Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  In that fall of 2012, the Syrian civil war was still a just war, to many, a just jihad. It was a clear case of a tyrant, a taghout, brutally murdering his people. Young men like Walid did not feel they could watch Assad’s slaughter while casually proceeding with their lives.

  Islam carries the concept of ummah, or a global community of Muslims, all of whom share a spiritual bond and a stake in each other’s welfare. This is an unshakable sentiment that rests in the heart of many Muslims across geographic and social contexts; it has a secular variant that may not rest on the idea of ummah so much as simple political solidarity. At Tunisian soccer matches to this day, fans drape banners in support of Palestine across the stadium. Was Palestine an Islamist cause, an Islamist value? Not especially—but an individual’s political worldview could be shaped by many values, anything from a belief that religious tenets should drive politics, to a belief in self-determination and democratic will. The secular youth of the revolution in Egypt, for instance, also focused on Palestinian rights, demanding that Egyptian foreign policy reflect these concerns.

  These new forces in the Arab Spring—the rise of popular Islamists; the emergence of radical young people who believed that religious parties should have a role in politics, young people who felt as viscerally about the sixty-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestine as though it had happened last week—were profoundly disquieting to the Sunni tyrants who had presided over the region for decades, as well as the Western countries whose interests had also upheld that order. The collapse of the Arab Spring revolts led to an even more extreme regime of repression in countries like Egypt and Bahrain; for the autocrats whose power rested on their choking suppression of politics and civil society, their strict control of the media, it became imperative to ensure other countries did not provoke their populations by example.

  Even though Tunisia was a pint-sized country of little consequence in the wider world, its internal politics suddenly took on urgent and wide-ranging implications for the region. The emerging axis of Arab authoritarian regimes allying with Israel—particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—could not tolerate the rise of a popular religious political movement in Tunisia; it would provide too dangerous a model for their local oppositions. Islamists were disruptors. They couldn’t be bought off with yachts. They felt the whole game—the Western political and economic ordering of the Middle East, enacted through wars, cultivation of potentates, and arms sales—was stacked against the people of the region, and they rejected this game entirely.

  The term itself, “Islamists,” was a popular but opaque term that didn’t capture the breadth and intention of what such actors were up to: they were often simply socially conservative political oppositions, challenging modern Arab nation-states’ failures—to oversee social and economic development, to endow the concept of citizenship with any meaning. These failures, the Islamists maintained, were the real driver of the region’s extremism. They had popular support; many had illiberal (in their eyes, orthodox) religious views. And their views on Israel, on America’s military footprint in the region, were disquieting. Everything about them was disquieting. But from the bottom up, they were exceedingly strong.

  In February 2013, a Tunisian MP who had been critical of Ennahda was shot dead outside his home. Within several weeks of his arrival, another politician was assassinated.

  The suspicion immediately turned to Ennahda, fanned by the press, still dominated by Ben Ali–era figures. But the Tunisian police were too ill-equipped to make an arrest and produce forensic evidence showing who was responsible. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Kasbah, demanding the Ennahda-led government step down from power. The situation was ostensibly a domestic political crisis, but there were forceful voices coming from outside. Western intelligence agencies sent urgent messages to the government in Tunis, pressuring it to get tougher on terrorism. Ennahda understood clearly that it had to save itself.

  By the summer of 2013, when Walid returned to Tunis, stretches of Avenue Bourguiba were lined with concrete barriers and whorls of barbed wire. The first evening of his return to Tunis, Walid met a friend downtown for a shawarma. He was stopped at two checkpoints, each stop necessitating a twenty-minute wait. The cars were mostly full of young men driving into the center of town for an evening of strolling past the avenue’s cafés. But the police saw this as an opportunity to resume their old ways: harassing young men for the sake of it, imposing spurious fines that were just demands for bribes.

  That night, Walid walked past the Café du Théâtre, past the alleyways that led to darkened cellar restaurants where union and leftist party leaders had wine with lunch. Tanks and barbed-wire whorls formed a cordon between the building and the street. On bad days, it felt to Walid like very little had changed: the police still terrorized you, they confiscated your car, demanded bribes for basic paperwork, turned your girlfriend’s family against you. Instead of raping you with a bottle, they savaged your life more bureaucratically, but it felt the same. On good days, he still thanked God that Ben Ali was gone, that there was a transitional justice process underway, where the former regime figures would be held to account in hearings broadcast on national television.

  In August, the government declared Ansar al-Sharia a terrorist organization. Whether the majority of the group’s members supported violence was unclear; certainly, the majority were not involved in acts of violence. But Ennahda needed to appear tough on terrorism, and the Tunisian security services lacked the capacity to monitor and police the Salafist movement with a fine-tooth comb. The police were used to operating as Islamist hunters, and asking them to do any different would have been like suggesting Joseph McCarthy make investigative distinctions between Stalinists and Trotskyists. Politically and practically, the only course was to ban the organization wholesale.

