“It is our duty to leave the land of the unbeliever, to go and live in the caliphate,” she said. “Also, I want to get married to a real man, someone who is living his religion the right way and is willing to fight for it.”
Various intelligence sources had told me that they saw a growing fascination with the idea of the caliphate among young people from Europe, including women. Meryam’s plans to move to Syria were real, and she was already picturing her future there. The man she planned to wed was a Tunisian-born fighter for the Islamic State, she said. “He came to Europe with a group of other fighters of Yemeni and Chechen descent.”
“How did they get here?” I asked.
“I don’t know for sure, I think via Tunisia, but we don’t speak about such things.”
I thought she must be na?ve not to understand the danger she faced, until she added, “I don’t want to know these details. There are so many informants in the community, and intelligence services are listening to calls and reading messages, so when I don’t know about things, I cannot speak about them.” She smiled.
I wondered if it was her way of telling me that she wasn’t as innocent as she seemed.
“What are they doing here?” I asked.
She said they sometimes went around and met with people, but he wouldn’t tell her where and with whom. Meryam and her boyfriend once visited a mosque in Berlin called the House of Peace, where her betrothed was outraged by the imam’s sermons against the Islamic State. “He said … these people are nonbelievers,” Meryam told me.
I asked if she was in love with her future husband. “He is handsome, and he loves his religion,” she began. “But it’s very difficult to communicate because he speaks Arabic and French, and I only speak German and some English.”
She would become his second wife. She worried she might be jealous.
“But you still would accept to become the second wife?”
“Yes. I believe I have found the right man.” She grabbed a few French fries. “Don’t you want to get married and have kids? Isn’t something missing in your life now?”
I took a big bite of my chicken burger, not because I was hungry, but because I wanted a few seconds to think about how to answer.
“If your question is, do I want to get married and have children, well yes, that would be wonderful,” I said. I thought that was the end of the conversation.
“Maybe I can ask my future husband if he knows one of the brothers there who is looking for another wife,” she said, laughing.
I thanked her for the kind offer but told her it wasn’t really for me. I did ask Meryam if I could meet her future husband, though. “Maybe we can have a coffee somewhere, or another of these chicken burgers?”
It seemed unlikely that he would agree, but I figured it was worth a try. She promised to ask him and get back to me.
My conversation with Meryam was in December 2014, just a month before the Paris attacks. I tried to get back in touch with her afterward, but her phone number had been disconnected.
She must have gone, I thought. I wondered if she and Hayat Boumeddiene would meet.
Meanwhile, one of Germany’s best-known talk shows, Günther Jauch, named for its host, asked me to discuss the Paris attacks, cartoons about Muhammad, and what would come next. The invitation didn’t thrill me. Yes, I was a professional journalist. Yes, I had covered extremism and the so-called War on Terror for many years. But I knew there was a big risk that I would be pushed into the role of “the Muslim” in a forum like this. Yet I accepted. Maybe this would be a good moment to build bridges, to explain and reach wise and moderate Muslims and others who could speak up, too, and contribute to a healthy debate.
The other guests were Germany’s interior minister; the CEO of the Axel Springer publishing house; and a German journalist and former news presenter who had lived in France for many years. We debated freedom of the press, the reason why groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS had called for the killing of cartoonists, and so on.
I made it very clear that killing journalists or cartoonists was unacceptable based on my understanding of Islam and my own principles, even if people disagreed with what somebody had drawn or written. Günther Jauch asked why such drawings didn’t make it to the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post. I explained that the leading American newspapers didn’t publish satirical or otherwise offensive drawings that could spur hate against a particular race or religion.
I went on to tell the group that I’d recently been in the United States for book talks about The Eternal Nazi, and I related how some Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community said they’d been worried when they saw some of the drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Europe. “They said it reminded them of how the Nazis insulted Jews and Judaism. So maybe it would be important to have a discussion about when does freedom of speech end and hate speech begin?”
The moment I said this, Mathias D?pfner, the Axel Springer CEO, seemed to grow enraged. I waited until he finished and explained that he had misunderstood me. I wasn’t saying that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and Nazi propaganda were identical, only relaying what members of the Jewish community in the United States had said.
At the same time, I saw how highly emotional the situation had become. I tried to hide my discomfort, but when I reached for a glass of water, I felt my hand shake.
I tried to listen to my inner voice, which said, keep calm. I remembered my grandmother, who didn’t shy away from uncomfortable confrontations and from speaking up. We must show Muslim youth in this country that there are peaceful ways to disagree, I told myself.
The discussion turned to questions of “Western values” and the rights that Europeans have enjoyed since the Enlightenment. I said that at some stage, it would be important that we as journalists not step into the trap of double standards. If we all agreed that there should be no restrictions on drawings, caricatures, or writing, we couldn’t use different rules depending on what religion we were speaking about.