GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS

Among the Women of ISIS

By Azadeh Moaveni

Azadeh Moaveni has written a powerful, indispensable book on a challenging subject: the inner lives and motivations of women who joined or supported the Islamic State militant group. It is a great read, digestible and almost novelistic, but it is much more than that. “Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS” tackles many taboos that have hampered cleareyed discussion of Islamist extremism in general and ISIS in particular. The book provides an illuminating, much-needed corrective to stock narratives, not only about the group that deliberately and deftly terrified officials and publics across the world, but also about the larger “war on terror” and the often ineffective, even counterproductive policies of Western and Middle Eastern governments.

Moaveni follows 13 women and girls — Tunisian, British, Syrian and German — creating three-dimensional portraits of their worlds, their logic, the choices available and unavailable to them. She made me hang on every turn to find out what would happen to them. This approach will likely infuriate some audiences, especially after years of media coverage that portrayed such women as uniquely evil, bloodthirsty extremists, or as brainwashed fetishists hot for jihadi men.

Moaveni anticipates such objections, acknowledging “the extraordinary horror and centrality” of the suffering of women victimized by Islamic State, like the Yazidis whose enslavement and rape have received enormous, sometimes prurient, coverage. “But along the way,” she writes, “we have been perhaps too caught up in revulsion to fully appreciate the conditions that gave rise to the group’s female adherents.” To truly understand these conditions, Moaveni argues, we must look at these women “with more nuance and compassion.”

Her call is urgent now, as hundreds of female ISIS members, or former members, and their children languish in camps and detention centers across the Middle East, subject to summary trials, the stripping of citizenship and indefinite incarceration in dangerously filthy conditions. Governments, including the United States and the United Kingdom, are dumping the problem of their own citizens who joined ISIS on ill-equipped authorities in Iraq and Syria.