My dear Deborah Scroggins,
I am Sid Harth.
After I wake up, which is a big fantasy of mine and so far, shows no signs of becoming a New York Times best selling No-well. Blessed be those hwo see things and blessed be those who see see them thru and come up smelling roses, I go
I have, yet, read your book, perhaps, never. I am one of them Po-folks. Ain’t got no money, honey-child. Get it?
For some odd reasons, I was being lured into Aafia Siddiqui affair. Not for no reasons, known to me, I got involved. Pakistan is a Muslim country, as if you care. Full of learned and not so learned people get into flag waving, defending (the honor) of people born in Pakistan to flag waving (Muslim) parents, who, it is known in the (Pakistan’s) history books, were brought up in previous flag waving families.
Suffice to say that upper echelon of Pakistan society roots for anyone who happens to go abroad and do something the rest of the population frequently fail to do.
Get (higher) education.
Aafia Siddiqui was celebrated, not because she was smart, beaautiful, was legally married to another educated Pakistan citizen but because she was a devote Muslim, Burqa and all. With all these innate (Muslim) (prized) qualities behind her, why would any respectable member of Pakistan’s rich and famous crowd doubt her intellectual feats? They did not. They rose as one and held her as a model. I do not know whether such highly educated female person could become anything but a subject of suspicion and dirigen. Former prime minister, Bhutto’s daughter, another western educated female person broke all traditional records. She came to politics and won the general elections, twice before she was assassinated for being too smart for her Burqua.
Aafia Siddiqui knew in her heart that she did not want to be assassinated for being beautiful, (highly) educated, married and having children. Good female person, that she was, did funny things. became a real-live female person terrorist. Got arrested, tried and sentenced in New York.
May all (Muslim) female persons take notice of the law of the land and forget about (higher) Sharia law of Allah.
May Allah be praised, (PBUH).
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2011 November 11 » My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth
mysistereileen.com/?m=20111111Nov 11, 2011 – Everything you always wanted to know about my sister Eileen and more …. board with Lady Al Qaeda’s (Aafia Siddiqui) lawyer Farha Ahmed, …
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Foreign Policy and I – cogito ergo sum
www.sidileak.us/2011/11/f-80.htmlNov 9, 2011 – Foreign Policy and I « My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth …. “Freedom and Justice” board with Lady Al Qaeda’s (Aafia Siddiqui) lawyer Farha Ahmed, …
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cogito ergo sum: Racial Integration
www.sidileak.us/racial-integration/Of Prince and a Pauper: Sid Harth – My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth …… India Exporting Computer Coolies: Sid Harth · Dr Aafia Siddiqui Affair: Sid Harth · Of Iftar, …
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Butler, Oops, Sid Did It: Sid Harth – cogito ergo sum
www.sidileak.us/2011/06/but.htmlJun 11, 2011 – Butler, Oops, Dr Aafia Siddiqi did it: Sid Harth * USA v Siddiqui … trial record Posted by Lew Weinstein on February 1, 2010 Aafia Siddiqui …
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Dr. Aafia Siddiqui Case – A Detailed Story of Lies And Deception By …
pakistankakhudahafiz.wordpress.com/…/dr-aafia-siddiqui-case-a-deta…Jan 20, 2010 – The reason we chose this day is because of the fact that today the American court is again holding another purported trial of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. …
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Aafia Siddiqui – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aafia_SiddiquiAafia Siddiqui (Urdu: عافیہ صدیقی; born March 2, 1972) is an American-
educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist who was convicted of assault with intent to …
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Foreign Policy and I « Back to Africa and I
www.arabuhuru.net/2011/11/11/foreign-policy-and-i-137/Nov 11, 2011 – Foreign Policy and I « My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth …. “Freedom and Justice” board with Lady Al Qaeda’s (Aafia Siddiqui) lawyer Farha Ahmed, …
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Cogito Ergo Sum: Butler, Oops, Sid Did It: Sid Harth
gosumercogito.blogspot.com/…/butler-oops-sid-did-it-sid-harth_11.h…Jun 11, 2011 – Butler, Oops, Dr Aafia Siddiqi did it: Sid Harth * USA v Siddiqui … trial record Posted …. @mysistereileen.com @wsj.com #FED #Ben Bernake …
