The surviving footage of Aafia Siddiqui speaking at a Houston campus in the early 1990s carries, in retrospect, the quiet radiance of an artefact of a life on the brink of catastrophe. On the surface, the footage is unremarkable: the faint grain of a camcorder, the hum of a lecture hall, the composed rhythm of a young woman explaining an idea with the ease of someone fully immersed in the world of ideas. What grips the viewer is the haunting contrast between that ordinary scene and the violent disfigurement that would later engulf her life and the lives of her three young children.
She stands at the podium without hesitation, as if the structure around her is dependable and the future ahead is stable. Her voice is clear, firm, touched with the earnestness of a believer in the sanctity of truth, justice and human dignity. And there is a quiet irony in that clarity: a young Muslim woman speaking with conviction about dignity and moral order, unaware that her own life would one day be subjected to violations so total that they now cast a long, painful shadow over the sincerity captured in that moment.
As I watched her, a strange recognition stirred in me. I admired the scholar, yes, but I also felt a strong affection for the young activist mother who once campaigned tirelessly for Bosnia, gathered donations, wrote letters and moved with the urgency of someone who refused to stand still while others suffered. Before her disappearance from public life, she had the restless energy towards her nonprofit that offered faith-based support and educational services to the incarcerated. These were all glimmers of a person shaped by conviction, intellect, and a profound sense of communal duty.
Seen now, through the long shadow of what came after, the recording feels more like a testimony. It divulges a woman animated by purpose, standing at the edge of a story that none of us, least of all her, could have imagined would be rewritten by the darkest machinery of the age.
Like many ambitious immigrants in that era, after arriving in the US, she excelled with startling speed, gaining admission to MIT and later completing a doctorate in cognitive psychology at Brandeis. Her research focused on early childhood development. In every visible sense, she embodied the narrative America cherished about itself: she was, for a time, one of its proudest confirmations and belonged fully to the aspirational story the country liked to tell about itself.
That is precisely what lends the subsequent unraveling its almost surreal quality, Aafia’s life collided not only with extrajudicial abduction but with a far deeper reordering of the American security imagination that unfolded after September 2001, a moment in which entire communities found their ordinary social presence reinterpreted through a framework that increasingly treated Muslim visibility as a latent index of risk. The shift that absorbed her was the cumulative expression of an institutional logic whose foundations had been laid long before, as evidenced by the legal history traced in a 2024 brief by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Palestine Legal, which shows that the earliest federal uses of the term terrorism were already shaped by an anti-Palestinian orientation, beginning with the 1969 statute that restricted aid to Palestinian refugees and continuing with the 1987 congressional designation of the PLO as the first non-state terrorist organisation, thereby embedding a presumption of political volatility into the legal architecture that would later expand to encompass wider Arab and Muslim populations.
Over time, legal instruments initially crafted for foreign policy objectives in the Israel-Palestine context, most notably the material support framework, migrated into domestic governance and were adapted for use in policing, campus oversight, immigration adjudication, and the management of political expression, producing a system in which scholarly inquiry, linguistic fluency, or humanitarian engagement could be treated as suggestive indicators of alignment rather than as normal features of civic and intellectual life.
The consolidation of this system was further reinforced by the ecosystem mapped in a 2010 CBS investigation, which documented a well-funded network dedicated to producing narratives that framed Islam as a civilisational danger and cast Muslim civic participation as inherently suspect, creating a cultural climate that legitimised expansive surveillance and preemptive policing. Within this broader environment, Aafia’s case becomes illustrative of how contemporary security institutions operate, prioritising potential trajectory over demonstrated conduct and organising their assessments around predictive markers that treat identity, knowledge, and mobility as variables in a risk model. Consequently, the threshold for intervention is how easily an individual can be fit into a preexisting template of suspicion, creating a security logic in which individuals are handled through anticipatory judgments and in which ordinary civic behaviour can be treated as evidence of risk simply because it resembles an inherited narrative of threat.
Yet the American transformation was only one part of the story. In Pakistan, another machinery was turning, one shaped by the structural dependencies of a postcolonial militarised state. By the early 2000s, the military elite had entered into a transactional partnership with the United States, a relationship largely defined by asymmetry. Years of reliance on American military aid, weapons systems, and diplomatic protection had created a hierarchy of dependence in which the generals viewed Washington as a guarantor of regime longevity.
