Many people in the West will not have known the name Aafia Siddiqui until the terrible incident at a Texas synagogue earlier this month, when the British terrorist Malik Faisal Akram asked to speak to his “sister” Aafia and demanded her release, before being shot dead by US police.
But I, along with thousands of my generation, have known Aafia’s name for 30 years. During the early to mid-1990s, I was on an international Muslim students’ email list, dominated by Islamists, with Aafia Siddiqui, then a student at MIT. A close British friend of mine was also studying for his PhD at MIT at the same time and knew her personally. His recollections of her, he once told me, were that she was very active in da’wah (proselytising for Islam), handing out free Qur’an translations on campus. My own recollections of her via electronic media are that of a student activist, who posted many times per week to an audience of thousands.
These recollections are borne out by rare footage of one of her Islamic talks from her student activist days in 1991. This talk reveals someone intelligent, articulate and well-versed in Islamic tradition, mixed with Islamist utopian ideals, coming from an erudite Pakistani family. But by the mid-1990s, her views became firmly jihadist: she wrote several times on our online forum that military jihad was the main solution to Muslim problems worldwide. This was at the time of the Bosnian war, and several years before 9/11, so the danger of such views was not readily apparent.
The next time I heard her name was in 2003, when I was teaching at a university in Pakistan. Dr Aafia, for she had completed her PhD in the US by this time, had gone missing with her children in Pakistan, and the national newspapers were reporting that she had been arrested by the country’s intelligence services and handed over to the US, which was fighting Al-Qaeda in neighbouring Afghanistan. I had known her name for a decade, but it was clearly new to many Pakistanis: a medic friend, who had helped set up an Islamic primary school in Islamabad, told me that she had met him in Karachi, only days before her disappearance: she had offered to write a modern primary-to-secondary Islamic school curriculum for a range of subjects, with Qur’anic verses introduced in relation to every major topic. “Sounds just like Aafia,” I remember thinking.
Between 2003 and 2008, Aafia’s name became more widely-known in Pakistan and in Islamist circles, especially after it was alleged that she was being tortured at the US-run Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. This was one theory about her whereabouts during this time: another was that she was on the run in hiding with an Al-Qaeda family, under the watchful eye of Pakistan’s intelligence services. Good writeups of her story, based on interviews with family, friends and other witnesses, were published by the Boston Globe and The Guardian.
The US government says that Aafia has only been in their custody since 2008, when she was arrested by their forces in Afghanistan. She was convicted in the USA in 2010 and jailed for life. She is on record as shouting vicious, antisemitic abuse during her trial. Although her supporters might try to doubt the court records, such antisemitic sentiment is depressingly common in Islamist circles.
Aafia has increasingly become a cause celebre amongst Western & Pakistani Islamists: since her imprisonment in 2010, major UK islamist organisations have campaigned for her release. A relief convoy to Syria, one of many that were organised or infiltrated by jihadists, emblazoned her name on one of its trucks. During the 2010s, several UK student Islamic societies on campus organised a joint streaming of her 1991 talk via YouTube. ISIS tried to trade two of their Western captives for the release of Aafia. When this didn’t happen, they beheaded both the captives, including the journalist James Foley. After the Texas synagogue attack this week, leading UK sympathisers of Al-Qaeda and ISIS have repeated their calls for Aafia to be freed. In an incredible irony, the Obama administration had already offered a prisoner swap involving Aafia in 2012, only for this to be rejected by Pakistan. Pakistan then tried to revive this deal in 2019 under Imran Khan, but the Trump administration refused.
The adoption of Aafia as “daughter of the nation” (out of 100 million other Pakistani women & girls) should be contrasted with the demonization of Malala Yusufzai in Pakistan as some kind of Western agent because her story portrayed Pakistan and the Taliban in a bad light: apparently, nothing to do with the latter shooting a schoolgirl in the head! A Pakistani girl who wins the Nobel Peace Prize is a foreign agent, whilst “Lady Al-Qaeda” is the daughter of the nation!
There may be legitimate concerns about Aafia’s prison sentence being excessive, but these are a matter for the US and Pakistani governments, democracies, civil society and legal systems to resolve. A Briton targeting a US synagogue is symptomatic of several Islamist tropes:
First, a paranoid conspiracy theory that “the Jews” are behind many perceived injustices against Muslims. Secondly, the idea of the ummah as a transnational Islamist nation or brotherhood, the loyalty of whose members is only to each other. (This, incidentally, explains why Akram referred to Aafia as his “sister,” prompting much confusion.) Part of this transnational loyalty involves Islamists freeing fellow-Islamist prisoners everywhere.
In the aftermath of the Texas incident, Liz Truss spoke of “defending the rights and freedoms of our citizens.” To help prevent further such incidents, the British government, Muslim communities and civil society must do much more to assert modern values of citizenship, irrespective of faith, as against the divisive and tribalist Islamist interpretation of the ummah.
Usama Hasan (@drusamahasan) is Senior Analyst at the Institute for Global Change (@Institute_GC)
