Widows -- Middle East. |
Muslim women -- Social conditions -- Middle East. |
Islamic fundamentalism -- Middle East. |
Islamic women |
Muslimahs |
Women, Muslim |
Fundamentalism, Islamic |
Islamism |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
---|---|---|---|
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | 306.883 MOAVENI | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | 306.88 M | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Norfolk Public Library | 305.48 MOAV | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Seekonk Public Library | 306.883 MOAVENI | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A gripping account of thirteen women who joined, endured, and, in some cases, escaped life in the Islamic State--based on years of immersive reporting by a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
FINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * NPR * Toronto Star * The Guardian
Among the many books trying to understand the terrifying rise of ISIS, none has given voice to the women in the organization; but women were essential to the establishment of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's caliphate.
Responding to promises of female empowerment and social justice, and calls to aid the plight of fellow Muslims in Syria, thousands of women emigrated from the United States and Europe, Russia and Central Asia, from across North Africa and the rest of the Middle East to join the Islamic State. These were the educated daughters of diplomats, trainee doctors, teenagers with straight-A averages, as well as working-class drifters and desolate housewives, and they joined forces to set up makeshift clinics and schools for the Islamic homeland they'd envisioned . Guest House for Young Widows charts the different ways women were recruited, inspired, or compelled to join the militants. Emma from Hamburg, Sharmeena and three high school friends from London, and Nour, a religious dropout from Tunis: All found rebellion or community in political Islam and fell prey to sophisticated propaganda that promised them a cosmopolitan adventure and a chance to forge an ideal Islamic community in which they could live devoutly without fear of stigma or repression.
It wasn't long before the militants exposed themselves as little more than violent criminals,more obsessed with power than the tenets of Islam, and the women of ISIS were stripped of any agency, perpetually widowed and remarried, and ultimately trapped in a brutal, lawless society. The fall of the caliphate only brought new challenges to women no state wanted to reclaim.
Azadeh Moaveni's exquisite sensitivity and rigorous reporting make these forgotten women indelible and illuminate the turbulent politics that set them on their paths.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this searing investigation, Moaveni, an Iranian-American journalist (Honeymoon in Tehran), explores the phenomenon of Muslim women--many of them educated, successful, and outwardly Westernized--choosing to travel to Syria in support of jihad. She follows 13 women and girls who were radicalized by news, by recruiters on social media, or within their social circles. Many of them naively dreamed of handsome warrior husbands, "camels trudging through a glowing vermilion sandstorm and Moorish palaces set against the moonlight." In Syria, many found that "the militants no better than the tyrants they claimed to oppose" and their new husbands, assigned immediately upon arrival by ISIS, were often alarming (some described as "swiping through phone apps for sex slaves"). The guest house of the title, which most women come to know well, since the men die so quickly, "was a place of such deliberate uninhabitability that few women could stay long without going mad. This was precisely the intention.... Refusing to marry was recalcitrant behavior that would not be enabled by a comfortable private room with en suite bathroom." In concise, visceral vignettes, Moaveni immerses her readers in a milieu saturated with the romantic appeal of violence. The result is a journalistic tour de force that lays bare the inner lives, motivations, and aspirations of her subjects. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Journalist Moaveni (Honeymoon in Tehran, 2009) investigates the reasons that young women in the West and Middle East joined ISIS in the early 2010s. She follows teenage and young adult women from Tunisia, the U. K., Germany, and Syria as they experience the rise of ISIS and the war in Syria. Moaveni was originally inspired by the media coverage of four 15-year-old girls from Bethnal Green, London, who left their families to join ISIS. She hoped to explore the complexity behind their recruitment and attraction to extremism. During her reporting, she met other women who had been involved, through varying degrees of willingness, in ISIS, and found their stories to further complicate the picture of radicalization and collaboration. Peeling back layers of gender, Islamophobia, faith, loyalty, and socialization, Moaveni situates the women's stories within the larger historical and sociopolitical context of the time. Following 13 women in total, Guest House for Young Widows is an ambitious attempt to understand the attraction of ISIS for many disaffected youth who were ready to believe.--Laura Chanoux Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
