Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Walking past one of the cobblestoned roads that led down to the back entrance of the mosque, Sharmeena passed an apartment building, one of the high-ceilinged factory conversions that made this former garment district so attractive to young professionals. She looked up to see if the three Bangladeshi sisters were at their perch. Life at home was harder for young Muslim girls born into the conservative Asian families of the East End; mothers and families cosseted boys, spared them chores, let them roam outside freely. But girls, they were expected to come home straight after school, stay pure, stay demure. Sharmeena didn’t know their names, but the Bangladeshi girls were always leaning out the window watching passersby, waving at those they knew, their heads in public space, their bodies in private. Split in two. Not having waffles with boys.

  Earlier that summer, when her father had suggested that they go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, Sharmeena was eager. The pilgrimage to the holiest site in Islam, the city in modern-day Saudi Arabia where the Prophet Muhammad was born and received his first Quranic revelation, was one of the five pillars of the faith, a journey required of all Muslims who could afford to make it. In her community in East London, it was commonplace to go; virtually every travel agent on the high street of any neighborhood advertised hajj travel. She started covering her hair ahead of their trip. While they were there, circling the Kaaba, walking the plains where the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had walked, Sharmeena wept openly. Her father considered this a most natural reaction. She had recently lost her mother and was on a pilgrimage that deeply stirred almost everyone’s emotions. Indeed, that was the very purpose of hajj, a spiritual shake-up, a reminder of the temporality of this dunya life, a reminder that growing close to Allah and walking His path would hopefully unite us with our loved ones in the akhirah, or the afterlife, which, unlike this one, would last forever.

  Apart from the security services, no one quite knows who in East London noticed Sharmeena adrift and lonely that autumn of 2014. Two women, it is said, began sidling up to her at the mosque and making conversation. They were solicitous and friendly, eventually interrupting her sad reverie with their sincere, rapt attention. They began texting and calling her regularly, and invited her to women-only discussions, ostensibly about religion, that she soon found to be hot-talking political grievance sessions laced with some Islamic terminology.

  Sharmeena liked sitting and listening. Listening to strangers was actually easier than talking to people she knew, who inevitably asked her how she was coping, which forced her to arrange her face into some semblance of okayness she didn’t actually feel. The strangers who had befriended her talked about the world in stark, finite terms: Muslims pitted against the kuffar, the unbelievers; an epic global struggle of Muslim suffering in places like Palestine and Syria; the urgency of building a real Islamic state.

  They asked Sharmeena if she was sincere in her iman, her faith, and if so, whether she was willing to act upon it. They told her there was an Islamic state emerging in Syria, where she could practice Islam freely without harassment and live a life infused with deep spiritual meaning. They encouraged her to contact other women who had traveled to Syria from the West.

  Much of what Sharmeena saw being circulated online, among the muhajirat, the female migrants who had already made the journey, made it clear that—if you were serious in your faith, in your commitment to other Muslims—traveling to the emerging state was not exactly a choice. As Umm Abayda, a prominent muhajira Twitter personality, noted: “To all those in the west chilling in their homes. Know that just like there is a fardh [duty] upon you for salah [prayer], there is one on you for hijra.”

  Sharmeena’s mosque-going was a great relief to her father, who imagined that his anguished teenage daughter was coping and finding solace in Islam. Piety was an expected coping mechanism—to wake up before first light and read the dawn prayer as a means of solace, rather than taking up yoga or going to drug-soaked music festivals, as the white people around them might do. Sharmeena had stopped obsessively scrolling through outfit lookbooks on her phone and saying she wanted to be a fashion designer; another relief, which spared her father from having to say, “No, baba, we need you to be a doctor!” She did appear changed to him, more pensive and withdrawn, but he felt changed too, by the death of the person who had anchored them both. He thought they were experiencing the same thing on the inside.

  The only things that struck him as amiss were the extra time she was spending on her phone, and her hectoring new injunctions. There were certain television programs he liked to watch that she had started saying were forbidden. “Baba, smoking is haram,” she would say, shaking her head at him. He started resolving to quit each time they saw each other, so he could say, “Sharmeena, I’ve just quit!” and have it be true. Though she used the term haram, “forbidden,” her concerns for him seemed more worldly than ideological: his health was poor—he had diabetes and high cholesterol, both of which were aggravated by long hours on his feet at the restaurant, running plates in and out of a hot kitchen.

  At a time when her own world in East London was constricting, Sharmeena stumbled across, or was pushed into, a whole new world online. By that December 2014, the Syrian civil war had been burning for nearly three years, ever since Syrians first rose up against Bashar al-Assad in 2011, in the heady early days of the Arab Spring. Her new women friends spoke to her regularly about the horrific deaths of Muslims in Syria and the urgency of building a caliphate, as a means of self-defense against the violence and depredations inflicted upon Muslims everywhere. These views were echoed loudly online. She began following the Tumblr blog of a Pakistani British girl from Glasgow, Aqsa Mahmood, who had traveled to Syria earlier in 2014 to join ISIS. Aqsa blogged under the kunya, or nickname, Umm Layth. In regular posts, she described why she had left her family in Scotland to join the Islamic State struggle, urging other young women to do the same.

