Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  In the 1980s, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States funded the Arab mujaheddin who traveled to fight the Soviet occupiers. Those jihadists were also very much favored sons of the Saudi state, but they turned against the Saudi ruling family after the first Gulf War of 1991, when American military bases cropped up across the Saudi Kingdom. To the disquiet of many Saudis, Osama bin Laden among them, these military bases never went away. The virulent opposition to this American presence in the Gulf peninsula eventually coalesced into al-Qaeda, a group that described its growing political militancy as a jihad.

  Throughout the 1990s, the al-Qaeda project of Salafi jihad remained marginal and underground across most of the Middle East; it gained traction in the mid-2000s, after the 9/11 attacks provoked American invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The broader War on Terror was like truth kindling to the al-Qaeda remnants who claimed the United States was at war with Islam: a years-long campaign operating across large swaths of the world, involving torture, black sites, and many civilian deaths, in the name of fighting terrorism. Those resisting the U.S. occupation in Iraq looked for religious ideas and symbolism to galvanize support for their insurgency; those within the Sunni community found ready material in the al-Qaeda vision, while Shia Iraqis formed their own sect-based militias to fight the Americans. The aimless insurgent veterans of the Afghan war had been searching for the next front, the ideal just war. The Iraqi insurgency offered them exactly that. It drew fighters from far and wide, from Jordan and Syria, from Saudi and Tunisia.

  Before the Arab Spring of 2011, the Salafis had little influence or public presence in North Africa. In Tunisia, religious political activism mostly coalesced around Ennahda, a party that was Islamist in identity and outlook but pragmatic and willing to work within the electoral process.

  While the Ennahda represented the interests of a socially conservative middle class during the years of President Ben Ali’s reign, the Salafis appealed to a younger generation of lower- and middle-class Tunisians, especially in urban areas. Their followers tended to be socially marginalized (though often university-educated), and drawn to an ideology that felt appropriately radical and antiestablishment in the time of the Arab Spring.

  But within the Salafi movement, there was division and disagreement. Two main strains competed: one that saw itself as a local social project with revolutionary aims, seeking to prepare society for a gradual move toward religious governance by teaching and activism; and a second strain, with an apocalyptic worldview more receptive to transnational jihadism and absolutism. This second strain recognized only themselves as true Muslims, and labeled everyone else (even other Muslims) as kuffar, or unbelievers. It tended to draw older-generation Salafis who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Iraq following the U.S. invasion.

  This first and more moderate group stepped into the space that opened after the revolution, eager to participate in civic life through charity work and religious teaching, and to be recognized as a normal civic actor. While this group believed, as a matter of core principle, that Muslims should be ruled by Sharia law, they did not advocate imposing this through violent means, nor were they necessarily jihadists. But to liberal Tunisians—the teachers who were skeptical of Nour wearing her niqab or even a hijab, those who wanted public and government spaces to be staunchly secular—the two strains of the Salafi movement were indistinguishable. The stereotype of the second strain—bogeymen with long beards, body odor, and tasteless Afghan-style tunics who wanted to drape the capital in black flags and ban yoga—was the predominant one. To liberal Westernized Tunisians, the appeal of Salafism after the revolution seemed bewildering and disturbing, carrying with it a threat of socially conservative, majoritarian rule.

  But in Kram itself, many regarded Salafis as neighborhood guys, not shadowy, Saudi-funded “foreign” figures. Communists like Jamal viewed the Salafis’ local efforts with skepticism, but not alarm. “Once the neighborhood policed itself, things really improved,” he said.

  Jamal, despite being fond of Charles Bukowski, believed Tunisian society had an “over-masculinity” problem that applied to everyone, not just Salafis, an amplified machismo that resulted from being kept permanently under the state’s boot. The neighborhood thugs who embraced Salafism often imported their brutish behavior with them and assigned it a moral compass: harassing girls who wore short skirts, roughing up stores that sold alcohol, even if they themselves had until recently been drinkers. In the aftermath of the uprising that unseated the Ben Ali regime, Salafism gave these men an outlet to vent long-standing social and political frustrations. Childhood angst, urban thug life, acute marginalization, and political and class grievances all fused together in a new Salafi identity.

