Deborah Scroggins

Interview with David Lewis, AM 1690 radio

aprilfrancis — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:23:39 +0000

http://1690wmlb.com/deborah-scroggins-wanted-women

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 3/6/12, by Jina Moore

aprilfrancis — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:48:43 +0000

books

REVIEW: Two women, two symbols, two different points of view

Article by: JINA MOORE , Special to the Star Tribune
Updated: March 6, 2012 – 1:44 PM

The lives of two very different women – one a Somali, one a Pakistani – serve as a framework for understanding fundamentalist Islam.

“Wanted Women” by Deborah Scroggins

It’s likely that only Deborah Scroggins could imagine, from the lives of two very different but equally polarizing women, a fitting frame for understanding America, terrorism and Islam.

Scroggins’ second book, “Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror” (Harper, 460 pages, $27.99), is a dual-track biography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee turned Dutch parliamentarian turned American neoconservative, and Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-trained Pakistani neuroscientist whom the U.S. government calls the most senior woman in Al-Qaida.

Scroggins takes each as a symbol of “the defining conflict of our time” — Ali the poster child of Western triumphalism, Siddiqui an emblem of jihad.

The dual-track biography is divided into thirds, with short chapters alternating between each woman’s life. The structure is distracting at first, but it heightens suspense in the second and third sections, in which both women turn their versions of Islam — and their personal ambitions — loose in the world. Though their stories never intersect, they are united by each woman’s rejection of moderate Islam for a fundamentalist interpretation: Siddiqui to enforce it; Ali to rail against it.

Siddiqui’s own story is a true-life mystery: At one point, she disappears for five years. Theories abound: She is in hiding; she is a prisoner of the Americans, or the Pakistanis; she is being tortured, or she is dead. The Pakistani press stokes rumors, and when she finally turns up in Afghanistan, and ultimately in a New York court, she’s become a national hero.

Meanwhile, Scroggins follows every lead she can, over six years and with seemingly little caution. At one point, a Pakistani double agent implicated in the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl tries to wave her off the case; at another, a local fixer persuades her not to visit the family home of relatives of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called 9/11 mastermind. (She still manages to get an interview with them, the only foreign journalist ever to do so.)

If Siddiqui’s story is a mystery, Ali’s is a soap opera. In this telling, the refugee becomes a diva, spending money she doesn’t have, making outlandish demands for personal protection by the Dutch government, brazenly switching political teams when one doesn’t advance her fast enough, breaking up a British power couple. Timothy Garton Ash once called her “an Enlightenment fundamentalist.”

Ash was forced to recant the moniker, but by the end of Scroggins’ book, it seems apt, even charitable. So fundamental has Ali become that she sells out her family, making her parents and half-siblings props in an argument about the vices of Islam, in not one but two memoirs. She visits her dying father only at the insistence of a Dutch ex-boyfriend; she speaks with her impoverished widowed mother only at the insistence of an American friend.

In Scroggins’ book, Ali is more cunning than brilliant — more Madame Bovary, say, than Voltaire.

Ultimately, Scroggins understands each woman as “an icon” whose “legend will always be more alluring than her reality.” That’s a powerful observation, subtly stated. “Wanted Women” is a necessary reminder that no individual’s story is the best lens through which to understand this complex global story — least of all when one casts oneself as the hero of that story.

Jina Moore is a writer who divides her time between New York and East Africa.

The Washington Post, by Rachel Newcomb, 3/4/12

aprilfrancis — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:11:00 +0000

The Washington Post

“Wanted Women: Faith, Lies & the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui

by Deborah Scroggins

By Rachel Newcomb, Published: March 2, 2012

“I think that we are at war with Islam,” Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali said in a 2007 interview. “And there’s no middle ground in wars.”

In “Wanted Women,” journalist Deborah Scroggins uses the biographies of Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, and Aafia Siddiqui, alleged to be one of the few female members of al-Qaeda, to tell a larger story about the war on terror. Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui represent two extremes in this war: on the one hand, the view that Islam is evil, and on the other, the sense that everything emanating from the West must be destroyed. Scroggins attempts to give a thorough biographical treatment to two women who remain enigmas, despite their status as public figures.

The book alternates between each woman’s story, making for riveting suspense. Of the two, Siddiqui will be less familiar to Western readers, though she is widely revered in Pakistan. She attended MIT and later received a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis, married a Pakistani physician and gave birth to three children. Scroggins documents Siddiqui’s growing radicalism and the subsequent unraveling of her marriage and her career. Under suspicion by the FBI for her links to key al-Qaeda operatives, Siddiqui fled the United States for Pakistan in 2003, and for five years her trail went cold. From the time of her disappearance until she resurfaced in a dusty Afghan town in 2008, bearing explosives and bomb-making documents, Siddiqui had become a hero to Pakistanis, who believed that she was being held and tortured by the U.S. government.

