Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  Elsevier magazine, which had named her Person of the Year in 2005, ran an article asking, “Why can’t the Dutch stand Ayaan?” The author concluded that they saw her as “an ungrateful adopted child” who, having milked their system, now wanted them to pick up the bills for her self-promotion elsewhere. Opinion polls showed that less than 40 percent of Dutch citizens favored paying for her overseas protection. When the Green Left party proposed a law that would extend her overseas protection, only one tiny party and one Labor parliamentarian voted for it. Even Geert Wilders’s new party opposed the measure.

  The battle of the bodyguards spilled into France, and a lineup of French intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy and Caroline Fourest, appealed to President Nicolas Sarkozy to protect her. A few months earlier, Ayaan had nominated the conservative Sarkozy for Time magazine’s Person of the Year, “in recognition for his services to women around the world.” Now she told the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that she hoped to become a French citizen.

  Sarkozy seemed receptive at first. But when it turned out that Ayaan wasn’t proposing to live in France but merely wished the French to pay her guards while she worked in the United States for the American Enterprise Institute, his government’s support evaporated.

  She and her friends next tried the European Union. Benoît Hamon, a French MP in the European Parliament, launched the campaign. Ayaan told the European Parliament in Brussels that since October, she had been forced to spend her time raising money for her own protection. “The threats to my life have not subsided and the cost is beyond anything I can pay,” she told the lawmakers. “I don’t want to die. I want to live and I love life.”

  Hamon proposed that the European Union create a 50-million-euro fund to guard her and other threatened European intellectuals wherever they lived. But other members called the idea unworkable. Only 85 of the European parliament’s 785 members supported it, and the proposal died.

  So she returned to Washington and resumed speaking around the world, reportedly for $25,000 per speech plus the cost of her security. Friends such as Sam Harris helped her set up various funds to raise money to pay her guards. In the United States they established a tax-exempt fund in 2007; it was located in Washington and called the Foundation for Freedom of Expression. Since U.S. law doesn’t allow tax-exempt contributions to benefit just one person, the foundation’s stated mission was to support Ayaan and other Muslim dissidents. The Wikipedia entry for the group said, “Donating to the Foundation for Freedom of Expression is a way to help Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others under similar circumstances, while allowing tax benefits to the contributor.”

  Harris campaigned vigorously for the funds, receiving help even from his Newsweek sparring partner Rick Warren, the popular Christian evangelist and author of The Purpose-Driven Life. (Harris joked that if Warren raised more money than he did, he might yet be convinced that Christians were morally and socially more engaged than atheists.) In October 2008, Harris wrote to thank the contributors to Ayaan’s fund and to announce that her security costs were “now being met on an ongoing basis.”

  Ayaan and a group of wealthy women friends had already formed another group at the end of 2007 that they called the AHA Foundation. According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Bruce Kovner’s wife, Suzie Kovner, chaired the group. The wife of John Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations, became treasurer. Two other Republican donors, Gwendolyn van Paasschen of Darien, Connecticut, and Brenda Boone of Houston, Texas, sat on the board. Still another charity, Haweya BV, was set up in Holland, and Ayaan herself was president of both Haweya BV and of the AHA Foundation. Soon a Web site, www.theahafoundation.org, began inviting donors to contribute regularly by PayPal to the AHA Foundation. The Web site said the group’s mission was “to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.”

  It was the first time in several years that Ayaan had proposed doing anything practical to support the cause of Muslim women. Certainly there was plenty to do. All over Europe, women’s groups and others were examining the issues of honor-related violence and forced marriages. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Centre for Social Cohesion, founded the same year as the AHA Foundation with a grant of $428,000, produced eleven meticulously documented studies of how Islamism and other extreme ideologies were eroding British law, plus numerous briefing papers and several public debates—all by 2010. One of the center’s studies was a 169-page report, “Crimes of the Community,” dealing with honor killings, genital mutilation, and domestic violence among UK Muslims, for which the center conducted more than eighty interviews with women’s groups, community activists, and victims of violence. The AHA Foundation, by contrast, produced no original research.

