Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  In the ten months that had passed since Karim left Tunis, there were moments when she despaired of their plan. She tried to imagine what life would be like in Syria, but her mind could produce no images at all. Would there be ice cream shops and Sunday afternoon strolls? Would there be bombing raids? Karim told her that she should see if there were other women who could be persuaded to come. He said dawla, the Islamic State, struggled to recruit among Syrian women. They had been harsh in taking over new towns in Syria, and had alienated local women. For the caliphate to be able to function as a state, it needed more women, and they would need to come from abroad.

  She was furious with Karim, who was supposed to be sending money but hadn’t managed to yet. Nour didn’t have coherent ideas about what to do, only flashes of rage that she then used to justify things she knew she shouldn’t be doing. Like texting with a friend of Karim’s and meeting up with him. Conducting illicit exchanges at night, before she fell asleep. Laughing at his jokes and allowing his knee to press up against her own, under the table. Some afternoons, Nour asked her mother to watch the baby while she had coffee “with friends.” She put on more makeup than just eyebrows and foundation, and felt a bit pretty when she caught her own reflection in the mirror of the bus.

  She had always believed that God knew best for her, and that by heeding His dictates, she would win His favor. But the recent months were testing her. She knew it was wrong to interact freely with another man. But it was summer, and she needed distraction. Otherwise, everywhere she looked, she saw couples holding hands, sharing a pastry, taking selfies by the ocean, smiling at some private exchange.

  * * *

  —

  IN JANUARY 2014, ENNAHDA AND its coalition partners voluntarily relinquished power, facing sustained pressure over security. The international community, especially the Europeans, were greatly relieved that Tunisia’s experiment with political Islam had evolved so gracefully, without the massacre and military coup that ended Egypt’s, or the collapse of neighboring Libya. Leaders across the world celebrated Ennahda’s pragmatism and maturity and lauded Tunisia as a democracy capable of peaceful transitions. Later that year, the French celebrity-intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, shirt as ever unbuttoned, floated into Tunis and praised Tunisians for their victory in the electoral “battle against the religious obscurantists,” referring later to a key Ennahda as “the most objectionable company to be found on the political scene.” An indignant crowd of protestors at the airport demanded he leave, and please never return.

  In May 2014, the new government banned the annual conference of Ansar al-Sharia, which they considered a terrorist organization. Ben Ali–era controls over the religious sphere continued, with imams harassed and prosecuted on trumped-up charges. Certainly some imams were inciting violence against minorities or political foes, but some were simply challenging the long-time hold anodyne state-oriented imams had held over the religious sphere. The security sweep appeared not to differentiate. No one asked what was to become of the thousands of peaceful Tunisian youth who had gathered under the Salafi banner. As one young Tunisian said, “It’s like shutting down a factory. Where are all the workers supposed to go?”

  Many activists resigned themselves to a retreat from civic life. For others, going underground again, as though the revolution had never happened, felt unthinkable; they saw only two possible directions: Libya and Syria. By the accounts of security groups and the Tunisian authorities in 2016, around six to seven thousand Tunisian men and at least one thousand women had left their country to travel to Syria. Jamal, the Communist in Kram, said around five hundred men from the district had gone, and that the recruiters received a generous fee, about $3,000, for each young man they sent to a battlefield. Female recruits garnered slightly less.

  Jamal knew many of the emigrants personally, and took a psychoanalytical view of their motivations. Many of the women were simply troubled; they had body image issues and were desperate to escape their families. Jamal remembered one neighborhood boy who had been bullied intensely as a child. Jamal later spotted him on an ISIS video, in the background of the shot, transporting prisoners for execution. He had seen friends being courted by the Salafis. “They prey on the most vulnerable, exactly at the moment when they’re not educated enough to know better, but religious enough to feel the impulse,” he said. “They ply them with YouTube sheikhs and fatwas and nasheeds, and six months later the guy finds himself in Syria, smoking weed, convinced it was the right thing to do.”

  But bullying, body image issues, toxic families, broken families—these were the ordinary challenges of life. Was it enough to drive a young person to join the jihad? Jamal sat smoking under a canopy in the rain at a café with exposed concrete walls, filled with young people on MacBooks. He crushed a cigarette and lit another. “Islam is the main pillar of our society. Sometimes I even sympathize with what they feel. Salvation through violence. Pining for the past.”

  Some days, Nour felt as though the revolution were a private dream. Despite hijabi women now sitting in parliament, despite the fact that a good half of the women on public transport or walking down Avenue Bourguiba now wore hijab, the public culture of bullying hijabi women had not been shed in the new Tunisia. Nour never looked askance at a girl who wore a short skirt on the tram, or glared at a woman in a tank top. They would answer to God on the Day of Judgment. The point of freedom was that everyone could dress however they wanted, was it not? Was it genuinely such a point of offense to women who dressed more liberally that she, Nour, chose not to? They were accustomed to harassment by the police, because the police harassed everyone. It was the contempt of ordinary women that she found harder to reconcile.

  On a spring Friday, Nour had dressed carefully to go give blood at a clinic near Carthage. She wore a loose blouse, one with sleeves she could pull up easily, and waited for Walid to pick her up. Walid looked out for her while Karim was away. The clinic was on a residential road, lined with gated villas that were covered in bougainvillea. The woman behind the reception desk wore a nurse’s uniform, and elaborate eye makeup. She looked Nour over and shook her head. “You can’t come inside looking like that.”

  Nour willed her features to stay impassive. “You can’t come inside looking like that” was meant to have died with the old regime. “We’re just here to give blood for a friend; what does it matter what she’s wearing?” Walid asked. The nurse started to answer, but Nour was already out the door.

  That day, they came from the clinic to a beachside café in La Marsa, a well-heeled northern suburb of Tunis, to have coffee. Across the street from the café was a boutique hotel with an infinity pool, where the air smelled like jasmine and the bartender mixed gimlets. Six months prior, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared a caliphate in Raqqa. Karim, like many Tunisian fighters, left the Nusra Front, which he had initially joined, and migrated to ISIS. Nour supported this, and she was still eager to join him. Her daughter was now almost two and had never met her father. “She thinks my father is her father,” she said.

  Walid scanned his eyes around the café, keeping his voice low. He thought Nour was foolish. The Tunisians going now, he said, were nothing like the idealistic first wave that had joined the jihad, when he did, back in 2012. “They’re not going to free Syria. It’s their last solution. They’re either mercenaries or going for martyrdom, and taking the shortest path to get there.” Unlike when he was a teenager, listening to jihadi cassette tapes and videos, young people now drew their information about jihad from the internet. This had changed everything. “Now it’s about the power of the medium, not the content,” he said. “It’s all about aesthetics and who produces the most beautiful video.”

  The seaside café was among the more modest in La Marsa, but even here, Nour’s outfit—a dark two-piece cloak and trousers over black Converses—drew attention. La Marsa was the quarter where affluent, foreign-educated Tunisians and expatriates lived. The neighborhood
had the requisite nail bars and gluten-free bakeries. Here, liberals enjoyed a comfortable majority, and as such, it was an active theater where emancipated secular women bullied emancipated religious women. When a rising star in the Ennahda party, the Sorbonne-educated Sayida Ounissi, attended a lecture in La Marsa a year prior, a woman accosted her in the bathroom and said, “You’re so beautiful and clever, why do you wear this stupid cloth on your head?”

  From her seat in the café, Nour stared out at the sea. A camel ambled across the beach with fluorescent tassels around its neck, looking, like most camels, wryly content. LIFE IS IN OUR HANDS, announced a nearby billboard advertisement for the British International School. A group of women in flamenco skirts and matching crimson hijabs posed for a photo shoot along the Corniche. The Corniche was lined with wilting, half-dried-out palm trees that were battling the red palm weevil, a palm-decimating pest that had originated in Tunis and migrated north to attack the palms of Palermo and Cannes. Tunisians whispered that the weevils were a curse brought to Tunisia by the son-in-law of the deposed president, the one with the pet tiger.

  Nour said she believed it was acceptable for ISIS to kill civilians in the West, but couldn’t articulate what religious rulings allowed that. As ISIS grew more savage, many Salafi clerics condemned its acts of violence. Nour seemed perplexed by not having any theological evidence for what she felt—politically, emotionally, morally—to be right.

  Walid interjected here, feeling the need to explain why Nour knew so little about the religion she followed so devotedly. The education system under Ben Ali, he said, deliberately kept religious instruction spare and shallow. He remembered being taught a Quranic passage in school, concerning rightful behavior in the face of injustice. At home, when his father opened the Quran to the relevant verse, Walid discovered that the teacher had bowdlerized it, leaving out the more forceful passages. This poor instruction encouraged curious young people to seek out information online, where they stumbled across sermons, sources, and texts of unvetted authenticity and background. “They’re like a blank board ready to be written on,” he said.

  Flimsy religious knowledge was common among young Tunisian women who had joined Salafi networks or traveled to join militants in Libya or Syria. One woman, who died in an air strike on an ISIS training camp in Libya, had failed the entrance exam for the Sharia law degree at the University of Tunis. This is what Walid meant when he said that an education system in a largely religious country that neglected religious instruction left the doors open for manipulation, by actors who used the language of religion for other aims.

  Nour didn’t feel especially conflicted by her support for a group that was, by that point, heavily involved in theatrical violence. To her, the crucifixions and sex slave markets were the fanciful propaganda of the group’s opponents. She seemed skeptical that ISIS had done all of those things. Many young people like Nour didn’t believe what they heard about ISIS. The media in most Arab societies was deeply politicized, enmeshed with authoritarian political regimes and reflecting those regimes’ agendas and biases. Many young people had simply disengaged. Asked whether she accepted ISIS’s tactic of targeting other Muslims, even at prayer in mosques, on the grounds that they had become unbelievers, she nodded in assent. Walid, lighting a cigarette, snapped, “So it’s all right for them to target al-Nusra?” She responded feebly and they sparred for a couple of minutes.

  After Karim left for Syria, the police started “inviting” Nour to have conversations with them. This involved her going to a police station about twice a month, to sit in a room with a metal desk, usually responding to the same questions posed by the same unibrowed officer: Why are you wearing those clothes? Why don’t you take them off? Who are you in communication with? Who is your religious mentor?

  For a while, Nour had managed to hide the police surveillance from her friends and family. She would come up with elaborate excuses for needing to change plans, but there was nothing she could do about the unmarked number flashing on her phone. In Kram, rumors flew quickly. Some of her friends started shunning her. No one wanted to be associated with a girl who was being watched by the police.

  When the neighbors asked her mother where Karim had gone, she told them he was attending to some business in France. But Nour suspected that many of the neighbors realized the truth. A family friend, a taxi driver, blamed Karim and his Islamist brothers for the fact that the cruise ships had stopped coming to Tunisia. In earlier years, the ships had dropped anchor in La Goulette harbor, pouring thousands of cheerful Europeans into Tunis for a few hours of spending each day. The taxi driver repeated the ships’ names lovingly, as if caressing a rosary: “The Majestic, the Fantastic, the Adonia…” Nour sometimes caught him looking at her with anger in his eyes.

  Ricocheting Out

  By the middle of 2015, ISIS establishes itself as a global menace whose reach extends across Europe, North Africa, and beyond, upsetting the political order in states from Germany to Tunisia. So many hundreds of Britons have traveled to join the Islamic State that a former UK counterterrorism official suggests the government should “lay on charter flights to Syria.”

  A Jordanian fighter jet crashes near Raqqa, and the pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh, is captured by ISIS. After feigning interest in a prisoner swap with Jordan, they ask for recommendations on Twitter as to how he should be put to death, under the hashtag #Suggest­A­Way­To­Kill­The­Jordanian­Pig­Pilot. The world, seemingly, fails to notice how social media companies are enabling the war, gaining traffic and therefore profiting off people’s interactions with such content.

  ISIS releases footage of the pilot being burned to death in a cage. Leading Islamic scholars across the world condemn the killing. Jordan and the United States retaliate with air strikes, and the group claims these strikes have killed American hostage Kayla Mueller.

  Throughout the spring, the group’s affiliates unleash bombings in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Tunisia. They hold a theatrical mass execution in the ancient amphitheater of Palmyra.

  This summer, the population exodus unleashed by the Syrian civil war reaches its peak, destabilizing Europe. German chancellor Angela Merkel calls it a “national duty” to host the largest refugee influx in Europe’s history, declaring, “We can do this.” On some days, Munich processes thirteen thousand refugees in a day, sometimes forty thousand over a weekend. Thousands of refugees die before arrival, asphyxiated in trucks or drowned in the sea.

  The European far right treats the war-fleeing refugees as unwelcome invaders, and exploits their plight to gain electoral ground. There are hundreds of attacks on asylum centers each month. A Hungarian camerawoman becomes the global face of this hatred, recorded on camera tripping a man running with a child in his arms for the border. Hungary erects a barbed-wire fence. The European Union confronts the fact that many of its members do not share liberal democratic values such as human rights.

  In September, a photo appears on the front page of newspapers around the world: the drowned toddler Alan Kurdi, wearing a red T-shirt and navy shorts, facedown on an empty beach, hands turned out against the tide.

  Despite the backing of Iran-led militias, the Assad government appears in real danger of falling. On the last day of September, at the behest of Assad, Russia launches its first air strikes in what will be a definitive turning point in the war.

  RAHMA AND GHOUFRAN

  May 2015, Tunis

  When Olfa came home and saw that her phone charger was gone, along with all her headscarves, she knew. It was a cloudless late spring morning and Rahma was gone.

  Rahma called two days later, but wouldn’t speak to Olfa. “Put one of the girls on,” she texted first. When the phone rang, Olfa obliged, because she knew Rahma would hang up otherwise. It had been the same with Ghoufran, who communicated only with Rahma, not with her mother. To both of them, Olfa was a pariah, an unbeliever.

  Olfa could understand. She had sat with th
e same sheikhs and found their ideas appealing. She had briefly considered wearing the same severe clothes that her daughters had adopted. Amid their lives of deprivation and hardship, Olfa saw the appeal of situating herself in the path of certainty. Whatever problem you had, they had a way of solving it. Anything you felt hurt by, any injustice or slight, they had a balm for it. Who wouldn’t want such solace?

  Olfa blamed herself for all of it; she blamed her parenting and Tunisia itself. She knew, in her heart, that she had not been a friend to Rahma. That she had been harsh with her, had responded to her moodiness and troubled behavior with anger and slaps, that she had allowed herself to take out her own suffering and resentment on her daughter.

  And as for Tunisia, how could any child growing up in this country grow up normal? What was a normal response to religion in a country that seemed hospitable only to the extremes?

  June 2015, Sousse, Tunisia

  On a cloudless June day, at around noontime, a young engineering student walked out onto the beach of one of the coastal luxury hotels in Sousse. There were tourists everywhere, mostly British, lounging on beach chairs, standing ankle deep in the sea. Seifeddine Rezgui held a beach umbrella awkwardly at his side, concealing the Kalashnikov wrapped in its folds. The young man pulled the rifle out and started spraying bullets in every direction.

  People screamed as he stalked up and down the beach. Some dove into the water to escape. Others ran, stumbling in the sand, or crawled under beach loungers for cover. He pivoted toward the hotel compound, reloading round after round, pausing to lob grenades. In all, Rezgui killed thirty-eight people—mostly Britons—in a shooting spree that went on for forty minutes before the police finally arrived and shot him dead.