This arrangement would prove to be handsomely profitable. General Pervez Musharraf would later admit openly that hundreds of individuals were handed over to American intelligence in exchange for cash bounties. This was part of a political economy of counterterrorism shaped by the post-9/11 order in which human beings became currency, and cooperation became a reliable revenue stream for an authoritarian bureaucracy that was largely insulated from public scrutiny.
One can easily imagine that a woman of her moral intelligence would have grown disillusioned with the imperial theatre, perhaps even chosen to return home and raise her children on her own terms. That possibility alone was enough to draw suspicion, and it was exactly this ordinary independence that the security apparatus later recast as radicalism. None of it, imagined or alleged, warranted the disappearance, the violence, or the years that followed.
When she vanished in Karachi in March 2003 with her three young children, there was no warrant or confrontation. Neighbours watched as agents dragged her away, and although human rights organisations raised alarms within days, the state denied awareness. The absence of due process, the lack of transparency, and the denial itself were all affirmations of a deeply venal military state.
Over the next several years, that silence cracked only in scattered and uneven fragments, as Pakistani officials contradicted themselves and ministers occasionally allowed brief acknowledgements that she had, in fact, been taken into custody. The Senate Human Rights Committee eventually confirmed that she had been arrested in 2003, yet no government showed the willingness to pursue a full accounting, an effort that would have required confronting a long chain of complicity running through several agencies and political actors. And so the silence endured.
The most harrowing dimension of her disappearance was the fate of her children, each treated as a disposable unit within a system capable of erasing identities with chilling efficiency. Her infant son, Suleman, only six months old, vanished entirely; human rights reports state that he was killed during the abduction, his life extinguished before it had even begun. Her daughter, Maryam, who was three years old, was removed from her family and placed into an American household, her faith and identity overwritten through paperwork that reclassified her as an orphan. Her eldest child, Ahmed, who was six years old, was given a fabricated identity, transported to Afghanistan, and held in captivity for years with no knowledge of his life story. They would almost certainly have remained lost forever had it not been for circumstances that forced their stories back into the light. Together, their experiences reveal with devastating clarity how state apparatuses can reassign identities, redistribute bodies, and erase lives with little to no trace of their passage through its machinery.
Eventually, reports began to emerge of a Pakistani woman held in a solitary cell at Bagram Air Base, known among detainees as Prisoner 650. These accounts consistently described a woman kept entirely off the record, detained for extended periods without acknowledgment, and visibly carrying the effects of sustained physical and psychological abuse. Former detainees recalled hearing her call out for her children. They also noted that she frequently disappeared from her cell for long intervals and returned in a markedly weakened and distressed state. American personnel later confirmed the presence of such a detainee, and Afghan officials eventually acknowledged that a Pakistani woman matching her description had been held in Bagram during those years.
Her orchestrated reappearance in Ghazni in 2008 did not resolve these questions. Instead, it inaugurated a new narrative designed to eclipse the old one. The official story claimed that she appeared suddenly with weapons, confronted American soldiers, and attempted to fire on them. Yet the details strained belief. There were no fingerprints or ballistic evidence. Evidence of bullet holes predated that encounter but ultimately the story served its purpose. It recast her as an aggressor and erased, in the public imagination, the years of torture in Bagram, a notorious prison defined by the extralegal detention of thousands and coercive interrogation.
The trial that followed in New York cemented that erasure. The judge ruled that questions about her disappearance, her children, or any allegations of abuse were irrelevant. Her court-appointed attorneys, funded by the government, prevented her from testifying about her ordeal. She was wrongfully charged with attempted murder, yet her sentencing incorporated terrorism enhancements that produced an eighty-six-year term. The purpose of the sentencing was closure.
Her imprisonment at FMC Carswell carried forward the same conditions of erasure that had defined every stage of her oppression. Carswell, long known for staff abuse and systemic violations of inmate rights, placed her in extended solitary confinement, and requests for independent medical evaluation were dismissed. Lawyers who attempted to represent Aafia faced obstruction and letters that managed to reach her from supporters were filtered by officials.
Meanwhile, the country of her birth drifted between symbolic outrage and paralysis. Pakistan invoked her name at rallies and in parliamentary speeches as a symbol of national humiliation at the hands of a foreign power. Politicians called her the daughter of the nation. Yet this rhetoric concealed a stark contradiction: the same state that publicly claimed her, had been complicit in the events that led to her disappearance.