  IRS records showed that AHA raised a total of $90,042 in 2008. Some $52,470 of that went toward “professional services.” An additional $31,432 went unspent. The AHA Foundation had no paid employees. No one answered the telephone number listed on its tax return. The group’s address appeared as 1735 Market Street, Philadelphia, but Pennsylvania authorities said they had no such organization incorporated in the state. AHA’s tax number turned out to be the same as the number for the Foundation for the Freedom of Expression in Washington, D.C.

  In 2009, according to IRS filings, the AHA Foundation received a grant of $375,000 to cover the costs in 2010 of setting up an office and hiring staff. (The IRS doesn’t require nonprofits to name donors.) Adding several new board members—including the AEI scholar and critic of feminism Christina Hoff Sommers and AEI’s former president, Christopher DeMuth—AHA moved its headquarters to New York and hired an operations coordinator and Elise Jordan, a former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice, as director of strategic initiatives. The group began producing more material, including a report on freedom of expression and the rights of women and a resource directory for Muslim women in the United States. Its output nonetheless remained puny compared to that of the United Kingdom’s Centre for Social Cohesion, for instance, or of international rights groups such as the London-based Women Living Under Muslim Laws.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The perplexing story that Aafia’s uncle S. H. Faruqi tells about the visit she paid him in early 2008 is typically Pakistani. By that I mean that important parts appear to be missing, other parts seem quite incredible, and further inquiries hit a brick wall. The persistence of such stories is one reason Pakistani history is littered with mysteries such as “Who killed President Zia ul-Haq?” Yet one needs to try to get to the bottom of them or admit defeat.

  Here’s how Faruqi told the story, to me and to other journalists, in a series of e-mails and interviews.

  On the evening of January 22, 2008, the doorbell rang at his two-story bungalow in the F-7 Sector of Islamabad.

  Faruqi went to the door and found a man waiting for him who said he was a driver for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs using his white government Suzuki to moonlight as a taxi driver. He said that inside his car sat a woman he had picked up at the Karachi Company Bus stand who wanted to see the geologist.

  Puzzled, Faruqi approached the car. A woman got out wearing a black niqab and burka covering her entire body except her eyes. “O Uncle, I am Aafia,” she said, and, to Faruqi’s amazement, she was.

  She told him she had come with a request. She wanted him to escort her to meet the Taliban in Afghanistan. “She said she wanted to get away, to go back to Afghanistan, where she said the Taliban would protect her,” Faruqi told the British daily the Independent. “According to her,” he told me, “they would not hand her over to her enemies.” He added that he assumed that Aafia’s enemies were American.

  The woman refused to take off her niqab, but Faruqi had no doubt that she was Aafia.

  Above her face veil, Aafia’s wide-set brown eyes and thick, sweeping eyebrows were unchanged. Moreover, “I recognized the voice to my complete satisfaction,” Farqui wrote me. “I was greatly surprised and perplexed, too, but soon regained my normalcy
and welcomed her and embraced her.”

  He invited his niece to come inside, but she refused, asking him instead to take her to some place where they could talk alone. When he tried to insist, she became very agitated. “Do not insist,” she screamed, “as that would simply result in the destruction of your house as well as of myself.”

  Flustered, the geologist got into the white car and asked the driver to take him and Aafia to the Jinnah Super Market, an upscale strip mall around the corner. There, Faruqi says, he and Aafia talked for more than two hours, first at the Taj Mahal restaurant and later at Captain Cook’s.

  Based on his conversation with her, Faruqi later claimed in the Pakistani newspaper the Nation that Aafia and her three children had been arrested on March 30, 2003, on Karachi’s University Road, as she and the children were on their way to the airport and while the United States was rolling up KSM’s network. He claimed that she and the children had been separated that same day and that she had never seen them again.

