Only Aafia herself, if her continued silence was any clue, may have realized that the days of doublethink were over. So far she had been charged only with shooting at some U.S. soldiers. But even if she were found innocent on that charge, the U.S. prosecutor had filed a statement leaving open the possibility that she might also be charged with providing support to terrorism in connection with opening the post office box in Maryland for Majid Khan.
Chapter Thirty-two
Ayaan kept lecturing—especially at universities, Jewish groups, and conservative organizations such as the Goldwater Institute, which had given her an award in 2007. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” she told a Palm Beach audience in March 2008. “It is a political theory of domination that seeks conquest by any means it can.”
But the surging popularity of the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, in the fall of 2008 suggested that most Americans favored a more nuanced approach to the war on terror.
Obama’s stated desire to mend relations with the Muslim world was completely at odds with Ayaan’s penchant for confrontation. Yet it wasn’t as easy for Ayaan to dismiss Obama as she had dismissed other Western politicians. As the son of an African Muslim economist and a white American anthropologist who had spent years in Indonesia as a boy, Obama could lay claim to knowing more about Islam than most Americans. He also had a large political following, which Ayaan and the neoconservatives lacked—and not just among Muslims but among Americans generally, who told pollsters they agreed with Obama when he said, “The United States is not at war with Islam and never will be.”
Ayaan had seemed receptive at first to America’s new master of cool. “I think he is very smart,” she reported enthusiastically to the Australian in June 2008. “I don’t think it matters that he has, in his very short career, a left-liberal record. I think that just shows consistency.”
But it was too late for Ayaan to make another switch, and from her perch at the American Enterprise Institute she began to snipe at the Democratic candidate. At first she made the unusual claim that Obama and the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, wouldn’t be very different presidents. Then, in a more conventional taunt from the right, she accused Obama of boosting the jihadists by planning to “cut and run” in Iraq.
In November, America’s voters elected Obama as the country’s first African-American president. Ayaan remained publicly silent about this historic election. She said and wrote nothing for the press about what such a vote might mean for Africans, for Muslims—or for Americans after centuries of slavery and racial prejudice. Nor did she comment on Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo and open up at least some of the files on the Bush administration’s record of torture and imprisonment outside any legal system. When the new president made a speech in Cairo reaching out to Muslims, she said he had disappointed moderate Muslims by failing to emphasize human rights. “According to the President,” she told the Web site New Majority, “we are only fighting a very small number of extremists, but it’s not Islam, so if that’s the case then there really isn’t much to reform.” She also pointed out, correctly, that he had failed to address sharia law in relation to women.
She kept writing op-eds, often for the Wall Street Journal, assailing liberals for their blindness to the dangers of Islam. But the audiences she attracted were getting smaller, and her American critics seemed bolder. At Scripps College in Claremont, California, a female rabbi complained after hearing Ayaan that she couldn’t imagine the college inviting a speaker who called for the annihilation of Judaism or Christianity to address its students. In the Netherlands, critics panned Adan and Eva, the book that she and a children’s author (writing under the name Anna Gray) produced in 2008 about the friendship between a Muslim boy and a Jewish girl. As for her often-promised sequel to “Submission,” she eventually became persuaded that the plan was too risky.
She still grew animated when talking about Shortcut to Enlightenment, the book she planned to write about the Prophet Muhammad waking up in the New York Public Library. But the book didn’t happen, and to keep her career going she needed something new. She had always had her greatest success telling her own story—of her family and how the West had delivered her from Islam—but in the five years she had gone without speaking to her relatives she had been cut off from that source of material.
Perhaps her telephone conversations with her family after her father’s death suggested a new angle.
In any case, the publishers Free Press and Knopf Canada announced in February 2009 that Ayaan would be coming out with another memoir. According to Louise Dennys, the executive publisher of Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, this sequel to Infidel would again explore Ayaan’s feelings about Islam. “It will be a blend of personal narrative and reportage, weaving together Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s ongoing story, including her reconciliation with her father who disowned her, addressing the situation of girls and women in the world today, and speaking openly about her own efforts to reconcile Islamic and Western values.” Dennys did not say whether Ayaan planned to use a ghostwriter again.
