“By not wearing it,” he continued, “you also make things harder for other Muslim women. They see you not wearing it and it plants doubt in their mind…they think to themselves, ‘If others don’t wear it, why should I?’ ”
“Thanks for your naseeha,” Emma said to the sheikh as they were leaving, wanting him to know that she knew the word for sincere Islamic advice. He wished her good luck in her efforts. She thought of how she might recount the conversation to her mother. Surely her mother would say, “That is very controlling behavior,” because that is how she thought of Muslim men; but in that moment, Emma did not feel controlled or admonished. She felt cared for; she felt the loneliness inside her slowly being chipped away.
That night, she sat crossed-legged on the couch at home, lit a cigarette, and studied the leaflet.
Women are taught from early childhood that their worth is proportional to their attractiveness.
The definition of beauty is ever changing; waifish is good, waifish is bad, athletic is good, sorry, athletic is bad. Women are not going to achieve equality by putting their bodies on display, as some people would like to have you believe. That would make us only party to our own objectification.
Wearing the hijab has given me freedom from constant attention to my physical self. Because my appearance is not subject to public scrutiny, my beauty, or perhaps my lack of it, has been removed from the realm of what can legitimately be discussed.
In the Western world, the hijab has come to symbolize either forced silence, or a radical, unconscionable militancy. Actually, it’s neither. It is simply a woman’s assertion that judgment of her physical person is to play no role whatsoever in social interaction. Its purpose is to give back to women ultimate control of their own bodies.
And we do not lay on any soul a burden except to the extent of its ability (al-Quran, 23:62).
Despite its saccharine fuchsia cover, despite the cliché metaphor of the pearl ensconced in its shell, despite knowing she partly just wished to please the blue-eyed imam, Emma did not find a single thing in the leaflet to disagree with.
* * *
—
AT HOME, EMMA’S NEW IDENTITY as a Muslim discomfited her mother and sister. They didn’t try to dissuade her, but they made their opinion clear: it was a disloyal, diminishing, wrong-minded choice. As though the path her mother had chosen, under the shade of a diffident German Christianity, had brought her any measure of success in the realms of men, children, and work.
To Emma’s mind, most Germans were fairly racist at their core; if they weren’t outright racists, they lived in such overt petrification at the idea of people different from them that, for all intents and purposes, they might as well have been racist. As in most cities and towns where Turks had settled, in Frankfurt, native Germans’ discomfort with foreigners played itself out in petty squabbles over the aesthetics of shared public space.
A pensioner in Emma’s building who resented the strange smell of her downstairs Turkish neighbors’ cooking would berate the family for failing to keep their window-ledge plants in bloom. The upkeep of hedgerows, gardens, and lawns became a battleground through which Germans expressed anxieties that they could not communicate more directly: their dislike of having to live alongside foreigners, of having to tolerate their different customs, manners, appearance, and food smells. They were reluctant to concede that if their modern economy required the labor of foreigners with names like Ahmet and Fatima, Ahmet and Fatima would build places of worship and eventually want access to higher education, better job opportunities, and citizenship; that they would bear children and those children would inherit their culture; that inevitably, the singular German identity defined by whiteness, rigid social mores, and norms would need to exist alongside a very different identity, a German-Turkish-Muslim identity that laid equal claim to being “authentically German.”
The pensioner was relentless in her torment of the Turkish family. She objected to the mother vacuuming on Sundays, because proper Germans did not vacuum on Sundays, the day of rest. Didn’t the foreigners realize this? She thumped on the floor with her mop when this occurred and posted sharp notices in the communal hallways. Occasionally she would drop litter from her balcony onto their ground-floor garden, and then knock on their door to inform them they were failing to keep the garden tidy.
Like many who were young when the German state began accelerating its guest worker program in the 1960s, the pensioner had internalized the government’s early position that the foreigners were there to fill a void in the labor market and then would eventually go home. As Germany struggled to rebuild itself and reenter European trade networks in the aftermath of World War II, the foreign guest workers filled the jobs native Germans didn’t especially want: construction, mining, metal industries. Initially, German law handled this imported labor as a pure human transaction and regulated the workers’ transience: they had to leave after two years of labor and were barred from bringing their families. Eventually that changed, in successive stages. Workers were permitted to stay longer, bring spouses, and become citizens. But the attitudes that had underwritten this slow process—native Germans’ reluctance to live among strangers and their fears about the dilution of a national identity based on whiteness—endured.
By 1980, the population of foreigners in Germany had increased eightfold. Social prejudice and intense occupational discrimination was growing, though it was rarely discussed or acknowledged by the state. Though many Eastern and Mediterranean Europeans had moved to Germany, employers and German society at large reserved special xenophobic disapproval for Turkish foreigners, who were nonwhite and Muslim. The derogatory term for nonwhite, nonnative, non-Western Germans was Ausländer, and it was gaining ground.