Even after Aafia’s conviction in the United States, as Pakistan’s actions amounted to symbolic gestures, Aafia’s lawyer Clive Stafford repeatedly explained that the United States was ready to consider repatriation if Pakistan submitted a formal, well-supported request at the end of the Biden presidency. Yet none was ever made. This inaction stems from a deep-seated fear. Any serious attempt to bring Aafia home would have reopened the unresolved question of her disappearance in 2003 and the domestic actors involved. For powerful institutions, allowing her to remain in custody was easier than confronting their own history and a rare moment of institutional honesty. Ambiguity functions as protection. As the political sociologist Charles Tilly famously wrote, “Power produces obscurity, because obscurity protects power.” By keeping her past unclear, the Pakistani government avoids revealing its entanglement in countless disappearances, torture, and perverting the course of justice for the innocent lives of its own citizens.
Through the years, Aafia’s story grew increasingly untenable. Testimonies continued to surface, documents continued to emerge, and the contradictions in the official accounts continue to widen. Her lawyer Stafford’s statements, supported by individuals from within intelligence and military circles, presented a coherent narrative of her abduction and secret detention. And still, Aafia’s case remains a thorn in Pakistan’s clandestine military complex, reappearing through legal petitions, online discussions, activist circles, and the restless memory of the Global Muslim imagination.
Today, Aafia Siddiqui demands more than sympathy; she demands recognition. For more than two decades, her devastating ordeal has oscillated between being deployed as sensationalising rhetoric and being abandoned through political inaction. Her story stands as a stark warning about the dangers of unchecked power and the precarity of those who find themselves in the direct path of state philosophies for whom justice appears somewhere between “normative rhetoric” and “non binding, impractical suggestion.” And in doing so, it forces a reckoning with a global order that permits such outcomes without a flicker of consequence. Aafia’s abandonment, by both the empire that violated her and the state that sold her, exposes a truth about the international order that is as disturbing today as it was on the day she disappeared.
A different but intimately connected tragedy becomes visible when one turns to Pakistan, which entered independence bearing institutions that had been crafted to preserve the interests of a distant empire rather than to cultivate justice-bearing institutions of its own. These institutions, despite the shift from colonial rule to national sovereignty, retained their hierarchical architecture without acquiring a corresponding ethic of public guardianship. A political class shaped by such an inheritance learned to measure its security externally.
Under these conditions, Aafia’s handover is not an aberration from some stable ethic of national dignity; it is the predictable outcome of a state that continues to operate on still-colonized scripts, reproducing the logic of muscle-memory-subservience.
Perhaps the most disheartening part of this story lies not in Washington or Islamabad but in the almost impeccably disciplined quiet that unfolded across Muslim-majority states. They are not, of course, custodians of every Muslim life. And yet, they routinely declare their commitment to Islamic values, often with a fluency that has perfected the habit of speaking in elevated moral platitudes, while cultivating expectations they rarely meet.
One of the strangest discoveries in writing this essay was realizing that the most substantial investigative account of Aafia Siddiqui’s life is Wanted Women by Deborah Scroggins, a book that deliberately pairs her story with that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for maximum impact. The two women share almost nothing in common, yet the book binds them together in a sensationalized narrative that has long surrounded Muslim women: lives turned into drama to satisfy a Western appetite for stories of extremism and victimhood. The fact that this remains the primary source on Aafia’s life is an indictment of our own intellectual landscape, a measure of how few Muslim thinkers, writers, or journalists have attempted a serious and comprehensive investigation that challenges the official narrative and tells her story on its own terms.
Aafia’s case does not so much indict the conscience of the community as it exposes a political reality that has settled in demanding nothing beyond its own performance. This endless parade of summits, conferences and ceremonious gatherings that reliably produce lengthy declarations on Islamic unity, declarations which, for all their emotional pitch and rhetorical flourish, are meticulously crafted to avoid generating the slightest operational burden on their signatories.
At a certain point in tracing Aafia’s story, the historical narrative begins to press against its own limits, and the events demand a framework capable of grasping not only what inflicted on her, but the moral conditions that allowed such a despicable outcome to unfold and continue with mechanical ease. Malek Bennabi argued that civilizations rarely collapse because of a sudden external blow; rather they are undone by a gradual erosion of the inner reflex that responds to injustice, that is a slow dulling of conscience marked by the toleration of small wrongs until larger violations no longer appear aberrant but natural. He diagnosed how societies drift from vigilance to indifference, and how injustice becomes possible because communities have already rehearsed their silence through countless smaller omissions and compromises.1
Al-Mawardi understood this long before the emergence of the modern state. Writing within a tradition that refused to detach political authority from moral responsibility, he defined rulership as an amanah, a public trust, whose purpose is “to guard the religion and to manage the affairs of this world.”2 This formulation establishes a moral horizon against which power is judged: guarding the religion anchors authority in an ethical order, while managing worldly affairs requires that this order be realized in the protection of the vulnerable and the prevention of injustice. When the weak are abandoned, the failure exposes not merely a lapse in administration but a deeper fracture in the purpose of rule, for it reveals that power has discovered it can overlook the vulnerable without consequence. Once that discovery settles in, the circle of lives treated as expendable expands quietly and almost imperceptibly, until impunity becomes the logic through which authority sustains itself and institutions cease to function as guardians of the public good, instead preserving their own survival even at the cost of those most easily cast aside.