  First of all wallahi wallahi I know my position, I am not a scholar, a daiee or even a student of knowledge—not even close to it. So please do not assume that of me. These diary posts I write are only and only written with the intention of being a way of encouragement and advice for my sisters and brothers who are still stuck behind the walls of Darul Kufr.

  So in this post I am not just talking about myself but in general of all the muhajirat here (all my words are my own). The media at first used to claim that the ones running away to join the jihad as being unsuccessful, didn’t have a future and from broken down families etc. But that is far from the truth. Most sisters I have come across have been in university studying courses with many promising paths, with big, happy families, and friends and everything in the Dunyah to persuade one to stay behind and enjoy the luxury. If we had stayed behind, we could have been blessed with it all from a relaxed and comfortable life and lots of money.

  Much of what Umm Layth wrote held true for Sharmeena as well, except perhaps the big happy family. Bright and academically successful, socially charismatic, with a path to university and then a decent career within reach—all of this was true of her. And so it meant something to Sharmeena, hearing someone else articulate this longing for something more meaningful, something higher, a testament of devotion to Allah that surpassed any of these worldly accomplishments.

  Umm Layth was mostly upbeat and determined on Tumblr and Twitter. She made clear that she believed terrorist acts—like the 2009 attack in Fort Hood, in which U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan shot at fellow soldiers preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan—were legitimate acts of armed opposition to American military atrocities. Umm Layth’s tone veered between the reductive stridency of a teenager who has just discovered injustice, and the plaintive voice of a vulnerable child far from home. Sometimes she admitted how hard it had been to leave everything behind. In the spring of 2014, she wrote:

  I’m not writing this because it’s mother’s day or whatever they call it. I am writing this because I miss my mother, and
I want this to be a reminder to all of you, to recognize the worth and value of your mother, because once you lose her, nothing will be the same again. While most of you can still see your mother’s smile, I cannot anymore. While most of you can still put your head on your mom’s shoulder, I cannot anymore. While most of you can still call out to your mother when you feel pain in your body, I cannot anymore. While most of you can still go and have that heart to heart talk with your mother, I cannot anymore.

  Sharmeena read that one repeatedly; it was like an arrow straight into her own heart.

  She loved Umm Layth’s humility and eagerly followed her postings. It was through her blog that Sharmeena learned about Mike Prysner, a U.S. soldier who spoke publicly about the abuses he and his battalion had committed in Iraq. Umm Layth posted clips from a speech where Prysner described dragging women and children by the arms and confiscating their homes for use by the American military, without providing any compensation; he described violent interrogations, putting bags over detainees’ heads. He spoke of his shame at the casually racist terms his battalion commanders used when they incinerated civilian convoys. This former American soldier said, “We were told we were fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me and the real terrorism is this occupation.” It was essentially what the American Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki argued: that state military violence against civilians was terrorism too.

  Sharmeena began following other women to whom Umm Layth was connected across various social media platforms, their feeds converging into one loud crescendo of outrage against Muslim deaths: Palestinians killed in Israel, U.S. drone strikes on weddings in Afghanistan, U.S. drone strikes killing civilians in Somalia, the children killed by Assad’s barrel bombs, Rohingya in Burma. No matter what part of the world, it was unsafe to be a Muslim. The women favored online ideologues who argued that armed insurgency, or jihad, was the only way to defend Muslims against these onslaughts. They posted quotes from Anwar al-Awlaki. They were religious too—concerned with being good Muslims, avoiding behavior that was impure—but their faith was more emotionally charged with political fury against the West than desire for spiritual awakening.

  It was a whole world of youthful, febrile, intellectual contestation, one in which young Western Muslims who had already traveled to Syria shrugged off the media’s depiction of their motivations, hoping to reach those who were sympathetic but wavering, like Sharmeena. It was possible, they argued, to have multiple and sophisticated motivations. A woman using the name Bird of Jannah, who was probably the most popular English-speaking feminine face of ISIS, posted a stylish, filtered image. It showed a couple in the desert, a handsome bearded young man and his wife in full face veil, with a pink heart and the caption “The love of Jihad: Till martyrdom do us part.” At the same time a person called Umm Irhab, on Twitter, cautioned women against being made to feel like their commitment was somehow driven by sexual frustration or base desire: “I have never personally met a sister [in] sham who came here because of a ‘romantic thought abt war or bcos of a man’ We all came bcos of Allah.”

  For many, the anonymous question-asking website ask.fm became a welcome platform to share views directly. Umm Ubaydah, for instance, received this question:

  Anonymous: I just wanted you to know that the vast majority of Americans don’t hate Muslims, & I want to apologize to you & all your people for the terrible things we’ve done, & all the families & husbands we’ve killed. It’s shameful. I’m American, but my best friend is Palestinian. I love her like a sister. Many of us understand you resort to violence because we’ve done you so wrong & that is the only way you have to fight us. Inshallah—we would embrace you if you sought peace. We are all one people.

