A friend texted to ask her how she was feeling. She replied, “Damn YPG. The whole morning only boom boom boom and now again .”
They messaged for a while about the bombing, and then moved to discuss makeup.
“i hate the daily mascara struggle in Germany. looking like a panda every morning i think about false 3D lashes.”
“not sure they’re halal? .”
“yes right because of the glue and the hair maybe the water dont arrive every single lash.”
The Muslim internet was divided as to whether fake eyelashes were religiously permissible. She watched CSI Miami, CSI New York; she memorized the specs of the new BMW 6 series. She read poetry and, along with the politically active household, followed the continual emergence of new rebel groups morphing from old ones. She could hold her own in a discussion about their varying tactics, and to what extent religion was a genuine or instrumentalist aspect of their military and political vision.
She heard from Selim only sporadically. He couldn’t get out of Raqqa on his own, and she was in touch with other ISIS fighters who were trying to help him escape. The German journalist who had helped coordinate her escape refused to help Selim; the journalist said he was too indoctrinated and could pose a danger to any Syrians that might try to get him out. She decided it was time to contact his family; whatever had transpired between them in the past, they deserved to be updated on his situation.
She thought of how she had once imagined they would have children together. She thought of the night their very first cat, ill from something toxic it had eaten outside, died in Selim’s arms. Selim had stayed up for hours stroking its head, and cried when it finally stopped breathing. She prayed that there would be one last time to see her husband again, so she could explain why she had left, and ask forgiveness for everything.
October 2017, the Same Syrian Village
She was still in Syria when the caliphate started to crumble. The Islamic State faced an onslaught from every direction—from coalition forces, from Kurdish fighters and the Iraqi army, from the Assad regime, from the Iran-backed Shia militias. Fighters and their families were escaping everywhere, turning themselves in, trying to evade capture. She thought of how her husband would be treated. Would anyone stop to ask when he had come? To take his measure based on his date of arrival? Although the life of the false caliphate spanned only two short years, it mattered deeply when a man had arrived. Was it in the early days, when the war seemed just and right? Or was it later, when it had devolved into an orgy of spectacular violence?
The best men came early and died fast. They were the men of the purest ideals and conviction, who came to fight for God. Had they known how it was going to turn out, they wouldn’t have come. The men who came later, responding to the siren song of the violence, were the mercenaries and the riffraff, the vulnerable converts and the lost souls, the thugs in search of a cause, the petty gangsters and the drifters, seeking redemption, identity, meaning. These were not men on whose shoulders you could build a society.
NOUR
Spring 2016, Le Kram, Tunis
Nour started awake with the first bang. It was late spring of 2016 and her window, overlooking the street, was open a crack, so she could hear the police shouting as they pounded against her front door. She locked the door to her bedroom, panicking; she needed to hide her mobile phone before they got to her.
The police were in the hallway now, demanding that she open the door. “I’m just putting on my headscarf,” she called out, fumbling with the wardrobe, where she stuffed the phone, wrapped in a sock, into a mess of clothes.
“Come out, Nour. We’re done with you. Your case is closed. We just want to know where your husband is,” the officer said.
Nour unlocked the door and stepped out. She explained that she was in the process of divorcing her husband Karim and was no longer in regular contact with him. They shouldn’t have any reason to be bothering her. They asked to see her phone, and she said she didn’t have one. “All right,” sighed the officer. “Let’s go back to the station.”
It was barely past dawn as they drove through the streets of Kram. At the station, the officer resumed his hectoring. He kicked the legs of her chair so that it skidded back. He threatened to make her life excruciating unless she handed over the phone. All this she took impassively, but then, later in the afternoon, the door swung open and they marched in her father. He was in his early fifties, but years of labor had made him hunched and creased as though he were two decades older. This was their leverage: they ordered her father to deal with his daughter, or else they’d make life hell for the whole family. Her father looked ashen and gripped the sides of his chair. Nour rose and said she would go get the phone.
Her mother was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when she came back home to retrieve the phone. Nour kissed her mother on the forehead before the officers escorted her back out to the waiting car. At the station, they offered her lunch—a cheese sandwich with harissa, pushed across the metal table. When Nour turned on her phone, she discovered that everything had been wiped: her apps, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp. Her resourceful younger sister had acted quickly.
The police asked her to reinstall her Facebook account, and she obliged. They went through her timeline, and didn’t find anything there, and then started on her Friends list. There were some Salafi girls there, and the police asked who they were.
Like many conservative young women who chose not to work outside the home, or who couldn’t find jobs because of their face veils, Nour was trying her hand at running a clothing business from home, selling modest Islamic robes. During the early heyday of Salafi activism that followed the 2011 revolution, niqabi women had organized to demand the right to attend university classes with their faces covered. There was little political support for this unsettling demand, which fused a progressive impulse (women’s access to higher education) to a highly orthodox one (the divisive, unpopular face veil). In Tunisian society, the notion of Salafi feminism seemed outright laughable. There was no political current that saw any benefit in grappling with these young women’s demands. Ennahda refused to engage with any niqabi discrimination issues—a fact that young protesters held up as proof of the group’s excessive caution—and it stayed silent throughout, even when the dean of the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities at Manouba University slapped a niqabi student for covering her face. But in part, the niqab wars were about pushing the boundaries, a way for radical, antiestablishment young people to see how far the new political sphere would accommodate and include them.
