Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  The same thing happened to a local rapper kid, whose hip-hop name was Kouba. Kouba also spent a month protesting in front of the Ministry of Transportation. He finally sat the national exam, and also, like Saber, passed his medical exam. When it came to the hiring list, though, his name wasn’t on it. Again, the jobs went to the union guys and others with connections. Emad, the activist from Kram, knew Kouba. He said that in the end, Kouba gave up on Tunisia. “He didn’t have an extremist thought in his head. But he found a way to Syria and died in Syria.”

  Leaving to do jihad in Syria became a dignified exit from a life that offered nothing else, Emad said, which made vulnerable young men easy prey for militant recruiters. “Imagine yourself a young kid, thinks he’s a hero because he carried out the revolution. Imagine after that revolution you find yourself respected by the state, hired, doing well. What would you be thinking about? You’d be thinking about getting married. Buying a car. Living your life. Then you have the opposite taking place. You find your life ticking by. It’s now six years after the revolution; if you were twenty-two then, now you’re twenty-eight. If you were twenty-four, now you’re thirty. You want to build a life, but the doors keep getting slammed in your face. When a man gets to that point, he doesn’t think for himself anymore. They think for him.”

  In the years following the Arab Spring uprising, many young people in Kram reported stepped-up harassment by the police. The old regime’s methods of policing—trumped-up charges, no evidence, no due process, physical violence—had never really gone away; now they returned quickly, and with impunity. Mohammad Ali was one of what was called “the wounded of the revolution,” protesters who had suffered bodily injury in 2011 and received a small monthly payment from the state. This extra help had allowed Mohammad Ali to take a short holiday in Turkey. Upon his return to Tunis, the police put him under house arrest. “Mohammad Ali was religious, he prayed. And he had gone to Turkey. To the police, this could mean only one thing,” Emad said. “Terrorism.”

  They had no evidence at all, nothing to go on. But they interred Mohammad Ali in his house for long enough that he eventually lost his coveted job at the Ministry of Health. “The police think religious-minded people are the enemy, that they’re a danger to Tunisia,” Emad said. “It’s not easy to get rid of that attitude in just three or four years. It will take ten years, fifteen even, for the police to become republicans and not interrogate people’s beliefs.”

  In the afternoons, during the years after the revolution, Emad often sat at an outdoor café on a crowded street in Kram. Around him men drank coffee and smoked water pipes. The wall across the road bore the giant graffito WE FEAR NOTHING, ALWAYS FORWARD. Emad bristled when people asked about his country’s jihadist exodus. In fact, such questions irritated a whole range of people in Tunisia—sociologists, young graduate students, human rights activists—who preferred to make clear that the nation, even after the revolution, faced a whole morass of problems beyond jihadism. A quarter of Tunisia’s population lived in poverty while a sliver grew more affluent; opportunity remained firmly out of reach to those not born to wealth or connections; the government could not begin to shape better economic policies, because the delicate political consensus that was keeping the country together, where the old elites had a stake in the new order, was too paralyzed to agree on and enact necessary reforms. Many young people saw militancy as just one symptom of what was still wrong with Tunisia, rather than a whole pathology or framework of inquiry on its own.

  The exception to this were many secularists who specialized in jihadism or extremism. These scholars and analysts tended to hold discussions from about ten thousand feet in the air; they laced their conversations with words like “brainwashing” and “concubine,” and believed that religion itself, rather than state brutality or corruption, or some intermingling of all these things, led men and women to militancy. Their scholarship was highly partisan and politicized, and their views quickly garnered them attention in domestic media, similarly partisan, and quickly received recognition, support, and funding from Western organizations who held them up as representative local civil society voices. Often, they reached for English terms like “radicalization” or “violent extremism,” policy terms of a counterterrorism discourse minted by the West as part of a foreign and security policy agenda, now spreading out across the world, imposing generic, context-collapsing terms and solutions on disparate societies with widely varying problems.

