Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  “I don’t know. You are putting words in my mouth,” Ayaan snapped.

  “No, I’m asking a question,” van Dongen snapped back. “Let’s get down to it. What were you afraid of when you ran away from your family?”

  “I never said I was afraid of honor killing.”

  “What were you afraid of, then?”

  “Look, I could go to this man and do what my father wants me to do. Or I could run away and start a new life for myself. I knew I was paying a price for this. My family would be very angry at me.”

  Van Dongen looked at her. “But that’s totally different,” he said slowly, “from being physically threatened.”

  “But just think, my father would be very, very angry . . . ” Ayaan insisted.

  Then van Dongen informed her that he had tracked down not only her brother and her aunt but also her Canadian ex-husband.

  The ex-husband, Osman Musse Quarre, had refused to go on camera. (Perhaps he, too, feared being charged with immigration fraud if he admitted he had tried to bring a woman into Canada illegally.) Off camera, however, he not only said that Ayaan had been at the wedding but that they had known each other for about five weeks before they were married. Osman also said that he had thought Ayaan liked him very much and wanted to marry him. Van Dongen said to Ayaan about his conversation with Osman, “He told me, ‘Why would I want to marry a woman who didn’t want me?’ ”

  Ayaan denied it, her eyes blazing. “He—how can he say I have known him for five weeks?” she burst out. “He went to a man who has five daughters and said, ‘I want one of your daughters,’ and my father said, ‘You get this one.’ ” But she went quiet again when the Dutchman told her that Osman also said she had written to him after she arrived in the Netherlands and had telephoned him and that he had visited her there before they finally broke up. None of that had featured in her story as she had told it before.

  “Yes, I did that,” she said.

  The scuffle over Ayaan’s marriage ended in a bit of a draw. She had been forced to concede she had known Osman before she married him, and she had admitted she had been in no physical danger from her family or anyone else when she sought asylum in the Netherlands. Yet she continued to insist that her father had forced her to marry the Canadian and that she had taken a terrible risk in running away.

  From Ayaan’s point of view, she was probably telling the emotional truth when she said that gaining asylum had saved her life. There’s no doubt that if she had failed to seize the chance to escape the bonds of family and clan, she could never have become the individual she became. Yet she was too intelligent not to realize that the emotionally and factually muddy account that van Dongen had extracted from her was a far cry from the romantic tale she had told Christopher Caldwell and many other Westerners about narrowly escaping clan minders to avoid a lifetime of servitude to a man she had never met.

  Then van Dongen asked another hard question: The Kosovar high school girl Taida Pasic was due to be deported the very next day for lying on her visa application. Wasn’t there something wrong with the fact that the Liberals were trying to expel Pasic while Ayaan herself was allowed to stay?

  Ayaan stammered that she hadn’t supported Pasic’s deportation and that she opposed the whole Liberal expulsion program. In fact, Ayaan said, she had phoned Verdonk and asked her to reverse her decision on Pasic. “But Rita,” Ayaan recalled pleading, “almost all asylum seekers lie. That’s how the system is. I lied, too.” But Ayaan told van Dongen that Verdonk had replied, “If I had been the minister when you applied for asylum, I would have deported you, too.” (Verdonk later said she had had no such conversation with Ayaan.)

  Ayaan knew, after the interview, that the Zembla program wouldn’t look good.

  Later that same day, she received another piece of bad news. In an unexpected ruling, an appeals court had decided that the Dutch government had been wrong to move her and her security detail into her Hague apartment building without first consulting the other residents. She was now being given until the end of August to leave the premises.

  Those nasty developments couldn’t be coming at a worse time. Ayaan was leaving for New York the next day. The English translation of her book The Caged Virgin was being published in the United States. She was scheduled to give her big speech at the American Jewish Committee in a week’s time, and her publisher, like much of the neoconservative establishment, was counting on her to make a good impression.

  She was already talking quietly with the American Enterprise Institute about becoming one of its fellows. She was planning to meet with the institute’s selection committee in Washington. It was no time for her to stumble.