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Eurokrise and I
www.cogitoergosumblog.net/page/5/Nov 11, 2011 – Foreign Policy and I « My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth …. “Freedom and Justice” board with Lady Al Qaeda’s (Aafia Siddiqui) lawyer Farha Ahmed, …
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Foreign Policy and I » USA: News, Views and Reviews
cogitoergosumusa.com/?p=3356Nov 3, 2011 – Aafia Siddiqui Sentenced: A Grievous Miscarriage of Justice …… 25 comments; @
mysistereileen.com @economist.com #Charlemagne’s …
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Americas and I » My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth
mysistereileen.com/?p=4340Dec 11, 2011 – Jun 22, 2011 – Explore CFR’s latest interactive, Crisis Guide: Pakistan … mysistereileen.com/?p=8 ….. USA: News, Views and Reviews …
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Pakistan Spring « My Sister Eileen
mysistereileen.com/?p=2516 hours ago – Muhammed Muheisen/AP – Pakistan’s Supreme Court issued a contempt of court notice to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Monday, …
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Foreign Policy and I » My Sister Eileen: Sid Harth
mysistereileen.com/?p=4279Dec 9, 2011 – Everything you always wanted to know about my sister Eileen and more … China is often called an “all-weather friend” to Pakistan — a strategic …
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Cogito Ergo Sum: Pakistan Spring
gosumercogito.blogspot.com/2012/01/pakistan-spring_13.html3 days ago – 2 days ago – Everything you always wanted to know about my sister Eileen and more … Pakistan fires defense secretary, army warns of turmoil …
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Pakistan Spring « The Devil and a Dingbat
www.allcogitoergosum.com/?p=606Dec 9, 2011 – Everything you always wanted to know about my sister Eileen and more … China is often called an “all-weather friend” to Pakistan — a strategic …
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@mysistereileen.com @foreignaffairs.com #CFR …
cogitoergosumusa.com/?p=185Jun 22, 2011 – Explore CFR’s latest interactive, Crisis Guide: Pakistan … My Sister Eileen, Oops, Sarah Palin: Sid Harth · The Wall Shit Journal and I: Sid Harth …
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@mysistereileen.com @foreinaffairs.com #CFR » USA: News, Views …
cogitoergosumusa.com/?p=182Jun 22, 2011 – Explore CFR’s latest interactive, Crisis Guide: Pakistan … My Sister Eileen, Oops, Sarah Palin: Sid Harth · The Wall Shit Journal and I: … …
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cogito ergo sum
www.sidileak.us/Everything you always wanted to know about my sister Eileen and more . …. 1 month ago : 9 May, 2011, 01.45PM IST,PTI Pakistan should decide on issue . …
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Foreign Wars and I « Energy: Sid Harth
www.findcogitoergosum.com/?p=251Sep 3, 2011 – 2 days ago – End of the World, Oops, Rick Perry: Sid Harth | My Sister Eileen: Sid … Osama bin Laden Killed by U.S. Forces in Pakistan … …
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Seven Eleven, Oops, Nine Eleven: Sid Harth | My Sister Mabel …
www.greatcogitoergosum.com/?p=53Jun 2, 2011 – Everything you always wanted to know about my sister Eileen and …… Nasir Mahmood in a commentary printed by the Pakistan Observer wrote …
…and I am Sid harth@topcogitoergosum.com
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Books of The Times
Warriors on 2 Sides of Militant Islam
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: January 15, 2012
If you were the Franklin Mint and wanted to issue a set of four collectible dinner plates devoted to “The Women of the War on Terror,” whose faces would appear on them?
WANTED WOMEN
Faith, Lies & the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui
By Deborah Scroggins
Illustrated. 539 pages. HarperCollins. $27.99.
Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s national security adviser during 9/11, would surely smile up from one. As would Lynndie England, “the lady with the leash,” as Mick Jagger sang on the 2005 Rolling Stones song “Dangerous Beauty.”
Plates 3 and 4? They would almost certainly depict Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui, the subjects of Deborah Scroggins’s sober and provocative new book, “Wanted Women.” Ms. Scroggins has composed a dual biography of these dissimilar Muslim women, intricately braiding their stories. They are such opposites that, as the author memorably observes, “Like the bikini and the burka or the virgin and the whore, you couldn’t quite understand one without understanding the other.”
