"Wanted Women - Faith, Lies & the War on Terror" - Review - NYTimes.com If you were the Franklin Mint and wanted to issue a set of four collectible dinner plates devoted to "The Women of the War on Terror," whose faces would appear on them? Faith, Lies & the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui By Deborah Scroggins 539 pages. HarperCollins. $27.99. Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's national security adviser during 9/11, would surely smile up from one. As would Lynndie England, "the lady with the leash," as Mick Jagger sang on the 2005 Rolling Stones song "Dangerous Beauty." Plates 3 and 4? They would almost certainly depict Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui, the subjects of Deborah Scroggins's sober and provocative new book, "Wanted Women." Ms. Scroggins has composed a dual biography of these dissimilar Muslim women, intricately braiding their stories. They are such opposites that, as the author memorably observes, "Like the bikini and the burka or the virgin and the whore, you couldn't quite understand one without understanding the other." If you are wondering who is the bikini (and thus the whore) in that formulation, Ms. Scroggins leaves little doubt that it is Ms. Hirsi Ali, whom her book relentlessly attacks, sometimes persuasively but often tendentiously. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Ms. Hirsi Ali is, you will recall, a Somalian-born former member of the Dutch Parliament. She wrote the best-selling memoir "Infidel" (2007) and, once seen, is hard to forget. In the words of the British journalist Andrew Anthony, she "looks like a fashion model and talks like a public intellectual." Brought up as a Muslim fundamentalist in Kenya, where she was subjected to genital cutting, she escaped to the West and has emerged as an incendiary critic of Islam, especially on issues regarding women. She is married to the British historian Niall Ferguson. Ms. Siddiqui's story is just as unlikely, and seemingly made for a tense Kathryn Bigelow film. Born in Pakistan, she left for America to study neuroscience and earned degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University. She married a Pakistani doctor who was accepted to study for a master's degree at Harvard, with whom she had three children. She also became a nearly psychotic anti-Semite, and began dabbling in pro-jihad organizations in America. In 2003 the F.B.I. named her the only known female operative of Al Qaeda. Ms. Scroggins is a veteran reporter whose very good first book, "Emma's War" (2002), was about a young British aid worker and tarnished idealism in the Sudan. In "Wanted Women" she seeks - and abundantly finds - what she calls the "weird symmetry" between her subjects. "They were both in their early 30s," she writes. They were both fiercely intelligent. They both came from politically ambitious families. They had both been tossed about among Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States ever since childhood. She adds: "They shared a kind of warrior mentality. Both prized fearlessness. They were both rebels. Just as interestingly, she alights upon "hints in their complicated backgrounds that each woman might have gone in a very different direction, perhaps even to the extent of Aafia Siddiqui becoming a Westernizing feminist and Ayaan Hirsi Ali becoming a militant Islamist." The bulk of "Wanted Women" is sturdy, well-reported, boots-on-the-ground biography. Ms. Scroggins moves through these women's lives, seizing on piquant details. Thus we find Ms. Hirsi Ali as a young woman in Nairobi, where her family had moved, devouring Western writers from Dostoyevsky to Jacqueline Susann and thinking: "White people were always having these wonderful adventures that we couldn't have, either because we weren't allowed or because we couldn't afford to." We witness Ms. Siddiqui throwing herself into volunteer work at M.I.T."s Public Service Center, where she twice won its award for her efforts. "They couldn't award me any more," she said, "because two times was the limit for one person." As "Wanted Women" progresses, following these women is like watching two deciduous trees in an arboretum: while one soars and bends toward the light, the other shrivels and grows stunted. Ms. Hirsi Ali makes her way to the Netherlands and revels in that country's freedoms. Ms. Siddiqui becomes more and more devout, rejecting drink and dance and music and movies, and pinning her black veil so that only her eyes are visible. A gifted speaker, Ms. Siddiqui becomes an important fund-raiser for Islamic groups with links to Al Qaeda. She ultimately marries into the family of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks. In 2010 she was sentenced to 86 years in prison for, while in captivity, the attempted murder and assault of United States personnel.