Chapter Thirty-three
Aafia’s psychiatric evaluation provided the first strong evidence that she was in the grip of an obsessive anti-Semitism.
Her attorney, Elizabeth Fink, had been eager to expose what she expected would be Aafia’s tale of torture, but after one interview, Aafia refused to see Fink or speak to her on the phone. Later court documents revealed that Aafia not only didn’t want to deal with the celebrated civil rights lawyer because she was Jewish but also refused to talk to anyone else at the Metropolitan Detention Center whom she suspected of being Jewish.
At FMC, Carswell, Aafia seemed to relax. She said later that she thought the Bureau of Prisons’ assessment that she was psychotic would be enough for her to be found incompetent to stand trial. The Pakistani senators and embassy officials who visited told her to be patient while they worked to get her released on humanitarian grounds.
She was therefore shocked when a new set of psychiatrists appeared to evaluate her. When one of them tried to question her, she put her hands over her ears and screamed for the woman to go away.
She seems to have believed she could trade information for her release, asking several times to speak to the FBI agents who had questioned her at Bagram, Angela Sercer and Bruce Kammerman. She wrote what she described as a “highly confidential letter” to Carswell’s warden, which she asked the warden to share only with “loyal African-Americans” and to give to President Obama. The letter claimed that the U.S. wars against Pakistan and Afghanistan were “designed to ‘benefit’ Israel at the expense of the very existence of the USA.”
“Study the history of the Jews,” Aafia wrote. “They have always back-stabbed everyone who has taken pity on them and made the ‘fatal’ error of giving them shelter. This was the ‘crime’ of the Palestinian Arabs and this is the ‘crime’ of the USA—and it is this cruel, ungrateful back-stabbing of the Jews that has caused them to be mercilessly expelled from wherever they gain strength. This is why ‘holocausts’ keep happening to them repeatedly! If they would only learn to be grateful and change their behavior!! But they will not! And history will repeat itself as it always does!”
She wrote to Judge Berman, who she evidently believed was Jewish, quoting to him from the Quran about the duty of women to “stay quietly in your houses” and asking to let her follow the example of the Prophet’s wife Aisha in the seventh century; Aisha “once left her city to try to settle matters in a political dispute among Muslims, but her action was in error and resulted in a horrible war between Muslims,” Aafia wrote. “She regretted and repented all her life for what she did and she shunned politics thereafter. I fear similarly for my ‘peace efforts’ and would much rather leave men’s world to GOD and obey his commands regarding women as quoted above.”
She claimed that she wasn’t against all “Israeli-Americans,” and she brought up the example of the wise associate dean at Brandeis who had allowed h
er to graduate despite the “nasty game” someone else in authority had played that had almost forced her to “go after Brandeis” and “open a can of worms.” She warned the judge that “prison here is not my ‘house’ ” and that if the “Zionist elements seeking to harm me” insisted upon a trial, she would “open a BIG can of worms and expose a lot of unpleasant facts about many, possibly Israeli Americans.”
But Aafia was disappointed again. The government’s psychiatrists found her mentally capable of standing trial, and Judge Berman appointed a new defense attorney, Dawn Cardi, to replace Fink. A hearing on her competency was scheduled for June 7, 2009.
I saw Aafia myself for the first time at that competency hearing in Judge Berman’s oak-paneled courtroom on Pearl Street in Manhattan. She entered wearing a cream-colored polyester scarf across her face and a long beige gown. Only her flashing dark eyes were visible, but her fiery personality soon became obvious as she interrupted her lawyers and harangued the court about her desire to make peace between the Taliban and the United States.
