LINA
Early 2014, Frankfurt, Germany
Lina, though now comfortably ensconced in the women’s shelter after leaving her husband, still didn’t have a television, nor did she buy newspapers. Most often she heard the news while she was working. Her elderly patients liked having the radio on.
But her life changed dramatically when she opened a Facebook account. Suddenly she could see who was doing and saying what, without feeling the pressure to participate. After some weeks, she tentatively posted a quote from the Quran. With a small delight, Lina—a shy, quiet woman her whole life—watched people liking her post. One day that winter, she came across a post from a man called Abu Salah al-Almani. He was, like her, Frankfurt-based, and he was asking if there were any good Muslim women open to getting married and emigrating abroad. The post included a contact number.
At first, she was too shy to make contact on her own behalf. She messaged Abu Salah and said she knew a Muslim sister who was interested in marriage. Could he please share some more information that she could pass on? Abu Salah seemed genuine, and obliged. He sent pictures of a man called Jafer, who had traveled to Syria to join a group that was working to build a new Islamic society, an Islamic state. Jafer was born and raised in Germany, but of Turkish origin, a man who had recently converted to Sunni Islam. His face was open like a palm, with thick eyebrows and an aquiline nose. Lina and Jafer corresponded and then eventually spoke on the phone.
Over several weeks, they talked about life and marriage, their expectations and temperaments. Jafer seemed kind and, most important, devout—nothing like her first husband, who was lazy and unreligious, but even more than that, immoral and cruel. Lina wanted a brand-new life and a new husband, all under the shadow of God’s blessing.
Jafer described what life was like in the new Islamic State, how the authorities were trying to take over local municipalities, establish schools, and provide the kind of fair governance people had been missing. Traveling to a war zone to secure a new life did not seem an extreme decision. Lina had grown up in Lebanon in the 1980s during the civil war; conflict and instability were not unfamiliar to her. She was not one of those people who refused to go back until the bombs stopped. Would she be happier in a new life with an upstanding, devoted, faithful husband, in a fractious atmosphere—or alone in a women’s shelter in Frankfurt? The choice seemed obvious to her.
EMMA/DUNYA
Spring 2012, Frankfurt, Germany
In early 2012, when she was twenty-three and floating through life trying to find herself as a young Muslim woman in Germany, Dunya met Selim.
He was friends with one of her friends’ brothers, and they encountered each other one night at a kabob shop in Frankfurt. He was Turkish-born and handsome, with a strong jaw and sweet eyes. She felt something fizz in her stomach when he spoke to her. They talked for a long time under the fluorescent glare of the restaurant; the tomato-red Formica tables might as well have been linen-draped and candlelit. Selim was funny and as readily silly as she was, and they developed an easy banter. Dunya didn’t like to reveal details about those early heady days. “In Islam these things remain private between a husband and wife,” she said sniffily when asked. (Like many converts or second-generation young Muslims in Europe who had grown up viewing the Islam of elders or parents as lazy, too soft, and “cultural,” Dunya often spoke about a singular “real Islam,” as though such a thing could exist.) But it was clear she was in love with Selim, whose only flaw, she said, was his habit of waking her up in the night by eating potato chips in bed.
Selim was not especially practicing, but she pressed for them to get an Islamic marriage contract, a nikah, before developing their relationship. They couldn’t afford their own place, so sometimes Selim stayed over at her flat, and sometimes they lived together at the home of his friend. Several months into their relationship, in the autumn of 2012, according to Dunya, Selim began to grow more religious. He started spending time with a group of Salafi brothers at the mosque; he asked her to start wearing the niqab instead of just the normal headscarf. His piety grew oppressive at times, like when he decided to uphold a puritanical prohibition on birthdays. Dunya found this very sad. It was just one day to celebrate oneself during the year; did it have to be such a problem? But to Selim, birthdays became impermissibly haram. She started buying more cake around their respective birthdays, so that she could pretend the cake just happened to be on hand.
