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THE DAWAH TENT AT THE head of their street went up quickly. Since the revolution the previous year, the local imams often set up preaching tents around the city, hoping to expose the good people of Sousse to the religious learning they had been denied during the Ben Ali years. The tent was filled with tables covered with pamphlets and Qurans, and stands that promoted various charity activities.
It wasn’t often, indeed exactly never, that a free event pitched up on their barren side street. Ghoufran asked Olfa if she could visit the tent, explaining that she was just curious to see what was going on. As her children had grown older, Olfa had started leaving them on their own; she had taken to locking the children in for the night when she left for her restaurant shift. Olfa said it was all right, and left the key with her thirteen-year-old daughter.
After evening prayer, when the heat receded with the scorching sun, Ghoufran approached the tent. A young man in a clipped beard and white thobe, the long robe worn by men in the Gulf, greeted her and summoned one of the women to look after her. This woman wore a full black abaya but her face, freckled and smiling, was uncovered.
The woman led her to a corner inside the tent where women were sitting in chairs arranged in a circle. Ghoufran took a seat and listened to the woman addressing the circle, talking about the straight path God has laid out for them, how by submitting to His will and dedicating themselves to living purely, they would be eligible for blessings not just in this life, which was fleeting, but in the forever of hereafter. God, the woman said, had infinite wisdom; though changing their lifestyle would be difficult, though they might alienate their families, if they trusted deeply what they would receive in return would be nothing less than the purest tranquility, the most settled of hearts.
This all sounded exquisite to Ghoufran. She had never heard Islam described in this fulsome, compelling way: as a salve to sorrows, an eternal puzzle for her curious mind, a tether she could reach for when she felt lost. These women talked of the justice Islam offered women. They described the attributes of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and how he revered women; how he chose for himself an independent, accomplished woman as his wife, and remained devoted to her until the day she died. After the talk, one woman pulled Ghoufran aside and handed her what she called shari’i clothes, a soft black abaya and a headscarf. Ghoufran was a teenager and often fretted over her clothes: their sameness or their fadedness or their lack of resemblance to what other girls wore. But in that moment, slipping into the abaya and headscarf, those anxieties were erased. Wearing the abaya felt like laying her head against someone’s chest.
When Ghoufran got home, Rahma looked up from the television and burst out laughing at her older sister. There was an Adele video playing on the television—Ghoufran loved Adele—but she took the remote and turned it off.
Of the two sisters, Ghoufran was the conventionally more beautiful. She was creamy-skinned, with full lips, soft almond eyes, and a narrow European nose. Rahma was small-boned and darker, her eyes walnut brown and set too far apart. They had both inherited Olfa’s undeniable charisma, a trait that subjected Olfa to some rude whispers in the neighborhood, because a woman like Olfa, who worked nights and whose eyes could laugh like that, she must be up to no good.
Ghoufran wore her abaya to breakfast the next morning. Olfa raised her eyebrows. “The girls handed it out yesterday,” Ghoufran said to her mother, “the ones who are going to teach me about Sharia.”
Olfa saw no reason to oppose this. She welcomed her daughters’ dressing more conservatively; perhaps if they looked more severe, as Ghoufran did that morning, if their beauty was toned down by the stark black abaya, the rapper and rocker types that they sometimes talked to would stay away.
“Ghoufran looks like a ghoul!” Rahma snorted.
“You shut up. Maybe you should try it out, instead of just mocking. It might be good for you,” Ghoufran said.
Though she tried, Ghoufran couldn’t persuade Rahma to come with her to the dawah tent. The prayer circle women had started coming to the house to visit and talk with Ghoufran, but Rahma only gave them sullen looks and disappeared into the bedroom to blare rock music at high volume.
A few days later it was a man, one of the sheikh’s assistants, who stopped Rahma in the street. “Why are you wearing those clothes?” he demanded, blocking Rahma’s way as she tried to step past him. With her father out of the picture, no man had ever concerned himself with Rahma’s dress, her well-being, the state of her soul, or even, frankly, her basic health. The rocker guys and the break-dancers mostly wanted to flirt with her. But this man, the sheikh’s assistant—in the half hour he spoke to her that day, his gaze never once strayed from the level of her head. Rahma never told anyone exactly what he said to her, but she came back into the house sobbing, full of loathing and fury at herself.
Such feelings were not unfamiliar. Growing up, she’d always felt she was bad, always doing something wrong. Her mother often shouted at Rahma for wearing the wrong things, or for socializing on the street after dark, even though they had no one to watch them in the evenings. Olfa didn’t like Rahma talking to young men, but Rahma earned their school-supply money by dancing in Fadi’s wedding band, and how were they supposed to be in Fadi’s wedding band without talking to Fadi?
* * *
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SALAFISM CHANGED THEM BOTH, LIKE a tint that brought out their temperaments in starker relief. Ghoufran became cheerier and more loving, tending to Olfa 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.
