ISIS Women

Guest House for Young Widows, by Azadeh Moaveni

The title is not apt, regretfully, for all its intriguing promise, because the guest house for widows actually only plays a very tiny part in this quite lengthy volume. The guest house is a holding pen for ISIS widows – of whom there are many, given that they marry (or are married to) ISIS jihadists, and so the rate of widowhood among ISIS wives is expectedly high. ISIS widows (even 2 or 3 times over) are expected to remarry quickly, so the ‘guest house’ is not made an inviting place. But this is just a very small part of the story.

There is a Note to Readers at the very end of the book which would have been much more useful if it was at the start of the book. The book was puzzling all the way, a set of disparate narratives of many stories of 13 young Muslim women from different corners of the world who support the Islamic State, interspersed with political descriptions of ISIS developments. It turns out that the author is relating real life stories taken from in-person interviews from 2015-2018 in UK, Turkey, Tunisia and Syria. The author is a reporter of Iranian background, investigating stories of women associated with ISIS, by talking with them and their families.

I’ve tried to write most closely from the perspective of the women themselves, while providing background that might make their actions intelligible.

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These are praiseworthy intentions, but not quite realised, because the way the book is written, it presupposes a considerable degree of what the author calls ‘religious literacy’, and also considerable cultural literacy and familiarity with Middle Eastern customs and norms. This reader grew up in a Muslim country and has some basic degree of religious literacy, and so some parts of this material is not totally unfamiliar, but the writing is still baffling because it assumes so much pre-knowledge about ISIS, jihadists, the caliphate, etc, and particularly, about the Middle Eastern political situation, histories, and cultures. Moreover, these political interludes between narratives are presented in largely undigestible and surprisingly dull chunks, considering the material itself in intrinsically so interesting.

It is not a particularly readable book, and this is doubly frustrating because these are doubtlessly stories that need to be heard. It is told flatly, the women coming across as puppets, and readers are left unable to identify with or understand or conceive of these as real people, as characters, even. The writing flattens the women’s personalities to 2-dimensions, making them puzzling and remote, rather than real life humans. There is a wealth of material collected here, and it is pretty clear the author has tried to stick to the absolute truth and facts, but there is something to be said about how fictionalising may actually render information conveyance more sympathetically and comprehensibly.

It is such a pity because many of these stories could have been so interesting: Nour from Tunis who rebelled as a teenager by insisting on wearing a hijab to school; Lina from a small town in Germany who runs away from an adulterous, irreligious husband and leaves behind her 3 children; Emma in Frankfurt, who converts to Islam and feels more at home with this community than mainstream Germany; Asma in Raqqa, Syria, who is finding life more and more difficult in the new regime; Olfa in Tunisia trying to bring up 3 daughters and her eldest two defying her to be Salafi activists; the 4 British Pakistani girls from Bethnal Green School in London who run away to Syria, etc.

On the positive side, Moaveni manages to depict such a spectrum of lives in such a geographical range of spaces, classes, backgrounds, situations, that she defies the stereotyping of Muslim women supporters of ISIS. They join for a range of motivations, though clearly, none are entirely contented in their lives, hence the attraction and appeal of this kind of organisation. On the downside however, the writing style distances the reader, making it feel like we are looking in through very opaque windows at these strange beings, given some bald facts about them but little else.

The stories of the 13 women are rendered in bits and pieces, returning to each character once in awhile, not in a single narrative each, and it is hard to keep track of so many women, who without distinct personalities, have only their storylines and names to distinguish them. It is, for most part, barely coherent as a narrative. The chopping and changing from one story to another (at least 13 storylines running in parallel, and which of course will not all tie in at the end, because they are mostly not connected to each other!) and all the heavy political interludes between sections of the book, render reading a struggle, and sometimes, the point or purpose seems unintelligible. It is unclear as to why the author chose such a difficult structure apart from the chronology of the real life timeline, which it makes no sense for this book to follow since the women do not necessary meet each other or affect each other’s lives. Even if this were a novel where all the storylines dovetail and interlock at the end, 13 plus narratives would not be an easy plotline to pull off.

Within each story, there are baffling and unexplained parts. For instance, when Nour is arrested, she is interrogated at length, and apparently other people are brought in for ‘leverage ‘, such as her father, or younger brother. However, she refuses to answer until her brother is taken home – so what kind of leverage is that? In another instance, a young girl is brought in and Nour is told the girl will be sitting naked the whole day unless she answers – but that doesn’t seem to be leverage either. They bring a young man in and beat him up in front of Nour, but it is not someone she knows, so that doesn’t work either. In the end, her parents pay a bribe and she is released. It is really impossible to understand or follow what is happening – perhaps that is what the author wants to convey – that Nour’s life really is impossible to understand because it has no intrinsic sense to how things develop.

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.

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The phrase ‘disobedient piety’ is a good one to sum up most of these women; they are devout followers of Islam, but in some way, they are also defying authorities at certain points in time, though they all apparently want to submit to God.

I began with saying this is a lengthy volume, but technically, it is only 336 pages, not particularly lengthy – it just felt long! It was hard work, for most part. I worked through it both because I felt it had something worth listening to, even if it wasn’t really succeeding in communicating that fluently and clearly; and to honour the hard work and integrity of the author, who is clearly passionate and sincere about her topic. It leaves me wishing this material could be in the hands of a defter writer who could make it come to life, readable, who can communicate the truth beyond non-fiction. That is not to say this author is not a good journalist or reporter; she is. But this book assumes the reader has the same knowledge and interest as the author herself, in this topic. It all but is premeditated upon a reader as invested as the author.

However, it is not at all a book I regret reading, because although it has left me with jumbled, piecemeal impressions of an intensely complex globally-reaching situation, it has provided a painfully honest and determinedly multi-faceted account, of what after all, is a fractious and confused state of affairs, lived by people who themselves are not able to wholly make sense of it or of their own lives. I will end this review with one of the best passages in the book, one of the more lucid ones, and which shows Moaveni’s reporting at its best:

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. […] They included educated daughters of diplomats, trainee doctors, teenagers with straight A-averages, as well as low-income drifters and desolate housewives. […]

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.

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