Later that year, a few weeks after their nikah, Selim arranged a dinner at a restaurant, at which Dunya would meet his mother. It was a gray, drizzling day. People walked to the subways and buses with their heads down. It was so grim that Dunya changed her WhatsApp picture to an image of a bungalow on stilts over turquoise waters. She considered bringing a gift for Selim’s mother, but decided it would only be appropriate once she’d been invited to their home. Selim’s mother had shoulder-length hair, with ash highlights, a wide, open face, and wore sensible loafers. She was strikingly short, enough that Dunya snuck a text message to one of her girlfriends after they sat down. “Cute. Pokemon.”
She seemed like one of those tireless Turkish mothers Dunya had grown up watching at her friends’ houses in Frankfurt, a woman who would cook stuffed bell peppers, keep the floors mopped, and serve everyone tea in slim-waisted cups; competent, never hesitating, never letting the sons lift a finger; slightly a martyr and prone to mysterious, attention-seeking ailments as a result. Selim’s mother asked questions about Dunya’s parents and looked pained to hear that her father lived in Spain and rarely visited. She clearly would have preferred a Turkish daughter-in-law, one who shared her language, who came from an intact clan known to them, who could be relied upon to keep Selim integrated into the family, and who held the promise of wishing to learn to stuff peppers. When the dinner was over, they exchanged the limpest of handshakes, not even a double kiss, and Dunya texted one of her girlfriends, “.”
Selim’s parents had done reasonably well for themselves and appeared content to be living in Germany. Or at least Dunya intuited that his mother was content, and because his mother was the one who ran things in their household, the husband and sons elected not to express any discontent. Selim’s father worked as a security guard at a train station. He would sometimes tell his sons that he would rather move back home, to Turkey. Dunya, like any woman who feels judged and rejected by her mother-in-law, began to project onto Selim’s parents a family dynamic that merged with her own pique: the mother overruled everyone, determined how everyone would feel about life in Germany, about faith, about everything.
But Selim’s mother also had real reasons to be alarmed by her son’s behavior, the long robes he wore, the Arabic expressions he was lacing into his conversation, his newfound piety. Once she found some musk, the kind the Salafi perfume sellers sold outside mosques the world over, in his room. When he came home that evening, his mother waved the vial in his face, screaming, “What’s this? Why are you trying to smell like a fucking Arab?”
Because Dunya had entered Selim’s life around the same time that his behavior began to shift, his mother was convinced she was radicalizing her son. Exactly who was encouraging whom remains contested. Dunya maintains that Selim was the one growing more devout, that he asked her to start covering more of herself. Others tell a different story.
The first time she was invited to visit his family home, she arrived wearing the niqab. His mother looked at her in stupefied horror. “What do you know of Islam? Maybe you misunderstand. Why do you believe this is wanted of you?” Dunya did not see much point in arguing. Selim’s mother was a typical Kemalist, the type of Turk who worshipped Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the twentieth-century modernizer who ended the Ottoman caliphate and founded the secular Turkish state. Selim’s mother considered herself a Muslim, as well as a devoted Turkish nationalist and a strong believer in the secular nation-state. (This, to Dunya’s mind, was disbelief and compromise. Real Muslims didn
’t believe in the nation-state, and they certainly didn’t venerate secular politicians above the faith.) And yet, unfairly, Dunya felt that Selim’s mother discounted everything she said on the grounds that she hadn’t been born a Muslim and wasn’t Turkish. Selim’s mother claimed a cultural authority over Islamic knowledge, even though she didn’t cover her hair and never prayed. In that moment, Dunya’s mother-in-law seemed to her like Atatürk and Hitler rolled into one authoritarian, thimble-sized figure.
After this first visit where Dunya wore the niqab, Selim’s mother barred her from the house. She told her son that she’d heard worrisome things about Dunya from others, that she was ill-behaved, not a decent girl. When he refused to break up with her, she asked him to leave the house.