By contrast, Hirsi Ali has been lauded in the West, in part for her willingness, as a former Muslim, to publicly criticize the religion. Supposedly fleeing a forced marriage, Hirsi Ali came to Holland, where she gained refugee status and became enamored of the freedoms of a democratic society. After learning Dutch and finishing college, she worked first as a translator, then later became a member of the Dutch parliament. Welcomed as a refreshing, charismatic presence on the Dutch political scene, Hirsi Ali “was cool, even analytical, yet she radiated passion.” In 2004, she collaborated with filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a documentary that featured, in addition to women narrating their stories of abuse by Muslim men, a woman praying, her naked body covered with gauzy veils and etched with verses from the Koran. When van Gogh was murdered on the street by a second-generation Dutch-Moroccan immigrant, Hirsi Ali had to temporarily go into hiding, and she has traveled with bodyguards ever since.

Yet as controversies over immigrants in Holland heated up, critics of Hirsi Ali dug up her application for refugee status and found several falsehoods. The forced marriage was, in fact, consensual, and Hirsi Ali already had refugee status in Kenya, which, if disclosed, would have precluded her from applying in Holland.

Scroggins suggests that self-promotion, rather than humanitarianism, has been Hirsi Ali’s principal motivation. Throughout the book, she cites numerous examples of Muslim public intellectuals and activists who have dedicated their careers to writing about the dangers of political Islam or helping Muslim victims of domestic violence. Yet these scholars and activists have worked for years in obscurity, while Hirsi Ali has garnered tremendous media attention. In 2008, Scroggins writes, Foreign Policy named her “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.”

Perhaps because of Hirsi Ali’s more extensive career in the public eye, Scroggins is able to document her life more fully than Siddiqui’s. The author’s discussion of Siddiqui’s marriage and her years in the United States, constructed from interviews with her ex-husband and other family members, provides the most detailed picture we have of her. After her disappearance, she becomes more of a shadowy legend than a flesh-and-blood woman. Yet Scroggins turns this ambiguity into an advantage, giving readers a greater understanding of Pakistan’s conflicted role in the war on terror. Siddiqui’s story makes clear that Pakistani authorities show vastly different faces to the United States than to their own people, and the authorities’ tales of Siddiqui’s whereabouts during the years of her disappearance contradict themselves, depending on the occasion.

Most notable about these two women is that their supporters seem, for the most part, unfazed by any evidence that might challenge their legendary reputations. Faced with mounting controversy in Holland, Hirsi Ali simply moved to the United States, where the conservative American Enterprise Institute offered her a professional home in its think tank. Meanwhile, Siddiqui became a hero to legions of Pakistanis who believe her to be an innocent victim of the war on terror, a charity worker and activist unjustly imprisoned for wearing a veil, in some accounts.

Although Siddiqui and Hirsi Ali are radically different women, both seem to see the world in black-and-white terms. This has made them convenient political symbols for both Islamists and conservative Westerners. While control of women, Scroggins says, “remains fundamental to radical Islam,” she argues that “Westerners who want to keep the Muslim world under Western rule also have used Islamic attitudes toward women not so much to help free Muslim women as to justify the West’s continued domination of Muslim men.” Ultimately, she suggests, the two women’s public prominence illustratives paternalistic attitudes on both sides, neither of which is particularly interested in tolerating ambiguity.

“Wanted Women” manages to evoke the complexity in both women’s backgrounds, despite their rigid positions and their often maddening single-mindedness. Siddiqui and Hirsi Ali, Scroggins writes, “are products of our migratory times. Like many others of their generation, they grew up on the move between countries and cultures, and they took refuge in universal identities.” While neither woman proves to be especially sympathetic, in Scroggins’s telling, their lives make a fascinating story that reflects this polarized era.

[email protected]

Rachel Newcomb is an associate professor of anthropology at Rollins College and the author of “Women of Fes: Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco.”

The New York Daily News, 2/21/12

aprilfrancis — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:44:39 +0000

The Arab Spring’s misogynist winter

DEBORAH SCROGGINS

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A year after they marched alongside men to topple regimes in the Arab Spring, Arab women are facing a wall of misogyny.In Tunisia, Salafist vigilantes have been attacking unveiled women and occupying universities that do not allow the face veil. In Egypt, only eight out of 508 newly elected parliamentarians are female, and the country’s Islamists are threatening to repeal laws making it easier for women to divorce and to gain custody of their children. The head of Libya’s transitional government has promised to bring back polygamy.

The rise of political Islam in all three countries has led some commentators to accuse the Islamists of turning the Arab Spring into an Islamist winter for women. Yet the backlash against women is not confined to Islamists. In Egypt, women who demonstrated for equal rights last year on International Women’s Day were met with ugly jeers and taunts to go home and take care of their children.

Female protesters against the secular military government were subjected to brutal beatings and “virginity tests.” Women who venture into Tahrir Square these days are often sexually harassed.

As the Egyptian anthropologist Hania Sholkamy recently noted, even the left-wing activists who first manned the barricades against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime “reject the whole narrative of gender equality as a figment of a Western imagination.”