  “When the local guys see a policeman beat up an old woman for wearing hijab, they develop a complex against Ben Ali,” Jamal explained. “But also a complex against the West, which supports him. They want to take revenge, and that means against the West. Every Ben Ali policeman has created four Salafis.”

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  IN THE SUMMER OF 2011, Nour could walk through Kram at dusk feeling more secure, without scanning for policemen who might hassle her for wearing her niqab, or some amped-up junkie who might suddenly lunge for her ankles. Her neighborhood was safer than it had been before the revolution.

  In the wake of the Arab Spring, neighborhoods across Tunisia formed local brigades that came to be called Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution. At first, these brigades protected residents from looting and vandalism after the collapse of the police force. Later, they grew into hubs of political activity, where organizers strategized on the local level, to ensure that old regime figures—from mafia bosses to local officials—did not creep back into political influence post-revolution. That, at least, was the original vision. With time, the Leagues began to function as political enforcers for the factions that found themselves facing off post-2011.

  In Kram, the local version of this league was called the Revolutionary Men of Kram, and it included activists of varying backgrounds. Emad, an activist in his fifties who looked more like a French academic, dressed as he was in white jeans, a black leather jacket, and aviator Ray-Bans, described it this way: “When the regime fell, it didn’t mean that we were just going to cling to the mosque. We had a lot to do. Everyone in Kram was on the same page. Everyone wanted to work on employment, dignity, and to make the youth feel like they had some stake in the state.”

  Nour was ready for this, to start expanding her horizons, to find a place for herself in this new Tunisia. One evening in that summer of 2011, she went to visit with the imam’s wife. Their house was small and spare: a living room with a foam sofa, a chipped lacquer coffee table, and a plate embossed with Allah in calligraphy hanging on the wall.

  Nour sat at the kitchen table as the imam’s wife prepared dinner and their toddler eyed the electrical socket in the corner. “I’ve been talking about you,” the older woman said. A Tunisian man who had been living in France had recently come back home, and asked the imam to find him a wife. “I said I knew just the girl for him,” the imam’s wife said. “A good girl, very religious, devoted, she would make a perfect wife.”

  Nour was young and had plenty of time to marry, but given that she hadn’t finished high school and lacked any skills or the liberal dressing habits that might allow her to find work in a shop, marriage was a promising prospect. She could get out of her parents’ house. She could finally assume an identity beyond failed student and perpetual daughter. She asked the imam’s wife to tell her more about this man.

  Karim came to Nour’s house the next day. He was thirty-three, fifteen years older than Nour, but he was attractive, with black hair and steady coffee-bean eyes. There was kindness in the way he stooped down to speak to her younger brother and sister, pulling a bouncy ball out of his pockets for each of them. She and Karim sat with her parents in the l
iving room, drinking tea as they all searched for things to talk about: he told them about his parents back in Ben Gardane, a town near the Libyan border, and the challenges of living in France, where he had worked for some years as a waiter, trying to save up enough money to do something better than that.

  Karim had dreamed of going to France his whole life, but upon arrival, he said he had felt smaller and more fenced in than he ever had in Tunisia. Floating from restaurant to restaurant, often washing dishes, not even waiting on tables, he started to despair. It was hard to get by, let alone save money. During his time in France, he started becoming more religious, which made work tricky, because he no longer wished to work in restaurants that served alcohol. This, in Paris, left him with poor options: greasy shawarma joints or a possible new career in what he called “commerce.”

