Having seen the e-mails and court documents, I believed that Fowzia was lying. For all I knew, she had good reason. But I was surprised that a neurologist who Sharp claimed had been given a “genius visa” to stay in the United States would say things that could be so easily shown to be false.
I had one more interview before I left—with Hamid Mir, the famous Geo TV broadcaster and authorized biographer of Osama bin Laden. When it came to the shadowy world of intelligence and jihad, no civilian was said to be better informed than Mir. He was also the man who, in two TV shows, had confronted Pakistan’s interior minister with the conflicting stories about Aafia’s disappearance.
Mir was a big, raw-boned man with curly black hair and a broad pale face. We met in his large office off Geo’s main television studio in Islamabad. Since his last program about Aafia, he had heard from Pakistanis who had known her in the United States. “They are whispering,” he said, “that she fled from the FBI with the help of some of her friends and that she is living somewhere underground with her kids.” Mir speculated that, with Aafia’s education, she might even be teaching in a school under a false name. He said that underneath the official silence, the Pakistani public was enormously curious about Aafia. “Aafia Siddiqui is a heroine in Pakistan among educated women,” Mir said. He found nothing strange in that. “Our women are more extremist than our men.”
I still had no idea where Aafia was. But by the time I boarded my plane for the United States, I no longer felt she was a Volvo-driving mother who had gotten swept up in the war on terror by mistake. There were just too many people who didn’t want to talk about her. I didn’t know what the Siddiquis were hiding, but they certainly seemed to be hiding something. Whatever it was, I suspected that the Pakistani government and Khalid Khawaja were in on it, too.
Chapter Two
For about two weeks that November, after the Dutch government hustled her into a waiting airplane, Ayaan Hirsi Ali seemed to have vanished. Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner declared her hiding place a state secret, and he didn’t conceal the fact that he was hiding Ayaan as much to protect Holland as to protect her.
With mosques and churches going up in flames and newspaper headlines saying things such as “Hatred Is Spreading Across Our Country like Wildfire,” Donner and others in the government feared that an attack on Ayaan might push the country over the edge. The government put Ayaan’s fellow Liberal parliamentarian Geert Wilders into a high-security prison cell—for his own safety, the government said. Even cabinet members weren’t told where Ayaan was.
Donner and his colleagues would probably have been happy to keep the two “Islam critics” out of sight indefinitely. But Ayaan’s powerful friends complained that they could not contact her, and rumors began to circulate that the government was holding her prisoner to prevent her supporters from taking revenge against the Muslims. So on November 27, Donner flew her back to the Netherlands to show everyone that she was alive and well.
She stayed long enough to share a bottle of champagne with her friend Herman Philipse, give an interview to NRC Handelsblad, and deliver an open letter to the Liberal Party. In her letter she declared that van Gogh’s murder had made her “stronger and more combative” than ever. She promised that, even without the director, she would make a sequel to “Submission.”
Donner sent her back to Massachusetts, but he couldn’t keep her away much longer. When she finally returned to Parliament in an armored black Mercedes on January 18, 2005, she was greeted like a queen returning from exile.
Bystanders cheered, and a wall of photographers recorded the moment that she stepped from the car. Ayaan rewarded them with a dazzling smile as she walked across the cobblestoned yard into the walled brick Binnenhof. She seemed so small and fragile that, for the first time in centuries, it felt right that the seat of the Dutch government should also be a fortress.
Every member of Parliament stood up to applaud her as she took her seat in the ultramodern Second Chamber, the Dutch House of Representatives. She had become a living symbol of everything the Dutch held dear and felt now was at risk: the right to free speech, to safety, to love, to “anything goes.” As she later wrote, “All the envy and bad feelings seemed to have melted away.”