The patriarchal attitudes that underlie this remarkable resistance to modern feminism go back centuries. They will not be changed overnight, any more than the authoritarian cultures that produced the regimes Egyptians and others are now seeking to replace can be changed overnight.

For example, more than half of Egyptians in 2010 said they backed segregating men and women in the workplace, while barely 60% agreed that women should have rights equal to those of men, according to the Pew Research Center.

Arab feminists would do well to listen to the leaders of Iran’s intellectually vibrant, though suppressed, women’s rights movement.

Iran’s 1979 revolution revealed that the penetration of feminist ideas in Iranian society was far thinner than the country’s pro-Western elite had imagined. The Shah’s top-down efforts to impose women’s rights on Iran had backfired, leading to widespread resentment. (Similarly, in Egypt, laws backed by first lady Suzanne Mubarak giving women more freedom to divorce and imposing a quota for women in Parliament are widely denigrated as “Suzanne’s laws.”)

Although Iranian women supported the overthrow of the Shah, the theocratic regime that replaced him turned them into second-class citizens.

Iran’s women’s rights activists decided that they had no choice but to start over at the grassroots. In political pushes such as the One Million Signatures Campaign, they have sought to persuade ordinary Iranians of the unfairness of the Islamic laws that, for example, give half as much weight to a woman’s testimony as to a man’s. The Iranian regime fears these simple appeals to justice so greatly that its response has been to imprison many of the movement’s leaders and drive others into exile.

The Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi has warned Arab women that they must not wait to stand up for their rights.“If women cannot gain equality and the right to set their own destiny, then that is not a real revolution and won’t lead to democracy,” Ebadi said. “Unless Arab women speak up soon, they risk being sidelined by the region’s new governments.”

Arab women at this point do not face the dangers that Iranian women do — of being jailed if they speak out. They should organize themselves to demand their rights before it is too late.

Scroggins is the author of a new book, “Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui.”

The Christian Science Monitor, 1/30/12, by Lee E. Cart

aprilfrancis — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:07:55 +0000

Wanted Women

What the West can learn from two fiercely intelligent Muslim women who took opposing paths in life.

By Lee E. Cart / January 30, 2012

Wanted Women By Deborah ScrogginsHarperCollins539 pp.

How do two women – both in their 30s, highly intelligent, and raised as Muslims – develop radically different ideas about militant Islam and its treatment of women?

This was the question journalist Deborah Scroggins set out to answer in Wanted Women, her six-year investigation into the lives of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui and Dutch-Somali politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In “Wanted Women,” Scroggins (who is also the author of the award-winning 2002 “Emma’s War,” about a British relief worker who married a Sudanese warlord), covers events from before the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 up through the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and on to the present. She provides readers with a behind-the-scenes look at the war on terror as seen through the lives of two women who played prominent yet deeply contrasting roles in that war.

Scroggins’s exploration began after reading the headlines about the beheading of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh’s murder was directly linked to a controversial film, “Submission,” which portrayed fictional Muslim women discussing the “rapes, beatings, and incest they have suffered at the hands of Muslim men.” Van Gogh had directed the movie and Hirsi Ali had written it

Scroggins was already on assignment to investigate the mysterious and brilliant Siddiqui for possible connections to Al Qaeda. Scroggins couldn’t help noticing a “weird symmetry” to the lives of Siddiqui and Hirsi Ali. “They were opposites, yet related,” Scroggins writes. “Like the bikini and the burka….”

Written in alternating chapters (a device that disrupts the continuous flow of each woman’s personal story), Scroggins examines the public and private lives of Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui from birth to near present-day. Although both women grew up in Islamic households, their lives took vastly different routes. Siddiqui was raised “to be a hero of Islam” and did not fail in her promises. Her parents sent her to the United States to receive a doctorate in neuroscience so she might become a “true mujahida” – an educated Muslim woman, following the “model of the Prophet Mohammad’s wives.”

Throughout her years of schooling and after, Siddiqui was more and more drawn to fundamentalist Islam and began working closely with members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in both the US and Pakistan. When she married one of the principal plotters of 9/11, Siddiqui landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. She was finally captured and convicted of murder in 2010.

Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali fled her native Somalia to live in Holland, first as a refugee, then as a member of society with A-list status. The freedom to do as she pleased after 20-plus years of life under the control of others led Hirsi Ali to adopt Western ways of dress and culture. She “had a very clear vision of what she wanted to achieve”: a career, money, and a life involving politics.

Through hard work and a good education, Hirsi Ali rose in the political chain of command in Holland to become a member of parliament. With her position of power, she was able to denounce the extremist Islamic practices that prevented women from being able “to dress as they pleased, to marry whom they chose, and to travel, work, and generally order their lives without male permission.”

“Submission” caused a huge stir in Holland and around the world, bringing Hirsi Ali acclaim in the West and death threats from her fellow Muslims. Likewise, her autobiography, “Infidel,” received rave reviews in the West and deep criticism from some Muslims.

