Life
Khan's father, Agha Abdul Khan, owned a pharmaceutical firm. Khan graduated from the medical school at Aga Khan University in Karachi in 1995.
When Dr. Aafia Siddiqui met his mother in Pakistan, his parents agreed on an arranged marriage for him and met with Siddiqui's parents to discuss the details. It was decided that since Siddiqui had been accepted into Brandeis University in Boston, Khan could move to Lexington, Massachusetts, with her and begin studies at Harvard University. Since Siddiqui was back in the United States, the couple, who had never seen each other, performed their nikah over the telephone in 1995. He has also said that Siddiqui wanted him to move to Afghanistan, and work as a medic for the mujahideen. They have three children: Ahmed (b. 1996), Maryam (b. 1998), and Suleman (b. 2002). The two older children are American citizens.
After approximately a year in Lexington, the couple moved to Back Bay Manor, in Mission Hill to be closer to Khan's hospital. In 1999, while living in Boston, Siddiqui and her husband founded the nonprofit Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching. They moved again in July 2001, this time to Malden. Their lease was taken over by Saudi nationals Abdullah Al Reshood and Hatem Al Dhahri, who had just received a $20,000 transfer from the Saudi government, ostensibly to pay for medical treatment for al-Reshood's wife.
Siddiqui's family claim that Khan was an abusive husband, and her colleagues at university reported that she often came in with bruises on her face. Khan admits that on one occasion, he threw a baby bottle at her face, splitting her lip, requiring stitches in the hospital.
According to Khan, after the September 11 attacks Siddiqui insisted on leaving the U.S., saying that it was unsafe for them and their children to remain because the U.S. government was abducting Muslim children. She had previously spoken of wanting to immigrate to Afghanistan or Bosnia. Khan balked, fearful he would lose his salary bonus at the hospital, and agreed she could go ahead and he would follow shortly. However, others dispute that the move was his idea, and suggest that Khan had been "more fundamentalist in his religious beliefs than her", and she wanted to remain in the United States while he had insisted on raising their children in an Islamic country.
Read more about this topic: Amjad Mohammed Khan
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Oh sure, everyone goes back to the earth at some point, but life itself is a thread that is never broken, never lost. Do you know why? Because each man makes a knot in the thread during his lifetime: it is the work he has done and that’s what gives life to life in the long stretch of time: the usefulness of man on this earth.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”
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“The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)