Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

Walthamstow had a high volume of Muslims, and many sympathized with the core political views that animated groups like al-Muhajiroun. The majority of those sympathizers certainly did not condone violence against civilians. But certain underlying truths were easy to empathize with: the belief that the West, through its War on Terror, was waging neo-imperial wars in majority Muslim lands; that with each year the war’s geographic scope and brutality, its secret torture sites and drone strikes and targeting of civilians, grew more extreme; that through support for Israel and Arab tyrants, it enabled Muslim underdevelopment and suffering on a vast scale. There was a gap between agreeing with these truths intellectually and acting on them in a violent fashion. It was a slim, fateful gap that the majority felt condemned to and capable of living within. But for some, the gap felt so slight that it was easy to bridge. It was easy to lure an impressionable young person to the other side. ISIS called that gap the gray zone of complicity and sought to crush it. The tabloids called it “creeping Sharia”; a prominent neocon thinker called it “the strange death of Europe.” Walter Benjamin called it the “state of emergency” that had become, for the oppressed, “not the exception but the rule.” British Muslims just called it life.