Guest House for Young Widows Read online

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  THE 2010S CHANGED THAT FOREVER. In 2011, a staccato sequence of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East heralded momentous change. Women galvanized the Arab Spring, often standing at the forefront of protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in Bahrain and Yemen, Libya and Tunisia, encouraging and egging on men to confront security forces, demanding political freedom, dignity, and opportunity. Young women like Nour, who had found no place for herself in the old order of Tunisia, formed the backbone of a movement that, more than anything, simply sought the right of all to be included: in school, in politics, in the market of opportunity.

  Arab despots moved to crush the protests. And in the tumultuous years of the Arab Spring, these despots found unlikely allies. The West was deeply ambivalent about this sudden wave of change, despite the fact that the United States and Europe had complained for years that authoritarianism was holding back the Arab world’s development, allowing women’s inequality to fester and fueling radicalism. As Egypt’s revolution stumbled to find its feet under the leadership of Islamists—politicians who had been democratically voted into power—President Barack Obama’s loyalty shifted toward the country’s generals, who were itching to consolidate their control. America’s priority, he declared, was stability. In the course of about two years, these hopeful Arab revolutions collapsed one by one, descending into civil wars or suppression by the generals and autocrats who saw that the United States was distracted by other priorities.

  Out of this historic interlude of hope and chaos, into the resulting vacuum of instability, the Islamic State emerged. It was sophisticated, organized, and determined to exploit all the grievances, cracks, and disorder the lost revolutions so generously offered. And it had perceptively noted women as a rising political force, even as it proposed a radically patriarchal form of family organization and politics that stripped women of their autonomy.

  The Islamic State rose from the recent histories of Syria and Iraq, the specific grievances and fractures of those countries. But from the earliest days, the State told a different, loftier story about itself. It claimed the mantle of leadership for Sunnis around the world, prophesying a final apocalyptic battle between the forces of Islam and the West. It promised the creation of an Islamic homeland, an empire-state where Muslims could live freely and justly under a kingdom of heaven. Echoing the demands of the Arab Spring protests, it seduced tens of thousands of Muslims into traveling to its territory, with assurances of enlightened rule, opportunity, and dignity.

  If in 2011 the aspirations of young women across the Arab world had been for freedom, a dream that seemed achingly close before disappearing into the smoke and tear gas of coups and massacres, by 2013, when IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate, the future held only more of what Simone de Beauvoir had sniffed at previous generations of Middle Eastern women for accepting: lives of repetition. Conventional wisdom in the West held that nominally secular Arab generals and royal autocrats were “better” for women than political Islamists, but under the rule of such leaders, women faced multiple binds: they had to contend with the patriarchy of their culture, which frowned on women being educated and working; they had to struggle with the structural barriers to accessing work and education in societies like Tunisia that rejected religious women accessing public life—and at the very same time could not organize to challenge these norms through politics, because secular dictators didn’t allow any politics at all.

  These supposedly better-for-women dictators were not opposed to imprisoning women or using sexual violence—gang rapes, virginity checks—to punish women who opposed them. For women who wanted more—more dignity, more public and civic influence, more room to practice their religion—the status quo had no room for them.

  It was in this febrile, despairing atmosphere that the Islamic State began unfurling its vision. It was neither authoritarian client state nor pretender to liberal democracy. It was not a conventional nation-state at all, not obliged to follow the dictates of neoliberal capitalism.

  In 2013, thousands of women from across the world poured into this promised land. They came from across North Africa and the rest of the Middle East, from Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, the United States and Australia, China and East Asia. Women formed 17 percent of all European travelers to the caliphate. They included educated daughters of diplomats, trainee doctors, teenagers with straight-A averages, as well as low-income drifters and desolate housewives. They swelled the cities under the group’s control, settling in the abandoned homes of Syrians and Iraqis who had fled the conflict. They set up makeshift clinics and schools for the Islamic homeland they believed themselves to be building.

  Many of these women were trying, in a twisted way, to achieve dignity and freedom through an embrace of a politics that ended up violating both. Perhaps it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand and sympathize with women whose vision of armed struggle deviated so dramatically from the liberation fighters of earlier decades. They embraced an apocalyptic ideology, supported attacks on cafés and places of worship, and seemed to espouse their own subordination, through an ethos of separateness so severe as to forsake any real prospect of justice within its confines.

  Perhaps to the outside world, the ending of the story was already written. But the Islamic State’s female would-be citizens harbored real expectations, and watched them quickly fall apart. The militants showed themselves to be no better than the tyrants they claimed to oppose; they too used religion as ornament, were obsessed with power, spoils, and territory, ignorant or dismissive of even basic tenets of Islamic justice. Crucifixions and beheadings drew crowds. Their husbands, who had been decent men at home, began to swipe through phone apps for sex slaves.

