There were several parts to her plan.
“I’m contacting you on behalf of a friend,” Aisha wrote. “She is very religious and wishes to know if you would be interested in marriage. She is willing to become your second wife.”
Yes, indeed, Bhatti was interested in marriage.
What to do next? Aisha wondered. She asked Dilal.
“I suppose you have to show up as that friend on your own e-mail address,” Dilal suggested. “But are you sure he is the one you want?”
Aisha had never been so sure of anything.
Arfan Bhatti’s criminal career had begun at the age of thirteen, when he joined the gang Young Guns. When he was fifteen, he stabbed a shop owner in central Oslo with a kitchen knife after having hit him over the head with a bottle. For that, he received his first conviction. His boyhood years were spent between primary school in Norway and stays with his extended family in Pakistan. Child Welfare took increasing care of him and he was placed in an institution. His teenage years were characterized by gang criminality and time spent in and out of prison. He acquired a reputation in Oslo for violent extortion, and at twenty-one he was placed under preventative detention for having shot a person during debt collection. The court-appointed psychiatrist, Berthold Grünfeld, determined that he had “insufficiently developed mental capacities,” and in two later court cases the experts diagnosed an “antisocial personality disorder.” He demonstrated “deficiency in his sense of responsibility and respect for social norms and obligations, apathy toward the feelings of others and the absence of an ability to feel guilt.”
Aisha pretended she’d been contacted by her fictitious alter ego and got back in touch with Arfan as herself. They began chatting on Facebook. They exchanged messages and talked on the telephone. She had seen him at the demonstration in January, which he had attended with his little sons in tow. He had never seen her and she offered to send him a picture. He refused. He wanted things to proceed in the proper way, in the Islamic way.
Dilal gave her friend some well-intentioned advice to facilitate Arfan falling for her.
“You have to do yourself up, Aisha. Put on some makeup. Fix your hair. Buy some nicer clothes!”
Beneath all the layers of veils, Aisha usually wore sweaters and loose-fitting jogging pants. Dilal felt obliged to offer some instruction: “Remember, you are going to remove your niqab when the two of you are alone together!”
“Allah doesn’t see the exterior, only what is within,” Aisha replied.
“But you aren’t marrying Allah!”
“Don’t blaspheme!”
“Some deodorant, or perfume even, and you should—”
“That is haram,” Aisha responded.
* * *
Aisha came in through the women’s door. Arfan strode in the main entrance. He was dressed in traditional Pakistani garb. She wore a niqab. He had procured a man to conduct the marriage ceremony, as well as two witnesses and a guardian—a wali—for her, a well-known Islamist belonging to the old guard.
It was a nikah marriage, one conducted according to Muslim law.
A couple of minutes later they were husband and wife.
The missed calls from her mother had accumulated on her telephone. She knew that her mother would never have gone along with her marrying Bhatti. She had confided only in her closest friends. Eventually, while sitting beside one of Norway’s most feared men in the passenger seat of the car en route to her honeymoon, she called her mother back and informed her she was on the way up the mountains with her husband.
She did not bother to tell her father. He later heard about the marriage via an acquaintance.
The honeymoon was to be spent in Hafjell, a posh ski resort a few hours’ drive north of Oslo where downhill skiing events had been held during the Winter Olympics of 1994. Arfan had rented a cabin. The newlyweds stopped along the way to buy food. They were really going to have a fine time of it.
When they got to the cabin, Aisha took off her veils.
* * *
The honeymoon was a disaster. In the car on the way home they scarcely exchanged a word.
The Islamist had tired of her almost immediately. Back in Oslo, Aisha lay on the sofa in their apartment in Stovner in the eastern suburbs and cried. Arfan had told her he regretted the marriage, he was not attracted to her. “You’re not how I thought you’d be,” was all he said.
“What will I do?” she sobbed over the telephone.
Dilal was at a loss for ideas, searching her repertoire.
“What about dolling yourself up a little?”
Aisha’s reply was inaudible.
“Have you got anything other than jogging bottoms?”
She had a pretty Pakistani dress, Aisha replied meekly.
“Put that on, apply some makeup, prepare some good food, and greet him at the front door with a kiss!”
It was to no avail. He walked straight past her when he came home. They already slept in separate rooms.
Arfan had neglected to inform his first wife of his new bride. She heard the news from someone else after a couple of weeks. It resulted in a row where she threw a clothes iron at him and he hit her. He was later convicted of domestic violence. He termed it “smacking,” akin to what he did to his sons when they failed do their Koran lessons properly. The charges cited blows to the face, head, and back.
In the summer of 2012, he relinquished custody of his children and began making plans to travel to the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He had “so much damned hate” in his heart, he told a journalist, the very thought of the authorities made him so angry that he could cry. Living in the West was no longer an option. He had to go ahead and blaze a trail so his children would not grow up being too influenced by Norwegian culture.
“When I get back, I want you gone from here,” he told Aisha before leaving. But he ended up throwing her out in the middle of the night prior to his departure.
In
