SO, YOU MARRIED AN AX-MURDERER:

The Fear Born of a Much Too Personal Look at Jihad (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, 11/27/04, NY Times)

THE first thing to know about the woman known widely here as Doris Glück is that Doris Glück is not her real name. She won't tell you her given name, or even her official new name - provided by the German police - beyond the first name and initial, Regina S. She won't say where she lives, either, and when she meets you at the railroad station in Bremen, she is clearly anxious to get away quickly lest she meet someone who knows her.

About a month ago, under the pseudonym Doris Glück, she published a book in Germany, "I Was Married to a Holy Warrior," in which she described how she fell in love with an Egyptian, married him and then watched, appalled, as he became progressively more militant and, finally, fully engaged in jihad.

The worst moment came in the mid-1990's in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she and her now ex-husband had gone to help the Muslim side in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. (In the book she calls him by a pseudonym, Omar, to forestall any effort he might have made to block publication had she used his real name, Reda Seyam.) One day, she was taken to a place near a mountain, she says, where she became an involuntary witness to the revenge execution of three Serbian men, one of them by beheading. [..]

IN their first seven years of marriage, she said, "my husband drank liquor, he had no beard, he didn't go to the mosque." But in 1994, the same year he became a German citizen, he broke his arm in a bicycle accident. With time on his hands, he started going to a mosque in Heidelberg, the university town along the Rhine where they were living, and before his wife knew it, he had committed himself to the Islamic cause.

Along the way, at Omar's request, Regina S. converted to Islam, taking the name Aysha, after one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad and also the name of her mother-in-law.

"Islam is a wonderful thing," she said, "but they destroyed that in me, because my ex-husband hates unbelievers. He thinks it's O.K. to kill unbelievers."

In Bosnia, of course, the West sided with the headsmen.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 27, 2004 12:00 AM