Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  President Bush announced on September 6, 2006, that he had moved KSM and thirteen other “high-value detainees” from CIA custody to Guantánamo Bay. In the same White House speech he also admitted what human rights groups (and al-Qaeda) had been saying for years: that the United States had been holding prisoners without being charged and beyond any proper authority and subjecting them to “an alternative set of procedures.” For the representatives of the International Red Cross and other human rights groups in the audience, Bush’s admission of what everyone already knew was a watershed. But for me, the most intriguing aspect of his speech was that for the first time in years it led to important government revelations about Aafia Siddiqui.

  Among the fourteen hard cases Bush referred to were several people who had been linked with Aafia. These included not only KSM but also his nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Majid Khan. Until Bush’s speech, no one outside the secret world of antiterror warriors knew what the connection was between them and Aafia or between her and KSM, apart from the obscure allegation that she had opened a post office box for Majid Khan.

  But the White House that day released a series of CIA biographies of the detainees. And among other nuggets was a revelation about Ali, whom the CIA called by his alias Ammar al-Baluchi: “In 2002, Ammar directed Aafia Siddiqui—a U.S.-educated neuroscientist and al-Qaeda facilitator—to prepare paperwork to ease Majid Khan’s deployment to the United States. Ammar married Siddiqui shortly before his detention.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The first five printings of Ayaan’s autobiography sold out in the Netherlands within a week. In the United States and the United Kingdom it was also a quick bestseller. Eventually it would become a number one bestseller in Europe and a long-running bestseller in the United States, Canada, and Australia. It would also be published in more than thirty languages.

  Starting in January 2007, Ayaan embarked on a worldwide promotional tour that took her all over Europe and the English-speaking world. The tour was expected to end in March, but, as Ayaan later told the journalist Clive Crook at the Aspen Ideas Festival, spring arrived and she and her publisher were getting more invitations than ever, so she kept on traveling and making speeches. “I spend my time in airports, in airplanes, in hotels and in places like this,” she said. “My initial plan when I came to the U.S. was ‘I’m going to get a rest, I’m going to get a normal life, I’m going to have free evenings and free weekends, I’m going to discover the American way of life.’ . . . But some of my capitalist friends in the United States said, ‘You can’t miss this opportunity—you have to do this!’ ” So she left her things in storage and kept moving, accompanied by bodyguards who were still being paid by the Dutch government.

  With very few exceptions, Infidel got glowing praise from English-speaking reviewers across the political spectrum. “She delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion,” said Publishers Weekly. “In the tradition of Frederick Douglass or even John Stuart Mill,” wrote Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post, “Infidel describes a unique intellectual journey, from the tribal customs of Hirsi Ali’s Somali childhood, through the harsh fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia and into the contemporary West.” The New York Times called the book “a brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir.” In Britain, the Daily Telegraph said, “If there is one book that really addresses the existential issues of our civilization, then Ali’s autobiography is it.”

  Ayaan’s ghostwriter wasn’t named in the book, and many reviewers apparently thought that Ayaan herself had written it. For example, Natasha Walter wrote in the Guardian, “She proves herself here a true writer, able to sum up a scene that may be completely foreign to the reader in a way that makes it a living, breathing experience, unforgettably raw and immediate.” At the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick said simply, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times.”

  Only a handful of non-Muslims voiced any dissent. Among them were Ian Buruma in the New York Times Book Review and Timothy Garton Ash in The New York Review of Books. Buruma praised Infidel’s virtues but doubted Ayaan’s methods of combating Islamism: “much though I respect her courage, I’m not convinced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam offers the best perspective from which to get this done.” In a review of Ayaan’s first book, The Caged Virgin, Ash described her as “a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist.” I, too, reviewed Infidel; the piece appeared in The Economist (unsigned, like all its reviews) and pointed out certain disparities between the facts as she had described them in her autobiography and the stories she had told in the Netherlands, for instance, about what she maintained was her forced marriage.

