I called him at home and was told he could not come to the phone. So, with little else to do, I sat in my room at the Marriott, studying the few fragments of information about Aafia that had come to light since the FBI had put her name on its Most Wanted list in 2003.
As Sharp observed, the U.S. government had never spelled out why it wanted Aafia so badly. From the earliest press reports, anonymous officials had linked her to 9/11’s mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but they had never explained the link. She had never been charged with anything, much less indicted. And no reward was promised for her capture, as it was for the others on the U.S. attorney general’s list of the “Deadly Seven.”
In New York, prosecutors had accused young Uzair Paracha of possessing the key to a Maryland post office box that Aafia had allegedly rented on behalf of Majid Khan in 2002. Yet Paracha’s indictment didn’t explain why possessing the key was a crime or how the prosecutors knew that Aafia had opened it. Sharp disputed that she had. “A simple fingerprint comparison would tell us whether Aafia is one and the same as the so-called ‘good sister’ who opened the post office box,” Sharp said. “Has this been done? If it has, then why hasn’t Aafia been indicted? Either they have the proof or they don’t. They should put up or shut up.”
But in the secretive world of the terror war, nothing was simple. Rumors, lies, and mysteries proliferated.
Sharp told me she felt that the Justice Department’s people who had questioned Aafia’s mother, Ismat (in Boston and again in Houston in 2003), had been telling the truth when they said they were still looking for Aafia. Still, Sharp thought, the CIA or Pakistan’s ISI might be holding her without telling the FBI. But when I called the CIA to ask, its spokeswoman laughed. “Let me give you an off-the-record steer,” she said. “If you say we have her, you’ll be wrong.”
I visited the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad to ask about her case and was told that no one knew anything. The embassy press officer also advised me not to go to Karachi. “The last reporter who went to Karachi to write a story they didn’t want him to write,” he reminded me, “was Daniel Pearl, and he got chopped up into little bitty pieces.”
Pearl’s horrible murder had been playing in my mind. Recently, the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lév
y had produced a book accusing the ISI of orchestrating Pearl’s “state murder” in order to stop him from exposing its collusion with al-Qaeda. Levy noted that not long before Pearl was kidnapped, he had written several articles for the Journal exploring the links among the ISI, al-Qaeda, and Pakistan’s jihadi groups.
Lévy finished his book before the State Department, in October 2004, announced that KSM had confessed to having personally cut off Pearl’s head. I had also read an article by Pearl’s friend Asra Nomani pointing out that some of the Jaish militants who had helped kidnap Pearl had told the Pakistani police that not one but a team of three “Yemeni-Balochi” men had carried out the slaughter and filmed themselves doing it.
If KSM, however, really was the man who had cut Pearl’s throat, the many ties that Lévy and others had documented between the ISI and the Deobandi jihadis who had kidnapped him became even more sinister. They suggested that the Pakistani establishment was somehow associated not just with jihadi groups but also with KSM, the planner of the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil in history. Could a mother with a Ph.D. from Brandeis have been mixed up with conspirators like that? I found it hard to believe. Yet there was evidence that Aafia moved in similar circles.
I had obtained e-mails showing that Aafia, as a student in 1993, had volunteered to distribute videos from Mercy International, the charity whose office in Pakistan was being run at the time by KSM’s older brother Zahid. Moreover, according to several books about Ramzi Yousef and KSM, police had found photos of Zahid with Zia’s son Ijaz ul-Haq when they had raided Zahid’s house in Peshawar searching for Ramzi Yousef. Ijaz ul-Haq was the man Aafia’s sister, Fowzia, had gone to for help when Aafia had disappeared ten years later, according to their uncle’s letter to Dawn. And in Islamabad I had learned from a columnist for an Urdu newspaper, Imtiaz Siddiqui, that Aafia had interviewed Haq, who was now Pakistan’s minister for religious affairs, for the MIT paper she had written on Islamization and its effects on women.
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