Bastian confirmed that he and Arfan Bhatti had arranged the demonstration and elaborated on his relationship to his infamous co-arranger. “The accused perceives it as special to be together with Bhatti and in making the video he had hoped to gain his recognition. The accused hoped that people would think he was cool. He realizes how idiotic this sounds but the accused was bullied while growing up and thinks this might explain it.”
Bastian denied having threatened anyone, and when he was asked what he meant by “Oh, Allah, destroy them and let it be painful!” he answered “that, like, Allah would punish them ones and get them out of Norway … out of Afghanistan.”
“Who are ‘them ones’?” his interviewer asked.
“Norwegian soldiers killing innocent people.”
“How would they be punished?”
“By a fever or something, or … dunno … illness, something that would make them leave in any case.”
With regard to the question of how he had chosen the people in the video, he replied that he had picked Prime Minister Stoltenberg “solely on account of the NATO symbol in the background.” He had no idea who the crown prince was, he said, and had “only seen him as a man in a photograph greeting a Norwegian soldier in Afghanistan.” He said he thought the foreign minister was a general or had “something to do with the army.”
By “destroy them,” he had meant that he hoped the soldiers would suffer psychological problems upon returning home.
* * *
The type of guys Aisha admired were all on the PST watchlist, a list Islam Net did not want to be included on.
The board discussed her case. Any greater focus on the niqab issue at the moment would only whet critics’ appetites; in the worst case, they feared, it could lead to a niqab ban. Then Aisha would be damaging both “the situation of the niqab and of Muslims.” The board voted not to publicly support Aisha.
Later Fahad Qureshi took Aisha aside. “It’s sad you’re at the receiving end of so much criticism,” he told her. “May the man who pulled off your veil get his rightful punishment.” But Norway was not ready for the niqab, he explained, Norwegians did not accept people who were different. Inshallah their attitude would soon become more inclusive.
At home, the trouble continued. The family lived in a small basement apartment in Bærum. Aisha and her sisters were at their wits’ end. One night, one of them was pleading, tearfully, with their parents to stop arguing; when her father pushed her aside and stormed out, she lost her temper. She swept everything on the table onto the floor, followed by everything on the shelves and on the worktops. “I’m only doing the same as Dad!” she shouted. She smashed the TV and her father’s cameras. She flung his laptop at the wall and then threw everything into a pile.
When their father came home, all hell broke loose. He beat his daughter around the head several times, then pushed her mother onto the floor and kicked her. One of the sisters bit his hand to stop him from hitting them. Aisha took the three youngest sisters into another room, locked the door, and phoned the police. A patrol car arrived, arrested their father, and charged him with assault. It led to a fresh meeting at the Mediation Service. “He has promised not to lay his hands on his wife and children,” the report drily stated. The father moved out and the parents separated. Following one more violent episode, a restraining order was taken out against the father in the spring of 2012. Aisha vowed never to see him again.
Beatings, intimidation, fear. She had switched off her emotions in order to survive. Once she was free of her father’s influence, she was eager to fill the void with something beautiful, something strong, something of her own.
* * *
Men wearing the clothing of the Prophet caught Aisha’s attention. Who could be more dependable and true than a man who followed Muhammad?
The bearded men who had turned up at the Peace Conference did not have a solid hierarchical organization with positions and membership lists, but they nominated a leader—emir—and a ruling council—shura. They wanted Norway to become an Islamic state governed by sharia, but they disagreed on how best to achieve that goal. For the time being they made do with preaching on the streets and demonstrations.
There was no ideological guiding light to decide on the matter in dispute, but there were several strong personalities who ruled along the same lines as in gang culture, employing bonds of loyalty. The group often bickered about theology, which the open discussions online testified to. The language could appear somewhat schizophrenic, neofundamentalism mixed with criminal code and gangster slang.
Some immersed themselves in the Koran. Study circles were held at a mosque in Grønland until the religious leader there, fearing problems with the authorities, asked them to leave. They borrowed other premises or met at one another’s homes.
When the videomaker Bastian Vasquez was released from custody, Arfan Bhatti was there to pick him up. The convert with the Catholic background was not an academic Islamist and reading frustrated him. “This isn’t the time to dust off old books, it’s the time for action,” he wrote in an e-mail to another in the group after having sneered his way through a meeting. It was the first and last study circle the convert would attend. With his video he had accomplished part of his goal—recognition from Arfan Bhatti. The two of them now hung out together almost every day.
While some in the milieu attempted to be scholarly, others preferred to discuss the use of terror. Following the reprinting of the Muhammad cartoons in Norwegian newspapers and in protest against Norwegian military involvement in Afghanistan, the most militant believed that attacks against targets in Norway were legitimate. The killing of Muslims in other parts of the world had to be avenged.
An eye for an eye,
