Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

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  SHAMIMA HAD TWO CHILDREN AND was heavily pregnant with her third. Her young daughter and son were sick, but it was difficult to be seen by a doctor; the hospitals in the areas where they were staying, around Mayadin and Hajin, were overwhelmed by people with war injuries. They turned away even people whose bodies were cut up by shrapnel. There was no medicine left. Her young son died first. That was when Shamima knew that she had to try to get out, for the sake of her daughter and her unborn child. She joined the crowds moving away from the fighting, streaming toward the territory held by the militias fighting the latest dredges of the Islamic State. Her daughter, increasingly ill, died before they reached the camp at Al Hol, where ISIS families and civilians who had fled were sheltering.

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  SHAMIMA’S INTERVIEW WITH THE BRITISH journalist from The Times was not unsympathetic, but like many that followed, it gave her ample rope with which to fashion her own noose. When asked if she had witnessed executions, she said no, but added that she once saw a severed head in a bin on the street: “It didn’t faze me at all,” she said. The remark was blasted on most every radio and television news broadcast across the United Kingdom.

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  THE FACT THAT SHE HAD been groomed and recruited as a fifteen-year-old, primed and indoctrinated by the Islamic State, evaporated from the national conversation about her. That she had been a child bride, married before legal age, that two of her children had recently died, did not deter reporters from interrogating her for dispatches read voraciously back home. Did she realize, they asked her, that the public questioned whether she could ever be rehabilitated? “I’m still kind of in the mentality of having planes over my head and an emergency backpack and starving, all these things,” she said. What did Shamima say to the head of UK intelligence, who had said that women like her were a danger? Would she accept it if the British authorities took her child away, in the event they were admitted back to the UK? What did being “British” mean to her? Would she raise her son as a British boy? Did she accept British democracy and rights for women and homosexuals? Shamima gamely answered these questions, professing in a sometimes shaky voice that she could be rehabilitated, that she didn’t even know what her options would be, and didn’t feel it was appropriate to demand any particular course for herself; sounding more naïve and confused by the day, precisely like the traumatized, indoctrinated nineteen-year-old that she was. “I think a lot of people should have, like, sympathy towards me for everything I’ve been through.”

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  BUT SYMPATHY WAS NOT WHERE public sentiment was headed. Short days after Shamima surfaced and asked for help to be brought home, the UK Home Secretary ordered her to be stripped of British citizenship. The legal basis was that Shamima, because of her Bangladeshi origin, was eligible for citizenship of a second country. Bangladesh quickly said it wanted nothing to do with her; Shamima had never even visited the country, how was she to become their problem? Racist memes began proliferating and spreading, a whole Facebook page sprang up to curate them: Shamima likened to a black umbrella tent, Shamima in a hospital giving birth to a ticking bomb, Shamima’s severed head superimposed onto porn sites and Mother’s Day cards. Many of the images bled into a generalized creepy far-right disgust for Muslims, mocking her covering, her brown skin, and physical appearance; her name itself became a racist slur, something British Muslim girls found themselves being called on the street in London: “Shamima Begum,” a new gender-sensitive incarnation of “Paki.”

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  SHAMIMA GAVE BIRTH TO A boy in mid-February. She named him Jarrah, and posed for a photographer, standing in the camp with a sea of white tents in the background, holding the infant in a blue-and-white-striped blanket. Three weeks later, Jarrah died of pneumonia.

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  OUTSIDE, NEAR THE KIOSKS THAT sell tea where people gather to smoke or chat as the sky darkens, there are tales traded about the outlandish stories circulating in the camp, stories that fleeing ISIS members will tell as they try to hide what they have done: there is the man who says he came to the caliphate as a simit seller and stayed to write short stories; there is a sudden profusion of cooks and clerical assistants.

  All through 2017 and into 2019, camps in Syria and Iraq swelled with thousands of ISIS women and children, whose husbands and fathers were either dead or detained by Iraqi or U.S.-allied Kurdish forces. Courts in Baghdad began sentencing many of the foreign women to death. The trials often lasted only ten minutes, and the courts kept evidence, if there was any, secret; defense lawyers were paid next to nothing. Speed was the only incentive.

  The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned these trials would lead to “irreversible miscarriages of justice,” but for the Iraqi state, the summary trials were retribution for the extreme savagery ISIS and its predecessors had shown toward Shia Iraqis. The judicial authorities were also pragmatic: if most of these women’s countries of origin refused to take them back, what was to be done? Who knew whether they had peeled potatoes in the caliphate, or committed atrocities? What if they still believed that everyone who wasn’t affiliated with ISIS was an enemy of God who deserved death? Did you want women like that walking around your country?

  In Europe, Britain and France led the way in stripping the nationality of their citizens who had joined ISIS. The UK Home Office argued this was “in the public good” and that citizenship was “a privilege, not a right,” even as it rendered these individuals stateless, leaving them without the recourse or oversight of any state’s legal process or rules. As a security measure intended simply to block the return of European citizens who had fought in Syria, it worked. But it was an approach bound to fuel more conflict and more resentment.