At first everyone vied to show support. Cisca Dresselhuys’s magazine, Opzij, gave her a prize. The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant named her Person of the Year. The newsweekly Elsevier had no such award, so it invented one and gave it to Ayaan. The rest of Europe showered her with recognition. The liberal European think tank Nova Civitas awarded her its prestigious Prize of Liberty. In Denmark, the Liberal Party awarded her its Liberal Prize. In Sweden she won the Democracy Prize. In Norway, Human Rights Service gave her its Bellwether of the Year Award. In Spain, she received the Tolerance Prize of Madrid. A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the unadulterated good feelings didn’t last long. I realized that when I arrived in Holland at the end of February 2005, in time for one last winter snowstorm to whiten Amsterdam’s lacy bridges and gabled canal houses.
Some members of the governing coalition had made it clear even while Ayaan was still in hiding that they had had enough of her provocative style. Justice Minister Donner had used a TV interview to call her “an Enlightenment fundamentalist.” The minister for economic affairs compared her decision to make the film “Submission” to “lighting a cigarette in a room full of munitions.”
Ayaan’s mentor, Gerrit Zalm, and the rest of the Liberal Party rushed to Ayaan’s rescue, accusing Donner and the others of blaming the victim and appeasing terrorists. But in the subtly ponderous Dutch way, a message went out to the body politic: things had gone too far. It was time to pull back, to cool down. It was time to reflect on the next step.
But Ayaan seemed to believe that stepping back meant giving in, and she was having none of it. She announced plans to start work immediately both on “Submission II” and also on a book, Shortcut to Enlightenment. When a group of Muslims tried to block her from filming the sequel, she fought back in court and won.
She demanded on TV that the Dutch intelligence agency investigate honor killings of Muslim girls. She resumed her fight to abolish Islamic schools. And she complained to the UN Human Rights Commission that the Netherlands and other European countries were not protecting female Muslim citizens.
She became a looming presence in the public eye, like a dark avenging angel. And to a quietly growing number of worried Dutch, her ubiquity and harsh accusations began to feel like a guarantee of further conflict.
In a series of open letters to her, later published as a book, Dutch intellectuals debated her role in bringing Holland to what felt to some like the brink of civil war. The Flemish writer Tom Lanoye accused her of being fixated on Islam. “Your flaming hate I don’t understand,” he wrote. Bouchra Zouine, a second-generation Moroccan immigrant, said she was disappointed by Ayaan’s failure to do anything concrete to help immigrant Muslim women. Referring to a magazine interview in which Ayaan had called herself a Somali warlord declaring war on “the Muslims,” Zouine warned that warlords bring unrest and misery wherever they go.
Herman Philipse was so infuriated by those criticisms and by Donner’s jibe about Ayaan being an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” that he published a forty-page booklet attacking the justice minister. He declared that the term “Enlightenment fundamentalist” was itself a contradiction in terms and that in using it Donner was belittling the Enlightenment and apologizing for fundamentalism. Some of Ayaan’s detractors had mocked her supporters for holding her up as a Dutch Joan of Arc. Philipse wrote that Ayaan was nobler than Joan of Arc: the French saint had led men into battle, but Ayaan “fights only with words.” Joan had considered herself divinely inspired; Ayaan was sustained only by her faith in herself. All that Ayaan had in common with Joan was her bravery—a bravery that, as in Joan’s case, was not shared by the men around her.
Holland’s best-loved historian, Geert Mak, comp
leted a pamphlet at the end of 2004 that would shock the country by taking a radically different stance. Mak had been one of the first prominent Dutch intellectuals to support Ayaan when she was first threatened in 2002. But in the course of writing a book about twentieth-century European history, Mak had become increasingly uneasy at the parallels he saw between the tone of the current Dutch debate over Muslim integration and the European debate over Jewish integration a hundred years earlier. His pamphlet was called “Doomed to Vulnerability,” and it warned the Dutch that European politicians had been down the road of appealing to religious and ethnic hatreds before and that everyone knew where such appeals led.
Mak’s argument was complex and politically sensitive. If the Dutch, and Europe, had achieved one moral consensus since World War II, it was that the demons that had led to the Holocaust should never be let loose again. That was why people were so disturbed by the anti-Semitism they saw taking root in Europe’s Muslim communities. As the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and others wrote, when Muslims accused Israel of racism, it was as if the system of antiracism that had been erected as a barrier against the return of the Holocaust had been turned inside out and was being used as a way to reinject anti-Jewish hatred into European society.
But Mak wrote that Ayaan and her fellow critics of Islam, by stoking the hatred of Islam, seemed to be turning the language of feminism and the Enlightenment inside out. There was, first of all, “the tone, the new tone that was suddenly in vogue.” It was belligerent and hostile, Mak wrote; it was “a dirty tone” that reduced complex issues to a simple common denominator: Islam and Muslims. Suddenly it had become acceptable to express hatreds and prejudices that would previously have been considered out of bounds. This time the Dutch were talking about Muslims, but the way they were doing it recalled the language that European newspapers of the early twentieth century had used in talking about Jews. For Mak, it was like hearing a song whose words had changed but whose tune remained the same.
There was also the constant evocation of cultural doom, the insistence that a Muslim fifth column was turning decadent Europe into “Eurabia.” There was the sexual innuendo, too, the harping on perverts and “goatfuckers” and the semipornographic fascination with the sex lives of Muslims—or, as one titillating headline on a Dutch magazine cover put it, “How Muslims Do It.” There were the calls for Dutch manliness and pride and tough leaders who weren’t afraid to have a “straight back” and take ruthless measures. None of it matched the reality of a Europe that was richer, stronger, and more united than it had ever been—but then, as Mak pointed out, Germany’s descent into self-pity and paranoia in the 1930s hadn’t been rational, either.
Even the evocation of Joan of Arc was eerily reminiscent of the anti-Dreyfusards who had called on the French to rally around the saint against Jewish traitors, while Ayaan’s attacks on “multiculturalists” such as Job Cohen brought to mind earlier anti-Semitic tirades against “cosmopolitans.” Not that Mak thought that Ayaan intended any such effect; he didn’t think so at all. But he had come to believe that, consciously or not, her rhetoric had sharpened a dangerous mood.
Mak wrote that after initially sympathizing with Ayaan and her friends, he had come to feel they were more interested in deriding Islam than in emancipating women. He compared the way she had used the Quranic verses in “Submission” to the way the infamous Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew had used verses from the Talmud to show how Jews were supposedly driven by hatred of Gentiles. Mak reminded readers that films such as The Eternal Jew had drawn on unconscious religious archetypes and ancient fears to convince Germans that they were threatened by their tiny Jewish minority rather than the other way around. He warned that it could happen again. “Feelings of angst can be blown up into a permanent mental attitude and exploited for political ends,” Mak wrote in his pamphlet. “In this way, we sober Dutch can end up in a closed-off, xenophobic fantasy land in which our coarseness and our ignorance of past and present become the norm, in which those who do not go along with this fear psychosis are denounced as weaklings and traitors, and discrimination and racism become the new ground rules.”
Mak’s pamphlet dismayed the many prominent Dutch feminists who still counted themselves among Ayaan’s greatest admirers. Margreet Fogteloo, the young editor of the left-wing weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, told me flatly that the historian was crazy. “People like him feel guilty because they were closing their eyes for such a long time to what was going on,” she said, taking a furious drag on her cigarette. Fogteloo said that politicians who claimed to support Ayaan’s goals but not her methods were mostly just making excuses. “What have they done to put Muslim women on the agenda?”
Feelings ran so high that some guests walked out of dinner parties when Ayaan’s name was mentioned, and old friends stopped speaking to each other over Mak’s pamphlet.
Donner, the minister of justice, who had called Ayaan an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” was also responsible for her security. The Liberal MP Geert Wilders had accepted Donner’s argument that his hiding place should remain a secret, but Ayaan and her friends defied Donner and went public with the news that Wilders was being held in a prison and that she spent her nights at a naval base. Ayaan complained that she and Wilders were being forced to live like fugitives while those who threatened them went free. “They are keeping me alive, but I cannot concentrate on my work,” she told the press. “I need a place where I have my desk, my books, my papers, a home where I can meet with people.” She demanded that the government provide her with normal housing.
Donner accused Ayaan of ingratitude for the protection she had received. But his government quickly bought a $1.1 million apartment in The Hague, added bulletproof glass, alarms, and metal detectors, and rented it to her for $1,500 a month. The building’s previous residents didn’t learn her name until Ayaan arrived in April and her bodyguards began checking visitors to the building. The other residents promptly sued the government for disrupting their lives and devaluing their property.
In Amsterdam, a group of left-wing Muslim women launched a campaign called “Stop the Witch Hunt!” Its stickers, featuring a veiled woman putting her hand up, appeared all over town. Pointing out that Spain hadn’t seen one act of violence after the Madrid bombings that killed 191 people, organizers accused Ayaan of fostering feelings in Holland that led the police to brutalize Muslims and inspired others to burn Muslim schools. “The cover for racism today is feminism,” an organizer named Miriyam Aouragh told me. “It’s a cover for a racist agenda, and they are not embarrassed to do that.”
Van Gogh’s friend the journalist Ebru Umar wrote an open letter to Ayaan in which she bitterly congratulated her for turning a private war into a national one. “I have always found it strange that I haven’t yet come across a Muslim woman who welcomed your concern for their emancipation,” Umar wrote. “Recently I have heard many say that they were happy with the ritual murder of Theo. You have done a service for radical Islam, Ayaan, you can be proud of it.”
Ayaan accused her critics of failing to understand the “tribal principle” driving the country’s Muslims. But Umar and others charged her with injecting such a principle into Dutch politics. “You are a foreigner with a foreigner’s mentality,” Umar wrote. “You always think that a trap is being set for you everywhere by everybody, especially by other women, especially by other foreigners.”
Ayaan’s friends angrily reminded her detractors that the woman they were criticizing remained in mortal danger. The police continued to arrest members of the Hofstad group, and in January 2005 two of the group’s women made their malevolent prediction to De Volkskrant that a woman would kill Ayaan. In June, Mohammed Bouyeri’s former roommate Noureddine al-Fatmi was arrested at the busy Amsterdam Lelylaan commuter train station, along with Soumaya Sahla, another girl he had convinced to “marry” him. Al-Fatmi was carrying a fully loaded Agram 2000 submachine gun. Shortly after his arrest, it was reported that Soumaya had tried to persu
ade her sister, who worked in a Hague pharmacy where Ayaan shopped, to give her the MP’s secret home address.
The public heard many lurid tales of the Hofstad group’s brutality, fanaticism, and fascination with violence and pornography. But the members’ appearances in court—chewing gum, dressed in skullcaps and abayas, hurling abuse at officials—also dramatized how different these Muslims were from the friendly Turkish grocers and even the unruly Moroccan street kids that most Dutch people knew. They seemed less like a disciplined branch of al-Qaeda than like some sick teenage cult. Commentators began saying that Mak had a point in accusing Holland of overreacting to van Gogh’s murder.
Some Dutch spoke of “the Ayaan effect,” a spirit of fear and rancor that seemed to have bewitched the country. To outsiders, the Dutch seemed to be having a collective nervous breakdown.
Ayaan’s own Liberal Party shifted with the public mood. A poll revealed that Liberal voters disliked Ayaan more than any other politician except the rival Labor Party’s leader. At one contentious party meeting, a Moroccan-born member told Ayaan he had talked to hundreds of Muslim women and hadn’t found one who supported her. “They could drink your blood,” he said. Jozias van Aartsen, a Liberal Party leader who still backed her in public, called her a “Somali clan fighter” in private. Some members suggested that Ayaan could not do her duties as a representative and should quit. Hans Wiegel, a popular former Liberal leader who wanted to lead the party again, proposed expelling her. “Mrs. Hirsi Ali encourages polarization and emphasizes contrasts,” Wiegel said. “She does not look for bridges but paints ethnic minorities and Muslims in a corner and tars them with the same brush.”
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