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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

A couple’s life torn apart by Islamic jihad

Nov 26, 2004 8:22 am By Robert Spencer

More confirmation of what Hugh and I were saying yesterday about moderate Muslims.

There is a great deal of important information here (not least of which is that this jihadist is now living off German welfare), but all I have posted here is the information about how he abandoned “moderation” and became a jihadist in the first place. Be sure to read it all.

It’s strange, isn’t it, that in Bosnia, which some moderate Muslims today attempt to portray as some sort of citadel of Islamic moderation, he not only didn’t get turned away from his radical opinions, but reinforced and hardened in them.

From the Chicago Tribune, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Whatever Reda Seyam is today, he acknowledges that he was not a devout Muslim during the first years of his marriage to Doris Glueck. “He would drink whiskey and smoke and chase after women,” says Glueck, who spoke through a translator during a five-hour interview.

“He did betray me, which I found out later. Maybe because I traveled a lot and he felt lonely.”

When the two met in November 1987, Glueck was sitting by herself in a cafe in Bonn. “I must have attracted his attention,” she recalls with a certain wistfulness.

“I was reading, and all of a sudden he was coming up to me and speaking to me. I was impressed–this big, beautiful man, big brown eyes. I always compare him to Omar Sharif,” the Egyptian movie actor and champion bridge player.

Seyam explained that he had come to what was then West Germany hoping to pursue advanced study in mathematics at a university. But Seyam’s tourist visa was about to expire, and he asked Glueck to help him compose a newspaper advertisement for a German wife.

She did, but when the ad failed to produce any acceptable candidates, Glueck offered to marry Seyam, with the understanding “that if it didn’t work out we would get divorced.”

In February 1988 Seyam and Glueck were wed in a civil ceremony at the Egyptian Consulate in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. Though his residency was now assured, Seyam’s university application was rejected nonetheless.

The hope of a better future that had lured Seyam to Europe quickly faded. He was reduced to taking menial jobs: working the grill in a steakhouse, moving furniture, running a small courier service.

Glueck, who held a decent-paying job with an international confectionery company, remained the couple’s principal provider. As time went on, Seyam began to chafe at his essentially subservient role. “He must have been humiliated by me being so strong,” Glueck says.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, his mother dying of cancer, Seyam turned for solace to the Koran and began attending a local mosque. When Seyam encouraged Glueck to convert to Islam, she agreed without much hesitation. The reason, she says, “was love.”

A bicycle accident left Seyam with a broken arm and several months off from work, time he filled with extended visits to the mosque. “I don’t know what was going on in the mosque, because women are not admitted,” Glueck says. “But when he came home every time he would go on and on about the great things he had heard.

“And that was when the radical change happened, when he really began to adopt the Muslim way of life. He started to wear Afghan clothing, he started to grow a beard.”

His arm mended, in the autumn of 1994 Seyam left Germany for a monthlong visit to Bosnia. He returned home to tell Glueck that he and four colleagues from the mosque had founded an organization to aid Muslim victims of the brutal conflict demolishing the former Yugoslavia.

“I woke up,” is the way Seyam describes what was happening to him. “You start to think about your life, why you live. I start to think, `Why I can’t help?’ You have this feeling that you can do something.”

When Seyam announced that he was moving to Bosnia, he gave his wife a choice. “He said if I wanted to go with him, we’d see many countries,” Glueck recalls. “If I wished to stay, the marriage would end.”

Three weeks later the couple had sold their furniture and were on their way to the central Bosnian city of Zeneca, where Glueck discovered that she was expected by the community of foreign Muslim fighters, known as mujahedeen, to pay her husband total obeisance.

“I had never worn a veil in public,” Glueck says. “Four weeks after I arrived in Bosnia, I was given the burqa. I hated the veil.” But she seems to have had few qualms about quitting her job, leaving her family behind and accepting–even embracing–a new way of life.

“When you’re used to doing everything yourself and being responsible for it all, it’s very nice to come to an environment where women are so protected,” Glueck admits.

“It was also the job, so much pressure. Maybe I just wanted to let go of all that. And actually, Islam is very beautiful, if you practice it normally. And this new task I had in Bosnia was a beautiful thing to do.”

Embracing Islam

With Germanic efficiency and dedication, Doris Glueck threw herself into her “new task,” keeping track of the recipients of the humanitarian aid provided by the organization for which Seyam ostensibly worked.

“Women would come to my house and knock on the door and say they needed this or that, food or clothes or whatever,” she says, “and I would pass that on to my husband, who took care of supplying these people.”

What else Seyam was doing, she wasn’t permitted to know. “Most of the time I was alone because he wasn’t there,” Glueck says. “Actually he was a mujahedeen, which I didn’t know at the time, and he was living in this mujahedeen village called Bocinja,” a former Serb town in central Bosnia that had become a Muslim stronghold.

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