  After 9/11, in the netherworld of the War on Terror, Western security states set down a dark path; they began rejecting the very idea that war had rules, that prisoners were still humans with rights. America’s War on Terror had created an enduring, transnational third dimension, a lethal space of limbo, untethered from the rules-based international order, in which suspects were passed around, held indefinitely, tortured, and executed. The West had become more extreme, and professed confusion at the extremism that arose in response.

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  THE ISLAMIC STATE WAS NOW vanquished as a military force. Over late 2018 its army dwindled down to a few thousand men in the desert hinterlands of Syria; in March 2019, the Syrian Defense Forces overran Baguz, the group’s final stronghold, raised their flags and declared victory. The leaders of countries whose citizens had flocked to join the Islamic State, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, pretended to recognize the need for changing the conditions that had propelled their young women and men to “Syria’s field of jihads.” But virtually many of their failed policies remained in place. So too did the dysfunctional American system of patronage of these troubled Arab regimes, which enabled their failures and protected them from their own dissenting populations.

  In Tunisia, where Nour was raising her daughter alone in a country where she had been unable to get an education because of her faith, there was at least a glimmer of change. The economy still kept her family at borderline poverty, most encounters with the police still ended with a bribe, and her brand of Salafi activism was banned. But there was a democratic transition under way, powerful enough that the old regime’s ambassadors and torturers went on television at night and confessed. Perhaps this transition was thin and fragile, and to Nour, who had endured much hardship, it was meaningless. Rahma, speaking to journalists from her detention in Libya, made it clear she felt the same way.

  But to a great many Tunisians, their fumbling, more inclusive government—the only state in the whole of the region where the pre–Arab Spring opposition was still in t
he political game, and the old elites had met some semblance of justice—was something to value. The new Tunisia faced powerful regional foes, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who chafed at seeing a country where moderate Islamists had prevailed. But at the very least, its fate was still unwritten. In 2011, a senior female politician from Ennahda served as deputy president of the country’s Constituent Assembly, one of the highest political offices held by a woman in the whole of the Middle East. In the spring of 2018, Tunis elected the Arab world’s first woman mayor, affiliated with the Ennahda party. Nour’s daughter would grow up in a country where such things were possible.

  For Asma, Aws, and Dua, the young Syrian women of Raqqa, the seeming impermanence of living as a refugee in Turkey soon became their everyday. For Asma and Aws, who once had promising futures as educated women, poised to achieve more independence than any generation of Syrian women before them, the war had blighted any such prospects. They were survival seekers now. Dua, who had only ever wanted a simple life of dignity, was stranded in a foreign country, with no skills or education, separated from her family, alone with the memory that her Saudi husband had died killing other Muslims.

  In government-controlled Syria, the broken land over which Bashar al-Assad presided as nominal victor, there was no sign that the regime would cease the policies of repression and violence that had provoked the original uprising. In July 2018, the government issued death certificates for sixty thousand people who had simply disappeared in government detention. Those who remained in Syria, on both sides of the regime/opposition divide, found themselves corrupted and straining for basic subsistence amid the lawlessness and insecurity of seven years of war. Reopening a shop, procuring a death certificate, requesting information about disappeared relatives: every small act required exorbitant payments to either local militias, predatory lawyers, or bureaucrats. Nothing was normal. Reconstruction seemed a hallucination. The cost aside, who was physically left to rebuild the country? The war had decimated much of the country’s male population; millions had fled, and of those who had stayed, a great many had been maimed or killed.

  For Dunya, still marooned in the small Syrian village near the Turkish border, a life back in Germany held some appeal, if only she could get there. The far right were ascendant, the right wing of Angela Merkel’s party agitated for the upper hand, and the everyday racism and exclusion she had seen Muslim-born Germans endure in her youth were only exacerbated by the influx of Syrian refugees. But she would take her old life back in a second. Whether the next generation of Muslims in Germany took a similar path, if they felt global injustice acutely enough to be led down the dark hole of militancy, only God could know.

  In London, Sabira continued to grieve for her brother Soheil and often still struggled with the confusing, contradictory rules those close to her maintained for good Muslim women.

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  IN BRITAIN, RELATIONS BETWEEN MUSLIM Britons and the government continued deteriorating. In the summer of 2018, Boris Johnson, a leading Conservative politician with ambitions of becoming prime minister, said Muslim women who wore the face veil looked like bank robbers and postboxes. Street harassment and physical attacks on Muslim women spiked in the wake of his comments. In the spring of 2019, the Conservative MP Jacob Rees Mogg nodded at a German far-right group on Twitter, signaling that a party that explicitly seeks to rid Germany of Muslims was worth British attention. Bigotry against Muslims had become the crudest but surest way to politically ascend in the contemporary United Kingdom.

  Under Donald Trump, the United States dropped even the pretense of supporting Arab democracy or self-determination. In the fall of 2018, the president openly described the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia as a protection racket, declaring that the Saudis couldn’t “last two weeks” without American protection. The U.S. military, for its part, refused to count the civilians it had killed in the blitz-style final assault against ISIS. “No one will ever know how many died,” a Defense Department spokesman admitted. Washington said it would pay nothing for the reconstruction of Syria unless Assad and Iran agreed to certain terms, which they would inevitably refuse. Had such terms been achievable, the war would likely not have dragged on for seven years, defying any resolution in the first place.