  The few Muslims who reviewed Ayaan’s book in the Western press, all liberal opponents of Islamism, were far more critical. In Newsweek, for example, the music critic Lorraine Ali noted that Infidel told only one side of Ayaan’s story. “Hirsi Ali is more a hero among Islamaphobes than among Islamic women,” she wrote. “This would-be ‘infidel’ often sounds as reactionary and single-minded as the zealots she’s worked so hard to oppose.”

  In the New Matilda, Irfan Yusuf worried that Infidel could have the same impact on gullible Western readers that the autobiography of Maryam Jameelah had on Pakistani readers in the 1980s. The former Margaret Marcus, Maryam Jameelah was a Jewish woman from New York who had joined Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami party and became an anti-Semitic Islamist ideologue after converting to Islam in the 1960s. “Sadly, for many Pakistani Muslims, Marcus’s views on Judaism are all they will ever get to read,” Yusuf wrote. “Pakistanis assume this Muslim convert Maryam Jameelah must be telling the truth. She must know what many Jews try to hide. She has ‘insider’ knowledge. In this sense, Jameelah and Hirsi Ali are similar—both ‘insiders’ of their ancestral faiths (which they now reject), both writing critically about their upbringing and the communities and cultures they were nurtured in.”

  Even Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi feminist writer who also lived under the threat of death from Islamist fanatics, felt that Ayaan had gone too far in Infidel. “For her, Islam is responsible for child marriage, incest, purdah, the insistence on chastity, female foeticide, genital mutilation, honor killing and everything else. This, even according to a rabid anti-Islamist like me, is too much.”

  But in the tide of adulation surrounding the book, those skeptics seemed just a few carping fish. In the United States, Amazon.com customers named the book among their hundred top choices for 2007. Hundreds of readers posted comments on the Web site testifying to Infidel’s readability and its heroine’s courage and honesty. Laura Bush read it. The leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada mentioned it on her Facebook profile. In Hollywood, movie producers called meetings about it. Ayaan—who said she saw the Somali model Iman in the role of herself—added modestly that she didn’t know what all the excitement was about. “The issue of freedom of women, the right to criticize Islam and the content of my criticism has all been there since the 1700s,” she told Variety. Then she noted, “I’ve taken a different path and of course, I’ve taken on the jihadists.”

  Ayaan’s family obviously had a very different take on some of the tales that Ayaan and her ghostwriter told in Infidel. But under orders from Ayaan’s father not to talk to the press, they sat very quietly lest another “Hurricane Ayaan” jeopardize their right to remain in Europe and Canada.

  Some members of the clan may have taken added steps to protect themselves from exposure. For example, on February 21, 2007, the woman who had been calling herself “Ayan Hersi Magan” was granted a divorce in Finland’s Vantaa District Court from Mohamud Mohamed Artan on the grounds that the two had not lived together for at least three years. Whoever she was, this other Ayaan, who had entered Finland as a student in 1993 and lived there as a refugee until 2001, vanished as noiselessly as she had arrived. According to court documents,
she returned to Somalia. When I asked Mohamud about her in 2009, he said he thought she was living in England.

  The real Ayaan returned to Washington after months of travel, saying she felt at home. “I am a happy individual now,” she told a reporter. Once again her luck had held.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I called Elaine Whitfield Sharp about the White House dossier on KSM’s nephew Ali that mentioned that he had married Aafia. Sharp told me the Siddiquis knew nothing about it.

  But the same grudging dawn of lawfulness in Washington, which had prompted the disclosures about the United States’ secret prisoners, seemed to be affecting Islamabad as well.

  A few days after Bush announced the existence of the CIA’s extralegal program, the relatives of some missing Pakistanis told a news conference of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan that they were going on a hunger strike. Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, promptly agreed to accept the commission’s petition asking the government to reveal what it knew about forty-one missing persons. Squirming under the unaccustomed light of publicity, President Musharraf’s government reported back that it had traced twenty of them.