  Chapter Nine

  Where was Aafia? Only later did court documents reveal parts of what she told the FBI about how she spent those missing years.

  She said that in 2004 or 2005, she had secured a small apartment in Karachi’s wealthiest area, the Defense/Clifton neighborhood. “It was a safe building and she was on the third floor,” an FBI agent noted in an investigation report. She had supported herself, she said, by working as a lab technician at the Karachi Institute of Technology. (It’s not clear what this institute was, but that is the name she gave the FBI.)

  She also said she had met with Mufti Abu Lubaba Shah Mansoor—whom she called Abu Lubaba—and with an imam named Abdus Sattar at a nearby mosque. Aafia didn’t name the mosque, but during that period Abu Lubaba served as an imam at Jamia Islamia Clifton, a seminary in the same neighborhood.

  Abu Lubaba was then writing a column, as he still does, for the al-Rashid newspaper, Zarb-e-Momin. Every week he fills its pages with fevered warnings about the diabolical international conspiracy subverting Islam and bringing the religion to its knees. He writes of Jews, Hindus, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the United Nations—some of whom use “brain transmitters” to send “Satanic whispers” to believers. He attacks Sufi “grave-worshipers” and clerics who interpret Islam more liberally than he does. His articles are often illustrated with weird symbols: evil eyes and blood-drenched American eagles pecking open the globe to extract dollars; Masonic pyramids and space weapons. But Abu Lubaba is known best for his popular apocalyptic books about the ongoing confrontation between the forces of good and those of the Dajjal, and the coming reign of the Mahdi. The title of one of those Internet bestsellers is Dajjal: Who, What, When, Where.

  Aafia described Abu Lubaba as “a fat man,” and in a single fuzzy photo on the Internet he does look pale and obese—rather like his protégé the Jaish-e-Muhammad leader, Maulana Masood Azhar—with small brown eyes and a patchy brown beard beneath a white turban.

  He comes across in his writings as a paranoid figure whose nearly incoherent accusations about secret plots give fresh meaning to the concept of psychological projection. He accuses an array of enemies—Zionists, Crusaders, India, Russia, Israel, the United States, and the “deviant” Muslim sects to which most Muslims belong—of pursuing schemes to bring about the apocalypse. Yet the reverent accolades of his former students, who have translated Dajjal and posted it on the Internet, make it clear that many Pakistanis at home and abroad greatly respect Mufti Abu Lubaba Shah Mansoor. On one Internet forum a former student described him as “a nice down to earth guy. A mufti you can chill with.” “His books go down like a box of popcorn,” wrote another admirer.

  Aafia told the FBI that Abu Lubaba had convinced her that Pakistan was about to come under attack from the United States and she had a religious duty to help him develop defenses. He wanted her to make “a biological agent for him to keep them safe from the enemies of Islam,” according to an FBI note from a 2008 conversation with Aafia. He also promised to arrange for her to get the means to make it.

  At Abu Lubaba’s request, she said, she had collected materials on viruses and provided Abu Lubaba and Abdus Sattar with the results. One of her projects involved finding a way to infect America’s poultry supplies with an antibody that would allow chickens to pass salmonella on to humans
more easily. Another was to alter viruses so they would kill only members of “certain ethnic groups” or only adults and not children. She also said she provided them with a small amount of a mysterious substance “which would be used to scare people.”

  Perhaps the coconspirators’ paranoia had fed on itself, for Aafia told the FBI that she had come to suspect Abu Lubaba and Abdus Sattar of luring her into the research “so that they could inform the United States that she was involved in bad things for a large monetary reward.” She said she had demanded that Abdus Sattar return the papers and other research materials she had given them. At first he refused, but after a few days, he gave them back. Aafia said she had burned most of the documents, as well as the laptop computer she had used to store them. She kept just a few papers and a thumb drive that she carried with her.

  She said that to get away from Abu Lubaba she eventually left the apartment in Clifton and went to live in the servants’ quarters of a small house in Karachi’s Nazimabad district. “She lied to the occupants of the house,” the FBI report notes, “telling them that she was hiding from family members that were giving her a hard time due to her divorce.”

