Aafia Siddiqui’s name may not be known to most people, but to some she has been notorious for thirty years
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.