She wanted nothing to do with Cardi, a pleasant-looking woman wearing a shiny gold jacket. When Cardi spoke, Aafia would turn away or put her head down on the table, behavior, Cardi said, that demonstrated her mental illness. Cardi and the defense psychologist, Thomas Kucharski, argued that Aafia’s political convictions—“her beliefs that Israel, the United States and India are conspiring to invade Pakistan, that Jews are responsible for 9/11 and have infiltrated American political and nongovernmental organizations”—were so bizarre as to amount to insanity. Sitting in the courtroom, I couldn’t help reflecting on how common such views are in Pakistan. They’re literally talk show staples.
Kucharski spoke of the “satchel of strange writings” that Aafia had been carrying in Afghanistan. “Some of her writings are frankly psychotic,” he said. “I find it hard to believe that a trained neuroscientist can believe in these half-baked ideas. She talks about explosions or instructions for chemical weapons. These are grandiose ideas. They are delusional. . . . She has a factual but not a rational understanding of the world around her. She is not capable of assisting her defense.”
Aafia sat up at this point. “I was trying to make peace!” she cried out. “I am a student of Noam Chomsky! All I ever wanted was to end the war, and I didn’t shoot anyone!” She was led out of the courtroom.
Kucharski said that Aafia’s claims that her children were dead and that she had seen them in hallucinations, that she herself was dead, and that the Bureau of Prisons had released a video on the Internet of her being strip searched were evidence of her disorder. But the government psychiatrist Dr. Sally Johnson said Aafia was faking.
Johnson had stayed in FMC, Carswell, for several days, watching Aafia both when Aafia was aware of her and sometimes when she wasn’t. Johnson also interviewed prison staff there and in Brooklyn about Aafia’s behavior. Aafia refused to speak to Johnson. Often she would act as if she were sobbing, sometimes crying out that she had been told her still-missing daughter would be raped if she talked. But Johnson observed that Aafia’s eyes remained dry and that as soon as she thought Johnson was out of sight she would begin to act normally.
“I disagree that she suffers from delusional disorder and I don’t believe she’s suffering from major depression,” Johnson testified. “Many of the ideas Dr. Kucharski has put down to delusional thinking are not abnormal in radical groups. These things are accepted within her peer groups.”
Cardi tried to argue that Aafia might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the torture she and her children had endured during the years she was missing. But Johnson pointed out that Aafia herself had never given anyone—not her brother, not her lawyers, not the Pakistani senators or the embassy personnel who came to visit, not the prison staff, and not the psychiatrists—a clear account of any torture or imprisonment.
Personally, I found this vagueness very damaging to Aafia’s case. By contrast, KSM and the other “high-value” detainees who had been held in secret CIA prisons were capable of giving the Red Cross elaborate descriptions of waterboardings and other tortures they had suffered, and they described them as soon as they got the chance.
Moreover, both government and defense psychiatrists who had access to the FBI’s secret interrogation reports noted that Aafia had told the agents at Bagram that she had spent her missing years not as a prisoner at Bagram but hiding in Pakistan.
Judge Berman found Aafia competent to stand trial. The date was set for November.
Chapter Thirty-four
Ayaan Hirsi Ali had been telling reporters for years that she wanted to have a child, but so far she hadn’t done it. She gravitated toward wealthy, older intellectuals such as Herman Philipse, but her relationships never seemed to last.
But at the 2009 Time gala, Ayaan seems to have found the love she was waiting for.
She was first introduced to the boyishly handsome British historian Niall Ferguson at a conference put on by a conservative Australian think tank called the Centre for Independent Studies. Later the two really clicked, it’s said, when they met again at the Time party in Lincoln Center.
Like Ayaan, the forty-five-year-old Ferguson was invited because he had been named earlier as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He was making a reputation for himself as a rather blunt defender of Western imperialism, past and present, and he had first landed on Time’s list in 2004 under the title “Theorist of Liberal Imperialism.” As Time noted in the article explaining its choice, “Timing is everything,” and, as the United States was invading Iraq, Ferguson had published Empire, “a book whose central thesis was a defense of the ‘liberal imperialism’ that Britain purported to practice toward the end of its time as a great power. Moreover, Ferguson argued that the United States, whether it wanted to admit the fact or not, had become an imperialist power itself” and ought to do the job properly.