Scroggins herself takes a bleak view of Hirsi Ali’s fierce criticisms of extremist Muslim practices. If Siddiqui consciously provoked religion-based violence, Scroggins implies, Hirsi Ali did so unconsciously, by inciting hatred toward Muslims.

The exhaustive research Scroggins did into the lives of her two subjects adds multiple levels to her narrative. “Wanted Women” reads like a mystery as one event unfolds into another. Lies, death threats, battles over the need for bodyguards, secret marriages, and disappearances that extend for years add to the intrigue. Meanwhile graphic details of female genital mutilation, beheadings, and torture force readers to question the role of Islamic extremism in the lives of women.

Thought-provoking and thorough, Scroggins’s comprehensive book offers a unique perspective on the tensions between Islam and the West as seen through the life stories of two very different and influential women.

Lee E. Cart is a freelance writer and book reviewer living in Maine.

The New York Times Book Review, 1/29/12, by Eliza Griswold

aprilfrancis — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:13:17 +0000

Sunday Book Review

Islam and the West Through the Eyes of Two Women

WANTED WOMEN

Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui

By Deborah Scroggins

Illustrated. 539 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

By ELIZA GRISWOLD

Published: January 27, 2012

Very few of the heroes and villains made famous in the wars of the past decade are women. Of the scant exceptions, two of the most fascinating are the subjects of Deborah Scroggins’s thoughtful double biography, “Wanted Women.”

One is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born thinker and neoconservative darling; the other is Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who, in 2010, was sentenced to 86 years in prison for her assault on American personnel in Afghanistan. She is known as Al Qaeda’s highest-ranking female associate.

The popular imagination has cast Hirsi Ali as a firebrand, clad in a satin evening gown and flanked by bodyguards as she denounces Islam. The diminutive Siddiqui is a firebrand of a different sort. She wears a burqa and totes vials of chemical weapons in her purse while denouncing the West. Yet the issue of who these self-made women actually are — and who they aren’t — remains deeply contested.

In 1992, Hirsi Ali fled from Africa to the Netherlands, where she won a bid for asylum and Dutch citizenship. She was elected to the Dutch Parliament in 2003. Thanks to her speeches, articles and participation in a short film called “Submission,” which depicted verses of the Koran on a woman’s naked body, as well as to her two successful autobiographies, “Infidel” and “Nomad,” she has been embraced both by many feminists and many on the American right. She argues that “Islam is backward,” and that its values must be stamped out before they overwhelm the West. Her most vociferous supporters — including her husband, the historian Niall Ferguson — consider her to be one of the staunchest defenders of freedom in our time. The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali.” Her critics, however, claim that her views are simplistic and, more harshly, that she is an opportunist.

Siddiqui is similarly polarizing. She traveled from her home in Karachi to the United States in 1989 to pursue her education, which she did at M.I.T. and Brandeis University. She eventually married Amjad Khan, a doctor from Karachi, bore him three children and completed the requirements for her master’s degree and Ph.D. in neuroscience in less than four years. At the same time she was embracing the most millenarian principles of jihad. In 2002, after the F.B.I. had begun investigating her for links to Al Qaeda, she returned to Pakistan and soon disappeared, only to be spotted in Ghazni, Afghanistan, along with her 12-year-old son in 2008. Maps, toxic chemicals and diagrams for making bombs were found in her possession, and after a tussle with American forces during which she was shot in the stomach, she was taken into custody. Her defenders — including her family and many Pakistanis — believe she is a devout mother and martyred hero sentenced to American prison because she is a Muslim. The United States government contends she is a terrorist.

In “Wanted Women,” Scroggins traces the lives of Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui from their earliest childhoods down to the present. Hirsi Ali continues to live in the United States; Siddiqui now resides in Fort Worth, Tex., where she is incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center Carswell and receiving psychiatric treatment.

Alternating between the two women, Scroggins explores what she calls “their weird symmetry,” examining how the forces of contemporary history — war, poverty, colonialism and politics — have forged these “icons of the war on terror.” She writes: “When it came to dealing with the crises of Islam, they were mirror opposites, but there were hints in their complicated backgrounds that each woman might have gone in a very different direction, perhaps even to the extent of Aafia Siddiqui becoming a Westernizing feminist and Ayaan Hirsi Ali becoming a militant Islamist.”

These linked narratives may seem at first to be simply a reductive gimmick based on the fact that both women were born as Muslims and educated in the West. Yet Scroggins, who has been an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is a thorough reporter and an astute analyst of global events. Because of her willingness to introduce readers to over a century of Islamic theology and politics, a book that might have been a facile juxtaposition of two very different individuals is actually much more than the sum of its parts. “I had felt for years,” she writes, “that the suppression of women was as basic to the ideology of radical Islam as racism had been to the old American South or as anti-Semitism was to Nazi Germany.”