  One such academic had designed a “rehabilitation program” for jihadist returnees that involved sequestration and a deprogramming process that would alter their views on religion. He admitted that it would be challenging to reengineer an individual’s belief system. “We would need to fundamentally review Islamic thinking, and that has not been done in the Arab world,” he said. “The problem is that political Islam believes in Caliphate.”

  The secularists sometimes acknowledged that they knew these outlandish plans wouldn’t work. Sometimes they freely admitted that they, the minority, were content to rule by force. Over dinner one evening, a refined professor at the University of Tunis declared that democracy was unsuitable for Tunisia, because until a population had absorbed the values of Rousseau, it could not be entrusted with the freedom to vote. The professor drove a gleaming SUV and in his free time enjoyed limericks and walking holidays in Britain’s Lake District. Western liberals who suggested that lasting stability for Tunisia could only be achieved through real public participation in politics—he thought they were delusional Islamo-gauchistes, deluded leftists who were enamored with Islamists and overlooked the sectarian and violent dangers they posed. His life was civilized, protected, and secure, and he didn’t seem interested in letting his country experiment with any real freedom.

  For the activist Emad, it rankled that Westerners turned their attention to Tunisia only when the country became involved in militancy that impacted the West, and then used the lens of that violence to understand the whole country. He kept pushing his beret back and shaking his head in exasperation. “We have so many kinds of extremism after the revolution, why does the media only look at the religious kind? Why does no one ask why the media outlets and prominent spokespeople, all affiliated with the old regime, were making huge public issues out of the niqab or even just fleeting references to Islamic law, when the revolution had been about employment and development and dignity at the hands of the police? Is it not extremism to make a national cause out of nothing, to sow false divisions about such side issues?”

  The new Tunisia was a place where the old grievances held strong. The inequalities remained firmly in place: between poor suburbs and seaside enclaves in Tunis; between the relatively prosperous north of the country and the impoverished interior and south. The country’s economy was sluggish. Real economic reform required an aggressive campaign against corruption, but the old-regime elites blocked these efforts, which would undo their ties of patronage. Stoking fears of terrorism was a rapid, effective way to ward off the anti-corruption purges that reform required. For Emad and others, if leaving to wage jihad in Syria had come to define the new Tunisia, that was a symptom that things had gone terribly wrong. Understanding those things—the many other extremisms that had produced this singular one—should be the focus.

  * * *

  —

  MOST MORNINGS WHEN KARIM LISTENED to the news on the radio or passed a newspaper stand, he felt as though nothing had changed. He was finding it difficult to control his reactions to ordinary things, or to react proportionally to anything. The sounds in the house of Nour’s parents, the scratch of her mother pulling the chairs closer to the table, the squawking of the pink rat creature in the cartoon her younger brother always watched, and the excitable boy’s mimicked response—all of it made him want to smash something.

  He decided it was time to go. He told Walid first, on a warm autumn night at a café in Kram. They smoked in silence for a time, and then Wali
d said, “You’re a total fucking idiot.”

  He interrogated Karim about his reasons. Did he want to be a martyr? Did he want to save the Muslims whom Assad was murdering? Did he want to serve the jihad? Walid was prepared to counter any of these notions. To die a martyr, no one could deny, was an exquisite fate. But what would become of Tunisia if all its youth abandoned it to help another cause? Who would fight for their country? And by that fall of 2013, the Syrian war had changed; it was no longer a just jihad, and Walid tried to impress this upon Karim. It was drawing mercenaries and delinquents, men without politics, with impure hearts. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, was a scorpion, responsible for turning the Syrian opposition into a pageant of extreme sectarian violence that alienated most Syrians and only served Bashar al-Assad. Syria was now a death trap, a war whose combatants and instigators twirled around in a space of funhouse mirrors.