  Walid was livid with this political reality. He had a tendency to spit out Abu Iyadh’s name like the shell of a sunflower seed, blaming him for the attacks that triggered the state crackdown. “Abu Iyadh did the greatest damage of any single individual to the cause of Islamism in Tunisia,” he said. Walid believed that Abu Iyadh was compromised, that he possessed some other agenda. Security services routinely penetrated Islamist networks and egged on everyone, from sympathizers to militants, to plan and carry out attacks. Islamists whispered this about Abu Iyadh everywhere, from London to Tunis; he was the Keyser Söze of the Salafi movement, a figure whose motivations and allegiances remained a permanent mystery. Walid reasoned aloud, “Why would you do that? Why would you take up arms against the government? Why go on the offensive so quickly? Couldn’t he have calculated how the state and the police would’ve reacted?”

  Or perhaps Abu Iyadh had been doing global jihad for so long that it had become a part of him. This was the view of Abu Abdullah, a fellow Tunisian traveler in the world of Salafi jihadism. His history, like Abu Iyadh’s, stretched all the way back to the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the resulting Sunni insurgency drew old veterans like Abu Abdullah back into the field. He spent two years in Anbar province over 2004 and 2005, fighting U.S. Marines in intense urban combat.

  In late November 2005, after an IUD exploded under a Humvee and killed an American soldier, Marines rampaged through the town of Haditha, in Anbar province. Marines ordered five Iraqi men out of a taxi—a driver and four students—and shot them in the street. Then they stormed into a nearby neighborhood and kicked in the doors of two houses. Inside were families, including a blind old man in a wheelchair and children as young as three, some still asleep in their beds. The Marines gunned them all down, nineteen in all.

  This was the fighting Abu Abdullah saw in Anbar. In his eyes, militant groups had no choice, in the asymmetric war in which they found themselves, but to target Western civilians. How was that any different from what the Marines had done that day in Haditha? They were up against a powerful country
that had launched an ideological war in Iraq and often deliberately killed civilians and feigned apology afterward. Was that not simply state terrorism?

  It was in Anbar that he met and grew close to the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, known later as “Sheikh of the Slaughterers,” and cemented his belief that the West was inexorably against the development of Arabs and Muslims. He came to believe that the developed living standards in the United States and Europe were dependent on an economy of Arab client-state management, of massive arms sales to dictators, military invasions, and the lucrative Western-contractor-led rebuilding that followed. “They steal our wealth, they oppose our movements, they want to keep us Third World,” Abu Abdullah said. To his mind, colonialism had never really ended, it just changed guise. In this new order of things, jihadism was revolutionary self-defense.

  There is no consensus perspective on Salafi jihadism, either as an idea or as a transnational militant phenomenon. How much is Salafism itself to blame, and how much the armed, oppositional tendencies of the groups in question? Ideology or context? How genuine and significant are the links between Salafi jihadist groups from one theater of conflict to the next? Just because one group signals ties to a powerful centrist jihadist group to burnish its muscular image and enhance its brand, does that mean we face the same enemy across multiple fronts? Or must different national and regional conflicts be largely understood on their own terms? Ideology or context?

  Some view Salafism as inherently toxic, liable to disrupt and fuel tensions in whatever society it takes root because at its core, Salafism is so rigid and inherently intolerant of difference, a sect that cannot help but preach apartness. Salafi jihadism is then a natural outgrowth of such a reactionary and unstable ideology. Others advance the idea that Salafi jihadism flourishes in the cracks of state disorder, that many insurgencies around the world may inflect their campaigns and agendas with its language and aesthetics, but that they are fundamentally local conflicts that must be read and assessed within their own spheres. Those tasked with responding to and assessing violent acts—intelligence agencies, police, scholars, journalists—tend to hew to one view over the other. The distinction matters because the story we agree to tell about extremism, the mapping of who is hurting whom and what should be done about it, as well as the scale and nature of the threat, determines the policies that states put into place.

  The ideological reading tends to advance militarized policies—more drone strikes, battlefield onslaughts, and more punitive security policies. The contextual reading promotes engagement with the politics of these insurgencies, perhaps at times even engagement with the militants themselves, with the aim of transforming the conditions that gave rise to them in the first place. The truth is that there is no singular answer to the problem of Salafi jihadism, and scarcely anyone is capable of theorizing it properly.

  For his part, Abu Abdullah’s views, like most hardened rebels, were sweeping and mechanical.

  The old jihadi argued that the Americans and the Europeans would never allow an Islamist government to take hold in Tunisia. He pointed to Ennahda’s retreat from mentioning Sharia or even Sharia principles in the new constitution. “Their project is not to create a state where Muslims can be religiously free. Look at them now, even though they’re in power. If you go to their headquarters and ask for help, if you say you’re a niqabi girl harassed by the police, they’ll say, ‘There’s nothing we can do for you.’ ”

  Apart from finding Ennahda especially useless, Abu Abdullah didn’t believe in working within the state’s political framework in the first place. He considered democracy to be shirk, or idolatry; God had provided all the laws necessary, and overriding them was sinful. This belief was at the core of many Islamist movements, which originated after the fall of the Ottoman caliphate at the end of World War I. The idea of an Islamic state—not the organization called the same in Syria, but a modern entity that brought Muslims together under one political banner—remained the ultimate aim of Islamists across the spectrum, from the veteran jihadis to the new generation of Salafi rebels.

