Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

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.