Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

That night, she sat crossed-legged on the couch at home, lit a cigarette, and studied the leaflet. Women are taught from early childhood that their worth is proportional to their attractiveness. The definition of beauty is ever changing; waifish is good, waifish is bad, athletic is good, sorry, athletic is bad. Women are not going to achieve equality by putting their bodies on display, as some people would like to have you believe. That would make us only party to our own objectification. Wearing the hijab has given me freedom from constant attention to my physical self. Because my appearance is not subject to public scrutiny, my beauty, or perhaps my lack of it, has been removed from the realm of what can legitimately be discussed. In the Western world, the hijab has come to symbolize either forced silence, or a radical, unconscionable militancy. Actually, it’s neither. It is simply a woman’s assertion that judgment of her physical person is to play no role whatsoever in social interaction. Its purpose is to give back to women ultimate control of their own bodies. And we do not lay on any soul a burden except to the extent of its ability (al-Quran, 23:62).

The brigade itself was deteriorating. At first its remit extended only to holding up dress codes, the rules around abayas and niqabs and makeup. The brigade’s role was to sow distrust and resentment, minimizing the likelihood that people’s dissent would coalesce into defiance. But now, the young women of the al-Khansaa Brigade had started using their authority to settle petty quarrels or enact social revenge. Even girls who weren’t employed by the brigade turned up to accuse their social enemies of some infraction. Sometimes women who had done nothing wrong were brought into headquarters. The social fabric of Raqqa had collapsed. That everyone was probably two-faced was the only reliable assumption. “Many times, I saw women I knew smiling at me when they saw I’d joined. But I knew inside they felt differently,” Aws said. “I knew because before I joined myself, when I saw a girl I knew had started working with ISIS, I didn’t like it.”

When so-called revolutions turn to terror.

But it was also true that no one shed their prejudices upon arrival in the caliphate. The racist superiority the Saudis felt toward Pakistani or Bangladeshi Britons (“they are not British British”), the superiority the British Asians felt toward the British Somalis, the superiority German Turks felt toward the local Syrians, the superiority the Lebanese and Syrians felt toward the Saudis, the superiority the Syrian Arabs felt toward the Syrian Kurds—none of these impulses dissolved. Indeed, they were harnessed into sweeping generalizations about who was most hapless in warfare and thus best assigned to suicide operations (Europeans), who was the most brutal (Tunisians), who was the most zealous (Saudis).

In the West, the Islamic vision of a state centered around social justice—the idea that society should be ordered such that every citizen has access to a decent quality of life—shared some commonalities with other political currents. In America and Britain, young voters were flocking to politicians who described themselves as socialists, who called for an end to austerity and promised to place education and home ownership within everyone’s reach. The financial crises in Western societies, and the democratic erosion that came with the revelation of the extent of financial misdeeds and the inability of states to regulate or penalize such behavior, encouraged young people to look for alternatives to the systems that were failing them. Just as some millennials were realizing that socialism wasn’t necessarily an ideological evil, some young Muslims were drawn to the idea of an Islamic caliphate out of similar motivations. Social media helped crystallize and connect young people across both these impulses. It is said that everyone wants freedom most of all, but if the Arab Spring and the bewildering appeal of the Islamic State suggested anything, it was that freedom meant quite little if unaccompanied by dignity and meaning. In the months and short years before it became clear that the Islamic State was a morass of atrocities and gratuitous violence, there were elements of its overture that resonated with young Muslims around the world.

“What sort of Islamic thoughts do you carry in your head right now? What is your Islamic ideology at present, Sabira?” one of them asked her, sitting primly on the sofa in the living room, her language stilted, as though she were reading from a script. What to say to such a woman? Sabira wanted to tell them she was fine, that she wasn’t a mental patient, that a terrible situation had occurred—but given the simplistic questions they were asking her, she was certain they would never understand. If they wanted to know why she had tried to go, why were they asking about the “Islamic thoughts” in her head? Didn’t they realize a naïve, broken-bird of a girl might follow a beloved brother to the very ends of the earth? Didn’t they realize abused girls were easy prey for charismatic men with dubious intentions? Didn’t they realize parents were sometimes hapless and didn’t notice abuse under their noses, and even if they did, they were often too cowed and worried about what people would say to do anything about it? Didn’t they realize that if her brother hadn’t gone, she would never be in this mess in the first place, and had there been no Syrian uprising and no violent crackdown, he wouldn’t have gone himself? How could she explain to this well-intentioned but extremely clueless and therefore potentially dangerous white woman in her living room that all these events were arrayed in her mind like the growth rings of a tree, that she couldn’t separate out one ring and hold it up as ...

