Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

But the shallowness of what the European muhajirat wrote about themselves, essentially diary entries about youthful Muslim political grievance and identity agony, stood in sharp contrast to the deeply theorized political and ideological writings of ISIS female leaders in Arabic, anchored in the discord of their societies. For the Arabic-illiterate Western women, going on the hybrid aesthetics and lofty resistance narratives of ISIS videos, and their own scattered, naïve longings for community, joining ISIS was not unlike joining a rebellion. For the muhajirat from Arab lands, many of whom had long adhered to strands of extreme Salafi thought and who politically supported the jihadist solution to their societies’ ills and their governments’ subservience to the Western state order, it was a less random choice, a hardening of existing positions within a political landscape where very little about what the group represented was unknown, in the face of circumstances that themselves grew more extreme.