“You looked so different from all these kids,” the woman I would come to call my German godmother, Antje Ehrt, told me later. “You looked so critical when you were pissed about something. People could see, she’s angry. They would fall in love with you, this funny, beautiful baby.”
I was born in the spring of 1978, on the eve of a period of dramatic change in the Muslim world. In the months after my birth, events in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan sent the Muslim world into turmoil and started what would become decades of coups, invasions, and war.
In Iran in January 1979, the shah abdicated and fled with his family. On February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his years of exile and declared an Islamic republic, turning against his former allies the intellectuals and liberals. Instead, he instituted a return to conservative religious and social values, curtailing women’s rights and enforcing Islamic dress codes. On November 4, student revolutionaries took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, seizing sixty-six American hostages, fifty-two of whom would be held for more than a year.
Sixteen days later, on the first day of the Islamic year 1400, a group of armed religious extremists took over the holiest sites in Islam, the Grand Mosque in Mecca and, within its courtyard, the Kaaba. Their sharpshooters climbed the minarets and took aim at pilgrims, worshippers, and police, all in an attempt to destabilize the Saudi monarchy and establish a regime based on fundamentalist Islamic ideology.
The Siege of Mecca lasted fourteen days and resulted in an estimated one thousand deaths and major damage to the holy structures before it was put down by Saudi troops with the help of foreign special forces teams. The reverberations were felt around the world, and forward in time. Osama bin Laden often recalled the defilement of the shrine by Saudi forces, laying blame on the Saudi royals and praising the “true Muslims” who had brought havoc to the holy place. A few weeks after that, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ushered in nine years of guerrilla warfare, as bin Laden and other Muslim fighters flocked to Afghanistan, giving rise to the era of global jihad.
My parents’ lives were much more mundane. My mother, Aydanur, was from Turkey; my father, Boujema, was Moroccan. They’d come to West Germany in the early 1970s, within a few months of each other. They were guest workers, part of a tide of migrants from across southern Europe, Turkey, and North Africa seeking work and an opportunity to build more prosperous lives. At the time, West Germany was still recovering from the devastation of World War II and trying to turn itself into a prosperous industrialized nation. The country needed workers: young, healthy people who could do hard labor and take on the unpleasant jobs that many Germans didn’t want to do. German companies were recruiting workers from Greece, Italy, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Spain, and Morocco. My parents were among them.
My mother had come to West Germany alone, at nineteen, on a trainful of Turks. Working in Hildesheim, not far from the East German border, she wrapped and packed radios and TVs for shipping and lived in a house full of other migrants, sharing a room with three other women. She later moved to Frankfurt to be closer to one of her brothers, who lived and worked there. She had long hair that she didn’t cover with a scarf, and she liked to wear skirts that showed off her legs.
She met my father in 1972, through an older Moroccan gentleman who saw her waiting tables at a Frankfurt shopping mall café and decided to set them up. Back then, my father was working as a cook at a place called Dippegucker, which was known for international fare and Frankfurt specialties such as the city’s trademark green sauce, made with herbs and sour cream, and served with boiled eggs and cooked potatoes. This was all new to my father, who had trained in the French cooking more popular in Morocco, but he had long dreamed of coming to Europe. Since his arrival in Germany a year earlier, he’d worked hard and made himself an asset in the kitchen.
My mother liked him immediately, but she was skeptical. The girls she knew were always saying that you had to be careful about these Moroccan guys, that they were good-looking but fickle, second only to the Algerians when it came to caddishness. Out of curiosity, she stopped by the restaurant and saw that he really was cooking, not just washing dishes, as she’d suspected. He was tall and muscular with thick, dark, wavy hair, and he looked impressive in his sparkling chef’s whites and toque. She noticed that he went out of his way to smile and speak courteously to others, not just to her. They drank coffee together, and he asked when he could see her again. When she arrived home from work the following day, she found him waiting with flowers and chocolates.
“If you think you’re coming upstairs, you’re mistaken,” she told him. Then she invited him up, and they drank more coffee.
The romance moved fast, and they married in a civil ceremony at Frankfurt’s City Hall a few weeks later. My father’s boss was his best man, and my mother’s Japanese roommate was her maid of honor.
My mother got pregnant quickly. But life changed dramatically for Muslims and Arabs in West Germany during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when a group of eight Palestinian terrorists entered the Israeli team’s quarters, killed a coach and a weight lifter, and took nine other athletes hostage. The militants belonged to a group called Black September. They vowed to kill the hostages unless Israel agreed to release two hundred Arab prisoners and guaranteed the hostage takers safe passage out of West Germany. Israel, following a long-held policy, refused to negotiate. The Germans, however, promised to fly the militants and their hostages to Tunisia. At the airport, German snipers opened fire on the Palestinians. But the terrorists were well trained; they killed the hostages. The raid ended in disaster, with all the hostages, five of the hostage takers, and a police officer dead.