  Karim stared at him impassively. It was all well and good for Walid to say these things. He had dropped into the war during its righteous stage and returned with the burnish of a warrior. Karim saw this in the way Nour looked at his friend, that sheen of admiration in her eyes. Who had more dignity in the eyes of a woman: an unemployed man on the couch in athletic wear, or the returned mujahid who had fought alongside his brothers and carried injured babies to the hospital?

  Karim told Nour late that night. They sat in the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed, with a plate of leftovers between them on the table. Nour didn’t know what to say. She still wore her niqab and wanted to lead a fully committed religious life, despite its hardship; she still believed that the people of Tunisia should be governed by Islamic laws. Now that Ansar al-Sharia was banned, some of the women in her prayer circle were talking about joining ISIS in Libya. The women said the space in Tunisia for religious and political activity had closed, and no one, not even Nour, felt like they could go back to how things were before, as though the revolution had never happened.

  It took two nights for Karim to convince Nour. On the second evening, they went for a walk, passing through the park where it had all started years ago, the day she told the girls she would be the school’s first student to wear a niqab. Ever since the government had banned Ansar al-Sharia, the neighborhood committees that collected rubbish had disbanded. The park was once again strewn with garbage, dirty diapers, and crushed water bottles.

  Nour thought about the relief it would bring to her parents, who felt the burden of supporting the young married couple. In three months, their baby would add a third mouth to feed. By now Karim should have had a job, they should have moved out. “Have I not tried here? Have I set my sights too high, for work I could not get?” Karim asked. They sat on rusted swings that punctuated the air with squeaks. Nour frowned and said, “No, you have been sensible.”

  She could not countenance staying behind. He was her husband, father of her soon-to-arrive child, her lifeline out of her parents’ home. Her aspirations were modest ones, ones that could very possibly be met by moving to Syria, if it was true that Karim would have a salary there. She wanted only to have a small space of their own, so they could sleep without her siblings in the room. She wanted to be able to work in a shop and earn some money without having to take her hijab off and show her body. She wanted to live in the caliphate under the protection of Islamic laws, practicing her religion without anxiety, social judgment, and public shaming. She wanted to hang curtains that she had chosen and watch them flutter in the breeze as she cooked dinner in her own kitchen. She wanted to be free of having to hold her tongue when her parents told her what to do, because they were living off their generosity and she could not.

  RAHMA AND GHOUFRAN

  Summer 2014, Sousse, Tunisia

  The first time Olfa heard the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014, it meant nothing to her, and she paid little attention. But over time, her daughters Rahma and Ghoufran, enmeshed in their new teenage lives as Salafi activists, mentioned him more and more. They read passages from his sermons aloud to each other and called him by the honorific “Emir.” Increasingly they talked about what was happening in Syria and how it was shameful to do nothing when Muslims were being slaughtered across the Mediterranean. “Muslims are suffering right here in Sousse, and five and ten towns away as well,” Olfa said tartly, but the girls shook their heads, as though they had become privy to some existential truth that eluded their poor ignorant mother.

  If the early months of Rahma and Ghoufran’s interaction with the Salafi movement had been social and active, a lively sequence of prayer circles and mosque visits, the girls now seemed to live in their mobile phones. They listened to jihadi nasheeds and fielded a stream of Telegram notifications. One night late that summer, like mothers of teenagers the world over, Olfa told Rahma to give her phone a rest. Rahma reached for it again in less than fifteen minutes, and Olfa lost it. She grabbed the phone and smashed it against the sharp corner of the coffee table.

  Rahma’s face crumpled. For a minute Olfa loathed herself; it was probably her fault her daughters behaved so strangely. They had no father, only a mother half-dead from exhaustion, bitter and volatile. Olfa fell asleep that night regretting the harshness she never seemed able to conquer. But the next afternoon, Rahma came home smiling, with a new, superior phone.

  Her daughter Ghoufran worried her less. Her old, cheery personality coexisted with her new religious identity; unlike Rahma, she hadn’t lost all sense of perspective or tolerance, which reassured Olfa. One of them was staying sensible.