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  I INITIALLY SET OUT TO write this book because I was disturbed by media accounts of the Bethnal Green girls’ disappearance, and the special culpability that was assigned to them as consorts of evil, despite their very evident youth. I was struck by how the most noxious things said about these girls were said by other women, in fact women who would otherwise identify as liberal feminists.

  To the public, they were either naïve jihadi brides or calculating monsters. But most of the women in this book were neither passive nor predatory, and trying to pin down their degree of agency seemed to be only one line of inquiry, and certainly not the most revealing. Some collaborated or acted knowingly; some were so young that, despite the outward appearance of deliberate choice, they were not mature enough to exercise anything approaching adult judgment.

  Most policy papers, public discussions, and security initiatives dealing with gender and extremism seem wholly disconnected from the lived experiences of women in the Middle East. This is largely because the counterterrorism discourses, from the United Nations and across national governments, seek to discuss and craft policies targeting women across a vast range of political and social contexts—from the hipster neighborhoods of peaceful East London to the collapsed, war-torn cities of Syria and Iraq to the battlefields of Somalia and Nigeria, where unpopular, weak, or corrupt states confront armed and popular opponents.

  In 2017, the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality released a report on women and violent extremism. The report speaks of the first jihad, the early-seventh-century conquest of Islam on the Arabian subcontinent, as though it were an event that happened last year. It includes the word “ideology” forty-two times, and argues that women undergo a “process of radicalisation” through a number of “push and pull factors,” and then go on to “form an integral part of jihad.”

  Honestly dealing with problems of modern conflicts involves acknowledging awkward truths about how we have ended up with such violence in the first place. But this 2017 report locates itself in history most strangely. It begins in the seventh century, as if there were more clues about ISIS to be gleaned from A.D. 622 than from the 1990s, the years when Iraq’s long history of totalitarianism and institutionalized cruelty peaked with the crushing of Shia and Kurd rebellions, or even than from 2003, the year that the United States, with the support of European allies—against the wishes of millions of people who marched across the world against this intention—invaded and occupied Iraq and set in motion the conflict that would eventually help produce the group.

  When the report describes the context in which young European women have been attracted to ISIS militancy, it hedges its language in a manner that seems suspicious of factual realities: the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the atrocities committed by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad are “perceived injustices” (emphasis mine). The post-9/11 rise in Islamophobia has “incited feelings of social and cultural exclusion and marginalization.” The report aims to counter gender stereotypes, but its approach is much like Victorian writing on hysteria—there are things in women’s heads, incited feelings and perceptions, and there are the things the good doctors conclude are actually wrong with them. The latter are diagnosed unequivocally: “a sense of adventure,” the “desire to be part of something bigger and divine,” the “aspiration to build a utopian caliphate.”

  The authors write that in the ISIS narrative, “Western feminism is portrayed as imperialist and exclusively advantageous to white women, leaving little to no room for Islamic women and their values.” But this is not simply cunning ISIS p
ropaganda; it is something a whole generation of Muslim women across the world say readily and regularly in books, articles, dissertations, and on social media.

  This perspective reminds me again of Victorian medics diagnosing hysteria as a peculiarly female condition. The report understands the extremism of the Muslim woman as a gendered pathology: the affliction of a woman who has internalized male patriarchy so assiduously that she, delusionally, seeks agency within its very strictures. Doctors in the nineteenth century believed women “hysterics” were possessed by demons and deviant sexual desires; in the twenty-first century, professional “deradicalizers” believe women militants are consumed by wicked religious ideologies and sexual repression.

  The comparison is useful mainly for the sake of identifying the power of the diagnostician in relation to the subject: hysteria was a made-up disease, constructed by medical forces in a culture that prized female docility and purity. Militancy certainly isn’t made up. But it is more politically expedient to suggest that women have been bewitched than to acknowledge the overarching wars, conflicts, and authoritarian repression that have created the grievances and space for extremism to thrive.

  The 2010s have been the decade of feminist reading of militancy, based on the laudable aim of being less sexist and stereotypical in assessing Muslim women’s involvement in supporting, developing, and sustaining jihadist groups. But this effort has not involved a great willingness to examine old beliefs about the causes and roots of violent conflicts, or dualistic certainties about enlightened secular liberalism versus regressive patriarchal Islam. Progressive analysis certainly helps us see how women distinctly experience repressive political orders, where they are marginalized and disempowered by their social status, religious sect, political affiliation, or identity mosaics of all these things. But the focus seems to dwell excessively on the manner of their experience rather than confronting the wider structural causes and realities that brought about that experience in the first place. What I mean to say, more simply, is that I hope the events recounted in this book will show the crucial importance of context: understanding how Nour experienced Ben Ali–era Tunisia as a woman is crucial to the arc of her life, but ultimately her story is embedded in a world she shares with Walid and Karim, her fellow Tunisians.