A skillful, sensitive report on the women who left their homes to join Islamic State - and found misery. "We are already a long time in the bedrooms of terrorists," a German security official is quoted as saying in Azadeh Moaveni's superb book, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize. The occasion is the controversy over the former FBI agent Daniela Greene, who fell in love with and married the Islamic State fighter she had been assigned to investigate. So twisted is her story no one can tell if it is a "coup for the FBI for sneaking in an agent into the heartland of Isis" or a victory for the terrorists. Moaveni profiles 13 women, including Shamima Begum, who left their homes in the UK, Germany and other countries to join Isis. Greene is not one of the 13 yet the tricky questions surrounding her case are pertinent. To what degree can we empathise with the women (many just teenagers, many fleeing difficult home lives) without becoming complicit in their adulation of terrorists? And are we as readers to allot levels of culpability depending on the details of the individual stories? Is Begum, who, her mother having died, was eager to escape a loveless life in a council flat, more or less culpable than Leena, the mother of three who flees an abusive marriage? And is their existence somehow of value to the West, which can offer them up as proof that Muslim women as well as men can be radicalised? Moaveni offers detailed depictions of the lives of Nour, Dua, Kadiza and her other subjects, and in doing so invalidates the stereotype of the Isis bride as a seductive, sinister figure bent on mass murder. The daily realities in Raqqa are far more mundane. There is the constant waiting for husbands who disappear for days, and the disposability of marriages when being widowed is a near-guarantee. The "guest house" from which the book takes its title is an actual place "of such deliberate uninhabitability that few women could stay long without going mad". The discomfort is intentional; the worse the conditions in this limbo between marriages, the more likely the widows are to accept whichever husband they are told to marry next. The exalted positions they were promised as the female pioneers of a new society turn out not to exist. Instead, each of the women finds herself in some semblance of hell. There is also a replication of the colonial hierarchies that Isis ostensibly set out to eliminate. "Why do they get to do whatever they want?" a recruit grumbles when she sees European teenagers being treated better and having more privileges in the Caliphate than the local Syrian women like herself. Her friend can only offer a half-hearted retort: "Maybe because they had to leave their countries to come here." When Greene, FBI agent turned Isis wife, returns home, she receives a short two-year sentence to atone for her terrorist romance. But Begum, found pregnant and languishing in a camp aged 19, is stripped of her UK citizenship. Dalliances with terror, like everything else, have different consequences for different women; the mastery of Guest House for Young Widows is to show us just how distinct and devastating each can be.
Kirkus Review
Iranian American journalist Moaveni (Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran, 2009, etc.) recounts the stories of women who have joined the cause of the Islamic State group.According to the current presidential administration, IS is a failing cause, but it remains strong in places such as Iraq and Syria, battling government forces and controlling large territories. Working with 20-odd women involved in IS and their families, the author shows them to be a diverse group with various motivations. "Many thought they were saving themselves, or saving others, from unspeakable harm," she writes, although on the battlefront of the caliphate, the women would find themselves in grave danger themselves. One of her subjects is a young Tunisian woman whom Moaveni, who uses pseudonyms throughout, calls Nour. She, like many of her compatriots, took up wearing the niqab as an instrument of protest: "For many, being religious became a language through which to demand freedom from the state's intrusion into daily life." Salafism, the extremely conservative, Saudi-funded movement, is a rebuke to liberal Tunisians in a secular state; although separated by dress and other strictures, the young women who became Salafi felt "not constrained but empowered." Just so, IS appealed to young women in secular Britain, some of whom became "true believers" and took up arms. Some died, and some, on returning (or being returned) to their homeland, became wards of the court: "Had she been a young American woman in similar circumstances, caught by American authorities," observes Moaveni, "it's likely she would have been prosecutedand forced to serve a years-long prison sentence." The author adds that it is not just the children of the dispossessed, but the well educated and affluent who join the cause; regardless of their status, however, "no country wants its ISIS citizens back."Writing sympathetically but not uncritically, Moaveni helps readers understand why these women join IS. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad) explores the reasons young women join the Islamic State (IS). Expanding on her 2015 New York Times story, Moaveni focuses on 13 women from varying socioeconomic statuses and countries. Their reasons for joining IS are complex: some follow husbands or boyfriends, some are seduced by the promise of a "pure" form of Islam, some are unable to leave their homes in the war zone. Alongside the personal narratives, Moaveni presents a compact history of the Syrian conflict and expands on the political and socioeconomic situations that gave rise to extremism in Europe and North Africa. The author pays special attention to the factors behind the women's choices and where interventions could have been made, as she hopes that by addressing the underlying causes, future occurrences will be prevented. Moaveni's tone gravitates toward compassion and understanding, given the young age of many of these women, but she also provides more critical counter-narratives, never glossing over or avoiding the gravity of her subjects' decisions nor the brutality of the IS regime. VERDICT A compelling read that imparts important lessons about religious extremism. Recommended for readers interested in women's issues and current affairs.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Excerpts
Excerpts
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. 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-Parisiennes; 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. 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 voting, 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. A few months into her existence as a specter at school, Nour told her parents she'd had enough. "At least finish and get your certificate," her mother said. But Nour could not see how it was possible to learn anything when she felt herself reviled by the teachers. Nothing entered her head anyway, not how to graph an atom or the qualities of a hypotenuse. What was the point? She quit school in 2009. Now, instead, she spent her mornings at home helping her mother clean and cook. After lunch she read the Quran. The neighborhood mosque had a prayer room where girls could meet to talk and discuss religion, and it was here that the imam's wife befriended her. Nour liked the imam's wife's spirited laugh and genuine conversation, the small lessons she gave that illuminated aspects of the religion--lessons about the mindset to bring to prayer and the importance of charity, and how it would ennoble a person. She told Nour stories about the prophets, about Moses and Jesus, and most of all, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's qualities. The Prophet said: "Guard yourself from the Hellfire even with half a date in charity. If he cannot find it, then with a kind word." Nour could manage half a date, and feeling like she could help others, even when she herself had so little, was heartening. She wasn't as powerless as she thought. When the imam's wife invited other women over for a circle of discussion, Nour was often too shy to say very much herself. But she listened avidly and took it all in. Excerpted from Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Prologue: Between Seasons: Spring 2007, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 1 |
Part I Inheritance of Thorns | |
Nour: Spring 2007, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 15 |
Asma: Summer 2009, Raqqa, Syria | p. 20 |
Lina: Summer 2000, Weinheim, Germany | p. 23 |
Emma: 2007, Frankfurt, Germany | p. 34 |
Nour: January 2011, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 43 |
Asma: January 2011, Raqqa, Syria | p. 57 |
Rahma and Ghoufran: June 2012, Sousse, Tunisia | p. 64 |
Nour: September 2012, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 71 |
Lina: Early 2014, Frankfurt, Germany | p. 76 |
Emma/Dunya: Spring 2012, Frankfurt, Germany | p. 78 |
Emma/Dunya: Summer 2014, Frankfurt, Germany | p. 83 |
Sabira: October 2013, Walthamstow, Northeast London | p. 89 |
Part II Gone Girls | |
Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima: December 2014, East London | p. 105 |
Part III Over and Out | |
Asma: 2012-2013, Raqqa, Syria | p. 123 |
Nour: Fall 2012, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 128 |
Rahma and Ghoufran: Summer 2014, Sousse, Tunisia | p. 143 |
Emma/Dunya: February 2014, Istanbul, Turkey | p. 145 |
Lina: July 2014, Gaziantep, Turkey | p. 147 |
Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima: December 2014, East London | p. 149 |
Sabira: April 2015, Walthamstow, Northeast London | p. 157 |
Part IV Citizens of the Abode of Islam | |
Asma, Aws, and Dua: January 2014, Raqqa, Syria | p. 165 |
Emma/Dunya: Spring 2014, Raqqa, Syria | p. 185 |
Lina: Autumn 2014, Tal Afar, Iraq | p. 191 |
Emma/Dunya: Fall 2015, Manbij, Syria | p. 193 |
Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima: February 2015, East London | p. 203 |
Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima: July 2015, London and Raqqa | p. 213 |
Rahma and Ghoufran: September 2014, Zawiya, Libya | p. 216 |
Nour: August 2014, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 222 |
Rahma and Ghoufran: May 2015, Tunis | p. 231 |
Lina: March 2016, Tal Afar, Iraq | p. 234 |
Part V Love, Mourn, Repeat | |
Asma, Aws, and Dua: January 2015, Raqqa, Syria | p. 239 |
Lina: Spring 2017, Raqqa, Syria | p. 245 |
Emma/Dunya: Spring 2015, Mmbij, Syria | p. 249 |
Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima: December 2015, Raqqa, Syria | p. 257 |
Rahma and Ghoufran: February 2016, Sabratha, Libya | p. 260 |
Bethnal Green: August 2015, East London | p. 264 |
Kadiza: May 2016, Raqqa, Syria | p. 268 |
Sabira: Spring 2016, Walthamstow, Northeast London | p. 269 |
Emma/Dunya: January 2017, a Village in Northern Syria | p. 281 |
Nour: Spring 2016, Le Kram, Tunis | p. 287 |
Epilogue: Among the Dissemblers | p. 295 |
Note to Readers | p. 333 |
Acknowledgments | p. 337 |