  By June, Olfa had to decide whether to travel for her biannual work trip to neighboring Libya, a chance to earn some extra money during the high season. Usually she found someone to stay with the children, or at least stop in frequently to make sure they were okay. Between them, Ghoufran and Rahma had always been capable of running the household on their own, for the month or six weeks that she was away. Olfa did not like the fact that she had to leave her four children for the sake of making extra money for the family, but she stocked the house with biscuits and tins of tuna, and trusted they would be fine. In Libya, working as a cleaner at a beach hotel or household, she could make in one month what she earned in Sousse in three. They needed this money; not going was not an option.

  The girls too had been thinking about Libya. A cadre of jihadists was coalescing there, and would declare allegiance to ISIS under the leadership of al-Baghdadi later that fall. Some of the women the girls knew in Sousse and Tunis worked with an online and recruitment unit run entirely by women. Many had already gone to Libya.

  They whispered about it in the mornings, while the younger children watched cartoons and played with their shared doll. When Olfa mentioned that it was about that time of year, Ghoufran made the suggestion: “Why don’t we all go?” The course she described seemed so reasonable, so obviously to everyone’s benefit—they could all be together, Rahma and Ghoufran could work as well and combine their incomes, they would look after the smallest children.

  Olfa was easily persuaded. Going to Libya together, why had she not thought of it herself?

  EMMA/DUNYA

  February 2014, Istanbul, Turkey

  Perhaps not enough is said of Istanbul’s grandeur and sweep, the role of its extraordinary beauty as the launching ground for impressionable young people journeying to the caliphate, many of whom had never traveled abroad before. It is a city capable of stirring something deep, a quality Orhan Pamuk describes as its ineffable huzun, or melancholy. It is a word whose root appears in the Quran five times, and denotes a feeling of anguish at separation from God. Huzun, though painful, is spiritually necessary. It is the darkness that impels one to seek oneness, or union, or a state of getting close enough to God. Without huzun, how would one even know to seek?

  It is this quality that permeated Istanbul, the City of Islam, the capital of the Ottoman Empire—the last caliphate—which ruled from the thirteenth century through the end of World War I. Stretching bet
ween Europe and Asia over the Bosporus, teeming with mosques cast in golden light, the city is one of the most physically arresting, historically saturated, cosmopolitan urban theaters, vaster and more majestic than any city that might seek to compare. If Isfahan, Venice, Damascus, and Cairo were all courtly little jewel boxes, Istanbul was the whole world itself.

  Dunya and Selim went walking alongside the Bosporus at sunset, watching the ships dock at Karaköy. The light was sinking into a smudge of gray-violet and rose; flocks of birds fluttered black against the dimming light, with the towers of Topkapi Palace in the distance. Despite the drama and beauty of her surroundings, Dunya was anxious. Not only about going to Syria, but also of the prospect of running into her mother-in-law, who traveled to Istanbul every summer to visit her relatives. Dunya had wanted to stay near Taksim Square, but Selim said this area was too visible, so they spent three nights at a motel near the airport, a low-slung, dank place with smoked-glass windows near a club called Big Boss Lounge and dumpy restaurants that all seemed to evoke Dubai in their names, as though this was a code word for sin. When they went outside, she would scan the street ahead, half expecting her mother-in-law to jump out of a shop and snatch Selim away from her. She was almost relieved when Selim said it was time to go.

  She slept badly the whole night, watching the shadows migrate across the ceiling, before Selim’s phone alarm went off. It was still dark when they left the hotel, the sea glinting in the darkness and the bridge in the distance draped in lights.

  The drive to the south took about ten hours. It was past midnight when their car approached the stretch of border where they were meant to cross. The driver turned the headlights off and crept forward, telling them to keep quiet. Beams of light swept through the darkness ahead: border guards, but apparently not the ones they had bribed to let them through.