  No one knew how many Pakistanis had been imprisoned in the terror war: the U.S. and Pakistani governments had refused to say, and those they released were often told they’d be rearrested if they discussed where they had been. The Human Rights Commission guessed that the number could range from hundreds to thousands. It also questioned their guilt. As the commission’s general secretary, Syed Iqbal Haider, stated, the government’s refusal to press charges or say where the prisoners were “gives rise to the suspicion that these allegations are unsubstantiated and there are no charges and no crimes committed by the people picked up.” Indeed it was widely believed that Pakistan had detained the prisoners simply because the Americans had paid them to.

  In Karachi the families of some other missing persons began a hunger strike beneath a dusty tree across from the elegant old sandstone building that housed the Karachi Press Club. More and more of the families had begun flouting orders from the intelligence agencies to keep quiet about their vanished relatives. Even KSM’s sister Maryam filed a suit in the Sindh High Court demanding that the government explain where KSM, her son, and her nephews had been taken. “Every male member of the family has been detained or tortured by the state agencies,” her lawyer told reporters.

  Aafia was often mentioned as one of the better-known Pakistanis whom the intelligence agencies had supposedly kidnapped. Yet her mother and sister failed to join the protests. Amjad’s father, Aga Naeem, contacted the Human Rights Commission to ask whether Aafia and the children were on the list that the commission had presented to the court. The commission responded that the Siddiquis had not asked the group to include them.

  Amjad, who had recently returned from Saudi Arabia, wrote to the secretary-general, I. A. Rehman, in December 2006, “Kindly can you let me know if Aafia Siddiqui is among those twenty persons whose whereabouts were reported or is she still missing? I am more interested in my children. Please let me know if you have any information that will help me in contacting or locating my children and their mother.” Amjad had meant his e-mail to be private, but Rehman showed it to a reporter as evidence of the need to investigate the disappearances. A few days later, it showed up in Dawn. After that, the group included Aafia and her children’s names on the lists of missing persons it was compiling for the court.

  The CIA was still thought to be holding some “ghost prisoners” in places such as Bagram. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and several other groups listed Aafia as one of twenty-two people who might be among them. I called Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch to ask if her group had any concrete evidence that Aafia was being held by the CIA. She said it didn’t but that news reports of Aafia’s disappearance in 2003 seemed to fit a larger pattern of CIA abductions. “We just found it hard to believe,” Mariner told me, “that she could have gotten away when KSM and all the other big guys they were looking for at the same time got picked up.”

  From Amsterdam, I noted that Khalid Khawaja, the former ISI man who had discouraged me from pursuing Aafia’s case, had helped form a new group to lobby on behalf of the missing. The Deobandis at the Lal Mosque also had joined the campaign.

  Musharraf’s government initially stonewalled the Supreme Court, refusing to say whether it had arrested any of those on the commission’s list of forty-one missing persons. Then Chief Justice Chaudhry began summoning the heads of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to testify. Chaudhry said his goal was to see suspected terrorists tried in court. But Pakistan’s spies weren’t about to let that happen. Like the CIA, they preferred to release suspected terrorists rather than let them testify in open court about their dealings with the “invisible establishment.”

  Under pressure from the court, the government eventually released more than a hundred people. Freed with them were many secrets about where the ISI had been holding prisoners. Musharraf was furious and ordered Chaudhry to resign. The judge refused. Musharraf suspended him anyway. The country’s lawyers responded with widespread demonstrations.

  Musharraf claimed that his decision had had nothing to do with missing persons—most of whom, he said, had simply run away to join the jihadis and some of whom had been killed in Afghanistan. But the president had lied so many times before that no one believed him, and, as the spring of 2007 ended and Pakistan’s monsoon season approached, his troubles mounted.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ayaan occasionally tripped in her new political world.

