Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  In the words of one scholar, Awlaki’s “radicalization is consistent with the historical pattern of activists adopting a belief in terrorism when political action fails to bring about change.” It also fit the pattern of Islamist or Muslim activists emerging from prison, where they endured intensive torture, with a radically altered position on the use of violence against civilians.

  This is not to say that torture mechanically reshapes all individuals to make them capable of greater cruelty. But scholars of psychopathology, like the great Simon Baron-Cohen, have found strong links that show enduring trauma can cause a person to lose empathy. To lose empathy is to view other human beings as objects, which is necessary to the infliction of cruelty and violence upon them. Baron-Cohen’s research shows that torturing a person, rendering him an object, a vessel out of which intelligence can be extracted, radically dulls that person’s ability to focus on another person’s interests at the same time as his own.

  The thousands of Muslims who had watched him online did not know what befell Sheikh Anwar in a Yemeni prison cell. They did not know that he was detained on the demand of the United States, and they did not see what he endured. All they saw was that this adored, admired imam had shifted his views from religious tolerance and coexistence, to an ambivalence around violence deployed in self-defense, to armed militancy targeting American civilians. He pulled many young people along because he already had them on board. After his time in prison, Awlaki went on to inspire so many high-profile terror attacks that President Obama felt justified in authorizing his killing by drone strike, the first assassination of a U.S. citizen without trial since the Civil War. Even now, “the Awlaki problem” is shorthand for the challenge presented by his legacy as a thinker, a militant, and a martyr. Tech companies eventually worked with governments to scrub his presence from the internet, but his lingering appeal to a new generation of Muslims raised a troubling question no one really wished to grapple with: was Anwar al-Awlaki the source of militancy, or were his voice and biography, so complex and deeply human, just an articulation of its causes?

  Dunya understood the compelling logic of Sheikh Anwar. It was hard not to see his point of view, which he had arrived at—he said it himself—reluctantly. She was also capable of understanding how it could simultaneously be true that Anwar al-Awlaki was right about everything and yet, that it was a terrible decision to go to Syria and join the Islamic State.

  Dunya could reconcile these seemingly conflicting positions, but Selim could not. She did not so much believe that Selim had been brainwashed, but that he was one of those people who has to believe in only one truth. At the same time, he was her husband, she adored him, and she did not for one second think that they could ever be apart. And there were other ways in which she sold the idea to herself: as the adventure of a dutiful wife acceding to her husband’s wishes; a journey to a place she had never been—Syria, so near Beirut, the stomping ground of the Arabic pop stars she admired; a gun-slinging foray to fight against a dictator who was undeniably murdering his own people.

  She told her family they were going to live for a while in Turkey. She packed quickly, throwing things into a single suitcase: clothes, toiletries, makeup, the essential things she couldn’t go anywhere without, like extra-long-lash mascara and a mild facial soap. She bought extra batteries and some flashlights before they flew to Istanbul. She had no idea if they would be useful, but it seemed like they might be.

  SABIRA

  October 2013, Walthamstow, Northeast London

  The whole family had gathered at their grandmother’s house for lunch on Saturdays since forever, since childhood. The place filled with the odors of cooking and the shouts of children playing and the sorts of discussions sisters and mothers had in kitchens: ailments, negligent husbands, broodings about the acquisitions and goings-on of more distant branches of the family.

  Sabira had known for two weeks now that her brother Soheil was planning to go to Syria, and the knowledge had made her panicked and watchful. She had found out from her mother, in whom Soheil had confided. Her poor mum hadn’t known what to do. She felt a glimmer of pride that her son wanted to go, but she would have preferred to leave it at that: a noble impulse that he then got talked out of by his father, ideally, though his father wasn’t around. In the end she told her daughter Sabira, in the bathroom one night as they were brushing their teeth, because she was upset and had to tell someone.