This enraged Dunya. She felt she was destined to struggle with mothers; mothers always found in her something to oppose rather than nurture. She imagined his mother poisoning Selim against her, whispering malicious gossip in his ear. It was with this open domestic warfare in the backdrop that the couple started talking about traveling to Syria. “When your mother is a dragon, it’s not hard to leave,” Dunya said.
The State Emerges
In January 2014, President Obama calls ISIS the “JV team” of the jihadist sphere. The casual remark is meant to underscore how al-Qaeda, as a transnational movement, remains a greater security threat to the United States than ISIS.
In June, in the space of a week, ISIS fighters capture Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, along with Tikrit and Tal Afar. Mosul, population two million, falls in four days. ISIS fighters encircle Baghdad, coming within twenty-five miles of the city and close to the airport. “This is not a terrorism problem anymore,” says a think-tank expert in Washington. “This is an army on the move in Iraq and Syria, and they are taking terrain.”
At the very end of June, on the first day of Ramadan, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi makes his first public appearance to give Friday prayers at the historic Grand Mosque in Mosul. He declares the establishment of an Islamic caliphate and invokes the ancient distinction between the Land of Islam and everywhere outside its borders: the Land of Disbelief.
“Rush O Muslims to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The earth is Allah’s,” he says. “Soon, by Allah’s permission, a day will come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master, having honor, being revered, with his head raised high and his dignity preserved.”
“The picture is no longer scary. It has become close to a nightmare scenario,” says a spokesman for the Kurdistan regional government, in northern Iraq.
U.S. military commanders start talking about ground troops. By August, it takes a combination of U.S. warplanes, Kurdish forces, and Shia militias backed by Iran to repel a major ISIS advance into northern Iraq. Iran dispatches military advisers and logisticians to support both Iraqi and Kurdish forces; both Washington and Tehran downplay that their militaries are acting in unexpected alignment.
EMMA/DUNYA
Summer 2014, Frankfurt, Germany
“This message is to the free women of Mesopotamia in particular, and the women of the ‘Muslim Ummah’ in general: Where are you from this holy jihad? What have you contributed to this Ummah? Do you not fear God? Do you raise your children to be slaughtered by tyrants? Have you accepted submissiveness and shunned jihad?”
—ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI, from “Religion Shall Not Lack While I Am Alive,” 2005
A mere eight days passed between the day Selim came home and started talking about emigrating to Syria, and the day they boarded a flight to Istanbul. Selim had spent the evening at the house of a friend, one of the Salafi brothers; they had watched Al Jazeera the whole night, absorbing images of Syrian children and women being pulled from rubble. When he got home, he sat on the floor, as though the gravity of it all required him to be closer to the ground, and told Dunya that Bashar al-Assad’s regime was killing Muslims and that he needed to help. He showed her the images on the screen of his mobile. There was a woman cradling a toddler with half its face blown off.
“Stop it,” she said, pushing his hand away. But he wouldn’t stop. His argumentation those days was a constant flow of disjointed, crude persuasion; how they could not stand idle while fellow Muslims were being hurt in this way; how once an Islamic caliphate had been established, it was everyone’s religious duty, her religious duty, to leave the Land of Disbelief and migrate there. Dunya tried to talk him out of this vision. “Is there no other way to help?” she asked. No, he said. Going to Syria was the only way.
These views were central to a radical political and eschatological worldview that Dunya at times seemed to uphold, and at other times to reject. Like many converts, she had watched the YouTube sermons of the globally popular Yemeni American imam Anwar al-Awlaki. He offered rich, thoughtful guidance on everything from daily health practices, to Ramadan fasting, to the qualities and habits of sound marriages. Awlaki was good to listen to, no matter if you were new to Islam or had years of practice and study. His voice was appealing, he was witty and articulate, and he refracted stories about early Islam and the lives of the Prophets into discussions that seemed contemporary and relevant.
