Guest House for Young Widows Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Azadeh Moaveni

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399179754

  Ebook ISBN 9780399179761

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover photographs: © Hiroshi Watanabe/Gallery Stock (woman), © Lorenzo Meloni/Magnum Photos (city)

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: Between Seasons

  Part I: Inheritance of Thorns

  Nour, Spring 2007, Le Kram, Tunis

  Asma, Summer 2009, Raqqa, Syria

  Lina, Summer 2000, Weinheim, Germany

  Emma, 2007, Frankfurt, Germany

  Fitful Quiet

  Nour, January 2011, Le Kram, Tunis

  Asma, January 2011, Raqqa, Syria

  Revolution

  Rahma and Ghoufran, June 2012, Sousse, Tunisia

  Nour, September 2012, Le Kram, Tunis

  The Revolution Loses Its Innocence

  Lina, Early 2014, Frankfurt, Germany

  Emma/Dunya, Spring 2012, Frankfurt, Germany

  The State Emerges

  Emma/Dunya, Summer 2014, Frankfurt, Germany

  Sabira, October 2013, Walthamstow, Northeast London

  Edging Toward Baghdad

  Part II: Gone Girls

  Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima, December 2014, East London

  Part III: Over and Out

  Asma, 2012–2013, Raqqa, Syria

  Nour, Fall 2012, Le Kram, Tunis

  Rahma and Ghoufran, Summer 2014, Sousse, Tunisia

  Emma/Dunya, February 2014, Istanbul, Turkey

  Lina, July 2014, Gaziantep, Turkey

  Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima, December 2014, East London

  Sabira, April 2015, Walthamstow, Northeast London

  Part IV: Citizens of the Abode of Islam

  Asma, Aws, and Dua, January 2014, Raqqa, Syria

  Late Summer 2014, the Caliphate Ascendant

  Emma/Dunya, Spring 2014, Raqqa, Syria

  Lina, Autumn 2014, Tal Afar, Iraq

  Emma/Dunya, Fall 2015, Manbij, Syria

  Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima, February 2015, East London

  Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima, July 2015, London and Raqqa

  Rahma and Ghoufran, September 2014, Zawiya, Libya

  Nour, August 2014, Le Kram, Tunis

  Ricocheting Out

  Rahma and Ghoufran, May 2015, Tunis

  Lina, March 2016, Tal Afar, Iraq

  Part V: Love, Mourn, Repeat

  Asma, Aws, and Dua, January 2015, Raqqa, Syria

  Lina, Spring 2017, Raqqa, Syria

  Emma/Dunya, Spring 2015, Manbij, Syria

  The State Retreats

  Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima, December 2015, Raqqa, Syria

  Rahma and Ghoufran, February 2016, Sabratha, Libya

  Bethnal Green, August 2015, East London

  Kadiza, May 2016, Raqqa, Syria

  Sabira, Spring 2016, Walthamstow, Northeast London

  Emma/Dunya, January 2017, a Village in Northern Syria

  Nour, Spring 2016, Le Kram, Tunis

  Epilogue: Among the Dissemblers

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Azadeh Moaveni

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  BETWEEN SEASONS

  Spring 2007, Le Kram, Tunis

  Nour didn’t consider herself a pearl without a shell, or a lollipop without a wrapper, or anything other than her thirteen-year-old self, wanting to practice her religion as best she could. She had listened to a sheikh on YouTube argue why the face veil was obligatory for Muslim women, and after listening a further four times, his words played like a ticker tape through her mind. The Quran commanded, in the verse called Surah al-Noor, “The Light,” that women not display their beauty and ornaments, “except for that which is apparent.” And is the face apparent? the sheikh argued. Is there anything less apparent than a face? It seemed to inexorably follow, then, that women wishing to submit to the divine will of God, to be eligible for His blessings and judged by Him approvingly, should cover their faces. The sheikh’s words made intuitive sense to Nour: modest covering enrobed women in the core values of Islam itself, in peace, calm, and equality. It dimmed the visible differences between rich women and poor women, dark and fair, beautiful and plain; it was a reminder that God loved all His creations equally.

  Nour shared this new belief with her girlfriends one afternoon in the spring of 2007 as they were sitting in the park, Le Kram’s nominal neighborhood green space, amid parched palm trees, heaps of garbage, and a decaying swing set covered in rust. The girls agreed it sounded persuasive, and one of them asked, “So who’s going first?” Most of them had started covering their hair when their bodies began filling out in the last few years, just a light scarf, and they also had begun praying, as many did in their families and in the neighborhood. Wearing a hijab was ordinary; even though Tunisia’s laws banned the headscarf in schools and you could get sent home for wearing one, it was still a commonplace enough infraction. The face veil, the niqab, was punchier, more assertive. But the sheikh on YouTube had said one shouldn’t be timid about one’s Islam, that even though wearing hijab was tough in so many places, “the more we are in number, the stronger our message.”