If you are wondering who is the bikini (and thus the whore) in that formulation, Ms. Scroggins leaves little doubt that it is Ms. Hirsi Ali, whom her book relentlessly attacks, sometimes persuasively but often tendentiously. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is, you will recall, a Somalian-born former member of the Dutch Parliament. She wrote the best-selling memoir “Infidel” (2007) and, once seen, is hard to forget. In the words of the British journalist Andrew Anthony, she “looks like a fashion model and talks like a public intellectual.” Brought up as a Muslim fundamentalist in Kenya, where she was subjected to genital cutting, she escaped to the West and has emerged as an incendiary critic of Islam, especially on issues regarding women. She is married to the British historian Niall Ferguson.
Ms. Siddiqui’s story is just as unlikely, and seemingly made for a tense Kathryn Bigelow film. Born in Pakistan, she left for America to study neuroscience and earned degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University. She married a Pakistani doctor who was accepted to study for a master’s degree at Harvard, with whom she had three children. She also became a nearly psychotic anti-Semite, and began dabbling in pro-jihad organizations in America. In 2003 the F.B.I. named her the only known female operative of Al Qaeda.
Ms. Scroggins is a veteran reporter whose very good first book, “Emma’s War” (2002), was about a young British aid worker and tarnished idealism in the Sudan. In “Wanted Women” she seeks — and abundantly finds — what she calls the “weird symmetry” between her subjects.
“They were both in their early 30s,” she writes. “They were both fiercely intelligent. They both came from politically ambitious families. They had both been tossed about among Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States ever since childhood.” She adds: “They shared a kind of warrior mentality. Both prized fearlessness. They were both rebels.”
Just as interestingly, she alights upon “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.”
The bulk of “Wanted Women” is sturdy, well-reported, boots-on-the-ground biography. Ms. Scroggins moves through these women’s lives, seizing on piquant details. Thus we find Ms. Hirsi Ali as a young woman in Nairobi, where her family had moved, devouring Western writers from Dostoyevsky to Jacqueline Susann and thinking: “White people were always having these wonderful adventures that we couldn’t have, either because we weren’t allowed or because we couldn’t afford to.”
We witness Ms. Siddiqui throwing herself into volunteer work at M.I.T.’s Public Service Center, where she twice won its award for her efforts. “They couldn’t award me any more,” she said, “because two times was the limit for one person.”
As “Wanted Women” progresses, following these women is like watching two deciduous trees in an arboretum: while one soars and bends toward the light, the other shrivels and grows stunted. Ms. Hirsi Ali makes her way to the Netherlands and revels in that country’s freedoms. Ms. Siddiqui becomes more and more devout, rejecting drink and dance and music and movies, and pinning her black veil so that only her eyes are visible.
A gifted speaker, Ms. Siddiqui becomes an important fund-raiser for Islamic groups with links to Al Qaeda. She ultimately marries into the family of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks. In 2010 she was sentenced to 86 years in prison for, while in captivity, the attempted murder and assault of United States personnel.
It is to Ms. Scroggins’s credit that this book is vastly more multidimensional than it at might first seem to be. She works hard to make both women come alive, and to both she is to some degree sympathetic. This book’s interwoven narratives allow her to strike chords that might otherwise have gone unstruck.
Yet by its second half “Wanted Women” becomes a rowdy assault on Ms. Hirsi Ali, whom Ms. Scroggins accuses of being imperious, deceitful, egomaniacal and divisive, of whipping up racial hatred through her unsubtle criticism of Islam. She swings lower, pointing out that Ms. Hirsi Ali used a ghostwriter and visited an “expensive hairdresser” to straighten her hair. She notes that Ms. Hirsi Ali supported the American-led invasion of Iraq, and that she has fallen in with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing research center.
She comes close to laying the slaughter last year, by a lone gunman, of those 77 young Labor Party campers and others in Norway, at Ms. Hirsi Ali’s feet. She notes that the killer’s manifesto proposed Ms. Hirsi Ali for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ms. Scroggins’s portrait of Ms. Hirsi Ali is eye-opening, and important. Her punches mostly land. She is especially good on how Ms. Hirsi Ali made it “possible to appeal to the Dutch xenophobic vote in a socially acceptable way.” She is persuasive on how East and West will need voices of reconciliation, not merely stern condemnation.