  How regretful were these women? It is exceedingly hard to say. They risked execution by rejecting the Islamic State’s rule and trying to escape. If they did escape, they risked death and social stigma afterward if they admitted to having willingly associated with or having believed in the caliphate. Some women rationalized that the atrocities their husbands committed were nothing singular, that their brutality was matched or exceeded by the brutality of the opponents they were up against: Assad’s army, the Shia militias controlled by Iran, the Russian air force, the al-Qaeda–linked insurgent groups, the pro-Kurdish autonomy forces supported by the United States. Many women found themselves trapped in a lawless place, strafed nightly by the warplanes of different nations. When their husbands died, there was always a knock at the door shortly afterward, a commander demanding that they remarry, again and again, forever widows.

  Though vanquished today as a battlefield force in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State is still with us: its supporters killed more than 250 people in coordinated bombings on Easter Sunday 2019 in Sri Lanka, and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi emerged in a video clip that same April, declaring that his group’s vision remained alive and vowing to continue its bloody guerrilla war against non-Muslim unbelievers across the world. Affiliates linked to the group continue to wage powerful local insurgencies in disparate corners of the globe, in areas the group insists are its “provinces.” Its sectarian hatred has infected a whole generation in the Arab world.

  The political fractures from which it arose have not been fixed. History has shown that unless conditions genuinely change, a new insurgency always arises from the ashes of an old one.

  If we are to break this cycle, we must contend with the group’s shameful, provocative legacy, and understand how it persuaded thousands of women that they could find security or empowerment through joining its ranks.

  This book follows thirteen women—some very young, some older; some educated, some not—as they sought lives in, or in support of, the Islamic State. It does not tell a Western story or a Middle Eastern story; it is set across the United Kingdom, Germany, Tunisia, Syria, Turkey, Libya, and Iraq. It charts the different ways women were recruited, inspir
ed, or compelled to join the militants, a process that often ensnared their lovers and relatives, their teachers and neighbors.

  The female victims of the Islamic State, specifically the enslaved Yazidi women, have commanded a great deal of attention. No one can deny the extraordinary horror and centrality of their suffering. But along the way, we have been perhaps too caught up in revulsion to fully appreciate the conditions that gave rise to the group’s female adherents. If we want to truly understand these conditions, then we must look at the women who joined the group with more nuance and compassion.

  As I write this, there are thousands of IS women and children lingering in camps and detention centers across the Middle East—awaiting death sentences, suspended in stateless limbo, or resigned to permanent incarceration. In fetid camps their children are dying in the tens of disease and exposure to the cold. They are no one’s priority, the human residue of a conflict that everyone wishes to forget. Their abandonment may be politically expedient in the short term. But it risks stoking another cycle of precisely the same resentments and reactions that led to the group’s creation. Not every woman who joined the Islamic State wished to hurt, enslave, or oppress others. Many thought they were saving themselves, or saving others, from unspeakable harm—harm they never could have imagined awaited them in the caliphate.

  If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police

  And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police

  I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police

  All my prose is against the police

  —MIGUEL JAMES

  [President Ben Ali] has done a tremendous job in Tunisia and is well respected back home, as well as here in the Arab world.

  —U.S. CONGRESSMAN EARL HILLIARD, ON HIS THIRD VISIT TO TUNISIA, 1999

  NOUR

  Spring 2007, Le Kram, Tunis

  After the niqab incident, Nour was suspended from school for ten days as teachers and the principal deliberated how to respond to a thirteen-year-old flirting with religion. No one summoned Nour to speak to her about why she had shown up at school wearing a niqab, or whether something was wrong at home. Nour just wanted to be virtuous, to be dutiful to her God and ensure her place in heaven; she was also an adolescent, and it made her feel alive to defy something and play around with her identity. But no one asked precisely why she felt that covering her face was her religious duty. Had they given her the chance to mention the YouTube sheikh, they might have informed her there were opposing and indeed stronger and more valid scholarly views. Instead the principal summoned Nour and her parents to the school and, in the presence of a disgusted-looking policeman, made her sign a pledge to never cover her face or hair again.

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  IN THE PERIOD THAT STRETCHED from its independence from France in 1956 to the 2011 revolution, Tunisia was said to be a secular country, but the state’s approach to religion was not so much secular as simply authoritarian. The state controlled how Tunisians practiced Islam, down to the daily, physical details of their worship—dictating what women could wear, when men could go to the mosque—and it did so with the totalizing scrutiny of a police state. President Habib Bourguiba, who ruled Tunisia after independence, was enamored with the French model of laïcité—secularism in public affairs, aimed at bringing about a secular society—and, when he took office, brought Islamic learning and instruction under the full control of the state.