  But court documents and her statements to the FBI suggest that Pakistan’s intelligence agents knew where she was. Among the papers found on her in 2008 was an undated letter, apparently to a well-known Pakistani personality whose name was omitted from the translation provided to the court, in which she volunteered to help “think of ways to rid our nation of the ‘superpower’ bent on destroying us.” She described herself as “a Western-raised and educated Pakistani (NOT American) doctor/scientist who is wanted by our enemies for the crime of wanting to serve Pakistan and protect its innocent citizens’ lives, properties, and cherished values.” She also wrote, “Since my whereabouts are known and activities are closely monitored by various agencies, I guess if Pakistan really needs any cooperation from me, they can contact me—that is, if they still left me around to be of help and not arrested me or handed me over—(Allah forbid!).”

  For the time being, however, no one seems to have bothered her.

  Chapter Ten

  Ayaan’s first Sunday in New York got off to what seemed a promising start. Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker interviewed her for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. The event was a bit of a lovefest. Ayaan used the occasion, at the New York Public Library, to apologize to Salman Rushdie, who was in the audience, for having wanted to kill him when she was a teenager. Gourevitch seemed quite charmed.

  But in a tactic that would become all too familiar among Ayaan’s most aggressive supporters, the New York Sun, a right-wing newspaper partly owned by Bruce Kovner, the chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, used a May 3 profile of Ayaan to launch a surprise attack on Gourevitch and U.S. liberals in general.

  Using a tone that echoed Ayaan’s Dutch followers who had charged “multiculturalists” with failing to honor and protect her, the Sun’s Brendan Bernhard accused the polite Gourevitch and the head of the PEN American Center, Ron Chernow, of being “ungracious.” Ayaan, Bernhard claimed, represented a “problem for liberal intellectuals” because she “refused to have a ‘victim’ label pinned to her lapel.” (The truth was surely the other way around: if Ayaan had not become famous as a victim of radical Islam, her book The Caged Virgin, a thin patchwork of heavily edited opinion pieces written for Dutch newspapers and magazines, would never have been published in the U.S., nor would Ayaan have been invited to speak at the festival.) Bernhard also criticized Gourevitch for having insufficient admiration for Ayaan, complaining that Gourevitch “didn’t put her in the dock, exactly, but he didn’t put her on the pedestal either.”

  This profile set the partisan and combative mood in which Ayaan received the Moral Courage Award at the American Jewish Committee’s hundredth anniversary gala. On hand to hear her acceptance speech were President Bush, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, German chancellor Angela Merkel, most of the U.S. Congress, and many other notables. Merkel had made her trip partly to confer with Bush about a common strategy for dealing with Iran’s newly elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ayaan’s speech seemed calculated to reach exactly the right audience.

  With their playful slogan “Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran,” some of AEI’s conservative ideologues made no secret of their desire to force a regime change in Iran. In the weeks leading up to the dinner, the AJC and other pro-Israeli groups ran full-page ads in American newspapers warning that Ahmadinejad’s efforts to build nuclear weapons posed an intolerable threat. “Suppose Iran one day gives nuclear devices to terrorists,” the AJC ad said. “Could anyone anywhere feel safe?”

  Ayaan began her speech in her usual dramatic fashion: “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a confession to make if you are Jewish. It is a testimony from my dark past, when I lived in ignorance.” She paused, then said, “I used to hate you.”

  Without ever mentioning Israel, she confessed to having believed a frightening litany of anti-Semitic canards before she learned better. “I didn’t need proof,” Ayaan told the audience. “You are by nature evil and you had evil powers and you used them to evil ends.” She went on to warn that “thousands and perhaps millions are learning to blame you and to want to destroy you.”

  Finally, she asserted that the West had two choices: a war against Iran while it still lacked nuclear weapons or a war against a nuclear-armed Iran. She predicted that if the West failed to go to war against Iranian president Amadinejad before he got the bomb, he would launch a new Holocaust.

