Guest House for Young Widows Quotes

“This is not to say that torture mechanically reshapes all individuals to make them capable of greater cruelty. But scholars of psychopathology, like the great Simon Baron-Cohen, have found strong links that show enduring trauma can cause a person to lose empathy. To lose empathy is to view other human beings as objects, which is necessary to the infliction of cruelty and violence upon them. Baron-Cohen’s research shows that torturing a person, rendering him an object, a vessel out of which intelligence can be extracted, radically dulls that person’s ability to focus on another person’s interests at the same time as his own.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“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?”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Every war has its stayers and leavers, and sometimes the staggering volume of the latter - the exodus from Siria formed one of the greatest mass movements of people in contemporary history - makes us think that everyone could have chosen that path. That somehow the only moral Syrian story, or the chief story of Syrian suffering, is that of those who live. But there were hundreds of thousands of families who were already barely surviving, or who were making it within the strictest of margins, who felt they had little choice but to stay.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Women may certainly experience wars, volatility, and state repression differently than men. But ultimately gender does not define their experience, it simply particularizes it; the women of this book have far more in common with the men around them than they do with women of wholly different countries.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“In government-controlled Syria, the broken land over which Bashar al-Assad presided as nominal victor, there was no sign that the regime would cease the policies of repression and violence that had provoked the original uprising. In July 2018, the government issued death certificates for sixty thousand people who had simply disappeared in government detention.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“The UK Home Office argued this was “in the public good” and that citizenship was “a privilege, not a right,” even as it rendered these individuals stateless, leaving them without the recourse or oversight of any state’s legal process or rules. As a security measure intended simply to block the return of European citizens who had fought in Syria, it worked. But it was an approach bound to fuel more conflict and more resentment.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Nearly all of the ISIS women detained in this camp claim to be victims, dissenters at heart who were forced to stay in Islamic State territory because getting out was impossible. They cite happenstance and conniving husbands and bad roads for how they ended up with ISIS. They admit they were originally true believers in the state-building project, but maintain that they quickly lost faith when they saw it was a miserable, vicious lie.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“The best men came early and died fast. They were the men of the purest ideals and conviction, who came to fight for God. Had they known how it was going to turn out, they wouldn’t have come. The men who came later, responding to the siren song of the violence, were the mercenaries and the riffraff, the vulnerable converts and the lost souls, the thugs in search of a cause, the petty gangsters and the drifters, seeking redemption, identity, meaning. These were not men on whose shoulders you could build a society.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“She didn’t feel even a beat of resentment when pulling on the hijab in the mornings. Best of all, she no longer felt herself superior to Muslim women who didn’t wear it. Now she viewed it as her individual choice, and felt no disdain for girls who wore turban-style hijab or bandanna-style hijab or hijab over lacquered faces and blatantly sexy outfits. No one was perfect. Everyone sinned differently. For herself, she felt blessed from the very first day she put it back on. The massive drop in daily comments, come-ons, harassment, eyes perving their way up and down her body: it was just a fact. Thanks be to God that she had the choice, and had found her way back to the choice.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“She didn’t feel even a beat of resentment when pulling on the hijab in the mornings. Best of all, she no longer felt herself superior to Muslim women who didn’t wear it. Now she viewed it as her individual choice, and felt no disdain for girls who wore turban-style hijab or bandanna-style hijab or hijab over lacquered faces and blatantly sexy outfits. No one was perfect. Everyone sinned differently. For herself, she felt blessed from the very first day she put it back on. The massive drop in daily comments, come-ons, harassment, eyes perving their way up and down her body:”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Islam was too big a religion for such constraints against women, and too noble a religion to countenance viewing non-Muslims with contempt, she thought.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“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.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Add to this poverty and broken families, absent fathers, unemployed fathers, fathers who couldn’t provide for and protect their families and marinated in that humiliation—realities that cut across all these girls’ lives. Immigration often meant long years of separation that caused marriages to fail, as Sharmeena’s parents’ had; it meant marriages not surviving the strains of arrival, through which women often coped better and men languished in shame-faced, low-wage bitterness; it meant having to dedicate vast time and energy to basic things like securing the rent, navigating the health service, caring for ill relatives, all within a bureaucratic system that was foreign and confusing.