To tell Siddiqui’s story, Scroggins begins in 19th-century India. She explains how Deobandism, an Islamic anticolonial movement that started about two centuries ago, has had a profound (and underinvestigated) impact on the politics of contemporary Pakistan.

Eloquence, courage and historical command are some of Scroggins’s well-known talents — ones she exhibited in her first book, “Emma’s War.” There, she chronicled the life and death of Emma McCune, a British aid worker in Sudan who became the wife of a warlord, while simultaneously providing one of the best histories of Sudan’s complicated civil war. Like “Wanted Women,” “Emma’s War” was a kind of double biography, but with Scroggins setting herself in opposition to McCune.

“Emma’s War” raised such high expectations, however, that “Wanted Women” seems a bit of a disappointment. Though Scroggins is a master at using herself to reflect the horror or mystery unfolding around her, here we get only fleeting glimpses of her as a character. One misses her observer’s guidance.

There is one exception. While investigating Siddiqui’s rumored arrest by Pakistani intelligence in 2005, Scroggins makes a grave mistake: unthinkingly, she forwards an e-mail from a Pakistani source to Siddiqui’s American lawyer. By exposing the source’s identity, Scroggins puts him in danger. He writes an anguished e-mail to Scroggins, saying “u have no idea that u have risked my life.” It’s a chilling reminder of the risks that reporters in Pakistan, among others, face while doing their jobs.

As Scroggins concedes from the start, she has never spoken to either of her two subjects, and she adds: “I came to see my enforced distance from both women as a blessing in disguise.” This could appear to be a convenient rationalization for what many would consider a serious limitation, yet Scroggins is so talented a storyteller that it is easy to forget her lack of contact with Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui as she moves deftly through their remarkable lives, capturing human qualities that help us get behind each woman’s public image.

It is undeniably a risky undertaking to attempt to write the biography of not one but two living figures who were unwilling to participate in the endeavor. But Scroggins, with her journalistic doggedness, does a remarkable job of reporting and reconstruction, and “Wanted Women” serves as a valuable contribution to contemporary history, recounting two ways in which a modern woman’s identity can be hers for the making — even if the outcome is tragic.

Eliza Griswold, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “The Tenth Parallel.”

The Washington Times, 1/26/12, by Lauren Weiner

aprilfrancis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:37:49 +0000

Drawing a comparison, dubiously

By The Washington Times

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

WANTED WOMEN: FAITH, LIES, AND THE WAR ON TERROR: THE LIVES OF AYAAN HIRSI ALI AND AAFIA SIDDIQUI

By Deborah Scroggins

Harper, $27.99, 539 pages

Reviewed by Lauren Weiner

“W anted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui” is a good book. Or rather, two. Deborah Scroggins takes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the critic of Islam and former Dutch parliamentarian, down a few pegs. She even splices the 42-year-old Somali writer’s life story together with that of an Islamist terrorist who, like Ms. Hirsi Ali, was raised Muslim in a foreign land, emigrated here and gained notoriety in the years after Sept. 11, 2001. Ms. Scroggins, foreign correspondent for Vogue and the Nation, uses a perverse format. Her short chapters ping back and forth between the two women. My advice: Read only the odd-numbered chapters (Ms. Siddiqui) for awhile, then read some even-numbered ones (Ms. Hirsi Ali). Repeat until done. It’s irritating, but the insights gained are worth it.

We Americans were not well-equipped to understand how it was that Ms. Hirsi Ali, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, got bounced from the Netherlands in 2006. We knew this up-by-her-bootstraps immigrant had falsified her application for asylum in the Netherlands. As she herself admitted during her candidacy for parliament, she had not been fleeing civil war in her native Somalia, as she had claimed, but poverty and Islamist strictures in Kenya’s Somali community, her actual place of residence. What most people did not know about were the two husbands she ditched to aid her escape to the West. (They weren’t great husbands, but still … .)

We knew, too, that the Dutch are inept at dealing with non-European minorities in their midst, especially those with pernicious customs – like the jihadi who killed Theo van Gogh, Ms. Hirsi Ali’s filmmaking partner, after the two released “Submission,” a vulgar movie short lambasting Islam’s treatment of women. But we on this side of the Atlantic may have overestimated the Dutch fear of being targeted for violence along with van Gogh and Ms. Hirsi Ali.

Ms. Scroggins shows what a bind the Dutch were put in by the provocative Ms. Hirsi Ali, a once-dogmatic Muslim turned fierce critic of barbaric practices such as honor killing and female genital mutilation. It turns out that in little socialistic countries, no controversialist can guard himself against physical threats. That task falls to the state, the only entity with the requisite resources and the license to bear arms. Dutch authorities were spending loads of euros on guards, vehicle convoys and the bulletproofing of apartment windows. They were doing this for an elected official whose immigration status was shaky at a time when the Netherlands‘ lax immigration laws were being reformed and other deceptive asylum-seekers were getting deported.