In the early 2000s, Awlaki was the imam at a large mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, and widely known as a moderate willing to engage with the wider community, even the government—he attended a lunch event at the Pentagon and preached on Capitol Hill. In the wake of 9/11, he declared, “There is no way that the people who did this could be Muslim, and if they claim to be Muslim, then they have perverted the religion.”
In the year that followed, the FBI conducted raids across the area of northern Virginia that fell within Awlaki’s congregation. Awlaki was sharply critical of how the agents had behaved, holding guns to the heads of women and children and handcuffing them for long periods. But he leveled his criticism as a civil rights concern and evoked the historical struggle of African Americans to organize and defend their communities. When he criticized U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the emerging War on Terror, and the FBI’s heavy-handed tactics, he stayed carefully within a framework of legal rights and an ethic of nonviolence, an ethic he applied as stringently to states as to armed groups. In October 2001 he maintained, “The fact that the U.S. has administered the death and homicide of over one million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the U.S. is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians, does not justify the killing of one U.S. civilian in New York City or Washington, D.C. And the deaths of six thousand civilians in New York and Washington, D.C., does not justify the death of one civilian in Afghanistan.”
Some terrorism experts cite such views—which morally equate deliberate, state-inflicted military violence against civilians with attacks like 9/11—as evidence that Awlaki was an extremist from the outset. But, if anything, such views were not uncommon among many Muslims and even non-Muslim Middle Easterners. What happened to Anwar al-Awlaki next is a dark story, largely unknown to his thousands of online admirers from across the world.
As the FBI picked up intelligence that at least two of the 9/11 hijackers had prayed at Awlaki’s mosque, they began monitoring him closely. In the course of their surveillance, they picked up evidence of alleged meetings between Awlaki and prostitutes, the disclosure of which would have destroyed his reputation and ruined his life as a respected imam. Awlaki later told associates he had been set up, that the FBI had fabricated evidence against him.
In March 2002, following a series of seemingly indiscriminate and aggressive FBI raids on the homes of Muslims in northern Virginia, Awlaki delivered an angry, blunt sermon, warning that American Muslims were becoming second-class citizens under the law: ‘‘So this is not now a war on terrorism. We need to all be clear about this. This is a war against Muslims. It is a war against Muslims and Islam. Not only is it happening worldwide, but it is happening right here in America, that is c
laiming to be fighting this war for the sake of freedom while it’s infringing on the freedom of its own citizens, just because they’re Muslim.’’
In the spring of 2002, Awlaki left America for London and never returned. Those who portray him as a silver-tongued extremist argue that he left the United States because he feared the FBI would go public with its alleged prostitute dossier. Others believe that politics reshaped him and propelled him out—that he found the post-9/11 realities in the United States, the expanding legal harassment of Muslims, and the invasion of Afghanistan irreconcilable with his moderate theology. He spent two years in London, his views growing more strident, and then traveled on to his native Yemen. In 2006, local Yemeni authorities arrested Awlaki and, according to a New York Times journalist, kept him detained at the behest of the U.S. government. During the year and a half that he was in prison in Yemen, Awlaki was tortured.
It was after he left prison that his views fundamentally began to shift. His empathy for American civilians waned. Upon his release, he said that FBI agents were present and involved during his interrogations, that they were aware of the abuse. He dropped his warnings against targeting civilians and started calling for violence against the United States within the context of a global jihad. He articulated his new position in a 2010 lecture called “A Call to Jihad,” against the backdrop of what he described as a mounting and expanding campaign of American violence across Muslim lands.
What we see from America is the invasion of countries; we see Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay; we see cruise missiles and cluster bombs; and we have just seen in Yemen the death of the twenty-three children and seventeen women. We cannot stand idly in the face of such aggression, and we will fight back and incite others to do the same. I for one was born in the U.S. I lived in the U.S. for twenty-one years. America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in nonviolent Islamic activism. However, with the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim. And I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.
Guest House for Young Widows Page 9