  In Holland, it had been important to pretend, at least, to dislike all religions equally. But her new American colleagues reacted with dismay when she criticized Christianity and Judaism alongside Islam. Interviewed by the British newspaper Metro, Ayaan said that asking her whether she saw a positive side to Islam was like asking if she saw anything positive in “Nazism, Communism, or Catholicism.” Robert Spencer, a Catholic critic of Islam who had called Ayaan his “hero” on his blog Jihad Watch, was taken aback by her “offhand remark with which I could not disagree more.” Ayaan told the Jerusalem Post in 2006 that Israel’s biggest problem was that ultra-Orthodox Jews were “fanatics” who were breeding faster than other Jews. Beila Rabinowitz, a Dutch-speaking writer for Militant Islam Monitor, responded with an angry blog asking why Ayaan likened “Israel’s most devout Jews” to terrorists. Rabinowitz and the Monitor appealed to AEI to rescind its offer to Ayaan, “since she has neither the temperament nor the intellectual gravitas necessary for successful scholarship—in our opinion Ali is a train wreck just waiting to happen.”

  AEI, however, stood by its offer. And Ayaan learned to direct her ire at Islam.

  She spoke and wrote less about women’s issues. In fact, during her first two years at AEI, she dedicated only three of twenty-one opinion pieces written in English to women’s issues. She wrote nothing at all in English during those years about gay rights, abortion, or the theory of evolution—all of which she had championed in Holland. Politically, she was shifting.

  Her attacks on Islam, meanwhile, were often so harsh that they startled even the neocons, who frequently assailed the Bush administration and others for failing to recognize the danger of “Islamofascism.” (The term seemed to encompass not only Islamism but also Baathism and other thuggish ideologies emanating from the Muslim world.) Ayaan said flatly that the West was at war not with Islamism or “Islamofascism” but with Islam itself.

  “It’s not a war on terror,” she told journalists soon after she arrived in the United States. “It’s a war on Islam.” That, of course, was what the jihadis said.

  Interviewing her in London again in early 2007, David Cohen of the Evening Standard noted that—though her nails were nicely manicured and she looked as lovely as ever in a gray flannel suit and pearl earrings—her “explosive rhetoric” was “even more inflammatory and hard line now” than it had been when he had interviewed her two years earlier.


  “Violence is inherent in Islam—it is a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” she told Cohen.

  She warned him that Great Britain was “sleepwalking” into a very different culture, one that could eventually be ruled by Islamic law and that Muslims would soon dominate. “We risk a reverse takeover,” she said. “In 50 years, a majority Muslim society could democratically vote for Sharia law, and then what you face is that Britain will slowly start to look like Saudi Arabia. Women will be veiled, driven away from the public sphere, polygamy will be rife.”

  Cohen gave her a skeptical look, but Ayaan went on. She claimed to base her argument on “current projections of immigration growth and birth rates,” as well as on a newspaper poll in which 40 percent of young Muslims said they would prefer to live under Muslim law.

  She had said similar things in Holland. But for English speakers who had thought Ayaan was controversial only because of “Submission” and some petty lies, her cataclysmic predictions and casual disregard for civil liberties came as a surprise. I found her claims of a Muslim takeover ludicrous: Muslims made up only 4 percent of Britain’s population, and Muslim birth rates and immigration rates were both falling. But powerful elements in the media kept promoting her opinions.

  “Islam, even in its non-violent form, is dangerous,” Ayaan told the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, Joseph Rago. She went on to hector Rago about the weakness and passivity of the West in the face of what she called “an external enemy that to a degree has become an internal enemy, that has infiltrated the system and wants to destroy it.” In her view, strong measures were needed, and she was no more swayed in the United States by arguments about freedom of religion or Muslims’ right to equal legal protection than she had been in the Netherlands. “It’s easy to weigh liberties against the damage that can be done to society and decide to deny liberties,” Ayaan said. “As it should be. A free society should be prepared to recognize the patterns in front of it, and do something about them.”