  He said Aafia told him that after she was arrested, she was taken to Afghanistan, where she was held at Bagram Airfield until mid-2007. Faruqi claims she was tortured during that period and was finally given a new identity. He told the Guardian’s Declan Walsh that her keepers wanted her to act as a double agent and infiltrate extremist groups for Pakistani intelligence. She was then returned to Islamabad.

  Faruqi later wrote me that Aafia was held at first in “the private jail of the American Embassy” in Islamabad and later handed over to the ISI. (The United States strenuously denies holding her anywhere during this period, and human rights officials I spoke to knew of no other reports of a “private jail” at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.)

  Toward the end of 2007, the geologist says, Aafia was transferred—by whom she didn’t say—to Lahore. There, she said, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had taken her into custody. She showed him a false national identity card that she said the FIA had issued to her in a different name. The card described her as a research scholar at a university, and it gave a Karachi address. The name on the ID card was different, but the photograph was of her. She said the FIA had given her money to go out occasionally in her concealing black burka under the pretext of gathering information about al-Qaeda. That morning, she told her uncle, she had seized the opportunity of just such an excursion to catch a bus to Islamabad and make her way to his house. “That was her main point, that she will be safe with the Taliban,” Faruqi told Walsh in 2009.

  Faruqi found Aafia’s story extraordinary. He says he told her he would take her to the Taliban—he says he had contacts with them from his years in mineral exploration—but he needed time to make the arrangements. Meanwhile, he wanted Aafia to tell some local journalists about her imprisonment. “She very seriously opposed it and remarked that it would simply be killing her.” Eventually she allowed him to check her into a nearby guesthouse, the Islamabad Inn, and the following day, he convinced her to come and stay with him and his wife at his house, where she spent the night on the floor, praying. By this time he had called his sister, Ismat, in Karachi, and Ismat flew up to see her daughter. But on the morning of January 24, Aafia insisted on returning to Lahore.

  Aafia’s uncle also described her behavior during her visit. She always carried a large black bag with her. Noticing how heavy it was, Faruqi tried to carry it for her, but she wouldn’t let anyone look inside it. When he asked what was in the bag, she said her captors had let her keep a few books.

  As she left for Lahore, her mother, Ismat, tried to give her 5,000 rupees. Aafia refused at first but eventually took the money.

  When I tried to ask Faruqi more about this tale, he became irritated and asked me not to contact him about it again. He seems to have been more forthcoming with Declan Walsh, and Walsh speculated that Aafia might have decided to go to Afghanistan to avoid being forced to spy on jihadis for Pakistani intelligence.

  Chapter Twenty

  The book tour that was supposed to end in the spring of 2006 went on and on. It helped Ayaan fashion a career for herself as a professional critic of Islam. She attended conferences and gave speeches all over the world. Television news shows asked for her comments on a succession of crises, such as the uproar over Geert Wilders’s anti-Islamic short film “Fitna,” the continuing threats to the lives of the Danish cartoonists, and later the controversy over a proposed mosque near the ruins of the World Trade Center.

  She debated Hassan al-Banna’s grandson Tariq Ramadan and the British ex-Islamist Ed Husain. She continued to be a useful symbol and figurehead for the kinds of publicists and politicians who liked to accuse their opponents of being soft on Islam. The American writer Paul Berman and the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner tapped out tens of thousands of words and engaged half a dozen other writers in a strange debate conducted on the German Web site Sign and Sight and in magazines such as The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. The argument (which resembled earlier fights in Holland) revolved around whether the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash—by qualifying their praise of Ayaan, and calling her, as Ash had, “a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist”—had thereby taken Ramadan’s side against Ayaan and thus opposed the Western Enlightenment. Bruckner even claimed, memorably, if hysterically, that the two mild critics had written in “the spirit of the inquisitors who saw devil-possessed witches in every woman too flamboyant for their tastes.” Buruma and Ash protested that they had nothing against Ayaan at all; indeed, they admired her greatly, and Ash apologized in public to her for calling her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist.” But Berman seems not to have accepted their apologies. Eventually he wrote an entire book, called The Flight of the Intellectuals, that a friendly reviewer called “an outraged attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s attackers.” (A less friendly reviewer, Lee Siegel of the New York Observer, characterized Berman’s book as an “onanistic tour du force” and a barely sublimated attempt to get back at Buruma and Ash for having taken Berman to task for cheerleading the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)