  Nour didn’t know exactly what “commerce” meant, but by day six (Karim was now coming to the house every day), she accepted it as honorable and correct that Karim had left France—a country that had never wanted the best for Tunisia or its citizens anyway—and returned home, where he could start over. She grew accustomed to seeing him in the living room with her family, to the sound of his voice, to a male presence that radiated warmth and made her feel, simply because he was there for her, more mature. On the seventh day, she accepted his proposal. Karim said he needed to go back to France to wrap up his affairs. Upon his return three months later, they married.

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  THAT FALL, THE YEAR AFTER the revolution, they still had hope. Nour and Karim slept on a roll-out mattress in a room at her parents’ house, which they shared with her two younger siblings. This was scarcely ideal. Her little brother mewed in the night and they often awoke to both children peering down at them with cartoon-wide eyes, willing them to get up and play. But it was better than the alternative: living with his parents.

  Nour hung her hijab and clothes on the same rusty nail she had used since that fateful day at high school in 2007. Karim was looking for work, any kind of work at all, so they could move out and get their own place, but ultimately he aimed for a proper job. Something that would enable him to have two children and feed and educate them well, so that someday their children could live on the other side of the wall of inequality that he, Nour, and everyone they knew had been scrambling against from childhood.

  Some days Karim was out until evening, meeting contacts in street cafés, tracing friends’ networks for someone who might be able to get him a government job. In Tunisia, a state sector job was a golden ticket: a steady salary for life, a measure of social status. Nour learned to gauge from Karim’s expression and the cast of his shoulders whether she should ask how the day went. Some days she let herself imagine that it was good news: that he had found something, that he would be starting the next week, that he would tell her to start searching for a flat, and everything would change.

  It hardly seemed too much to expect from the new Tunisia. The revolution spread to other parts of the Arab world—first to Egypt, then later to Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain—but in all of these countries, upheaval only led to more intense repression, civil war, or outright collapse. Tunisia was the sole country to emerge steady enough to hold elections and withstand their result.

  In late 2011, in the first free elections in Tunisia’s history, the Islamist party Ennahda swept by a wide margin. The party’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, back from decades of exile in London, promised that “Tunisia was for everyone.” Ennahda members who had suffered torture under the previous regime now served in the government alongside politicians from the old regime who had overseen those abuses. The fruit-seller martyr Bouazizi got his own postage stamp.

  Nour was energized. There were things to do. The mosques in Kram bustled with activity, and religiously tinged social activism was gaining ground both locally and nationally. In the past, even charity work was dangerous; the state viewed it as gateway behavior that led to Ennahda or Islamist sympathies. But now the atmosphere was open and freewheeling. It was acceptable to exude an aura of Muslimness. Popular personalities like Rikoba, a singer who led the crowd during soccer matches, grew a beard and meshed his revolutionary anthems with Islamic nasheeds, or devotional songs. He posted clips on YouTube, standing beside a young man with a black Salafist bandanna, saying to a journalist, “Why don’t you speak to my friend here, this young Salafist? He’s a good guy!”

  In Kram, the women’s group that Nour attended affixed themselves to Ansar al-Sharia, the post-revolution Salafi group launched by Abu Iyadh, the most senior religious militant who had been imprisoned by the Ben Ali government and released after the revolution. Ansar al-Sharia grew by about 1,000 percent between April 2011, the year it held its first annual conference, and April 2012, when the same event drew almost ten thousand young Tunisians. It was early days in the political market of the new Tunisia, and everyone, from Ennahda to Ansar al-Sharia, wanted to draw on the widest possible constituency. Ansar al-Sharia operated skillfully in the new climate, with a robust Facebook presence; in a two-month span, the group held sixty-five events in about thirty locations across the country. A young Tunisian graduate student who wrote his thesis on Ansar al-Sharia described it as “charity work on an industrial scale.” The founder of the group said, “We want to reach the hearts of people, not hurt them,” although he did little to intervene when Salafis went too far and harassed people for drinking alcohol or dressing immodestly.