Where Ms. Hirsi Ali’s early years were marked by family instability and deprivation, the opposite was true of 39-year-old Aafia Siddiqui. Her neurosurgeon father and religious activist mother were part of Pakistan’s elite, influential members of the Deobandi sect, which has spawned as much terrorism as the Iranian Revolution and Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Ms. Siddiqui’s mother raised Aafia to be “a true mujahida” version of the late Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s female prime minister. The daughter was to go to the West and excel there – to help conquer it for Islam.

Excel Ms. Siddiqui did. She earned a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis University. She wanted to marry a jihadi but accepted the person her parents picked for her, a Pakistani immigrant to Boston. He was dedicated to his medical studies, not armed combat on behalf of Allah. Their differences caused the doctor to divorce her after they had three children together.

The second time around, she would wed Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who helped KSM train the Sept. 11 hijackers. This second union took place hurriedly in Pakistan, with Ms. Siddiqui and al-Baluchi on the lam after participating in KSM’s foiled plot to blow up gas stations on the U.S. East Coast. In 2008, members of the U.S. military picked up Ms. Siddiqui and her 11-year-old son in Ghazni, Afghanistan, after she shot at them. The boy said he and his mother were on a suicide mission.

Ms. Scroggins pieced together Ms. Siddiqui’s movements by delving into Pakistan’s military-intelligence-Deobandi complex. From those murky precincts, all the way to U.S. cities where highly educated people like Ms. Siddiqui move about freely, plans are gestating. “Wanted Women” is as alarming as it is informative – for how can every such plan be derailed?

The book’s climax is a biographical linkage, and it is a gruesome one. Ammar al-Baluchi videotaped KSM and one other person slaughtering Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002, and this horrendous video, seen by countless viewers on the Internet, inspired Mohammed Bouyeri to kill Ms. Hirsi Ali’s collaborator, van Gogh, on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. This is a stunning connection, but it fails to make Ms. Siddiqui and Ms. Hirsi Ali mirror images of each other.

That is how they seem to Ms. Scroggins, or so she says in justification of her interpolated structure. Each woman gained legions of admirers who ignored her faults, and so the two are “parallel lives,” she says. Ms. Scroggins goes to great lengths to suggest that Ms. Hirsi Ali’s harping on the oppression of Muslim women has done more harm than good. I don’t buy it. I do see that in Ms. Hirsi Ali we have a real-life Becky Sharp or Scarlet O’Hara – someone who used her wiles and charisma to beat adversity. Such figures practice manipulation, and that’s wrong, yet there’s something almost amusing about the pliability of the world in their hands.

The author is right that both women interpret Islam in a malign way. Unfortunately, Ms. Hirsi Ali too sweepingly condemns all of Islam, and in the end, all religious faith. Ms. Scroggins does not omit drawing the key distinction before winding up the book: Ms. Siddiqui is violent; Ms. Hirsi Ali fights only with words. It is an obvious point, and it means that really, there’s no comparison.

Huffington Post, 1/26/12

aprilfrancis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:30:56 +0000

Deborah Scroggins

Women As Weapons In The War On Terror

Posted: 01/26/2012 10:09 am

Seven years ago I set out to trace the lives of two Muslim women who were becoming Joan-of-Arc figures for what the Bush Administration used to call “the global war on terror.” The first was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born activist and author of the bestselling autobiography “Infidel,” whose life was threatened for her criticisms of Islam. The second was Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who was being hunted as an accomplice of al-Qaeda and who is now serving an 86-year sentence in federal prison. One striking thing I learned was that both for jihadis, on one side, and also for some Westerners, talking about the place of Muslim women became a kind of code for talking about the power of the West in Muslim societies.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali rose to worldwide fame after the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a short movie decrying Islam’s treatment of women, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. Hirsi Ali was often described as a feminist and advocate of free speech, but her criticisms of Islam went much further than that. She called the Prophet Muhammad a pervert and a tyrant, and said Muslims should stop seeing him as their guide to moral behavior. She said the West and its culture were far superior to that of Islam, and she even asserted that the West needed to crush Islam militarily.

Hirsi Ali’s sweeping denunciations thrilled many American and European conservatives, who praised her as a “feminist hawk” and accused her critics of capitulating to her jihadi enemies. Near the height of this ideological frenzy, The Times of London in 2007 declared the question of whether the Netherlands should keep paying for her bodyguards even after she moved to the United States to be a litmus test in a new culture war. Real progressives would demand that Dutch taxpayers pay, while phony progressives would disagree, the paper said.

What got drowned out in this noisy drama were the voices of thousands of women who were and are bravely working for change within their own Muslim communities. Those I interviewed in the Netherlands said that Hirsi Ali’s condemnation of Islam and Muslims actually hindered their efforts to free Muslim women from the strictures of religion and culture. Some women were so angered by Hirsi Ali’s statements, and by the applause they excited from the Dutch public, that they began wearing veils in protest. One Muslim woman told me that Hirsi Ali made her life as a feminist ten times harder because Hirsi Ali associated feminism with the hatred of Muslims.

