On Feb. 12, 2018, Naamen Meziche appeared before a French court to face charges that he had helped plan terrorist attacks in Europe. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted and sentenced to 18 years. The verdict completed a 180-degree turn in the personal fortunes of the French Algerian and his estranged wife. Sixteen years earlier, before the 9/11 attacks upended the couple’s world, it was Mariam el Fazazi who had lived as a virtual prisoner, unable to leave her apartment or socialize without her husband’s permission. Now Meziche was in prison, and Fazazi, for the first time in her life, felt truly free. She had an apartment and a job that paid the bills for herself and her children.
Fazazi took no pleasure in her ex-husband’s hardships, but she eagerly embraced the new life she had created. “I always wanted to get out of that extremist world, even when I was a little girl in Morocco,” she said. “But I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to stand on my feet alone.”
The change, as she recalled, had come slowly at first, and then all at once.
Meziche’s failed attempt to enter Iraq in 2003 had attracted the attention of German police. Shortly after his return to Hamburg, a half-dozen plainclothes officers showed up at the couple’s apartment to conduct a search. They seized computers, files and videotapes and took Meziche in for questioning.
Fazazi’s family, meanwhile, faced similar pressure back in Morocco. After a wave of coordinated suicide bombings killed 33 people in the coastal city of Casablanca, the country’s police rounded up suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, including Fazazi’s brother and her preacher father. The fiery imam Mohammed el Fazazi was notorious in Europe and North Africa for his sermons urging Muslims to embrace violent jihad. Charged with contributing to the radicalization of the Casablanca bombers, he was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison — effectively a life sentence for the 54-year-old man.
Back in Germany, Meziche was becoming weary of the constant surveillance. He also was increasingly pulled by a perceived obligation to help other Islamist militants he had met on his journeys, Fazazi said.
“How can we sit here eating while our brothers are dying?” he would ask his wife.
Finally, Meziche decided to quit Germany for good. He left the apartment in 2009, initially claiming that he was going on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca. But from his phone calls to his wife, it appeared that he was on the move: first in Iran, then in Pakistan, then in the tribal region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He never explained what he was doing, but he made clear that he wasn’t planning to return any time soon.
“There’s no way back,” he told his wife in a call.
Fazazi had heard enough. She delivered an ultimatum: Return home within a month or agree to a divorce.
The Imam’s Daughter
After the attacks in New York and Washington, Mariam el Fazazi discovered a horrifying personal connection to the hijackers: Several were former neighbors who attended a local mosque where her father sometimes preached. The discovery forced her to contend with her own beliefs.
(Marzena Skubatz for The Washington Post)
“He answered, ‘Go ahead and file for divorce,’ ” she said. “That’s what I did.”
Meziche never came home after that. Fazazi later learned that he had been arrested in Pakistan, and that a police raid had discovered explosives and guns in his house. Meziche was extradited to France.
For Fazazi, life as single mom was a struggle at first. She had no job experience and a limited social network. Yet eventually she was able to find work, helping with Arabic translation at a German nonprofit that dealt with refugees. “It was the first job I had in my whole life,” she said.
Other changes followed. The days when she skipped wearing her head covering came more frequently. One day she put it away, for good. She saw nothing wrong with head coverings, but for her it never felt like a choice.
“I was about to start a new job and I just decided not to put it back on,” she said.
Fazazi worried at first about her family’s reaction, especially back in Morocco, with its conservative culture. Her father was back at home now, having been granted an early release from prison, and he appeared to have undergone a transformation of his own. After receiving an official pardon from Morocco’s king, Mohammed el Fazazi had publicly renounced violent jihad. Yet, despite the changes she saw, Fazazi worried that her father would be offended by her rejection of conservative Muslim dress, and view her decision as a betrayal of her family.
She decide to broach the subject at a safe distance, in a text message.
“I decided to take off the veil,” she wrote. “I am starting a new job. I have to support my children. I don’t think I can do this job with the veil on, and I don’t want to wear it.”
The message was met with silence. Several days passed. Then, one day, her phone’s texting app chirped. It was a note from her father.
“You’re a grown-up,” it said. “You need to do what’s best for you.”
The short text was liberating, a final psychological break from the past. A few months after the exchange, she decided to go into business for herself. The immigrant who departed Morocco knowing barely a word of German launched a new company that helped German firms comply with government covid-19 restrictions. If things went well, Fazazi thought, she might expand into the nonprofit world, perhaps with a support group for Muslims who struggled to come to terms with their sexual orientation. In the meantime, the job was enough to support a son and two daughters, both of whom were preparing for professional careers. The girls, like their mother, no longer wear head coverings, although Fazazi said she would not mind if they chose differently.
Her transformation had not come without pain. Her relationships with siblings and other close relatives had become badly strained, and some of her old friends no longer associated with her. Yet, to her delight, she has grown closer to her father, who truly had emerged from prison a changed man.
As Mohammed el Fazazi later explained it, his extremist views began to soften after a chance meeting in prison with a female human rights activist who was fighting to improve conditions for detainees. The woman, a Moroccan named Assia el Ouadie, didn’t practice the same kind of Islam he did. Yet she exuded a personal decency and compassion that impressed him. Even though she was around the same age as Fazazi, he and other prisoners called her “Mama Assia” as a sign of their admiration. It was the start of a period of introspection that intensified as he got to know other men who were confined with him. He met prisoners who supported the Islamic State and were quick to condemn anyone who disagreed with them. Others were quietly pious, rejecting violence in any form. Still others just wanted to return to their families and live normal lives.
After his pardon and release, the imam gave interviews in which he disavowed his extremist past. The reaction within militant circles was harsh. The Islamic State issued a death threat. He was denounced as a traitor by radical clerics, including several newcomers who broadcast hate-filled sermons from European cities, as he had done years earlier. The elder Fazazi listened to their messages with concern, worried that the same cycle of radicalization that he helped nurture 20 years ago was starting up again.
But with prison behind him, he was mostly preoccupied with trying to right past wrongs. After mending his relationship with his daughter, he decided that he wanted to travel to New York. In the unlikely event he was granted a visa, he said, he would like to visit the memorial where the World Trade Center had stood.
“I will go in a heartbeat. I will definitely visit Ground Zero,” he said. “It is a very … emotional place.”
The men who flew airplanes into the buildings had believed they were acting righteously, as martyrs, Fazazi said — partly inspired by words he once uttered, but now rejects.
“This is not Islam,” he said. “Heaven is not for terrorists. Heaven is for good people, people who respect life, people who do good.”
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