By 2013, Turks constituted 4 percent of the German population, around four million people. They were systematically turned down for professional, skilled jobs, and tended to live in neighborhoods like the one in which Emma grew up. Educated, second-generation German Turks with higher aspirations sometimes moved to European capitals like London or Paris to seek employment by a German multinational company. From there, they could return to Germany and slide into a decent position as just another expat hire. For the hiring of management positions and other desirable rungs of employment, German employers tended to shun their Turkish-origin citizens, who in turn developed bitter grudges against the country that refused to acknowledge them. Equally frustrating and baffling were the parochial rules that governed public space, rules that seemed arbitrary and purposely obtuse, designed to give those of Turkish origin the sense they were never doing anything right.
Emma’s mother, though a native German herself, didn’t have a reflexive dislike for foreigners, but she did respond to Emma’s new identity with indifference tinged with denial. She refused to call her by her new Muslim name, Dunya. Emma had chosen Dunya because it sounded different. It meant “world” in Arabic, and she hoped it would portend an opening of horizons for her.
At eighteen, Emma/Dunya moved into a small flat she shared with one of her close friends, a modest little place with a wood-paneled kitchen untouched since the 1970s and a bathroom with a tea-rose pink bathtub. It was housing for vulnerable young people, supported by the state. Being on her own, away from her mother and sister, made experimenting with Islam easier. It also made smoking pot easier. She started wearing the hijab, something she had been reluctant to do while living with them.
Everything about Islam was fascinating; it was a novelty that did not seem incongruent with the rest of her life, which she spent watching romcoms with her girlfriends, listening to R&B, and debating the relative merits of Arabic pop stars, agreeing that Samira Said was the hottest singer, despite Haifa Wehbe’s devilish hip swirling and Elissa’s elegant sluttiness. Dunya and her friends experimented with ranges of mascara and kohl, and Dunya found herself feeling almost Arab herself, or Turkish, or Muslim, something certai
nly not German, whose women were proud to be plain as oatmeal and sneered at femininity and makeup.
Fitful Quiet
Across much of the Arab world, the early winter of 2010 passes unremarkably, like so many seasons of so many years past. Each country endures long-running economic and political troubles and popular discontent, but the status quo feels permanent, presided over by dictators-for-life who demand the obedience of their people: Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa in Bahrain.
Iraq is once again restive, as it has been regularly since the American invasion in 2003. The Shia-led government in Baghdad is discriminating against the country’s Sunnis, threatening to rekindle the Sunni insurgency that was only quieted in 2007 after a surge of U.S. troops and an “Awakening” movement that drew prominent Sunni tribesmen and families away from the militants. Though many factors contributed to the reduction in violence in Iraq, top U.S. generals declared the surge a victory, and said the tide of the battle had finally been turned.
Those Sunni insurgents formed a group called al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004, and then rebranded as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) in 2006, under different leadership. The group’s prospects have waned in recent years as the Iraqi government has sought to govern more equitably and inclusively, but they track the mounting dismay of Iraqi Sunnis with watchful eyes, waiting for an opportunity to harness their extremist aims to a community’s legitimate grievances.
NOUR
January 2011, Le Kram, Tunis
Sunlight poured into the room as her little sister yanked open the curtains and slapped at Nour’s bare feet, which were poking out from under the blanket. “Get up!” she hissed. “The quarter is exploding! We’re allowed to go as far as the end of the street as long as you come.”
A few weeks earlier, Nour’s quiet life in Tunis as a high school dropout, a girl who had chosen her faith over the discomfort of pretending to be secular at school, had been abruptly interrupted. On December 17, 2010, in Sidi Bouzid, a provincial town in Tunisia’s parched, jobless heartland, a young fruit seller who supported five members of his family by selling produce from his cart challenged a policewoman. She was demanding a bribe, but he offered to pay a small fine instead. The policewoman confiscated his electronic scales and slapped him in the face before a crowd. The fruit seller was humiliated, but most of all, he needed his scales back. He remonstrated at the local municipality office, but no one would see him. With a bucket of gasoline in hand, he stood in full view of the street and screamed out, “How do you expect me to earn a living?” and lit himself on fire.
His desperate, simple act of protest resonated with those in Tunisia who had also endured the state’s needless molestation at the most intimate level. Demonstrations broke out in the streets of Sidi Bouzid and then quickly spread across the country.
The protests reached the capital city of Tunis in January 2011. Nour’s neighborhood, Le Kram, was the first to erupt. Le Kram sat perched just below Carthage, the district that was home to the presidential palace and lined by palatial villas, overlooking the Mediterranean from a gentle cliff near ancient Roman ruins. Le Kram was the lone working-class quarter situated near this seat of power. In the late 1970s, as President Bourguiba sought to modernize the port district of La Goulette, he expelled poor families from the area and dumped them into Kram. Many squatted in homes abandoned by Tunisian Jews who had left in the 1950s and 1960s, after the founding of Israel. The families set their clocks in these vacant homes, waiting for the requisite fifteen years a property had to be empty in order to claim it as one’s own.
Kram looks different from many of the capital’s narrow, crowded slum districts; its streets are wide and tree-lined, reminiscent of better days. But closer in, among the fraying buildings, the signs of Kram’s restiveness are evident: heaps of garbage the municipality fails to collect, graffiti that revolves around the despair of young men with too little to do, convulsed by anti-police rage and soccer mania.