  When you were a single mother and had ceded authority to your too-young son, simply because he was a man-to-be, it was almost impossible to claim it back. Ever since her husband had left, she had allowed Soheil to take care of so many household things. His resulting sense of dominance, of knowing well enough for himself, meant that his mum couldn’t change his mind anymore. But what did Soheil, barely eighteen, actually know of life?

  To his younger sister Sabira, he tried to play the role of their absent father, which was a confused role in the best of circumstances: the conservative Pakistani British father encouraging his daughter to go out into society, while also overseeing her morals and proper behavior (Go to university! Study hard! Don’t talk to boys!). Grown men tended to navigate this role poorly, let alone a teenage boy. Soheil did his best to become the man of the house. He took the meter readings for the gas bills, he built the ready-to-assemble furniture, he took his mother to the doctor. He told Sabira to wear the niqab. He studied hard and put his total faith in Allah.

  Sabira was fifteen, accustomed to doing as he said in exchange for her older brother’s friendship and loyal protection. When he decided he was going to Syria, explaining that it was his religious duty as a Muslim, that it would be an honor to dedicate his life to the defense of innocents being killed, she raised her objections with him only once.

  “Are you sure?” she’d asked. “How will we see you again?”

  He smiled at her fondly, as if to say I love you. But aloud he said, “I’m never coming back.”

  He was implacable. Like the story was already written in his head.

  Sabira didn’t make any dire pronouncements or try to change his mind. Instead she started rubbing lotion onto her hands obsessively, a mild alternative to nail-biting. There was no obvious reason to think that this Saturday, the day for cooking and family and gathering, was different from any other. Soheil hadn’t done any extra laundry; she hadn’t caught him packing a bag. But they were close enough that she could read his moods. That Saturday, he looked at everything a split second too long. She took extra pictures of him during and after the family lunch, as they played hide-and-seek with the cousins. When he finally said to her, “I’m going to go now,” it felt like some kind of joke, an unreal scene that they would laugh at later. He hugged her and then hugged their mum, glanced around the living room that had been the backdrop to their whole childhood, and turned to walk out the door.

  It was early winter, the time of year when it was already dark at four-thirty. The street lamps made the PVC window frames glow starkly white against the brick houses, and the wind blew tufts of brown leaves around the pavement. Sabira pulled a sweater on and sat on the steps, watching her brother leave. She kept her eyes open, refusing to blink, until he was all the way down the street, a small dark figure in the distance, turning the corner.

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD ALL STARTED WITH a leaflet. Soheil Rasheed (age seventeen, a normal Pakistani kid from North London, fond of trampolining, cycling, boxing, Shaolin kung fu, going to the gym, action movies, and smoking shisha with his little sister Sabira; by multiple accounts one of the nicest young men in the neighborhood; bright and openhearted, polite to elders, perennially attractive to girls) was one day walking down the high street of his neighborhood when he noticed some brothers running a dawah preaching stall and stopped to pick up a leaflet. His older cousin Nadim, who was with him, picked one up too.

  For Soheil it was the end of Year 11, a turning
point at the end of secondary school. He looked forward to starting professional training, in mechanical engineering. In recent years, London had poured money into its urban schools, raising standards and results dramatically. This sapped funding for schools across the rest of Britain, but turned many secondary schools in working-class districts of London into high-achieving, competitive institutions. Though their neighborhood was soaked in drugs and stabbings, and the obvious path out of poverty for most young people seemed to involve drug dealing or petty fraud, Soheil and Sabira received the kind of education that gave them skills and aspirations. They had a sharp sense of the opportunities and rights they were entitled to as British citizens, as citizens of Europe and the world; certainly a sharper sense than their parents had ever had. Soheil graduated with a high-level vocational diploma that positioned him to go on to a promising apprenticeship or university, if he wished it. Both branches of the family ran successful businesses that he might have joined. “We weren’t from some family of no hope,” Sabira said. “We had a lot to give back.”