Al-Ghazali approached this from a different angle, although he arrived at the same understanding with an equally sober realism. In Naṣīḥāt al-Mulūk he writes that “justice is the foundation upon which the world is built”3 and warns that “the state can endure unbelief, but it cannot endure injustice,”4 making justice the element that renders political life coherent. Disorder, for him, does not begin with visible breakdowns in authority. It begins when injustice becomes ordinary, when “the greatest harm is that which becomes familiar to people, so that their hearts no longer reject it,”5 and when wrongdoing settles into administrative routine. A society begins to unravel, he suggests, not when an external force overwhelms it, but when the public grows accustomed to violations that once would have interrupted the rhythm of their collective life.
All of these insights eventually gather around a single prophetic instruction that has, over time, been reduced to an ethical platitude, even though in its original force it constituted a complete political and civic ethic. Islamic jurisprudence is laden with concepts that give this directive legal weight: ḥisba (institutional oversight), dafʿ al-ẓulm (the obligation to prevent and remove injustice), rafʿ al-ḍarar and dar’ al-mafāsid (eliminating harm and preventing corruption), al-maṣlaḥa al-ʿāmma (the preservation of public welfare), and wilāyat al-maẓālim (the adjudication of grievances against officials). Taken together, they show that the prophetic command was understood as a discipline requiring communities to sense injustice before it became habit, to intervene even when harm seemed distant or politically costly, and to recognise that public life depended on the courage to stand between power and its transgressions. It rested on the truth that a community’s moral condition is reflected in its institutions, and that justice gains its meaning only when it is carried out as part of the responsibility God has entrusted to the believers.
Placed beside Aafia’s case, these teachings reveal with painful clarity that the machinery which consumed her did not arise suddenly, nor did it require extraordinary malice to function; it emerged in a world where the moral restraints that once governed political authority had been eroded long before she was disappeared, a reality in which institutions had grown accustomed to acting without the scrutiny that would have halted their excesses, and one in which the abandonment of the weak had already been normalized through countless smaller acts of indifference that paved the way for greater acts of violence.
It is against this bleak horizon, where systems perfect their indifference and communities adjust themselves to the unthinkable, that the small and stubborn traces of what survives in a human being become all the more arresting, for even within the walls built to silence her and within a machinery that sought to bury her, something in her refused to recede, a clarity of faith that continued to rise from depths where most would have lost the will to speak at all:
Prayers for patience, persevere
Above all, God, my heart’s revere
No matter if the storm’s severe
Persevere, persevere
Far as it seems, help is near
So long as God’s to me dear[…]
Aafia’s poem, written in incarceration, carries a truth that stands apart from the cruelty that closed in around her. Justice fashioned by humans falters, bends, and often collapses altogether. The justice of God however, does not. Her poem brings one back to that early footage in Houston. A young Muslim woman standing at a modest podium with a clear voice and proud belief in dignity and moral order. Rewatching her, one cannot avoid the recognition that had she been permitted the life she was building, she would be a proud 53-year-old woman today, with the wit and groundedness that comes with age. One can imagine her checking her phone for a message from her 23-year-old son Suleman who promises he will be at family dinner, before stepping onto the podium to deliver an eloquent speech, calling our generation to uphold God’s justice on earth claiming that the measure of our time will be judged by whether we recognize and speak on the forces that prey on the vulnerable.
Photo by Ye Jinghan on Unsplash
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Works cited:
- Ghennam, 2018 [↩]
- Al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyyah, pg. 5 [↩]
- Al-Ghazali, Naṣīḥāt al-Mulūk, pg. 79 [↩]
- Ibid, pg. 82 [↩]
- Ibid, pg. 91 [↩]
Hibatuallah Bensaid
Bensaid holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from Ibn Haldun University. A mother and freelance editor, she is deeply interested in the sociology of religion, processes of social change, the moral dimensions of sustainability, governance, and institutional development.
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