Bourguiba’s legacy as “liberator of women” had been revealed as a comprehensive success, with unexpected ramifications. The rise of women like Nour and her Salafi sisters showed that the religious women of Tunisia had internalized the message of independence. Now, they were exercising their newfound freedom to request a very awkward thing: that society include and accept them in the framework of a highly conservative, orthodox vision of Islam. What to do with willful women like this, who started as strong-minded girls determined to wear the hijab, impatient for society to catch up with them? Politicians scarcely knew how to respond, let alone the police, who looked at a woman like Nour and, truth be told, just wanted to beat the disobedient piety out of her.
“They buy stuff from me, they’re my customers,” Nour said, in answer to the police’s question about the Salafi women. They found an older Facebook account that belonged to her, and scrolled through that timeline. One of them looked through the older posts and status updates, and exhaled loudly. He held the screen up in front of Nour’s face, within an inch of her nose. “Exactly what does this mean?” She had posted, “There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his messenger,” and underneath it, “my last words before death.” “You want to be a martyr, huh?” the policeman said.
Another officer walked in with a sheaf of papers. It was a list of girls, with photos and names.
They asked Nour to go through the list, and asked if she knew any of them. Those who she knew had been arrested before, she pretended not to know. She didn’t want them to go through the same hell again. Those who she knew hadn’t been arrested yet, she admitted to knowing.
Nour asked if she could go home, but the officers pushed the untouched sandwich toward her and told her not yet. Around the time for the evening prayer, they brought her little brother to the police station and sat him down in the corner. The officer tossed the list in front of her again. Her brother edged back into his chair, as though making himself more compact. Seeing his well-worn, faded FC Barcelona T-shirt in the interrogation room made her feel faint. When the officers demanded that she look at the list again, she told them she wouldn’t do it until they took her brother home.
The interrogation room was small and windowless, with a stained linoleum floor. Before the revolution, the security services routinely raped and assaulted women suspected of ties to the religious opposition, interpreting “ties” as broadly as possible. It was meant to be different now, now that Tunisia was a model of democracy. Nour sealed her mouth shut, refusing to speak until they took her brother away. About an hour later, the door opened again, and the interrogator pushed another woman into the room. She attended the same mosque as Nour, in Kram.
“When did you first meet her?” The interrogator started, as usual, from this premise.
“Don’t know her at all,” Nour replied, lying.
“You don’t know the guests at your own wedding?”
“My parents invited lots of people.”
“Does she share your ideology? Was she happy when policemen were slaughtered? What are you, Nour? Are you al-Qaeda? Ansar al-Sharia? Jabhat al-Nusra? Daesh?”
Nour wondered if the officer even knew how these groups differed from one another, and if he didn’t, as seemed the case, why he was even a policeman. If all the police did, apart from taking bribes, was hunt Islamist militants, shouldn’t they have some basic knowledge about different factions? Apparently even this was too much to expect.
It went on like this for about fifteen minutes. The girl shuffled back and forth against the wall. Nour feigned peering at her, as if she were making a genuine attempt to recognize her. The police hustled three more women in, with the officers demanding that Nour say whether she recognized them and Nour pretending not to know them at all.
Around 10 p.m., after a full day of interrogation, the police put Nour in a van and drove her to al-Gorjani, the detention center where terrorism suspects were handled. Tourism had evaporated in Tunisia after the terror attacks the past year, on the beach in Sousse and a museum in Tunis, giving the police ample reason to pursue extremists. But in reality, they used the terror threat for much vaster purposes: sweeping up anyone with suspicious connections, or anyone simply in contact with those people. The Tunisian police were predisposed to abuses, and then they were given a task that invited abuse: fighting terrorism on a nationwide scale.
This new holding room at al-Gorjani was slightly larger, and included a random assortment of women: a teenager, a wife of an Ansar al-Sharia member, and a woman who explained in bewilderment, “All they found was photos of bin Laden on my phone, that’s all.” They all sat on the floor, legs outstretched; two of the women were pregnant, and kept moving wincingly from one position to another.
The days began blending into one another, the sameness of the light and the sameness of the noises interrupted only by interrogations. The questions were the same too: “Are you with ISIS?” “Do you prefer al-Qaeda?” “Do you believe in the nation-state?” “What sheikh do you follow?” Nour wanted to stay completely silent. She wanted to be so quiet that her silence would amass into its own force and devour these men. But she was afraid they would beat her, so she spoke only to deny everything, and it always ended up the same way too: “Stupid takfiri bitch, you’d have us all killed!”