  Abu Abdullah said the appeal of jihadism signaled a desperation, the failure of the prospect of gradualism. “The system is so corrupt and so oppressive that it seems futile to do anything. That’s why you see the rapper, the praying man, the drinking man, the Rasta man…all turning to ISIS.” But if there was a repaired Tunisian system, would young people still be drawn to jihad or the pursuit of an Islamic state? He considered this carefully. “Young Muslims have this instinct inside them. Something in them will always awaken to fight the enemy. To change things in the world, to make the religion proud and glorious.”

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  —

  BY THE AUTUMN OF 2013, Karim had given up looking for work and was back on the sofa. Most evenings he sat with Nour’s father, watching the news. They flipped between the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, which covered the Islamists of the region as though they were statesmen, and the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, which dourly warned of Islamism as a creeping terrorist fungus. One night, on the latter channel, he watched the presenter’s glossy fuchsia mouth pucker into an O every time she called the interviewee “Doktor.” Her high-cheekboned, lacquered face was so beautiful it was almost calming.

  Karim had a shift later that night driving a taxi. Two such nights’ work would make him about one-sixteenth of a month’s rent. His original plan—to get a job at the Ministry of Transportation and then earn enough to rent a taxi on the weekends, rather than picking up just an occasional pity shift—had fallen apart. There weren’t any objective criteria for getting hired by the ministry, or making it through the various stages of almost-hiring that might or might not result in an actual salaried job.

  Karim was not alone in his mounting disillusionment. Young men gathered almost weekly to protest in front of the ministry; it happened so regularly it didn’t even count as news anymore. Sometimes Karim went along, halfheartedly throwing a stone. He was thirty-seven that year, but he felt as though he were living out his third lifetime: the first in corruption-choked Tunis under Ben Ali; the second his escape to France, a nomadic existence where he tried to avoid the easy lure of petty crime; and now the third, here in the new Tunisia, which made his heart tighten up, because if nothing opened up for him here, nothing ever would. Falling asleep at night, he would whisper to Nour to be patient, but she was two months pregnant by now.

  It was the season of Mediterranean dust storms that would sweep in from the north and make the sky a glowing saffron haze. It was the season that the men of Kram started to disappear. They were going to Syria, where, it was said, you could make a living by joining the jihad. It wasn’t just petty drug pushers who were drawn by these promises, but skilled guys with degrees. Professional soccer players. IT guys. Lawyers, doctors, fine arts graduates. There were tales of large salaries and subsidized apartments.

  The story that was making the rounds fastest was that of Hamza Ben Rejeb, a disabled university student who had spent his whole life confined to a wheelchair in a third-floor flat in Tunis, and somehow managed to wheel himself to Syria to join the fight against the tyrant Bashar. Once there, he put his IT training to use and, reportedly, felt respected and productive for the first and only time in his young life. Back in Tunis, his older brother Mohamed went on television, complaining bitterly that the jihadists had so little shame they were even willing to seduce a cripple. Mohamed went to Syria and demanded that Hamza come home. The militants held up their hands, saying they were not in the business of keeping cripples against their will, and Mohamed wheeled Hamza back to Tunis, back to the third-floor flat with the view of no future.

  Before 2013, no one talked much about “radicalization” in Tunisia. They talked about fucking off to Syria to find a job, to build a polity for Islam, to fight Bashar al-Assad, to join a militant group, to rescue a dying child, to ensure a place in heaven, or some combination of all those things. Those choices an
d motivations were taken at face value; no one imagined that the young people going to Syria didn’t actually feel these things, that there was instead some fuzzy ideological process called radicalization happening to all of them. Mohamed, brother of wheelchair-bound Hamza, was someone who had seized upon the idea of radicalization that had recently been exported to Tunisia. Each decade tended to have a notion that reliably elicited Western donor funding to local civil society organizations. The 2010s was the decade of “countering violent extremism.” Mohamed started an organization euphemistically called Tunisians Stranded Abroad. He held court in local cafés, explaining how online Salafi sermons and targeted grooming had convinced Hamza he was a genius (“Hamza is not a genius,” he assured journalists who asked). In all of this, no one was ever permitted to speak to Hamza himself. He had grown depressed and wanted to return to Syria.

  Karim hadn’t known Hamza, but he did know Saber, the son of a local seamstress. Saber had a scar on his right arm from where a bullet had grazed him during the revolution. Saber applied for work from the Ministry of Transportation and protested outside every day until finally he was accepted into the recruitment process. He made it all the way to his medical exam, the very last phase. He was meant to start work two days after that, but when the final hire lists were published, he wasn’t on them. No one from Kram was listed; the only guys hired were those who had connections to the influential labor unions, just as it had been before the revolution. Saber left for Syria, and after about three months, news reached home that he had died.