Hirsi Ali’s mirror opposite, Aafia Siddiqui, had a similar effect in Pakistan but for different reasons. She also made life harder for women’s rights activists. When Siddiqui disappeared in 2003, after the FBI announced it wanted to question her about al-Qaeda, Pakistanis assumed that the Pakistani government or the CIA had locked her in one of their secret prisons. Then in 2008 she was arrested in Afghanistan and charged with shooting at the US soldiers and investigators who came to question her. By the time she went to trial in Manhattan, in 2010, a good deal of evidence had emerged that she had spent the years between her disappearance and her capture on the run in Pakistan. Yet Pakistan’s “honor squad” of Islamist and nationalistic politicians and pundits insisted that Siddiqui had been secretly imprisoned and tortured for years by the US and its Pakistani allies. Anyone who questioned Siddiqui’s story, meanwhile – or suggested that Pakistani women had other things to worry about — was accused of siding with the West against a persecuted “Daughter of the Nation.”

One can only hope that the use of women’s rights as hypocritical weapons in “the global war on terror” will be retired along with the name. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Salon, 1/22/12, by Laura Miller

aprilfrancis — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:41:57 +0000

Books

Sunday, Jan 22, 2012 5:00 PM 21:45:15 EST

“Wanted Women”: The she-devil and the martyr

An engrossing look at women and Islam finds parallels between a bestselling author and a convicted terrorist

By Laura Miller

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui (Credit: Wikipedia)

Topics:Books, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, War on Terror

Deborah Scroggins’ engrossing new book, “Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui,” is the story of a martyr and a she-devil. Or the story of a she-devil and a martyr, depending on your perspective. However, the author (a prizewinning international journalist) subscribes to neither view. By juxtaposing the lives of two (in)famous women involved with the so-called War on Terror — a celebrated critic of Islam and the only woman included on the FBI’s most-wanted list of al Qaida-linked international terrorists — Scroggins aims to show how “women like Ayaan and Aafia became symbols in battles that were really about other things.”

It should be added that both women eagerly participated in their own symbolification. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician-turned-pundit, has never voiced an intention to become the kind of person who gets paid to say inflammatory things on television. (If she had, Scroggins’ dogged reporting would surely have found it out.) But she has pursued that end as surely as iron filings follow a magnet. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist educated in America, worked the jihadi circuit here and abroad, whipping would-be holy warriors into a frenzy by making speeches exhorting them to prove their manhood by attacking the infidels. Her single-minded devotion to such activities wreaked havoc on her family but the price she paid for it made her a heroine in her homeland.

Neither of Scroggins’ subjects appears to advantage in “Wanted Women,” which is not so surprising when it comes to Siddiqui. She has close ties to the al-Baluchi clan of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and she assisted in a failed KSM plot to blow up gas stations in the U.S. Siddiqui is currently serving an 86-year sentence in a federal prison, not for the gas station plot, but for grabbing a rifle and trying to shoot some American soldiers while detained in a police station in Afghanistan. Scroggins, who makes an impressive effort to get to the bottom of a story more murky and ominous than a John le Carré novel, concludes that Siddiqui was “almost certainly plotting murder … And perhaps prepared to further a biological or chemical attack on the United States on a scale to rival that of 9/11.”

For Westerners, Hirsi Ali is a more ambiguous figure. She has been the darling, in turn, of Dutch leftists, Dutch free-market conservatives, American neocons and Anglo-American atheists, but she has also drawn criticism for making simplistic and bellicose statements about the religion in which she was raised. Her primary calling card is her personal story: Born in Somalia, genitally mutilated (by her grandmother, without her parents’ knowledge or permission) at age 5, she purportedly fled to Holland to escape a forced marriage. Her mediagenic presence and fiery rhetoric have made her a particularly intoxicating figure for hawkish, anti-Islam commenters like Christopher Hitchens, who rhapsodized about her “arresting and hypnotizing beauty,” and Pascal Bruckner, who compared two critics who dared to mildly criticize her memoir to the Spanish Inquisition.

Scroggins can’t disguise her distaste for Hirsi Ali, who in this account comes across as a reckless, uninformed and opportunistic showboater with little regard for the real-world consequences of her actions. Hirsi Ali has called for a “war on Islam” (“a destructive, nihilistic cult of death”) and predicted that Britain (among other Western nations) will be subject to Shariah law within 50 years if it doesn’t look out. She supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has urged a similar invasion of Iran, efforts she regards as essential to a campaign against “Islamofascism.”

Scroggins tries to make the case that, in the mid-2000s, Hirsi Ali measurably contributed to a political climate in Holland that led to xenophobic prejudice, violence and a deportation campaign prompting the U.N to cite the Netherlands for human rights abuses for the first time in history. She argues that Hirsi Ali’s insistence on conflating all Muslims with militant fundamentalists served only to back moderate Dutch Muslims — the vast majority — into a corner where they felt forced to choose between their faith and their nation. This, and the rest of her apocalyptic pronouncements, Scroggins and others have argued, played into the hands of extremists by needlessly increasing the resentments that nurture militancy.