The police varied their routine, trying to come up with new ways to scare her into talking. One day they brought a young man into the room, a detainee, and punched and pummeled him until he crumpled to the floor, covering his face with his hands. Two officers kicked him until one eye caved in and blood was everywhere. As he grabbed his eye and turned away, he left a bloody handprint on the wall.
Nour slept on the soiled mattress on the floor, breathing the stench from the toilet in the cell, with an arm flung over her eyes to blunt the fluorescent light that blazed on, day and night. Lunch was cold tomato water with a few peas floating at the top.
One day, early enough that the morning was still cool, a new interrogator arrived with a file of papers, containing records of bank statements and transfers. Nour didn’t know what day it was anymore. That morning at dawn, a prison guard had stopped her and the other women in the cell from praying together. Now they had to use a pantry with filthy mops at the head of the hallway, praying one at a time. The room where the new interrogator took her was in a different part of the detention center, a wing that was cleaner, with proper offices and desks and computers. The new interrogator had everything in hand, and Nour’s lies felt heavy and leaden. He had a computer screen that was somehow connected to her various accounts. He could see the messages, as though her phone was on his screen, and he pointed to a Telegram message from her husband. “What are you planning, Nour? Are you planning something here in Kram? You want to kill someone?”
She didn’t know whether to say the money that Karim sent was just for her and the baby, or to deny receiving it at all. She said she thought her husband was dead. She had asked for a lawyer two days prior, and they had allowed a man sent by her father to visit her. But when the lawyer asked for her file, the police said no, and when he protested, they laughed and said, “Go complain to the security chief, if it bothers you.”
Nour lost track of how long she had been at the prison. One night, one of the officers brought a young woman into the room. Nour remembered her distantly from Kram, a girl who had gone to Libya the previous summer. She was another attempt at leverage. “Talk to us about your husband, or this girl will sit naked here the whole day,” they said.
She didn’t think they would actually do it, or do it the way they did. Four men pounced on her at once, ripping at the girl’s clothes. The girl screamed and stumbled back. Nour sprang from her chair and tried to push the men off her. They pinned the girl’s arm back to wrest her shirt off. Her skin was so pale that everywhere they grabbed erupted into red splotches. They grabbed as they went along, pinching at her skin, tearing at the girl like wild dogs.
They held that girl from Kram for a week. Another girl was brought in for smoking a joint in the street. The security services often arrested activists, religious and secular alike, on drug pretenses, sometimes detaining them for as long as a year, simply for possession of marijuana. It was a clean way of keeping the opposition in check without seeming authoritarian before the international community.
One afternoon they allowed Nour’s father to visit. He whispered to her, in the little room reserved for visitations, that if they paid the lead officer two thousand dinars and changed lawyers, Nour would no longer be a takfiri terrorist charged with being a member of Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda and with aiding a member of the Islamic State. Neither Nour nor her father knew it, but the bribe the officer had asked for was modest; depending on the type of case, police usually demanded between three thousand and twenty thousand dinars in terrorism cases. With so many women detained simply for being “in contact with jihadists,” on top of the thousands of others arrested on suspicion of actual militant activity, the police had a generous inmate pool to squeeze for cash. Recommending a new lawyer was a popular way of dealing with this: the new lawyer would incorporate the bribe into his “fee,” and then divide the money with the police.
The corrupt, extralegal way it dealt with those accused of extremism was classic to the Tunisian state. If the extraction of a brib
e had triggered the Tunisian revolution—the immolation of the fruit seller Bouazizi back in December 2010, the moment that shook the Middle East—then it felt, certainly for women like Nour, that events had come full circle. Perhaps for others a great deal had changed, but for her, the story of the new Tunisia as it was being written was the old story she already knew.
Three weeks into detention, Nour had lost weight and had scabs on her legs from the bug bites. She had not seen her daughter since her arrest. The final day, they brought Nour’s mother to the station. She was wearing a pale blue headscarf and the one coat she had for formal occasions, and grasped Nour’s father’s hand as she entered the room.
“Enough. It’s enough, now.”
Once her family paid the bribe and changed lawyers, the police dropped all charges against her.
* * *
—
NEAR CARTHAGE, NOUR SAT AT a café with her sister and a friend. The sun cast long shadows on the ground and they drank their coffee slowly. She saw a man looking at her intently and then speaking into his mobile phone. He didn’t take his eyes off her. She grabbed her handbag, rose, and signaled her sister to leave the café. They walked quickly along the main street and then turned down an alleyway. A car pulled up alongside her, and one of the policemen who had interrogated her just short months before leaned his head out.
“Nour, is that really you?” His eyes traveled up and down her tight jeans. “I suppose you shouldn’t be talking to men, no? I want you to know I have an order to arrest you right here in this car. But we’re not going to do that today. For now we’re going to leave you alone. Take care….And, Nour? You look really hot.”
Guest House for Young Widows Page 30
