Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

Azadeh Moaveni

Random House Publishing Group, Sep 10, 2019 - Social Science - 352 pages

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.

Contents

• INHERITANCE OF THORNS: 13
• Summer 2009 Raqqa Syria: 20
• 2007 Frankfurt Germany: 34
• January 2011 Le Kram Tunis: 43
• January 2011 Raqqa Syria: 57
• June 2012 Sousse Tunisia: 64
• Early 2014 Frankfurt Germany: 76
• Summer 2014 Frankfurt Germany: 83
• October 2013 Walthamstow Northeast London: 89
• GONE GIRLS: 103
• OVER AND: 121
• Fall 2012 Le Kram Tunis: 128
• Summer 2014 Sousse Tunisia: 143
• SHARMEENA KADIZA AMIRA AND SHAMIMA: 149
• April 2015 Walthamstow Northeast London: 157
• ASMA AWS AND: 165
• Spring 2014 Raqqa Syria: 185
• Autumn 2014 Tal Afar Iraq: 191
• SHARMEENA KADIZA AMIRA AND SHAMIMA: 203
• September 2014 Zawiya Libya: 216
• August 2014 Le Kram Tunis: 222
• May 2015 Tunis: 231
• ASMA AWS AND: 239
• LINA: 245
• Spring 2015 Manbij Syria: 249
• SHARMEENA KADIZA AMIRA AND SHAMIMA: 257
• August 2015 East London: 264
• January 2017 a Village in Northern Syria: 281
• Spring 2016 Le Kram Tunis: 287
• NOTE TO READERS: 333

About the author

Azadeh Moaveni is a journalist, writer, and academic who has been covering the Middle East for nearly two decades. She started reporting in Cairo in 1999 while on a Fulbright fellowship to the American University in Cairo. For the next several years she reported from throughout the region as Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, based in Tehran, and covered Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iraq. She is the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and co-author, with Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening. In November 2015, she published a front-page piece in The New York Times on ISIS women defectors that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist as part of the Times’s ISIS coverage. Her writing appears in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The London Review of Books. She teaches journalism at NYU in London, is a fellow at the New America foundation, and is now senior gender analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS
• Author: Azadeh Moaveni
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2019
• ISBN: 0399179755, 9780399179754
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / Political Ideologies / Radicalism; Political Science / World / Middle Eastern; Social Science / Women's Studies