But the portrait of Ms. Hirsi Ali is frequently so one-sided that the author seems nearly as needlessly combative and complexity-free as she claims Ms. Hirsi Ali has been. This sense is underscored in a narrative that compares Ms. Hirsi Ali’s life to that of a woman who, Ms. Scroggins writes, “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.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a complicated and imperfect person. But her fights have employed words and an attempt at reasoned debate, while Ms. Siddiqui left those things, and civilization, behind. It is possible to appreciate both burkas and bikinis and still wonder why this book’s sympathies seem to be with the woman who hoped to speak through the most destructive weaponry available.
A version of this review appeared in print on January 16, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Warriors On 2 Sides Of Militant Islam.
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FOCUS ONPolicy Paper: Fairly Trading the World’s Timber
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Wanted Women: A Political Salon with Deborah Scroggins
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 – 6:30pm
Wanted Women: A Political Salon with Deborah Scroggins, author of Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui
Moderated by Patricia DeGennaroJanuary 17, 2012, 6:30pm
This event is by invitation only.With special thanks to the Heinrich Böll Foundation for supporting the Political Salon
Western conservatives have embraced Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician and intellectual, for her scathing criticisms of Islam. Aafia Siddiqui, a middle-class Pakistani student at MIT, joined the circles of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and received an 86-year prison sentence for trying to kill US personnel who came to interview her after she was captured in Afghanistan. The new book Wanted Women focuses on the radical choices of these two women who followed very different paths at the nexus of Islam and women’s rights in the defining conflict of our time: the battle between fundamentalist Islam and the West. Moderated by Patricia DeGennaro, this Political Salon with author Deborah Scroggins raises challenging questions about loyalties, culture, security, human rights, and freedom of expression.
Wanted Women will be on sale at the event.
About the Author:
Speaker Deborah Scroggins is a journalist with over twenty years of reporting experience. She is the author of Emma’s War, which was translated into ten languages and won the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. She has written for Vogue, Granta, the Nation, the Sunday Times Magazine, and other publications, and has won two Overseas Press Club awards, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as a foreign correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was named Georgia Author of the Year by the Georgia Writer’s Association. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.
About the Moderator:
World Policy Institute Senior Fellow Patricia (Tricia) DeGennaro is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Department of Politics where she teaches a course on international security. In addition to her work as a professor, she is a subject matter expert for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command Center for Intelligence. She is an expert commentator for CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, BBC, and various nationally and internationally syndicated radio programs. DeGennaro is also a regular columnist for the Huffington Post.
About the Sponsors:
The World Policy Institute, a non-partisan global think tank, engages fresh ideas and new voices from around the world to address critical shared challenges. WPI’s Fellows program, regular public and private events, policy development, media activities, and flagship World Policy Journal provide a forum for solution-focused policy analysis and debate. It seeks and promotes policy solutions in support of an inclusive and sustainable global market economy, effective global governance, and broadened security strategies.
The Political Salon, organized by Steve Sokol since 2003 to promote dialogue among the next generation of leaders in business, policy, and the media, regularly convenes a diverse group of young professionals to discuss a range of foreign policy issues and global affairs. Attendees are diverse in terms of nationality, profession, and political persuasion.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a Germany-based international policy network focused on sustainability, democracy and human rights, and self-determination and justice. Its various initiatives place particular emphasis on gender democracy, equal rights for cultural and ethnic minorities, the social and political participation of immigrants, and the promotion of non-violent and proactive peace policies.
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Dear Deborah Scroggins: Ouch.
I spent the weekend and part of my week curled up on a couch, drinking litres of citrus juice and eating the peculiar things one eats when one is too sick to assemble reasonable sustenance for oneself: a fifth of a canister of Belgian-made “Texas Barbecue” Pringles, an apple, week-old bread. To occupy myself as I recover from this cold (a strangely titled affliction, given that it’s 85 degrees (29 Celsius) outside), I’ve been noveling and reading Emma’s War, the true story of a young, passionate British aid worker who married Sudanese warlord Riek Machar in 1991.I admit that I know very little about Africa — I’ve spent a combined total of less than three months on the continent, all within five hours of Kampala. Other than the content of the handful of books I’ve read and a couple of courses I took in college, the little I do know comes from discussions with other students and activists, my own research and interactions with Ugandans. Most of this knowledge is limited to the Great Lakes region and filtered through the lens of the LRA conflict in northern Uganda.
