Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

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.