  It was left to the German-Syrian philosopher of Islamic liberalism Bassam Tibi to point out that Muslim thinkers trying to reconcile Islam with universal human rights didn’t take Ayaan or Ramadan seriously. “What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam,” Tibi wrote on Sign and Sight. Tibi, a professor at Göttingen and Cornell universities and the author of nine books and dozens of articles about political Islam, had warned since the 1990s of the danger the jihadis posed to the West. And though he drew no attention to it, he, too, had been threatened with murder and forced to live under guard in Germany. (In truth, thousands of accomplished people have come under threat from violent Islamists—in Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries.) Yet Tibi continued to write and lecture to Muslims and non-Muslims around the world, and he received only quiet recognition for his pains. Ayaan, by contrast, was named by both Foreign Policy in the United States and Prospect in the United Kingdom in 2008 as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals despite her output of one ghostwritten memoir, one collection of heavily edited journalism, and some op-ed pieces.

  Ayaan was on the road so long that she didn’t bother to rent an apartment, though eventually she found one in New York. She lived on planes and in hotel rooms and occasionally at the homes of friends—always accompanied by her bodyguards. Her travels were coordinated with the police, sometimes weeks ahead of time. She had not spoken with anyone in her family for years.

  In June 2008, Claudia Anderson, the managing editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wrote a cover story called “Parallel Lives” comparing Ayaan to Frederick Douglass, the famous former slave and abolitionist whose nineteenth-century autobiography had helped crystallize Americans’ opposition to slavery in the South. The article suggested that Ayaan’s “flight to freedom” from her family in Nairobi had been similar to Douglass’s escape from slavery in Maryland. It also included a postscript
that hinted at changes in Ayaan’s life.

  Anderson recounted the story of how Douglass had written an open letter warning his former master, Thomas Auld, that he intended to use the story of their relationship as a “weapon with which to assail the system of slavery.” Three decades later, Auld, by then over eighty and dying, sent for Douglass to see him. “Douglass records that he was ushered straight into the bedroom, and the two old men were overcome with emotion,” Anderson wrote. “Neither showed malice. Each acknowledged ways he had wronged the other. They ‘conversed freely about the past’ and parted reconciled.”

  The article did not mention it, but Ayaan had recently received a similar summons regarding her own seventy-three-year-old father, whom she had portrayed as masterlike and the story of whose relationship with her she had used to assail Islam. Earlier that month, Ayaan’s twenty-four-year-old half sister Sahra (the daughter of her father’s third wife) had managed to track down Ayaan’s former boyfriend Marco and asked him to tell Ayaan that Hirsi was dying of leukemia in the East End of London.

  Ayaan wrote that she called her father as soon as she heard, though it was late in the evening in London. Her hands were shaking, and when Hirsi picked up the phone, tears welled up in her eyes at the sound of his voice, “strong and excited.” “I said the only thing I wanted to convey, that I loved him, and I heard his smile, so powerful that it seemed to come through the telephone.”

  “Of course you love me!” he exclaimed in reply. “And of course I love you.”

  They began to talk, and Ayaan says she told her father that she wanted to see him. But then the conversation went wrong. Ayaan offended Hirsi by saying she would have to bring the police if she visited. Her father started preaching to her about how she ought to return to Islam, and after a while she told him she had to run and catch a plane.