In 2015, the government redefined its thinking around counterterrorism, declaring that radicalism wasn’t fueled by economic marginalization or political grievances, but by the ideology of conservative Islam. Prime Minister David Cameron set out the new approach in a speech that year: Britons who rejected “liberal values” were “providing succor” to violent extremists. Suddenly, wearing the hijab, being socially conservative, belonging to a family that hadn’t yet made the transition from village patriarchy to modern independence—each of those traits marked a person as being extreme. And, warned Cameron, “the extremist worldview is the gateway, and violence is the ultimate destination.” By 2017, Louise Casey, an official overseeing integration, was arguing that “oppression of women in Muslim communities” was linked to extremism and Islamist terrorism. She went even further, blaming Muslims for the rise of the far right in Britain, outlining the causal relationship like this: Muslims’ religious conservatism led to their poor integration; their poor integration together with their conservatism led to terrorism; their terrorism fueled the far-right and white supremacist movements. Soon, there was almost no aspect of daily Muslim life and religious observance that was considered out of bounds for scrutiny by officials. Though most recent UK governments had resisted the European trend of banning face veils, by early 2016 both the ordinary hijab and face veils rose to become nation...

Would Sabira’s mother, for instance, have been better poised to notice and deal with both her and Soheil’s attraction to extremism had she been more integrated? Would the mothers, grandmothers, or older sisters of Sharmeena, Kadiza, Shamima, and Amira have been? It depends on our understanding of integration itself. Immigrant parents were poorly equipped for the challenges of contemporary parenting in the urban twenty-first-century Europe. They behaved as though they were still back at home in Bangladesh or Ethiopia, where there was a surrounding cushion of extended family and friends supporting their parenting, casting a protective eye on all the children around them, because that is the way children had always been raised, collectively. In London, there was no such protection; there were gangs and knife crime, predators on Facebook and Instagram, whole collections of virtual and physical threats. These parents assumed the mosque and Quran classes were safe spaces, but the reality was that there were no safe spaces left, period, online or in the real world.

Very good point.

Parenting of millennial Muslims in the age of the War on Terror demanded levels of awareness that immigrant parents often didn’t have the capacity for. Integration, then, in the context of were you integrated enough to stop your kids from joining ISIS, involved layers of proficiencies, abilities, awareness, and confidence that were gained from many different directions: socioeconomic advancement, education, language skills, access to adequately provided social services, involvement in public life. But to the government, integration had come to mean acceptance of “British values,” full stop. Britain’s core national identity was enshrined in gender liberalism, women’s physical visibility, an acceptance of homosexuality, and UK foreign policy, especially respect for Israel.

For every young girl or young man from a broken home who went to Syria, there were others from loving, intact families; for every one whose mother spoke halting English, there were five others whose mothers were native or fluent English speakers. The children of diplomats and consultant doctors had joined ISIS alongside the children of restaurant waiters and unemployed welfare recipients. The thorny fact was that the structural factors that bred extremism—the Arab tyrannies and coups, Western wars and state collapses that extremists exploited—hardly lent themselves to counterterror policing in the West. These meta forces were too enormous, too profitable, and too endemic to even acknowledge as drivers of extremism. It was only the slighter factors, and indeed some made-up ones, that seemed feasible to tackle: getting YouTube to erase Anwar al-Awlaki, blocking encryption on messaging apps, vetting speakers at universities for “extremist views,” discouraging boycotts of Israel or aid work for Syria, because these types of activism were portrayed as gateways to extremist views.

Good point

Prevent now required doctors, teachers, and social workers to be on alert for signs of “extremism.” If a family pulled their teenage daughter out of co-ed swimming classes, teachers were encouraged to consult Prevent guidance. A young Afghan British boy who attended school with a “Free Palestine” badge on his backpack had counterterrorism police show up at his door. “It’s easier to speak to the women than the men,” the Prevent officer concluded in the end. The women just wanted to stop their sons from going off to die, and were more cooperative. They would blame themselves in the end, anyway. The men, they just wanted to talk about why their sons were going.

To the public, they were either naïve jihadi brides or calculating monsters. But most of the women in this book were neither passive nor predatory, and trying to pin down their degree of agency seemed to be only one line of inquiry, and certainly not the most revealing. Some collaborated or acted knowingly; some were so young that, despite the outward appearance of deliberate choice, they were not mature enough to exercise anything approaching adult judgment.

There is an error in invoking their age and maturity. Most of the international recruits were adults. And many young adults who were similarly exposed to the recruitment efforts did not respond by running away.