Olfa, at first, did not grasp the seriousness of what was transpiring with her daughters. The women from the mosque were now coming over every single day. Even the sheikh himself was coming. He would sit down on the faded couch and draw his thobe around him imperiously, and admonish Olfa: “The girls tell me you’ve instructed them to come straight home after prayer. Sister, I’ve explained to you, they need to attend classes as well; this is where their real learning takes place. I respectfully ask that you don’t stop them.”
As long as it was within reason, Olfa didn’t have any problem with her daughters’ becoming more religious. It was the “within reason” part that was hard to parse, because Olfa had completed only up to a secondary education, and her understanding of religion was extremely basic. Her interpretation of the Salafism her daughters had taken up was that, while stultifying and severe, it promoted chastity and good Islamic morals. For a single mother who worked most waking hours in order to avoid all-out destitution for her family of five, severity was a better problem to have than looseness.
A couple of weeks later, as Olfa was preparing for her evening shift at the restaurant, Rahma handed her a long cloak and told her she needed to start dressing properly. “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?”
As she walked to the restaurant, Olfa considered what to do about her daughters. Recently they had graduated into positions of minor local influence within Sousse’s bu
dding Salafi community. Because marriage was an essential part of a Muslim life—the Quran made it clear that marriage was intended to “give ease”—Ghoufran was tasked with matchmaking for those in their circle. It was her job to identify young men and women in the area who were inclined to marry and help make suitable connections. Sociable and romantic, keen to be beautiful and proper, the Jane Bennet of the family, this work fit Ghoufran very well indeed.
The tough and strong-willed Rahma had the role of advocate and mediator. She would turn up at schools or private homes and argue on behalf of girls in the movement who were clashing with their parents, or who were barred from school for wearing the niqab. Olfa couldn’t help but think this work suited Rahma well: Rahma could never keep her mouth shut, always rushing headlong into conflicts at school, if only as a way of easing her own pain.
Olfa’s working life was a one-woman case study in the challenges of the Sousse labor market: there was little work, and the little to be had was strenuous, ill-paid, and impermanent. That her girls received some modest payment for such labors—Ghoufran’s matchmaking, Rahma’s mediating—was almost as inconceivable as their being whisked away to a ball by a pumpkin coach. This was working-class Sousse: there were no coding classes or after-school chess clubs, no avenues for poor teenagers to improve themselves. To be invited to participate in local charity work, raising money for refugees fleeing the conflict in neighboring Libya, or soliciting donations for religious celebrations—in Sousse, this was the only thing that might pass for civic engagement. It was better to have something positive to do in the community, to gain some measure of social status and confidence, rather than sit at home watching Justin Bieber videos, as Rahma and Ghoufran might have been doing otherwise.
NOUR
September 2012, Le Kram, Tunis
In previous years, before the revolution, when she had dropped out of school and had nothing much to do with her time, Nour had found it easy to slumber through the summer weather with long afternoon naps. That seemed like a different life; now, she almost had too much to do—attending meetings of her women’s group at the mosque, going to charity events, keeping up with all the Facebook activity that drove much of the Salafi movement. Karim’s friend Walid was also busy, between his job and his own political meetings. It was just Karim himself who seemed out of sync with them, still dragging himself out looking for work, scrolling through his mobile phone contacts for the hundredth time, as though willing some helpful, connected imaginary friend into existence. She sometimes winced when she came home and found him on the sofa, in almost the same position she’d left him.
What unfolded next, on a warm Friday in September, would change all three of their prospects. At a mosque in central Tunis, Abu Iyadh, the leader of Ansar al-Sharia, gave an impassioned sermon denouncing an amateur YouTube video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. His supporters swarmed on the mosque terrace outside. There were buses idling on the street, waiting to drive the men across the city to the hulking compound of the U.S. embassy, in protest of the California man who had made the video.
Later that day, the protesters breached the embassy gates. They hung the black Salafi flag from the building and torched the nearby American school. Smoke rose from the buildings. “Obama, Obama, we are all Osamas!” they chanted at one point. A few looters came out of the embassy carrying computers under their arms. Police fought to keep the protesters back and the president sent the presidential guards, who killed two and injured nearly thirty protesters. The video, and the ensuing protests, had led to bloodshed across the region: four days prior, militants affiliated with Ansar al-Sharia in Libya had attacked a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, killing the ambassador and three other Americans.
Stoking anger at the United States was easy. At the end of 2010, WikiLeaks had released U.S. diplomatic cables that described the corruption of the “sclerotic” Ben Ali regime in granular detail. American diplomats acknowledged that the country was “troubled,” yet underscored Ben Ali’s importance as an “ally” in fighting terrorism. The American ambassador recounted a dinner invitation to the home of the president’s son-in-law. The mansion’s infinity pool was filled through a lion’s head, Roman columns lined the terrace, and frescoes adorned the ceiling; the son-in-law kept a pet tiger called Pasha, who consumed four chickens a day. Human food arrived on planes, from Paris. The Western-backed regime was so brazen that the son-in-law felt at ease telling a French newspaper, “I’ve got Ferraris, limousines, but nothing gives me a hard-on, not even my wife, like a boat. It’s like an uncut diamond.”