  Had Nour been born to an upper-middle-class family in La Marsa, a suburb of the city where liberal Tunisians lived amid Western expatriates and restaurants that served prosciutto and gin, she might have rebelled by piercing her tongue. But she was a daughter of Le Kram, a working-class neighborhood in a country where the state micro-policed people’s piety, and putting on the niqab was a natural act of defiance for a teenage girl. That day in the park, as the sunlight caught the glinting sides of the juice packs in the trash heap, she felt a knot of purpose in her stomach. “I’ll do it first,” she said to her friends. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  She already had a niqab from the hijab shop near the pizzeria; she had bought it the previous week after watching videos of the sheikh. She had tried it on in the bathroom at home with the door locked, angling her body in different directions to see what it did to her eyes.

  The next morning, she stuffed it into her schoolbag, and said goodbye to her mother as usual. As she neared the school she slipped into a doorway and pinned the niqab—by itself it was a small thing, just a little scrap of fabric that covered her nose and mouth—to her headscarf. The fabric tickled her lips as she breathed against it.

  The principal often stood outside the main doors of the school in the morning, greeting pupils as they hurried up the steps. Nour fell in behind some older girls, hoping to pass by without notice, but the principal stopped her.

  “Who are you?” she asked, peering at the slim frame obscured by the folds of black. Nour heard, if it wasn’t her imagination, a flicker of appreciation in the woman’s voice. “I’m going to let you in,” the principal said. “But you’re going to have to deal wit
h the teachers yourself.”

  Nour’s first class of the day was French, and she took her usual seat in the classroom, assembling her notebook and pens on the wooden desk. The teacher looked at her from across the classroom. She didn’t say anything at first, just narrowed her eyes, then approached Nour, stopping to lean on an empty desk a couple of meters away.

  “What is this ridiculous thing you’re wearing? Do you think God wants you to hang a curtain across your face? I hate God. God isn’t some kind, benevolent power, he’s cruel.” The teacher crossed her arms over her chest, nostrils twitching. To Nour, the things the French teacher was saying were blasphemy. Nour stared ahead at the blackboard, focusing on the strange curve of the teacher’s handwriting. “God killed my parents,” the French teacher continued. “If I could take revenge against God, I would.” The class watched the berating in unprecedented silence. The French teacher finally rose and started the lesson.

  Nour’s next class was Arabic literature. In Tunisia, teaching of the humanities, especially literature, tended to draw Francophone secularists with a deep antipathy to the religious, whom they viewed as backward and uncultured. When the literature teacher saw Nour, she rose from her seat in surprise and walked over, blocking Nour from reaching her desk.

  “You’re not sitting in my class with that thing on. Take it off immediately!” she said.

  Nour’s face went hot, and she refused.

  “I said, take it off,” the teacher repeated, punctuating each syllable.

  Nour wondered if the teacher knew it was her. The literature teacher liked her. Would it matter? “No, I can’t, please. It’s me, it’s Nour.” Her voice trembled.

  The teacher moved forward and placed a hand on Nour’s chest. “Didn’t you hear me? I told you to take it off.” She was shouting now, her face distorted and ugly with anger.

  Nour’s heart roared in her ears. She stepped backward, away from the weight of the hand. Students gathered around them, trying to calm the teacher. She pushed them away and planted both of her hands on Nour’s chest, shoving hard, as if to topple her.

  Nour gasped and stumbled backward. The teacher’s arm rose again, as if to strike her, as if to pull the niqab off. One of Nour’s friends in the class, a tall girl who sometimes got called the Giraffe, grabbed the teacher’s hand. “Please, ustadha, please, calm down.”

  Nour was crying, glad only that no one could see the tears of humiliation under her niqab. By now, the class was openly rioting. Someone had fetched the principal, who came running into the room and ordered the students into the schoolyard. Classes were canceled for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AND the decades that followed, men and women led the Middle East’s armed opposition groups and insurgencies together. The women who took part often became international celebrities. The Algerian resistance fighter Djamila Bouhired, who opposed French rule of her country in the 1950s, planted a bomb in an Algiers café that killed three people. A French colonial court sentenced her to death and she was tortured in prison. Her trial became an international cause célèbre, prompting a Moroccan princess, tens of British parliamentarians, and Bertrand Russell to plead her case to the president of France, who eventually stayed her execution. Bouhired later married her French defense attorney, who had fallen in love with her during her trial, and became known as “the Arab Joan of Arc.” She was featured in The Battle of Algiers, along with two other films, posed for Picasso, and was sung about in Persian. When the Palestinian liberation fighter Leila Khaled hijacked an airplane in the summer of 1969, she inspired several rock songs, a character on the television show Doctor Who, a feature film, a mural in Belfast, and an art installation called The Icon, featuring 3,500 tubes of lipstick. She had to undergo six plastic surgeries to evade her own visibility.

  In this age, women like Khaled and Bouhired would certainly be called terrorists. But in the 1960s and 1970s, their popular appeal reflected a worldview that was more understanding of armed struggle. Such opposition, in those years, was seen as an expression of legitimate political aspirations—a symptom of asymmetrical conflict rather than evil ideology. Those decades, leading up to and during the Cold War, were dominated by postcolonial liberation movements that commanded sympathy in the West, and were supported, to varying degrees, by the Soviet Union and the United States itself.