A superb storyteller and astonishingly prolific, Ferguson dealt in ideas that went down well in large segments of Great Britain and America. Not just Empire but also The War of the World (2006) and The Ascent of Money (2008) became British television series. Ferguson, meanwhile, collected academic posts at Oxford, New York University, Harvard—and later other famous schools. He wrote that he had come to love the empire as a child in Kenya, where his Scottish father had briefly worked as a doctor and which he recalled in The War of the World as much better run in those days. Ferguson considered decolonization to have been mostly a mistake. Particularly in Africa, he wrote, “some form of imperial governance” might have been better than independence.
Ayaan, of course, had grown up on the other side of Nairobi from Ferguson, and she would never have been accepted in the semicolonial British society of the 1960s that he remembered so wistfully. Yet she wasn’t bothered by what critics called Ferguson’s failure to present the viewpoints of the colonized. She herself had been charged with the same failing, and she had long shared his belief that many parts of the Third World would benefit from Western rule.
Ferguson was married with three children to the former publishing executive Susan Douglas, but the chemistry between him and Ayaan prevailed. Photographs from the Time party record their attraction. Ayaan was wearing a short cobalt blue satin dress. In one picture, Ferguson stands with his arm wrapped around her shining waist, looking thunderstruck. Soon he and Ayaan were spending as much time together as their travel schedules allowed.
Among many other talents, Ferguson was a leading historian of finance. His ability to explain the origins of the Western financial system—and his conviction that it, too, was basically a good thing—had helped make him a wealthy man, with earnings sometimes estimated at more than $4 million a year. Ferguson also had the reputation of being tight-fisted, however, and some of his friends wondered whether the “intense dislike of spending money” to which he confessed might clash with Ayaan’s free-spending habits. Yet the relationship flourished.
Ferguson’s marriage was
apparently in trouble before he met Ayaan. His wife, Susan, a fifty-two-year-old former Fleet Street newspaper editor and magazine executive, lived in England with their children. She and Ferguson had met when she was an editor at the Daily Mail, and he had briefly moonlighted there. She had supported him financially when he was a young don at Oxford. But his and Ayaan’s lawyers later wrote to the Independent of London that he had already “moved out of the marital home” before he met Ayaan. (Actually, Ferguson and his wife owned three houses, a working farm in Oxfordshire, an eleventh-century castle near the Welsh border, and a town house in Boston, the oldest on Beacon Hill.)
With Ayaan’s fortieth birthday approaching in November, he agreed to help sponsor her birthday party at a five-star Manhattan hotel, reportedly picking up a bar tab for many thousands of dollars. The party was a celebration of how far Ayaan had come since arriving in the United States three years earlier. Old friends from the Netherlands, including her Dutch foster mother and Marco van Kerkhoven, were on hand to watch as more than a hundred guests, including some of the wealthiest people in the world, lined up to have their photos taken with Ayaan, dressed in a long brown evening gown. That evening she gave an interview to Steffie Kouters, the reporter who had first put her into the Dutch national eye in 2002. Although Ferguson’s wife still didn’t know about Ferguson and Ayaan (by one account, he invited his wife to the party and then, after she flew to New York, told her it was happening elsewhere after all), Ayaan regaled Kouters with the story of her love affair. “This is him,” she said, pointing to a picture of Ferguson. “Most of the time, I think: this is the man I belong with,” she said. But there were also “big problems” because Ferguson was married and Ayaan said she didn’t intend to be polygamous. In a speech to the guests, Ferguson said he had never met anyone as sharp as Ayaan.
The pair went public in January 2010. Ayaan was flown secretly to make a surprise appearance at India’s Jaipur Literature Festival, an important event for the global literary set. Ferguson was giving another talk there, and they were photographed kissing on the grounds of the opulent Hotel Diggi Palace. Two weeks later, on February 12, the Daily Mail broke the news that Ferguson was leaving his wife for Ayaan. The story’s impudent headline read, “The History Man and the Fatwa Girl.”
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