  In doing so, he upended centuries of tradition. Tunisia was a country with a deep Islamic heritage stretching back to the late seventh century, when the Arabs wrested control of North Africa from the Byzantine empire. Though the boundaries of the Islamic world shifted continually over time, expanding as far as Spain and Sicily, the region of Tunis remained firmly within the heart of successive Muslim empires. Al-Zaytuna, Tunisia’s historic center of religious learning, dated back to 737 CE. When Bourguiba took power, he shut it down. He abolished religious courts, turned imams into civil servants, and bowdlerized religious texts used in schools. He sought to end fasting during Ramadan, arguing that Tunisians couldn’t develop without shedding such dogmatic habits; he drank orange juice on national television during the holy month to make his point. Like many of the Middle East’s twentieth-century nation-building modernizers, he believed that society needed growth and discipline to modernize and catch up with the West, and that Islam inhibited those qualities.

  Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who seized power from Bourguiba in 1987, further instrumentalized religion to establish his authority. He allowed radios to start broadcasting the call to prayer, went on the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and promoted folksy Sufi festivals, pushing a curated, “moderate” Tunisian Islam that, as an ethos, made full submission to the state a core principle.

  In 1989, he allowed candidates of Ennahda, the religious opposition movement, to participate in elections, but when they fared well, Ben Ali tortured and imprisoned them. He also shut down mosques and expanded restrictions on wearing the hijab. Mosques were locked up outside prayer times, and police crept through the streets at first light, making note of who had risen for the dawn prayer.

  Despite all this, the state did not manage to turn Tunisians into either state-friendly Sufis or secular proto-Parisiens; the majority remained conservative, traditional Muslims. Under the chokehold of repression, asserting control of one’s religiosity became a means of challenging the state. Young women like Nour, who grew up curious about religion, often resorted to watching sheikhs on satellite channels broadcast from the Gulf countries, whose approach to Islam was far more rigid and puritanical than the “Zaytuna” school that had been native to Tunisia for centuries.

  Generations of young Tunisians grew up identifying as Muslims, but their worship and religious identity were fraught with political meaning. For many, being religious became a language through which to demand freedom from the state’s intrusion into daily life.

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  WHEN SCHOOL STARTED BACK UP a week later, Nour showed up at breakfast in her pajamas. Her mother told her she was too young to make her own decisions about her future, and that she had better go get dressed. She consented. But the incident had doubled Nour’s conviction to wear the niqab, and now, instead of changing surreptitiously by the bakery after she left the house, she put it on openly at home, wore it through the streets, and only took it off outside the school. In the classroom, she felt like a specter, a girl the teachers refused to look at or speak to.

  “You should be wearing it too,” she told her mother reprovingly. Nour’s mother, a housewife with four other children to look after, didn’t know what to say to this aggravating teenage daughter. Nour often lectured her mother about taking Islam more seriously. Her mother, it seemed to Nour, had no thought-through position on why she didn’t cover her hair, apart from it saving her humiliation on the street and visits to the police station. These were weak positions, Nour thought; not even positions, just a base instinct for self-preservation.

  President Bourguiba had famously called the veil “that miserable rag” and banned it from schools and public offices in 1981. There was grainy footage of him pulling the white scarf off a middle-aged woman’s head, on the street on the day of the Eid festival at the end of Ramadan; the woman looks startled and embarrassed, and her fingers flutter to pull it back up, but the president pulls it down as if correcting a child, and pats her cheek indulgently. Since 1981, Tunisian women were obliged to go bareheaded in public spaces such as schools, universities, banks, and government buildings.

  Like other modernizers in the region, Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, Bourguiba didn’t explicitly advocate that women abandon Islam, but he made clear that he wanted them to act secularly: to mingle bareheaded in mixed company, to dress in modern Western fashion. Along with this, he granted women sweeping rights in votin
g, marriage, and child custody that rapidly made Tunisian women the most literate, educated, and independent in the Arab world. LIBERATOR OF WOMEN is engraved on Bourguiba’s mausoleum, but whether it was liberation for all women or just for some women would become clear in later generations.

  Nour’s mother, like many in her generation, went along with this model pragmatically, because there were more people than jobs in Tunisia, and she had a family to support. Everyone saw what happened to the families of the resistant women in the neighborhood, the stubborn women who insisted on covering their hair and engaging in religious activism. These families were nervous wrecks, in and out of police stations, living at the brink of poverty, with fathers, husbands, and sons who were imprisoned or in exile for dissident activity. Nour’s mother recounted these ghoulish stories often, hoping her daughter’s ears would catch some basic truths: the story about the woman who married an Islamist and arrived at the wedding reception to find it swarming with police ripping the headscarves off guests; the stories about nighttime home raids of those suspected of “religious” activity.

  She told Nour about a woman three blocks over who was raped by policemen one night during a raid on her house and went mute for a whole year. “A whole year, Nour, she didn’t utter a word. Every week, we would ask, ‘Has she said anything?’ And they always said, ‘No, not yet.’ ”

  Nour understood these stories were meant to scare her, but she remained stoic. “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a test then, would it? Allah loves those most whom he tests the hardest.” That was true, according to the Quran, but that line had also become a rose-filtered meme popular among teenage Muslim girls.