  The brothers who offered Soheil the leaflet were from a local cell of al-Muhajiroun, a small extremist group of disruptive loudmouths. They invited him to attend a talk that evening, they took his mobile number, and from that day on, they encircled him. They had events going several nights a week: talks, brothers’ soccer, dawah stalls, demonstrations, meetings. Soheil was suddenly with these men all the time. When he was at home, he listened to talks on the internet and watched videos of Syria, which made him fiery and intense. He often asked Sabira to sit and watch as well, which bothered her at first, but Soheil was Sabira’s older brother, and she wasn’t about to tell him what to do. And, actually, the videos made her feel the same way. It was impossible to watch them and not feel any response—not to feel outraged, and moved to action. When Soheil suggested she start attending the al-Muhajiroun sisters’ circles, she agreed.

  Their neighborhood of Walthamstow had the highest density of Muslim residents of any area of Britain. The borough was home to between sixty-five thousand and seventy-five thousand Muslims and about fifteen mosques. The main thoroughfares of Walthamstow were lined with halal restaurants, barbershops with names like Lahore or Kashmir Hairdressers, travel agents specializing in the hajj pilgrimage tours, and dessert cafés, a social mainstay of young Muslims. There was an Islamic bookshop that carried stern-minded, English-language books, many printed in Saudi Arabia. The largest local mosque, on Lea Bridge Road, was where most of the city council’s decisions were actually made. The councillors handed down political influence among families, their networks of patronage transferred seamlessly from rural Pakistani villages to this dense London neighborhood.

  This mosque shared a building with a community center and gym run by a community youth organization called the Active Change Foundation. For many years, the foundation had received government funding to counter the appeal of radicalism in the area; it offered young people a place to hang out, with gaming consoles and pool tables, but like many such groups, it also worked closely with the police and security services. The group’s primary aim, many local residents came to believe, was surveilling the community. The foundation’s youth workers and the al-Muhajiroun guys knew and mutually despised each other. They argued with one another after local talks and religious events, they challenged each other’s religious learning (or even their basic right to self-identify as Muslims), and they sometimes battled over the lives and souls of young men from the neighborhood.

  Soheil was one such battle. Muhajiroun followers were actively working to recruit him, though if you were to ask them, they didn’t view their efforts as recruitment per se. They sincerely believed in their political cause and were just trying to educate him, to awaken him as to how extreme the War on Terror had become in its targeting of Muslims.

  In the spring of 2013, Soheil watched ISIS propaganda videos that told him Muslims could not live in peace in the West, in the Land of Disbelief; that they were fundamentally unwelcome, that they should hasten to join the group as it strove to create a caliphate where Muslims could live under Islamic laws, as they were meant to. This tactic was acknowledged openly by groups like al-Muhajiroun and ISIS. They spoke of targeting the “gray zone,” the space in which Muslims coexisted peacefully in Western societies. The erosion of the gray zone was the primary way ISIS sought to draw recruits to Syria from the West. With time, it would also become a tactic of conservative British politicians seeking to win votes and popularity by inflaming public sentiment against Muslims.

  In this effort, both ISIS and right-wing politicians had a devoted partner—much of the British media was equally eager to show that Muslims were an awkward fit in Europe, that they were a threat to the existing social order and could only hope to assimilate by renouncing their religion altogether. Newspapers published a steady stream of coverage that encouraged people to think that the Muslims they lived among were a fifth column, lurking extremists with terrorist sympathies plotting to impose “Sharia law” and sneak halal food into the supermarkets. Studies showed that the message got across: 31 percent of young people in the UK believed that Muslims were taking over the country; 56 percent believed that Islam, as a religion, posed a threat to Western liberal democracy.