How much responsibility Hirsi Ali herself bears for the powder-keg atmosphere in Holland at that time is hard to say. (Scroggins maintains that Dutch politics returned to its more typical sedate and reasonable tenor after Hirsi Ali moved to the U.S.) Without a doubt, she belongs to the ever-growing club of lying memoirists; documentary filmmakers discovered that her tale of a forced marriage was bogus. Also, she was eventually forced to admit that her family never threatened her for running out on the Canadian husband who (under the impression that she loved him) had funded her immigration to Europe.

Of course, women living in patriarchal Muslim cultures are forced into marriages and abused and even killed by their relatives quite often. But Hirsi Ali’s feminist critics have complained that she has done little of a practical or material nature to alleviate the suffering of such women or to help them out of dangerous situations. The short film she made with director Theo van Gogh in 2004 — “Submission,” featuring verses of the Quran written across naked female bodies — ostensibly protested Muslim misogyny. However, it only served to anger and alienate the women it purported to champion, as footage of Hirsi Ali visiting a Muslim battered women’s shelter illustrated. An emotionally disturbed Islamist militant murdered van Gogh on an Amsterdam street later that year, triggering a wave of mosque and church burnings.

You can support the free-speech rights of Hirsi Ali and van Gogh while recognizing that “Submission” was largely a self-serving exercise in deliberate provocation, but it’s a thin line to walk. So robust is her distrust of Hirsi Ali that Scroggins has a hard time toeing it. Hirsi Ali makes such a captivating character — like the villainess on a soap opera that you love to hate so much that you end up kinda loving her — that sometimes Siddiqui gets overshadowed. Like Hirsi Ali, Siddiqui is a self-contradictory zealot. Hirsi Ali believes so ardently in the Western ideals of tolerance and intellectual freedom that she blithely advocates the suspension of civil liberties to “save” them. Siddiqui’s commitment to protecting the Muslim way of life led her to routinely transgress the strictures imposed on good fundamentalist Muslim girls. The very name of her religion means “submission,” but Siddiqui could not do it; in one of the book’s many grimly amusing scenes, she presumes to hotly lecture a venerable religious leader on his mistaken interpretation of her duties.

Although Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui have never met, and Scroggins wasn’t able to interview either one of them for “Wanted Women,” although there is no obvious connection between the two, the book works astonishingly well. Cutting back and forth between the two stories fosters a considerable amount of narrative suspense, and the juxtaposition of two similar personalities with two very different ideological positions keeps prompting the reader to look beyond easy or knee-jerk assumptions. Scroggins ultimately concludes that both women were “useful to the real drivers of conflict in their countries” because their stories provided political cover. Hirsi Ali’s talk of women’s oppression justified “Westerners who want to keep the Muslim world under Western rule,” and Siddiqui’s visible crusade against Western dominance masked the fact that jihadi were (at least in part) “fighting to maintain their control over women.”

True enough, but they are also both warriors by temperament, rash and aggressive. (Hirsi Ali has blithely likened herself to a “Somali warlord.”) If each gave her side of the War on Terror a female martyr to brandish before the troops, what they got in return was something every warrior needs: an enemy to battle to the death.

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.More Laura Miller

Vogue, 2/2012, by Megan O’Grady

aprilfrancis — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:07:50 +0000

Books

Read It Now: Wanted Women—Faith, Lies and The War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui

by Megan O’Grady

Photo: AP Photo/FBI

A welcome respite from the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric in post-9/11 international affairs is Deborah Scroggins’ eagerly anticipated Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and The War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui (Harper Collins). The book, which grew out of a 2005 article for Vogue (below) chronicles the wildly divergent, oddly parallel destinies of two women raised in Islam: the Somali-born author (and former member of the Dutch parliament) Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who became famous—or infamous, depending on one’s point of view—as a scathing critic of Islam and a champion of the West; and the MIT-educated Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, who was linked to Al Qaeda and disappeared for several years before she was eventually captured and convicted, in a New York courtroom, of attempted murder. Highly intelligent, ambitious, and seemingly motivated by an intriguing mix of idealism and self-interest (and perhaps self-delusion), both women have become figureheads of sorts—on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Emma’s War author Scroggins has a gift for locating the complex human narratives behind the all-too-reductive headlines, and here she captures the critical disconnect between the West’s perception of Islam and its multifaceted reality—at the heart of which is a lightning-rod issue: the status of women. “In the mirror symmetry operating here, the jihadis claimed that they weren’t really fighting to maintain their control over women but rather to throw off Western dominance. Right-wing Westerners, meanwhile, claimed that they weren’t fighting to maintain Western dominance but to liberate Muslim women,” concludes Scroggins. “Women like Ayaan and Aafia became symbols in battles that were really about other things.” Currently, Hirsi Ali is married to the historian Niall Ferguson, with whom she has an infant son; Siddiqui is serving an 86-year sentence in Fort Worth, Texas.