I’ve spent the last eighteen months seeing the Sudan People’s Liberation Army as a single, unified movement in southern Sudan, fighting against the cruel, genocidal Islamic government and battling LRA rebels who cross the border to obtain supplies from Khartoum. I’ve heard that “Museveni backs the SPLA and al-Bashir backs the LRA” and accepted the alarmingly prevalent (among college-aged activists) logic that because the LRA are obviously the “bad rebels,” the SPLA must be the “good rebels.” The recent peace talks in Juba, coordinated by Machar himself, have served as even further proof that the SPLA is “on our side.”
Eeep.
I know that no single book should be taken as a definitive source for information, but to author Deborah Scroggins I say: wow. I’m ashamed that, despite recognizing the complexity of the conflict(s) in Uganda and having worked for organizations that acknowledge and are wrestling with the problem of developing a comprehensive, holistic approach to national reconciliation and rebuilding in such a fractured social, political and economic environment, I have been so persistently, unquestioningly, ridiculously naïve.
I won’t attempt to explain the multiple political, religious, ethnic and economic conflicts that have been torturing Sudan over the last several decades here, nor will I try to describe the influence of international actors ranging from Chevron to the UN to Osama bin-Laden — such an effort would require much more space than I have and is beyond my capacity and authority. I will say that this weekend has been an invaluable lesson in the need to constantly re-evaluate my perceptions of what’s going on in the world around me and to strive to seek out and examine the complexities of not only the particular issue on which I focus but of the surrounding conflicts and regions and of both local and international actors. I realize I may be preaching to the choir, and for those of you who started with Texas Barbecue Pringles and ended here and feel like that’sseven minutes of your life you’ll never get back, I apologize. Still, I wanted to offer up what I’ve learned, if only to remind myself that there is still so much about this place I don’t know.Labels: conflict, northern uganda
posted on 11/16/2006 · 1 comments
1 Comments:
Deborah Scroggins did an incredible job of researching and putting together massive amounts of information–much of it based on firsthand accounts. My hat’s off to her! And, like you, I came away bewildered by the complexity of the issues, the fraility of the notions of good and evil, and the almost impossible challenge of bringing peace and stability to this region.
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Rosalie, at July 28, 2009 4:32 PM
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Deborah Scroggins: Beyond Darfur there is the plight of southern Sudan
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“Don’t Look Away Now” was the rallying cry at the Day for Darfur events held around the world last month. But the trouble with Sudan – and Darfur is still part of Sudan – is that as soon as you focus on one crisis, another one breaks out somewhere else.
I met my first refugees from Sudan’s wars almost 20 years ago. Listening recently to women from Darfur and Chad tell of being raped, of watching their husbands and children being murdered before their eyes, all I could think was how sickeningly familiar their stories were.
Sudan’s refugees have been telling the same stories for a long time because their misery stems from the same root: the tactic whereby successive Sudanese governments have armed favored tribes and encouraged them to attack rebellious tribes.
The tactic itself is part of a centuries-old pattern in which the Arabised tribes living near Khartoum along the Nile have dominated and exploited the peoples of the country’s periphery, who have in turn periodically risen up in violent revolt. One has only to read General Charles Gordon’s diaries to recognise today’s Sudan in his 19th-century descriptions of Darfur’s piles of skulls.
In Gordon’s day, slaves and ivory were the loot. Today the loot is oil, gas, and well-watered land. As the stakes have grown and the weapons improved, the slaughter has intensified. Until two years ago, southern Sudan was the scene of a much longer and even bloodier war than the one in Darfur. About 2 million southerners died in it; an additional 4 million were driven from their homes. After years of negotiation and mighty international pressure, Khartoum and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) agreed to divide the south’s oil wealth between them and to hold nationwide elections in 2009 and a referendum on independence for the south in 2011.
The north-south peace talks were still under way when the Darfur rebellion broke out in 2003. One of the reasons it did is the lesson the Darfur rebels drew from the southern war. This was that only by fighting could they win a bigger share of money and power from the Khartoum elite.
By the time the south signed its agreement with the north on 1 January 2005, the diplomats who had worked so hard to bring it about were in no mood to celebrate. In a predictably murderous response to the Darfur revolt, the government had set mostly Arab militias on civilians from the mostly African tribes accused of sympathising with it. Darfur was ablaze and roughly 200,000 people were dead.
