Guest House for Young Widows: Book Review

Book Author: Azadeh Moaveni

“What is the difference between an extremist and a very upset Muslim?”

When I was in tenth grade in Cadet College (a military run boarding school), we girls planned to fast on a religious holiday. In Cadet College we were trained to do activities that required us to wear Western inspired shirt pants, tailored in a fashion that made us look so boring, so that there was no question of immodesty in a Muslim majority country. It was mandatory for the Muslim girls to join the evening prayer (Maghrib prayer) out of the five prayers God made mandatory for Muslims. So, in the evening, Muslim girls (those who were not having their period at that time) would wear a white scarf over the overall and walk in lines to the mosque. Our religious engagement also included learning how to write Quranic verses, mainly to earn extra marks in Religious Study. Each year, before the Ramadan starts, our institution would be closed so the girls can return home, keep fasting or not. So on that religious holiday, we teenage girls planned to keep an optional fast together. Because it would be something we would do together. We would eat Sehri together, break our fast in the evening together. The idea was exciting! Friends living more like family.

When the day came, before dawn alarm clocks started to ring one after another. We woke up in the dark, ate biscuits, cakes, anything that was dry enough to stock, instead of the ritual meals that families eat in Sehri—rice, daal, meat etc. No problem, our spirit was not broken. We are doing this together. We joined the morning prayer and came back to our dorms. As the first light of the morning broke, we went back to sleeping again.

We used to have five meals in Cadet College. Five times a day, a duty Cadet would ring a bell to call for the meals. The first ring was for breakfast. The whole college woke up and went to the dining hall. It was a very quiet meal that day. Only girls having their period and who were non-Muslims ate their breakfast. It was a combined effort to keep fast, so seniors were not to scold juniors for skipping meals. But what we did not think was—what would the DDM, Day Duty Master, who supervises all the meals, make of it.

That day, DDM was a male teacher, a mustached 50 years Mathematics teacher. His initials were N.I. He would always cut 1 mark from the answer sheet for drawing a problem figure. So, 99 was the highest  mark one could get in mathematics under him. He had a local accent, maybe from Rangpur. He neither looked religious, nor non-religious. His get up didn't give any clue. He noticed us skipping our meals and came to know we were observing fast. This angered him a lot. We were a military-run academy, discipline is our first priority. A bunch of girls can’t just do anything they like. “Permission” was not sought from him or anyone.

So, in the next meal, a mid-morning tea, he was pacing through the dining hall to make sure that we eat and do not keep fasting. With each step he was approaching, we planned how we could keep ourselves from swallowing the food. This was our test. God before everything. We needed to prove our point. Then I don’t remember much. Did we break our fast, did we not. But I remember us being very angry. Who is Mr N.I. to decide our well-being? Our proud plan got dismissed because of him. This was our prayer to God and doesn’t he know it would be a great sin on part of him that he made us break that prayer? Was he not afraid of the punishment from God? Our childhood grooming made us think confidently about the wrath that would fall on him as punishment from God.

Growing up I started to understand, people have their own take of everything, not just God, but of money, power, status, food, drink, clothing etc. And it’s okay, people with different mindsets can sit together in a dining hall, some can eat, some can skip. But what is not okay is—hurting others’ belief, or imposing one’s belief on another. My God is in my head, so is yours in your head and they might be very different—which is totally okay.

The ISIS women have come to Raqqa from all around the world. Even though the destination was the same, the journeys they undertook were different. Different airlines from all around the world stopped at Turkey, then cell phone calls were made to the connections and borders were crossed, and finally the fighters reached Raqqa. But what transpired these folks to get a ticket, board on a plane, make a call and cross a border. What transpired before that? How were their old lives which made them turn to the direction of Raqqa, like Muslims turn to Ka'ba for their prayers. The author shows us the unique journeys to Raqqa—from living in a communal home to holding a kalashnikov, from posting trendy hijab fashions to living in a discarded apartment as a front liner's wife, from growing up with a hunger to change the society to work for the ISIS.