But while many Tunisians might have sympathized with the protesters’ resentment of the United States—the cables noted Tunisians’ deep anger at the U.S. invasion of Iraq—the public mood was not receptive to violent confrontation. Ennahda, the Islamist party elected after the revolution, sought to allay people’s fears; its leader Rachid Ghannouchi said that “with time, such extremism will vanish.” This view was born of his long years in Islamist movements, witnessing countless young hotheads mellow with time through long-term engagement with politics. Political scientists call this approach the “inclusion moderation hypothesis,” which holds that the more a society democratizes and allows radical groups to participate politically, the more such groups are inclined to soften their rhetoric and behavior. But despite Ghannouchi’s attempts at mollification, the media, Tunisian and Western alike, fed the public’s panicked reaction to this display of violence. (Tunisian media remained largely under the control of old-regime supporters, and Western reporters tended to speak to English- or French-speaking politicians and secular activists, rather than young women like Nour, when they wrote about the Salafist movement.)
Ennahda, at that moment, was bogged down in a dispute over Tunisia’s new constitution. The committee writing the constitution was deciding whether to criminalize blasphemy, which meant outlawing the defamation of God or Islam. This value was shared by many of the party’s supporters, but unacceptable to its secular coalition partners. Ennahda’s chief objective was to become a normal political party, acceptable to the international community and tolerated by its political rivals. Becoming politically “normalized” required Ennahda to distance itself from religious ideas and contentions, but the expectations of its constituency, and its very identity as an Islamist party, required religious engagement. In the end, facing ferocious pushback from secular parties and civil society groups, Ennahda abandoned most of its legislative aims; it dropped any reference to Sharia as a source of law; its leadership rejected a proposed law that would have forbidden former members of the ruling party under Ben Ali to run for parliament. It did not concede so much as relent entirely.
And in the eyes of the Ennahda party, this willingness to compromise seemed eminently sensible, given what was unfolding around them, both domestically and in the nearby region. In Egypt, in a coup that was backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, military officers had recently overthrown the democratically elected Islamist government of Mohammed Morsi; the army and security forces killed approximately a thousand protesters in a single day. The West largely yawned. The Arab Spring, for all its froth and glory, was already a receding memory; the regional Arab powers and their Western backers seemed most at home with authoritarian order, not democratic tumult.
But if slowness and caution made sense to Ennahda, to the young radicals of the Tunisian revolution, it was a betrayal. If a religious political movement existed to bring religious political and social values and identity into its politics, then Ennahda, in the eyes of more ardent Islamists, had ceased to be an Islamist actor. Frustrated young people who believed the revolution was already floundering said that all that was left of Ennahda’s Islamism was their headscarves and their beards.
The Revolution Loses Its Innocence
By early summer of 2012, the armed opposition has defeated the Assad government in several cities across Syria. The group known as the moderate rebels, the
Free Syrian Army, battles the Nusra Front for control of Raqqa. In March 2013, the city falls to the Syrian opposition.
In April, a disagreement cleaves the Islamist rebels. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claims that Nusra is an offshoot of ISI and declares both groups will be subsumed into one, which he calls, for the first time, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. A day and a half later, the leader of the Nusra Front rejects this: Nusra is its own brand, he insists, focused on the fighting in Syria and loyal to al-Qaeda central.
There are sincere disagreements between them over tactics and degree of hostility to non-Sunnis, but no one knows whether the split is genuinely ideological or intra-jihadi politicking. The world struggles to understand how these rivalries and divisions should shape its response to Syria’s war.
In August, a sarin gas attack on Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, kills 1,500 civilians, including more than 400 children. Videos flood the internet of foaming and twitching bodies, sprawled in basements and on hospital floors. A United Nations investigation establishes the use of sarin, but has not received a Security Council mandate to assign blame to any party. Obama does not launch immediate strikes, but turns to the U.S. Congress. By October, Assad admits to possessing chemical weapons and agrees to dismantle his armory.
The American aid worker Kayla Mueller travels to Aleppo to accompany her boyfriend on a mission for Doctors Without Borders, and is abducted.
In December, the U.S. State Department launches “Think Again, Turn Away” across social media platforms popular with ISIS followers, in an attempt to challenge the group’s appeal with “counternarratives.” The account bumbles into numerous unwinnable exchanges with online jihadists about U.S. military abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It accidentally trolls prominent religious figures who oppose ISIS. It is shut down after a few short months, its online archive wiped from the public record.
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