Since the 1970s, Le Kram had produced ministers and assassins, Communists and Islamists, pimps and poets—men and women who didn’t feel as though they belonged to modern Tunisia, and who dedicated their lives to redressing or venting that feeling. It was a shaabi neighborhood, working class and of the people, a place you went when you had to go underground. Le Kram had a rich history of swinging the country’s politics. When Bourguiba cut bread subsidies in 1984, Kram was the first district in the capital city to revolt. A sepia news photo from the time shows a Kram woman in a traditional white veil standing down an army tank in the streets. The day after Kram rioted, Bourguiba reinstated the subsidy.
That day in January 2011, Nour got dressed, her little sister almost levitating with impatience. Outside, neighbors stood at their front doors or leaned out their windows, speaking quickly. The lady next door was in her housedress, telling everyone that local protesters had torched the police station and were now heading toward the headquarters of President Ben Ali’s political party. Nour blinked at this news. The police station in Kram was the largest in all of greater Tunis. She grabbed her sister’s hand and they ran.
Out on the main thoroughfare, there was no traffic, and people were congregating in the middle of the road. Plumes of black smoke rose from the tram stop, billowing behind a line of fir trees. A man cycled past with one hand on his handlebars, swerving to look over and behind. Another staggered about, pumping a two-finger V in the air, slurring the two demands of the revolution, “Hurriya” and “Karama,” freedom and dignity. The baker’s muffins, usually finished by this hour, piled against the glass, unsold and forgotten amid the chaos.
Kram contained a multitude of political currents—there were Islamists of many persuasions, trade unionists, Communists—but in the early months of 2011, all were united in a seething revolt against the Ben Ali regime. Jamal, a young man in his early twenties, was a devoted Communist, but when he talked about Kram, about what they did that day and the days that followed, he spoke in a collective “we.” “All of us felt like we didn’t belong,” he said. “Everyone wanted to leave. Every political problem that existed in Tunisia? We had it.”
On January 13, Jamal stood alongside the Salafis that his leftist group sometimes rumbled with. Together, they watched the police headquarters burn, their affiliations subsumed in the battle between the neighborhood and the police, who felt more than ever like an occupation force. By night, as the fire of burning tires glowed orange, the air fluttered with singed papers and the mosquitoes hurled themselves toward the light. At least nine Kram protesters were killed that day. The police abandoned their charred station and vacated the area. The neighborhood had won.
* * *
—
THAT AUGUST, DURING THE FIRST Eid celebration of Ramadan after the revolution, Nour and her mother walked to the mosque for Friday prayer, down a residential street lined with palm trees and bougainvillea. Never in fifty years had anyone in Kram seen so many women en route to pray publicly.
Nour saw women she knew converging from all directions. There were so many women that it was mayhem trying to get inside, into the small women’s prayer room. After Ramadan that year, the mosque built a separate women’s entrance, the first since its establishment many years before.
In January 2011, President Ben Ali boarded a plane to exile (he reportedly wobbled on the tarmac, teary at leaving his pillaged country, only to be upbraided by his wife: “Get on, imbecile. All my life I’ve had to deal with your screw-ups.”). After the collapse of the regime, the neighborhood changed quickly. It started policing itself through newly formed groups like the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution. Local Salafis trained together and patrolled in groups that sometimes crossed the line into vigilantism, roughing up drug dealers, delinquents, and thieves.
In Tunisia, the Salafis were relative newcomers, both religiously and politically. The term Salafi refers to fo
llowers of a strain of puritan, revivalist Islam that originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the lands that eventually became Saudi Arabia. The founders of the Salafi movement believed that contemporary Islam had strayed from the true path of the Prophet Muhammad, and moved to create a stripped-down, back-to-fundamentals Islam. For this, they called themselves after the salaf, the term for the pious early followers of the Prophet. Salafism grew and evolved over time in Saudi Arabia, fusing with the young state’s emerging national ideology and becoming crucial to the ruling al-Saud family’s claim to legitimacy. Salafism contained various strands, some apolitical, others more activist. Various scholars and religious dissidents from around the Arab world took refuge in Saudi Arabia over the years, injecting the Salafi scene with orthodox theologians from other parts of the Muslim world.
At its doctrinal core, Salafism mostly overlaps with orthodox Sunni Islam. It mainly diverges in its harsh anathematizing of its enemies, or those deemed outside the fold of Islam. The overzealous tendency of making takfir, or excommunicating, those whom the Salafis oppose is what makes Salafism so intolerant and potentially flammable. Because Salafism coexisted with, indeed underpinned, Saudi Arabia’s transnational activities during the 1970s and beyond—through its support for the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets; through its soft-power investments in exporting ideas across the Muslim world via books, imam training, the building of mosques and religious centers—it eventually grew into a complex global movement with many different manifestations. Sometimes it existed quietly in European cities where it made people more pious and apart, but still peaceful; sometimes it took root in restive ghettos and banlieues, offering a language of division and militancy to Muslim youth who already felt aggrieved, alienated, and isolated by European society.
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