  Evoking the memory of World War II, she said, “For me the lesson of that war is ‘Never appease evil.’ May our elected leaders have the courage to make the right choice.”

  Bush and the rest of the crowd gave her a thunderous ovation.

  Five days before that anniversary dinner, Ayaan had shared a podium with Vice President Dick Cheney. The occasion was a conference in Philadelphia in honor of Professor Bernard Lewis’s ninetieth birthday, and the room was full of notables from the AEI. Cheney was reported to be highly impressed by this brave young Somali, who was almost the same age as his daughter Liz, then deputy secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Ayaan also impressed Cheney’s friend, the AEI chairman, Bruce Kovner. Forbes magazine listed Kovner as the ninety-third richest man in the world. In his quiet way, he played a significant role in shaping the neoconservative agenda.

  Ayaan later said that she had told AEI’s selection committee that she was an atheist with “a big mouth” and planned to make a sequel to “Submission” focusing on Islam’s condemnation of homosexuality. “No problem,” she quoted AEI’s president, Christopher DeMuth, as saying—though some of the anti-gay Islamic attitudes she planned to criticize weren’t very different from those of some conservative Republicans. As her AJC speech indicated, Ayaan had already joined the AEI choir on matters of more importance to the organization.

  DeMuth invited her to become an AEI fellow in the fall.

  Much as she enjoyed the accolades, she had to have been slightly worried. She knew the Zembla program was going to air soon. Perhaps to prepare the ground, she began suggesting to American interviewers that the Dutch were trying to get rid of her because they were too spineless to protect her from her enemies.

  The British-born writer Christopher Hitchens was the first to advance this line of attack. In an article headlined “The Caged Virgin: Holland’s Shameful Treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” which appeared on May 8 in Slate, Hitchens noted Ayaan’s “arresting and hypnotizing beauty” and gave a capsule account of how she had fled to Holland “after being nearly handed over as a bargain to a stranger.” He then announced the “grave and sad news” that Ayaan was thinking of resigning from Parliament and leaving the Netherlands. Hinting that the Dutch were closet racists, Hitchens wrote that “after being forced into hiding by fascist killers, Ayaan found out the Dutch government and people were slightly embarrassed to have such a prominent ‘Third World’ spokeswo
man in their midst.” He said that the Dutch court’s decision to evict her from her apartment had convinced her to think about leaving.

  Zembla’s documentary, “The Holy Ayaan,” aired three days later.

  Ayaan’s brother, aunt, and ex-husband Osman Musse Quarre, all said on the program that far from being forced to marry, Ayaan had seemed happy to do it. Osman had thought that Ayaan loved him. But once he had paid for her tickets and “papers” to get to Europe, she had failed to continue on to Canada. He had gone to Holland, looking for her. When she’d told him that she didn’t want to go to Canada with him, he had left peaceably. “Without me, Ayaan wouldn’t have reached the Netherlands,” Osman said. “She used me. But I’m not angry. It’s something between her and her God.”

  The program suggested that Ayaan had lied not because she feared her family but because she feared the Dutch authorities might discover she already had refugee status in Kenya. But why, asked the Zembla team—if the lies of eighteen-year-old Taida Pasic had resulted in her deportation—had those of Ayaan been accepted?

  Minutes after the broadcast ended, viewers began venting on the Internet.

  “Just watched an interesting report on the Zembla news show about everyone’s favourite asylum seeker Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” wrote a blogger who started a thread on the Expatica Web site that drew hundreds of comments. “A journalist investigated her story about why she sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 and found she made up a lot of it. . . . Now she’s MP of a party that is turning back asylum seekers. Nice. Looking at Hirsi Ali try to answer the questions she reminded me of a bold child caught out in one lie after the next.”

  “The asylum process in the rich countries actively encourages people to take a shot at lying to get in,” another blogger countered. “How else are they going to get in? If you were a third worlder desperate to have a better life in the first world, wouldn’t you take a shot at it?”