Thin lines… Between a person brought up in an immigrant family, bullied as “Paki”, growing up as a journalist or activist or footballer and a person brought up in the same environment, ending up in Raqqa, taking religious law classes, witnessing beheading of Western journalist or following order to execute them—the line is thin.

The book does an excellent job showing the journeys of selected ISIS women (sometimes their men counterparts also) and their consequences. After landing in Raqqa their likely course was - settle in a seized apartment, joining the religious classes, handling marriage proposals (and ultimately getting married as marriage was rewarding in the Caliphate), running household chores in absence of the husband fighting in the front line or join the religious police to scrutinize the dresses of local women. The first heartbreak for some of these women was that—they revolted against the lives lived, protested so that they would be able to do high end works while wearing niqab, being respected, and yet they landed on the repetitive jobs of washing dishes and keeping a neat house.

“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.”

The case studies from Tunisia went deep into political matters. I could relate to Tunisia so much. A country whose backbone was corrupted, educated young men were still unemployed during their thirties due to lack of “connection” in government offices. What provoked young Tunis is - an exaggerated interference in the public's religious practices by the governments. One government promotes exposing female bodies, another bars. Government or fashion school, who knows… ISIS came as an opportunity for these unemployed young folks to be employed, to make anything out of their empty days.

For many, being religious became a language through which to demand freedom from the state’s intrusion into daily life.

We get to know about Ghoufran and Rahma, the sisters from Tunisia, who were influenced by Salafism.

Salafism changed them both, like a tint that brought out their temperaments in starker relief. Ghoufran became cheerier and more loving, tending to Olfa (their mother) and chattering openly about the things she was learning. But Rahma took Salafi ideology and used it to become the family bully, criticizing Olfa and the younger girls for doing everything wrong—for not waking up for the dawn prayer, for wearing tight clothes, watching haram television, listening to haram music. Rahma tried to force her youngest sister, then nine, to start covering her hair. When she didn’t listen, Rahma refused to sit next to her at mealtimes. Here Olfa intervened and threatened to slap her if Rahma continued calling her nine-year-old sister kafira, an unbeliever.

“What you wear right now, it’s not shari’i,” she said, pointing to Olfa’s sequined tank top, navy trousers, and fitted pink cardigan.

“I’ve been dressing like this for years, and I like it like this,” Olfa replied, wrapping a red scarf over her hair.

Rahma’s eyes welled up with tears. She didn’t want to be separated from her mother in the afterlife, and the bar for heaven was high. “You think I’m just being horrible,” Rahma said. “But how are you going to make it to jannah, going out like this?”

Clothing becomes the greatest display of religious beliefs, especially clothing of the women. 

“Hisham, faith is here,” she said, tapping her fingers against her heart. “It’s not here”—she ran her hands through her hair, then down her body. “You loved me first without hijab. Why, now, do you say I have to put it on?”

He shrugged. “I can’t change that part of me that wants that. It’s fixed.”

The situation of Syrian women who got education and built ambition to go somewhere in life was also traumatic. Without the means to flee the country, they found themselves working for ISIS, helping foreigners crossing borders into Syria - not their dream jobs, but jobs they were left with.

She belonged to a generation of Syrian women, born in the 1980s and 1990s, who were leading more independent lives than their mothers and indeed any women before them. They were a generation who studied at university before getting married, who got married later, who were more in control of their destinies. Asma had grown up thinking that as a woman she should be able to get an education, earn money, and have authority. The collapse of her country’s revolution now meant that she was putting that belief into practice by working for ISIS.

Ironically the dreamy ISIS was no better than the places people left to come there-

But it was also true that no one shed their prejudices upon arrival in the caliphate. The racist superiority the Saudis felt toward Pakistani or Bangladeshi Britons (“they are not British British”), the superiority the British Asians felt toward the British Somalis, the superiority German Turks felt toward the local Syrians, the superiority the Lebanese and Syrians felt toward the Saudis, the superiority the Syrian Arabs felt toward the Syrian Kurds—none of these impulses dissolved.