Outraged Western activists launched a campaign to save Darfur. The campaign has become the biggest African cause célèbre since the anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980s. Without the political pressure and media attention that it has garnered, it’s doubtful whether the Sudanese government would have allowed relief agencies to mount the massive humanitarian effort that currently keeps some 2.5 million Darfurians alive. It’s also doubtful that the UN Security Council would have authorised an additional 19,000 UN peacekeepers to join the 7,000 African Union soldiers on the ground in Darfur next year.
The problem is that, while all eyes have been trained on Darfur, the armed men who thrive on Sudan’s conflicts have been setting fires elsewhere. Only a few weeks after the Day for Darfur was over, the SPLM quit the national government over what it said was Khartoum’s failure to implement the 2005 peace agreement. Salva Kiir, the president of Sudan’s semi-autonomous southern region, had been warning before the walkout that the south’s deal with the government was coming undone, and that the country was in danger of reverting to full-scale war.
Southerners complain that the Government has refused to remove troops from the southern oilfields, has missed the deadline to begin a national census leading to the planned elections, and has rejected the ruling of a commission on the fate of oil-rich Abyei. Others say that political figures on all sides are looking for opportunities to avoid a vote that would put their power at risk.
The breakdown of the southern peace agreement almost certainly has doomed whatever hopes were left for the Darfur peace talks scheduled to open tomorrow. Seven of Darfur’s rebel groups, including the two largest factions of the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement, have pulled out of the talks. Instead, the Darfur rebels have been meeting with the SPLM in the southern capital of Juba. SPLA officials have said they could form an alliance with the Darfurians that would render Sudan “ungovernable”. The JEM gave a graphic illustration of the point last week when they attacked an oil field and kidnapped two oil workers.
If war breaks out again in the heavily armed south, there’s no telling how much killing could go on or how far it would spread. Perhaps even more important, if the 2009 elections are cancelled, all Sudanese civilians would lose their best chance in decades of reversing the destructive patterns that have doomed the country to endless wars.
By all means, don’t look away now from Darfur – but try not to lose sight of the big picture either.
Deborah Scroggins is the author of ‘Emma’s War’ (Harper Collins), which tells the story of a British aid worker who married a southern Sudanese rebel, and is now being made into a film
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Dwight Garner’s Revisionist Ignorance: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
– January 16, 2012Posted in: garner-dwight, hirsi-ali-ayaan, scroggins-deborah
In the January 15, 2012 edition of The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviewed Deborah Scroggins’s Wanted Women — a dual biography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui — and leveled some irresponsible, reckless, and highly misleading charges at the book’s author. Accusing Scroggins of “a rowdy assault on Ms. Hirsi Ali,” Garner set forth a litany of misleading modifiers at Scroggins, claiming that she had accused Hirsi Ali of “being imperious, deceitful, egomaniacal and divisive, of whipping up racial hatred through her unsubtle criticism of Islam.”
The problem with Garner’s attack is that he has failed to dredge up any significant facts to support his foolhardy fulminations even as he has simultaneously omitted two key points in the record: (1) that Hirsi Ali lied about her asylum application, yet used this story to garner sympathy and eventually earn a Parliament seat in the Netherlands to promote her over-the-top attacks on Islam (motivated by a legitimate concern for radical Islam’s oppression of women which quickly grew to subsume considerations of Islamic pluralism: a peaceful pluralistic option that doesn’t work the first time doesn’t necessarily have to be thrown out with the bathwater) and (2) that Hirsi Ali demanded costly and possibly unreasonable overseas security while she was in the United States. (In overlooking the second point, Garner slams Scroggins by claiming that she “swings lower” in pointing out that Hirsi Ali “visited an ‘expensive hairdresser’ to straighten her hair.” As Development Cooperation Minister Bert Koenders stated at the time, “Hirsi Ali is protected in the Netherlands. She herself has chosen to go to the U.S.” It’s no surprise that Garner, fixated like a sad middle-aged man on Hirsi Ali’s looks rather than the vital crux of her actions, would be more interested in Hirsi Ali’s minor image-conscious offenses rather than her quite serious efforts to milk money from the likes of Nicholas Sarkozy and Benoit Hamon — the latter involving the unsuccessful establishment of a 50-million-Euro security detail. As Scroggins observes, Hirsi Ali’s appeals to various governments were futile. She returned to professional speaking with her tail between her legs, factoring the security costs into her lecture fees, before the Foundation for Freedom of Expression was established, in part, to solve the money problem.)