  Bouhired and Khaled were striking correctives to prevailing Western attitudes about Middle Eastern women. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account of a 1967 trip to Egypt, she was offended to find Egyptian women bound to a “life of repetition,” subjugated by men who behaved toward them like “feudalists, colonialists, and racists.” A “deadly beauty” from the Middle East who hijacked airplanes in service of her movement’s political struggle embodied an unexpected, raw female power. So too did a young Algerian woman who refused to chant “France is our mother,” as was rote for students under colonial rule, and screamed “Algeria is our mother!” instead. It was possible, even if not easy, to sympathize with emancipated Middle Eastern women seeking to free their countries from occupiers.

  In the decades that followed Bouhired’s capture and trial by the French and Khaled’s hijacking, the political landscape of the Middle East changed dramatically. The great secular nationalist liberation movements of the post–World War II era that had challenged colonial control saw themselves weakened and subverted. The Palestinians, whose first intifada included many women among its leaders, saw many of their leading figures assassinated by Israel; in Iran, a CIA-supported coup snuffed out a democratic push to nationalize the country’s oil industry; in Egypt, defeat in the 1967 war against Israel contributed to sclerosis within the Nasserite movement, and eventually to the entrenchment of authoritarian military rule under Hosni Mubarak, a firm ally of the United States. Across the Middle East, secular movements and leaders fared poorly, whatever they were agitating for, whether the return of occupied land, political freedom, or socioeconomic justice. Enshrined in nationalist and leftist armed struggle or even secular nationalist politics was a belief in liberal universal values and democratic principles, and the assumption that the West—which espoused these ideas—would respond to or tolerate Middle Eastern figures who also upheld them. But over time, it became starkly clear that that would not be the case. Prisons began to swell with Islamists, activists and militants who, disenchanted with the old failed ideologies, turned to religion to inflect their opposition. The torture they often faced accelerated and cemented their radicalism. Politics across much of the region stagnated. In 1979, with markedly little violence, the Iranian revolution did something unthinkable: it dislodged a modern, worldly U.S.-allied government, and propelled to power a Shia cleric, a gloomy medieval figure in black robes who promised his people independence and freedom under the banner of an Islamic republic. This was a defining moment for the Middle East. Where all secular leaders, from cosmopolitan leftists to nationalist democrats, had failed, a cleric had succeeded. And he was propelled to power by crowds filled with women; bare-headed women in skirts, conservative women in headscarves, united in their nationalist belief that Iran must be independent of the United States. The Iranian revolution inspired a new wave of politics in the region; the militant groups, political oppositions, and visions that emerged turned more religious and radical, and with this shift, they also became more firmly the terrain of men.

  In the 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War, the United States backed Muslim foreign fighters opposing the Soviets in Afghanistan. That fight drew men from around the world, but women were not invited to join in this religious jihad. The wives of fighters often accompanied their husbands to the front, but in traditional domestic roles. So too with the al-Qaeda movement of Osama bin Laden that grew in its wake, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. When it came to gender roles, al-Qaeda remained starchily orthodox and uninterested in women’s involvement. Even as late as 2008, bin La
den’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawaheri, maintained that “there are no women in al-Qaeda”; women were simply wives of the mujaheddin, “assuming a heroic role in taking care of their homes.” Al-Qaeda neither wooed fighters with promises of brides nor beckoned single women to join as members. In 2003, the U.S. invasion of Iraq attracted Arabs from around the region to fight the American occupation, setting off a wave of insurgent violence that would roil the country for years to come. It was here, in the shattered aftermath of liberated Iraq, that a new chapter opened for women’s militancy.

  Iraqi women were ensnared in both the U.S.-run torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and the brutality of Iraq’s criminal justice system; their defiled honor became a rallying cry for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq (a predecessor to the Islamic State in Iraq), and young women themselves began signing up for suicide missions in the Sunni insurgency. This dark interlude remained largely an Iraqi story, an after-wound of the American invasion, but it laid the groundwork for what would later follow. Because so many of the fighters who traveled to Iraq were veterans of previous waves of jihadist violence, it was easy for policy-makers and security analysts to cast what was unfolding as more of the same: Middle Eastern terrorism driven by Islam itself. To the Western eye, the dynamics by then were cemented: insurgency was religious, and insurgent leadership, combat, and recruitment were men’s work.

  You can pick up books on any one of these conflicts, riffle through the index, and not find a single woman. Violence and insurgency were enacted by men, and women blended into the wallpaper of history, believed to be bystanders, passive enablers, sometimes victims. They weren’t the ones holding forth on the pulpit, excoriating the West or Arab dictators. They didn’t record fatwas on cassette tapes that were smuggled across the world. They didn’t carry guns or sit beturbaned and cross-legged on dusty floors with Western journalists. But women were always there in the background: as wives and logisticians, educators and morale boosters, mothers whispering values, politics, and worldviews into the young ears of the next generation. Their roles were indirect. To outside observers, who kept their eyes trained on armed actors on the stage, the women in the wings were invisible.