The Syrians viewed the British fighters as colonizers, and were bewildered by the insertion of these London-accented, brown-skinned Brits into what was, to their mind, their local civil or regional proxy war. The British fighters behaved like conventional overlords. They viewed their mission as legitimate and just. They thought it correct that they should appropriate the homes of Syrians who had fled, and to impose their rule on those who had stayed behind.

European converts to Islam were more vulnerable to extremist groups because many lacked this lifelong socialization. Many came from deprived social backgrounds and were primed to be drawn to aggressive, militant strains of anything, from local gangs to local extremist ideologues. They were quick to subsume their personal grudges against family and society into transnational political grudges against the West. Cuspert fell readily into the arms of shadowy German jihadist figures who promised that extreme stance.

In fact, Cuspert didn’t convert to Islam so much as initiate himself straight into a radical Islamist group called the True Religion. It was as though he had pressed a button and changed the aesthetic theme of the WordPress site of his life from gangsta to mujahid; the chaotic structure and violent impulses were all the same, but were now overlaid with Islamist imagery and themes. Suddenly causes like Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan mattered to him deeply, and Germans, Westerners, and a broad swath of humanity became “unbelievers” who were complicit in Muslim suffering.

I think I know this lot of people who suddenly become “religious”. In my country Bangladesh, I have seen people making religion to cover every sort of business - a clean shaved man suddenly keeping long beard and wearing white punjabi (thus becoming religious) once who used to molest children. 

Many of the Western ISIS recruits were from immigrant families, and the author tries to go to the heart of the crisis.

Immigrant parents were poorly equipped for the challenges of contemporary parenting in the urban twenty-first-century Europe. They behaved as though they were still back at home in Bangladesh or Ethiopia, where there was a surrounding cushion of extended family and friends supporting their parenting, casting a protective eye on all the children around them, because that is the way children had always been raised, collectively. In London, there was no such protection; there were gangs and knife crime, predators on Facebook and Instagram, whole collections of virtual and physical threats. These parents assumed the mosque and Quran classes were safe spaces, but the reality was that there were no safe spaces left, period, online or in the real world.

The case of a German convert woman who was very inspired by the Turkish household of the neighbors and left for ISIS (what was she thinking) and finding herself craving for things Western. In the heart of her, she seems just a regular girl, with mood swing and all.

She changed her WhatsApp profile picture obsessively. It was a better barometer of her moods, aspirations, desires, and regrets than any words she could articulate.

In the span of one month, it featured her mother, herself as a baby, a BMW at sunset, the sloth from Ice Age, peach Nike sneakers, cuddling penguins, the Taj Mahal bathed in moonlight, Homer Simpson hoisting a “The End Is Near” sign, Syrian children in a field waving their national flag, a stark Arabic “I Hate You,” pouting selfies with flowing lustrous hair, pouting selfies with hijab, SnapChat selfies with mouse ears, a beach in the moonlight, “Whatever,” “Sometimes you have to forget what you want to remember what you deserve,” a fighter on a battlefield cradling a cat.

Towards the end of the Caliphate, many ISIS women were captured by the Kurdish Army and the Free Syrian Army and kept in camps. In those camps, the author got the chance to interview many women of unique backgrounds. Commander Salar was in charge of one such camp. I would like to end this long review with this paragraph from the book that kinda captures the aftermath of the so-called revolution…

Every morning, Commander Salar plays Arabic pop music for the ISIS children, featuring the throaty, luscious voices of Lebanese and Egyptian divas. The children cluster around the soldiers, their hair hopping with lice and matted to their scalps, shrieking offendedly, “Haram!” “You’re a kafir!” four-year-old Abu Bakr shouts at him. Commander Salar plays an ISIS nasheed next and the children relax. The Kurds play the pop music every morning. After about a week, some of the ISIS women stopped covering their faces and hands, and stopped wincing at having to speak to Commander Salar. “Their husbands told them we’d behead them. It took a little while for the shock of their reception here to wear off,” he says. Eventually the pop music becomes ordinary to the children. But they continue running around in the dirt playing their “Allahu akbar!” shootout games.