  From the outside, the group’s appeal to young women like Nour was bewildering. Salafi attitudes toward women were extremely strict: no free mixing of genders; full Islamic dress, often including the niqab. Somehow the group managed, within these strictures, to create a sense of solidarity across genders. While, for women, the secular space within liberal Tunisian society was emancipated but archetypically Western and objectified, Ansar al-Sharia encouraged women to study, work, and function in society, albeit on the other side of a cloak of separateness. The Tunisian graduate student described women in Ansar al-Sharia as feeling not constrained but empowered; the group was very respectful of the women within its own boundaries. It made no pretense of espousing Western-style feminist equality, but it advocated women’s access to education, and participation in civic life through charitable and religious activities. This was, to a young woman like Nour, the more resonant message.

  Women conducted their own dawah circles, where they invited new members to study and understand Islam, and were active in running Ansar al-Sharia’s social media accounts. The conversations and buzz of activity, though religious in nature, often focused on practical concerns, such as how to build a halal tourism industry in Tunisia. It was one of the fastest-growing types of tourism in the world, as demand surged for resorts that did not serve alcohol, offered private or separate swimming areas for women and families, and encouraged modest dress. Many young Salafis thought it would be ideal for Tunisia, which—with its long Mediterranean coastline of sandy beaches, palm-tree-lined ancient ruins, and whitewashed desert towns—relied heavily on tourism for national income.

  The more cautious young Salafis tried to fuse Ansar al-Sharia’s magnetic, antiestablishment energy to a more considered approach that emphasized working practically within the system. Karim’s friend Walid was of this persuasion. Nour admired Walid; it was hard not to. He came from a middle-class family from Ben Gardane; his father was a successful landowner and Walid was well educated, a graduate in economics with family connections that had enabled him to find a government job. He wore polo shirts in bright colors and white sneakers. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he looked equally capable of playing tennis and beating the shit out of someone. Walid was objectively handsome, but what Nour found especially attractive about him was that he was a “good family” militant, an Islamist out of pure belief, not because he was born destitute in some urban slum.

  Walid had an intellectual’s grasp of the origins of Salafi jihadism. H
e could parse its theoretical and political evolution from the earliest writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian militant-ideologue who advocated radical resistance to the nationalist authoritarianism of Nasser, through to Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian jihadist theologian and co-founder of al-Qaeda, who insisted that defensive jihad placed strict safeguards around civilian casualties. Walid had listened to their arguments as a teenager on cassette tapes and videos, impressed by their plans to bring justice to society. Crony capitalism, he grew to believe—the kind practiced by Ben Ali and supported by the West, especially France—not only failed to bring Tunisians jobs and dignity, but it also robbed them of spiritual comfort. As long as powerful forces in the West imposed such secular autocrats on Tunisia, the people stood no genuine chance of overthrowing their oppressors, he thought. Because it was, in the end, hard to overthrow a regime that was bolstered—through direct aid, military help, intelligence sharing, and training—by wealthy Western nations. This postcolonial distrust of Western interference also happened to be part of al-Qaeda’s strategic vision. Though Walid faulted bin Laden for many things, he agreed that bringing about change in autocratic Muslim countries required weakening the will of Western nations to back them.

  Fighting the Americans in Iraq, to Walid, was clearly just, an anti-imperial war. But in Tunisia, he saw no need for any violence. After years of secular indoctrination, it would take time and patience to persuade Tunisians to give the Islamist vision a fair hearing, to see it as a possible way of ensuring independence, social justice, and the core demands of the revolution.

  Walid sometimes teased Nour, who listened gamely to his discussions with Karim but tended to filter the ideas through posts she read on Facebook, distilled to an easily absorbable level. Like many young people in Tunis, she spent hours on social media. She flicked through the video of a song by the rapper Weld El 15, “Boulicia Kleb” (“Cops Are Dogs”). If there was any one sentiment the youth of Tunisia shared in 2012, it was probably this song. She read a post from two local doctors, both women, who said they were working longer hours so they could donate a third of their salary each month to the Ansar al-Sharia movement.