  About a ten-minute walk down the high street stood another gym, with separate men’s and women’s workout spaces, run by two brothers who gained notoriety when they, along with their families, were barred from boarding a flight to Los Angeles for a Disneyland holiday. The Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most popular tabloids, ran a photo of the family home in Walthamstow with a column that read, “Just because Britain’s border security is a Mickey Mouse operation, you can’t blame America for not letting this lot travel to Disneyland—I wouldn’t either.” The Mail alleged that the family were extremists, based on a link to a Facebook account that ended up being unrelated to them. The newspaper later apologized and paid the family compensation, but this hardly undid the social harm or discouraged such reckless reporting in the future. It had become commonplace for both tabloids and mainstream newspapers to publish false stories about Muslims with impunity; the coverage sold well and the country’s liberal and conservative commentators reliably echoed the message.

  Academic research showed and warned that mainstream media coverage of Muslims was fueling hate crimes and creating a climate of extreme hostility. Why did the newspapers carry on with such relish? Some argued that the media’s dehumanization of Muslims wasn’t just a reflection of the bias of media proprietors, but also vital to foreign and security policy in an increasingly diverse Britain. A leaked report by the Ministry of Defence in 2014 acknowledged that the government would find it more difficult to conduct military interventions in countries where UK citizens or their families originated. It was a rare acknowledgment of how complicated it was becoming for Britain to pursue strategic policies—support for the U.S. War on Terror and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, the ongoing troop presence in Afghanistan, lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and complicity in the Saudi war in Yemen that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths—that British Muslims opposed. The media, this argument held, was structurally essential to British foreign policy: the public needed to believe that Islam was the greatest social and security threat to modern Britain. If Muslims were dehumanized, it was easier to repress and silence their political objections to such policies, easier to justify the human toll of the invasions and campaigns waged globally in the name of fighting extremism.

  The belief couldn’t just exist on an abstract level. It needed to become a part of people’s daily lives, persuading them that the Muslims down the street were traveling to Disneyland with nefarious aims. Tabloids routinely found ways to portray Islam as a religion of sexual violence, spotlighting marginal characters from across the world—figures that virtually no British Muslim had ever heard of—and running screaming headlines like “Islamic Scholar ‘Says Allah Allows Muslim Men to RAPE
Non-Muslim Women to Humiliate Them.’ ” Or “Egyptian Lawyer Says Raping Women Who Wear Ripped Jeans Is a Man’s ‘National Duty.’ ”

  The British press ranked last in all of Europe in a 2017 poll by the European Broadcasting Union that measured how truthful citizens perceived their media to be. In domestic polling, the right-wing tabloids regularly came last in rankings of trustworthiness. But people kept on buying the papers nonetheless.

  * * *

  —

  SABIRA REMEMBERED A BRILLIANT BOY she had gone to school with. Faisal was ahead of the class by bounds, the top in every subject, attracting the attention of the teachers, who noticed his exceptional intelligence. But his parents ran a restaurant and they pulled Faisal out of school at age sixteen, to wait tables. He would have been a straight shot through university exams to Oxford or Cambridge, but instead he would spend his life running a restaurant. First-generation Pakistani parents were well attuned to the struggles of making a decent living in a changing, unequal economy that had an oversupply of unskilled labor; they often coped, like Faisal’s parents, by prodding their kids as quickly as possible into wage-earning of some kind, rather than enduring longer, costlier stretches of higher education.

  This approach was driven by hard work and a real aspiration for prosperity, but often ended up leading Asian Muslim kids down fitful, scheme-pocked paths that secured little real opportunity. A BBC television documentary in 2018 queried why Asian Muslims seemed to fare so poorly compared to Asians of other religious backgrounds, like Punjabi Sikhs or Hindu Gujaratis. Why was it that these other Asian kids performed better at university exams and slid into early home ownership? Was it possible, the BBC presenter even suggested, that Hindus and Sikhs were receptive to drinking beer at the pub, and this openness to social drinking helped them assimilate and access opportunity better? Was it possible, in effect, that what was holding British Muslims back was their Muslimness? These conversations tended to glide over the way racism in the United Kingdom had matured, shifting from crude prejudice against anyone brown as a generic “Paki,” to a more targeted discrimination against Muslim people of color.