A more competent reader than Garner would easily comprehend that, in asking critical questions of Hirsi Ali, Scroggins is considering the need for free expression (which would include the 2004 film, Submission, which Hirsi Ali wrote for Theo van Gogh and resulted in van Gogh’s barbaric murder — another key fact elided from Garner’s review) along with the impact of unfettered words. None of Scroggins’s investigations state or implicate that Hirsi Ali should be silenced. But if a prominent figure is promoting Muslim liberation within Enlightenment values, shouldn’t the evolution of these thoughts be examined? Bear in mind that, in her Dutch political career, Hirsi Ali abandoned the Labor Party to join the more conservative VVD, viewed in the Netherlands as the “party of businessmen.” In 2003, as a member of Parliament, Hirsi Ali called Mohammed a “perverse tyrant.” And her belligerence didn’t stop with invective. As Hirsi Ali confirmed in a 2007 interview, she hoped to abolish Article 23 of the Dutch Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of education, and sought to close down all Muslim schools — even as she refused to consider reports which “emphatically stated that Islamic schools are no cause for alarm,” with most maintaining an open attitude towards Dutch society. And as she revealed in her book Infidel, Hirsi Ali’s hard-line stance against basic rights was often predicated on specious work experience:
I had also proposed dramatically reducing unemployment benefits and abolishing the minimum wage. From my experience as a translator with welfare cases, I knew that easy access to generous unemployment benefits leads to a poverty trap: people in Holland often make more money from welfare than they would in actual jobs. Everyone told me these ideas were far too right wing — meaning that they would lead to a society polarized between wealthy and poor, teeming with beggars and very rich people, with lots of violence and exploitation.
All of these facts are plainly stated in Scroggins’s book and are helpfully backed up by endnotes (many of which I have consulted for this piece). Scroggins’s book is a welcome reconsideration (rather than an attack) of a complicated individual who charmed the pants off many intellectual figures. Consider how Anne Applebaum (“a Muslim immigrant who embraces Western culture with the excitement of the convert” — a remarkably rose-tinted summation), Christopher Hitchens (“calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected” — but not moderate Muslim schools), and Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (“one of the most poised, intelligent, and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience” — but not when it comes to freedom of religion, even when separate from state) all proved mostly unwilling to perceive any flaws in their cherished heroine. Is Hirsi Ali’s Manichean ultimatum between Islam and liberation tenable? Are all strands of Islam radical, dangerous, and anti-Semitic? Isn’t the truth more subtle and less one-sided? These are the questions which Scroggins’s book raises in examining two significant figures.
Garner has chosen to simplify these very important issues, reducing them to the muddled and tendentious viewpoint of a country bumpkin incapable of comprehending the other side of imperialism. He cannot seem to see how extreme fears of Muslims (like any extreme hate, including radical Islam) can produce figures like Geert Wilders or, even deadlier, Anders Behring Breivik (Garner suggests that Scroggins has laid the Breivik association “at Ms. Hirsi Ali’s feet” when she is merely pointing out that Breivik believed she should win the Nobel Peace prize). These intricate concerns require more than cheap dualities. They require serious thinkers, not suburban burnouts whose view beyond Levittown isn’t altogether different from a Helen Bannerman vista.
About Edward Champion
Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
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The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (Bat Segundo interview with Murphy)
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‘Wanted Women,’ ‘Night Swimm’ ‘The Vineyard at the End of the World’
The fine print
WANTED WOMEN:
Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui
By Deborah Scroggins
Harper, 539 pp., illustrated, $27.99
This dual biography follows two Muslim women, both brilliant and restless, whose lives led them toward radically different places. For author Deborah Scroggins, Somali-born Dutch writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pakistani-born, US-educated Aafia Siddiqui are “opposites, yet related.’’ Each gained fame (or infamy) for how she forged an identity and purpose in the heated conflicts between Islam and the West: one a celebrity activist, the other a FBI most-wanted terror suspect. Both, Scroggins says, were rebels, “though Ayaan rebelled against Islam while Aafia said she rebelled to serve Islam more completely.’’ While the parallels are fascinating, the book’s strength is in its clear-eyed yet sympathetic storytelling. Somehow Scroggins manages to convert a mountain of research into a fast-paced, truly gripping pair of stories.