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“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.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“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.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“In January 2016, Cameron established a new fund for teaching English to Muslim women. He warned that those who failed language tests after a couple of years might be deported, because non–English speakers were “more susceptible to the extremist message coming from [ISIS].” The approach was something akin to integration at gunpoint: The more English you know, the less likely your kids will be to blow themselves up.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“There is a necessary debate to be had about gender equality among Muslims. Britain’s largely South Asian Muslim community is highly conservative in a way that often makes life unbearable for some of its young women, and to a different and less immediate extent, for young men. There are suffocating proscriptions around marriage, problems with forced marriage, domestic violence, stark double standards in the treatment of daughters and sons, and taboos around confronting and reporting sexual abuse. (Many of these behaviors are imported from South Asia and, interestingly, rejecting them has encouraged young people to seek religious knowledge and identity from urban, Mecca-trained imams.)”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“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.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“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.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“By the time her husband eventually went to the front and was killed, Kadiza rued her decision to travel to Syria. The caliphate was not a land of honor and justice where Muslims could hold their heads high, where the call to prayer filled the air and the pavement was littered with roses. Instead it was a vortex of violence and corruption where men hoarded cars and women settled scores against neighbors and foes, as though it were one long mafia war.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Behavior that had in the past been acceptable—being in contact with your family, being on the internet when you weren’t supposed to—was suddenly grounds for intense suspicion. Not fighting was not an option. Not fighting other Syrian rebel groups, composed of Sunni Muslims, was not an option. Being a private citizen who stayed at home was not an option. The only option left to her looked to be escape.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“THE GUEST HOUSE FOR WIDOWS was a place of such deliberate torment and uninhabitability that few women could stay long without going mad. This was precisely the intention. Every town or city controlled by ISIS had one or several of these guest houses, depending on its size, but they all resembled one another in condition and atmosphere. The Guest House for Widows was a state of mind. Across the caliphate, women passing through them were made to understand that a female ISIS member’s place was at the side of her husband, any husband, and that refusing to marry was recalcitrant behavior that would not be enabled by a comfortable private room with en suite bathroom.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“If the widows were widows twice or even thrice over, as was the case with many women, the problem of envy took on monstrous dimensions. To be a widow in the Islamic State was to be condemned to a rough, deprived existence in a guest house for widows.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“But Dua, more pious and conservative, had learned about Islam only when ISIS took over, and wished to see religious politicians—moderate and genuine ones, certainly not these fanatics who used religion as flourish—in power. Her problem with ISIS was not that it had sought to establish an Islamic state and impose Islamic law, but that it showed disregard for basic Islamic legal tenets. ISIS had instrumentalized Islam, made it a means to its political ends; it had hollowed the faith out of everything it stood for and reduced it to a tactic: takfir, designating opponents as enemies whose blood could be spilled.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“But in the words of Olfa, who struggled with this question every day, “What is the difference between an extremist and a very upset Muslim?”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“As ISIS grew more savage, many Salafi clerics condemned its acts of violence. Nour seemed perplexed by not having any theological evidence for what she felt—politically, emotionally, morally—to be right.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“The point of freedom was that everyone could dress however they wanted, was it not? Was it genuinely such a point of offense to women who dressed more liberally that she, Nour, chose not to?”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“They prey on the most vulnerable, exactly at the moment when they’re not educated enough to know better, but religious enough to feel the impulse,” he said. “They ply them with YouTube sheikhs and fatwas and nasheeds, and six months later the guy finds himself in Syria, smoking weed, convinced it was the right thing to do.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“Jamal, the Communist in Kram, said around five hundred men from the district had gone, and that the recruiters received a generous fee, about $3,000, for each young man they sent to a battlefield. Female recruits garnered slightly less.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“They had been harsh in taking over new towns in Syria, and had alienated local women. For the caliphate to be able to function as a state, it needed more women, and they would need to come from abroad.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS