Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  The play was planned to debut at a school in Bethnal Green. But the council at Tower Hamlets, the borough that oversees the area, pushed the school to cancel. The National Youth Theatre (NYT) found another venue, but there were further signs the play continued to create unease. The police had asked to read the script, attend the first three shows, plant plainclothes officers in the audience, and sweep for bombs. The teenage actors protested, and rehearsals carried on.

  Two weeks before opening night, the whole production was abruptly canceled by the NYT, with no explanation. In 1968, with the passage of the Theatres Act, the United Kingdom ended a 230-year-old system of formal state censorship. Since 1968, no play had been banned by a theater or the police without clear indication that it might spark violence. A leaked email written by the NYT’s director faulted the play’s “one-dimensional tone and opinion” and accused the writer and director of an “extremist agenda.” Various groups protested, from English PEN to the Index on Censorship, which said the government had “created an atmosphere” that made arts groups increasingly nervous to tackle controversial subjects, “specifically the question of Islamic extremism.”

  But it wasn’t simply that plays dealing with Islamist extremism were hard to put on. Indeed, about a year later the National Theatre itself performed Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State, which included the stories of Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima as part of the narrative. But this production interspersed their stories with the points of view of U.S. generals and lawyers, and sawed off its nuance until nothing was left but the cliché it handed back to the audience: “We are just the same as you.” If there was any truth to be gleaned from the stories of those girls, it was that their lives, worldviews, and experiences were precisely not just the same as those of the white, middle-class audience that turned up at the National Theatre.

  Perhaps Homegrown was too raw and too unfiltered: it vented the views of the British teens without interrupting them to inject the views of American generals. It contained sympathy for the young man Mohammed Emwazi, before he became the ISIS killer Jihadi John. What could you do when you commissioned a play from young people, and they came up with this? How did you confront the disturbing truth that they felt sorry for him and despised him at the same time? Most of all, how could you allow them to reveal that while they rejected ISIS itself, they agreed with its overarching portrayal of the state of the Middle East and its apportioning of blame on Western state interventions and policies for that state? That, in fact, this view was so widely shared it could not in fairness be called the ISIS view at all, but the broad sentiment of many Muslim and Arab publics, in the region and in the West, that was simply articulated by ISIS with its own twist and political agenda.

  As it turned out, you could not allow this to be aired publicly at all. It was censorship, of course, but in the United Kingdom of that time, policing was an imperative over artistic freedom or even, really, freedom of expression. Homegrown was banned because it circled back relentlessly to foreign policy as the instigating cause of so much anger among young British Muslims. Its cast of characters seethed with so much grievance that you could not read it or sit through it and fail to understand how ISIS had recruited so skillfully; not because ISIS was especially clever, but because it knew its audience so well.

  And though the CCTV image of the teenage girls gliding through the airport had transfixed the world, there was very little eagerness to truly understand why they had gone. Their disappearance raised many more questions than answers, but their story seemed to prompt one angry conclusion after the other, as everyone—the media, the police, Prevent officers, Muslim feminists, Western feminists, human rights groups—vied to impose their answers onto the girls’ disappearance. To swirl in a morass of suppositions and half-truths seemed safer, in the London of 2015, than to hear what a youth theater group born and raised alongside those girls had to say.

  KADIZA

  May 2016, Raqqa, Syria

  An air strike ripped through the building where Kadiza was living. She was inside, and died instantly. Sharmeena, the first of the Bethnal Green girls to travel to Syria, the one whose example her friends had followed, called Kadiza’s sister in London to give her the news.

  SABIRA

  Spring 2016, Walthamstow, Northeast London

  After the rout at the airport, Sabira spent weeks entangled with courts, the police, and counter-terrorism officers. It was a multilayered institutional process that resulted in the loss of her passport, semipermanent surveillance, and the belated realization that—in the midst of her depression, and with the influence of Imran—she had very nearly demolished her young life.

  As far as her view of Imran, it was as though he had suddenly been thrust under a glaring fluorescent bulb. What her own neediness and illness had obscured—his manipulations, his cunningly deployed charisma—now appeared obvious. On her backup mobile phone, a text came from him: “I miss you.” She considered various retorts to this—How is your wife? Thanks for getting my passport taken away!—but decided none of them were worth the bother. One night that spring of 2016, Imran showed up at the door. She pressed herself flat against the hallway upstairs when she heard his voice. Her mother comported herself brilliantly, for once. “Don’t you ever set foot in the direction of our house again!” she shouted hoarsely, slamming the door. Sabira felt the vibrations shaking through the wall.

  She was obliged to attend the country’s highest court to learn her sentence; her father accompanied her to the courthouse on the Strand, in London. Like dozens of other young women in Britain whom the authorities viewed as at risk of travel to Syria, the judge made her a ward of court. Sabira wore her hair down and a charcoal-gray dress and gray tights. She was grateful that everyone at the court treated her with respect and kindness, and that, apart from losing her passport and being barred from traveling, for a given period of time, to any Muslim country, the United Kingdom was giving her another chance. Had she been a young American woman in similar circumstances, caught by American authorities, it’s likely she would have been prosecuted under vaguely defined statutes around “material support for terrorism” and been forced to serve a years-long prison sentence.

  She spent weeks in email contact with various detective inspectors. She underwent psychiatric evaluations and endured visits from Prevent officers, who sat awkwardly in her living room and asked about Islam and where she stood with her religion. “What sort of Islamic thoughts do you carry in your head right now? What is your Islamic ideology at present, Sabira?” one of them asked her, sitting primly on the sofa in the living room, her language stilted, as though she were reading from a script. What to say to such a woman?

  Sabira wanted to tell them she was fine, that she wasn’t a mental patient, that a terrible situation had occurred—but given the simplistic questions they were asking her, she was certain they would never understand. If they wanted to know why she had tried to go, why were they asking about the “Islamic thoughts” in her head? Didn’t they realize a naïve, broken-bird of a girl might follow a beloved brother to the very ends of the earth? Didn’t they realize abused girls were easy prey for charismatic men with dubious intentions? Didn’t they realize parents were sometimes hapless and didn’t notice abuse under their noses, and even if they did, they were often too cowed and worried about what people would say to do anything about it? Didn’t they realize that if her brother hadn’t gone, she would never be in this mess in the first place, and had there been no Syrian uprising and no violent crackdown, he wouldn’t have gone himself? How could she explain to this well-intentioned but extremely clueless and therefore potentially dangerous white woman in her living room that all these events were arrayed in her mind like the growth rings of a tree, that she couldn’t separate out one ring and hold it up as her “Islamic thoughts”?

  But Sabira responded with patience and humility, because she understood that both Allah and these people from the
court and the police had given her a second chance. She talked to herself a lot, in those days. Sabira, you’re such an intelligent and clever young lady. How could you have allowed yourself to feel so small?

  Sabira’s long-term goals had always been to work productively, marry a nice Muslim boy, and lead a comfortable life. These were the aspirations of most young women in her community, a great many of whom grew up in households that were poorer and even more exclusionary than Sabira’s. For much of the 2000s and 2010s, due to austerity measures, the state cut programs that were intended to help less-skilled immigrants find work and integrate. This policy collided in the mid-2010s, around the time Sabira’s life unraveled, with a wholesale shift in how the British government viewed and dealt with its Muslim citizens.

  In 2015, the government redefined its thinking around counterterrorism, declaring that radicalism wasn’t fueled by economic marginalization or political grievances, but by the ideology of conservative Islam. Prime Minister David Cameron set out the new approach in a speech that year: Britons who rejected “liberal values” were “providing succor” to violent extremists. Suddenly, wearing the hijab, being socially conservative, belonging to a family that hadn’t yet made the transition from village patriarchy to modern independence—each of those traits marked a person as being extreme. And, warned Cameron, “the extremist worldview is the gateway, and violence is the ultimate destination.”

  By 2017, Louise Casey, an official overseeing integration, was arguing that “oppression of women in Muslim communities” was linked to extremism and Islamist terrorism. She went even further, blaming Muslims for the rise of the far right in Britain, outlining the causal relationship like this: Muslims’ religious conservatism led to their poor integration; their poor integration together with their conservatism led to terrorism; their terrorism fueled the far-right and white supremacist movements.

  Soon, there was almost no aspect of daily Muslim life and religious observance that was considered out of bounds for scrutiny by officials. Though most recent UK governments had resisted the European trend of banning face veils, by early 2016 both the ordinary hijab and face veils rose to become national security concerns. Cameron called on institutions like courts and schools to devise their own “sensible rules,” while other authorities made clear banning face veils in certain spaces wasn’t simply about sensible security, but also liberal empowerment. A top education official, speaking about face veils in 2016, said that “our liberal West values” must be protected and that “the Muslim community needs to listen,” because British society has come a long way “to ensure that we have equality for women” and “mustn’t go backward.”

  Amid all of these rows and interventions, officials clearly never considered that for a vast number of girls like Sabira, wearing a headscarf secured them freedom, autonomy, access to public space and education. But the hijab rows were never really about female equality at all. It was about how the state felt obliged, now that it had conflated Muslim conservatism with extremism, to nudge the community toward liberalism.

  There is a necessary debate to be had about gender equality among Muslims. Britain’s largely South Asian Muslim community is highly conservative in a way that often makes life unbearable for some of its young women, and to a different and less immediate extent, for young men. There are suffocating proscriptions around marriage, problems with forced marriage, domestic violence, stark double standards in the treatment of daughters and sons, and taboos around confronting and reporting sexual abuse. (Many of these behaviors are imported from South Asia and, interestingly, rejecting them has encouraged young people to seek religious knowledge and identity from urban, Mecca-trained imams.) But the possibility of shedding this atavistic conservatism while retaining religious values was lost in the acrimony, fear, and mutual suspicion that gripped the Muslim community.

  Was it feasible to encourage people to reconsider inherited patriarchal tendencies while diagnosing these same patterns of behavior as pathologies that lead to bombings and beheadings? In January 2016, Cameron established a new fund for teaching English to Muslim women. He warned that those who failed language tests after a couple of years might be deported, because non–English speakers were “more susceptible to the extremist message coming from [ISIS].” The approach was something akin to integration at gunpoint: The more English you know, the less likely your kids will be to blow themselves up.

  Would Sabira’s mother, for instance, have been better poised to notice and deal with both her and Soheil’s attraction to extremism had she been more integrated? Would the mothers, grandmothers, or older sisters of Sharmeena, Kadiza, Shamima, and Amira have been?

  It depends on our understanding of integration itself. Immigrant parents were poorly equipped for the challenges of contemporary parenting in the urban twenty-first-century Europe. They behaved as though they were still back at home in Bangladesh or Ethiopia, where there was a surrounding cushion of extended family and friends supporting their parenting, casting a protective eye on all the children around them, because that is the way children had always been raised, collectively. In London, there was no such protection; there were gangs and knife crime, predators on Facebook and Instagram, whole collections of virtual and physical threats. These parents assumed the mosque and Quran classes were safe spaces, but the reality was that there were no safe spaces left, period, online or in the real world.

  Add to this poverty and broken families, absent fathers, unemployed fathers, fathers who couldn’t provide for and protect their families and marinated in that humiliation—realities that cut across all these girls’ lives. Immigration often meant long years of separation that caused marriages to fail, as Sharmeena’s parents’ had; it meant marriages not surviving the strains of arrival, through which women often coped better and men languished in shame-faced, low-wage bitterness; it meant having to dedicate vast time and energy to basic things like securing the rent, navigating the health service, caring for ill relatives, all within a bureaucratic system that was foreign and confusing.

  Parenting of millennial Muslims in the age of the War on Terror demanded levels of awareness that immigrant parents often didn’t have the capacity for. Integration, then, in the context of were you integrated enough to stop your kids from joining ISIS, involved layers of proficiencies, abilities, awareness, and confidence that were gained from many different directions: socioeconomic advancement, education, language skills, access to adequately provided social services, involvement in public life.

  But to the government, integration had come to mean acceptance of “British values,” full stop. Britain’s core national identity was enshrined in gender liberalism, women’s physical visibility, an acceptance of homosexuality, and UK foreign policy, especially respect for Israel.

  Because the state’s understanding of integration was security-driven, it led to policies that increasingly aggravated the country’s Muslims, who felt discriminated against, surveilled, and stigmatized. This was a political choice by the government, in the end; to this day there is no clear, established empirical research that shows why people commit acts of extremist violence or join militant groups. For every young girl or young man from a broken home who went to Syria, there were others from loving, intact families; for every one whose mother spoke halting English, there were five others whose mothers were native or fluent English speakers. The children of diplomats and consultant doctors had joined ISIS alongside the children of restaurant waiters and unemployed welfare recipients.

  The thorny fact was that the structural factors that bred extremism—the Arab tyrannies and coups, Western wars and state collapses that extremists exploited—hardly lent themselves to counterterror policing in the West. These meta forces were too enormous, too profitable, and too endemic to even acknowledge as drivers of extremism. It was only the slighter factors, and indeed some made-up ones, that seemed feasible to tackle: getting YouTube to erase Anwar al-Awlaki, blo
cking encryption on messaging apps, vetting speakers at universities for “extremist views,” discouraging boycotts of Israel or aid work for Syria, because these types of activism were portrayed as gateways to extremist views.

  A local Prevent officer described with frustration his efforts to speak to British Muslims, especially men, about extremism. “You just get all these men droning on about ‘the problem is your foreign policy,’ ” he said. To him, this was like complaining about the British weather: pointless. The country’s foreign policy wasn’t changing anytime soon, and those who opposed it—emotionally, practically, or legally—would find themselves increasingly squeezed by Prevent. Prevent now required doctors, teachers, and social workers to be on alert for signs of “extremism.” If a family pulled their teenage daughter out of co-ed swimming classes, teachers were encouraged to consult Prevent guidance. A young Afghan British boy who attended school with a “Free Palestine” badge on his backpack had counterterrorism police show up at his door. “It’s easier to speak to the women than the men,” the Prevent officer concluded in the end. The women just wanted to stop their sons from going off to die, and were more cooperative. They would blame themselves in the end, anyway. The men, they just wanted to talk about why their sons were going.

  Soheil’s son was born in the early summer of 2016, nearly a year after he got married. In video clips, he gazed at his son with enchanted eyes, tickling his chin to coax laughter. He sent his sister photos every couple of weeks. Then one day, Sabira received a text message from one of her cousins: “Your brother’s trying to contact you.” She downloaded a new app and they managed to speak.