  But Umm Ubaydah responded on her Tumblr blog:

  We don’t resort to violence because of the wrong America has done. We are trying to build an Islamic state that lives and abides by the law of Allah.

  It seemed like there was a collective drive by followers, relatives, observers, the media, the government, to find one angle of understanding the muhajirat. But online, there were countless young muhajirat pushing back against this tendency, saying openly, Our motivations are diverse. Muhajirat literally translates as female migrants, but could arguably be rendered as female jihadists. Within the ideological worldview that advanced the notion of hijra to the Islamic State caliphate, migration was not such an innocent or neutral transfer of location, for those who were old enough to be held accountable. It meant signing up to the caliphate’s disruptive everyone-punishing project of extreme violence, as a female citizen-member and adherent.

  Umm Layth, the young woman from Glasgow, remained Sharmeena’s favorite. She seemed always candid and reliable, calling out rumors and false information wherever she saw them, even from ISIS supporters. She said that those who claimed that female muhajirat could go to the front and fight alongside men were spreading propaganda.

  Apparently, head military of Sham said women are not allowed [to fight]. They can do lots of other works. Today I spoke to one of Dawlahs main men in sham. He said even if u wanna start a business here COME. Like if u wanna be a dr here or anything just come, u can do it all inshallah. Lolll

  But Umm Layth, like so many other European women, was unable to read the campaigns and manifestos of the most prominent female ideologues of the group who explored these matters—women’s fighting roles or suicide operations—in Arabic. Whether she and others would have felt differently if they were able to access and understand these texts is impossible to say. Most likely not. 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.

  In Umm Layth’s writing, Sharmeena also saw a reflection of her own confused, pain-flecked, teenage Londoner naïveté: it was true that Muslims in all these places were dying, being killed by Israeli snipers or Syrian bombs; it was true that it was excruciating to watch that from the comfort of their British lives, feeling hopeless, useless; it was true that when they read Sheikh Awlaki online saying that change “depends on the youth,” that might very well mean her—an ordinary teenage girl, a girl who loved browsing ASOS and chewing wine gummies, sitting in her home in East London.

  As she read the comments under Facebook posts and the exchanges on Twitter, occasionally someone would ask one of the women who had already made hijra whether the violence that ISIS was meting out—the beheading of the journalist James Foley, the calls for attacks in the West—was theologically ethical or justified. The argument in response often went like this: Such brutality was certainly not desirable, but the West had left the militants no choice, there was no other way left to resist; nonviolent protest would not sway the dictator Assad, whose military was torturing and killing scores in detention centers, nor would it sway the United States, which had invaded and occupied Iraq, killed countless civilians, and sustained and protected Arab tyrants. Western societies were slumbering, had lost all empathy for the plight of Muslims, and needed to be awakened: only when their own citizens were forced to suffer would they be roused to notice the violence Muslims suffered daily.

  Sharmeena was only fifteen
—what did she know of anything—but the logic made sense to her: extreme violence begat extreme violence. She tried this argument out at school, defending ISIS to a teacher, who disagreed sharply with her. They argued, but the teacher reported to neither the school nor Sharmeena’s father that this vulnerable, testy girl, whose mother had just died, was openly advocating on behalf of a group that sliced people’s heads off on camera. The teacher didn’t suggest that, perhaps, someone might have a talk with her about these radical, violent political views. Perhaps, as might well have happened if she existed in a more educated family and world, someone might have told her there were other avenues for dissent and other ways to help vulnerable Muslims across the world: that she could devote herself to human rights law and political activism, or postcolonial studies or conflict reporting or humanitarian work. There were many things a young woman could do with rage. But it took an attentive, intact family, living rooms with books, a sensitive school, layers of protection that often didn’t exist around working-class girls from East London, to introduce those ideas. Even when the government got around to employing British Muslim women who had been through precisely this journey, dispatching them to counsel girls who were “vulnerable to radicalisation,” they conceded, as one did in an interview, that there was little to no space for these discussions in British society, no avenue for these angry young women to channel their political discontent to the government.

  Bethnal Green Academy, the state high school that Sharmeena and her three best friends attended, had an overwhelmingly Muslim student body. Its teenagers mostly kept to the daily five prayers even while at school, and girls wore long skirts or threw abayas over their school uniforms. Even if their families were conservative about mixing with the opposite sex, boys and girls interacted freely at school; they swarmed into the nearby Nando’s or chip shop together after class or congregated in the local park. If anything, they separated along racial lines, Asians and blacks, rather than by gender. Student life at Bethnal Green Academy was, by most reports, relaxed and warm. What was missing was a way for especially unhappy and especially intelligent girls to learn that the world offers many ways to dissent against injustice, beyond violent radicalism.