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Both women were born into families marked by political and religious activism, but their early lives differed remarkably. Aafia grew up in a secure family, a carefully raised daughter whose powerhouse mother encouraged her academic ambitions. While in college at MIT and graduate school at Brandeis, she was seen by fellow students and faculty as smart, driven, pleasant (though her insistence on inserting tenets of fundamentalist Islam into scientific papers put off some instructors, and one Jewish professor said she repeatedly tried to convert him). Off-campus, she was an organizer and speaker for radical Islamist groups, activities that frightened her first husband, a Pakistani medical student with no interest in jihad. By contrast, Ayaan’s chaotic childhood left her, she later said, a teenager who was “angry at everyone and everything.’’ Arriving in the West as a refugee, she embraced life in her adopted Netherlands. Her work as a Somali-Dutch translator thrust her into the burgeoning debate over Muslim immigration, where Ayaan’s willingness to criticize Islam – especially for its treatment of women – made her a darling, especially among American neoconservatives. While Ayaan tended to “wrap her calls for the liberation of Muslims in the banner of the Enlightenment,’’ critics complained that this line of rhetoric, particularly when it called for the closing of Muslim schools, for instance, “seemed to be turning the language of feminism and the Enlightenment inside out.’’
NIGHT SWIM
By Jessica Keener
Fiction Studio, 284 pp., paperback, $13.95
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Photo by David McWilliamsMuslim Women’s Rights: Two Views: PW Talks with Deborah Scroggins
By Jordan Foster
Oct 14, 2011
| Reader Comments 3 In Wanted Women, Deborah Scroggins explores conflict in the Islamic world through the experiences of two fascinating and very different women .
Both Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui are charismatic but not necessarily sympathetic figures for American readers. Did this worry you during the writing process?
Yes, it did. When I started out, I thought Hirsi Ali would be the straightforward heroine and Siddiqui the villain. But I discovered that they were just too human to be pigeonholed. Hirsi Ali, who has been portrayed as an icon of women’s rights, bravery, and even Western civilization, turned out to have some interesting flaws, and a lot of the Joan of Arc rhetoric about her turned out to be credulous, hysterical, and sometimes quite cynical. Even Siddiqui—the icon of an increasingly blind Islamism—had a weirdly idealistic streak as well as a delusional streak.
The “war on terror” has become shorthand for our climate of fear post-9/11. What strategies did you use to go deeper than the buzzwords?
My strategy was simply to follow the two women’s stories wherever they led. Hirsi Ali, for instance, ended up offending millions not so much because she advocated women’s rights as because she made hostile and ignorant generalizations about Islam and Muslims. And Siddiqui was not a helpless victim of mistaken identity, as millions of Pakistanis and others believe to this day, and as I once thought might be true. She was a full-blown supporter of religious war and a repulsive anti-Semite. So Hirsi Ali’s Muslim critics weren’t just crazed misogynists and the U.S. was correct to suspect Siddiqui of being a major security threat.
What do you want readers to take away from your book, particularly about the differences between the religion of Islam and political Islam?
We make a terrible mistake when we lump the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims into the same ideological box. In particular, we need to distinguish between Islam the religion, and Islamism the political ideology that calls for creating states based on Islamic religious law. Even within Islamism there are important shades of belief, with the violent jihadis on the extreme fringe. When we insist they’re essentially the same, as both Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui often did, we push ordinary Muslims into the arms of our enemies.
Hirsi Ali made a name for herself in Holland’s Parliament before coming to the United States following revelations that she lied on her asylum application. Why do you think the anti-immigration American right welcomed her?
Hirsi Ali’s admirers on the right accept her story that she was trying to escape a forced marriage and feared that her family might track her down. They don’t know or care about the evidence that she came to the West like millions of other illegal immigrants—because she wanted choices and opportunities she didn’t have in Africa—and that she lied because that was the only way she could stay in Holland. They don’t want to think about the contradictions in her story because then it wouldn’t be a simple parable about a young woman fleeing evil Islam only to be liberated by the West.
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Actually, Garner’s review of the Scroggins book — and her treatment of Hirsi Ali — is more balanced and more positive than you make out here. E.g., “Ms. Scroggins’s portrait of Ms. Hirsi Ali is eye-opening, and important. Her punches mostly land. She is especially good on how Ms. Hirsi Ali made it ‘possible to appeal to the Dutch xenophobic vote in a sociallya cceptable way’. She is persuasive on how East and West will need voices of reconciliation, not merely stern condemnation.”