Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Walthamstow embodied all these challenges. It was an ordinary, slightly grimy northeast London village-suburb, but it was a microcosm of everything that British authorities faced in dealing with the threat of radicalism. More than one violent plot had been hatched by men who lived in the rows of terraced houses and attended the local mosques, including the 2006 plot to bring down an airliner with liquid explosives.

  Walthamstow was the launching ground for al-Muhajiroun, and contained its densest network of cells. The group was led by a man called Anjem Choudary. He had no religious credentials or scholarly standing, but relished saying incendiary things that reliably put him on television or in the newspaper. He craved and thrived on attention. His media prominence grew in seemingly inverse proportion to his standing among British Muslims; the more they viewed him as destructive, self-promoting, and divisive, the more frequently he appeared on television. Even while mainstream and respected Muslim figures in Britain—journalists, lawmakers, academics, and activists—openly rejected Choudary, even while mosques across the country banned him from their premises, his notoriety never diminished.

  In a way, Choudary was the ideal straw man for the newspapers. With his jaunty smile and crass bigotry, he instantly discredited the notion that Muslim radicalism had any rational political context. He wanted to slap “Sharia Zone” stickers around East London; he organized morality street patrols that, in fact, no one attended but his own small band of followers. All he lacked was an evil cackle. In 2010, a journalist wrote memorably in The Spectator that “Anjem Choudary…is one of those thick-as-mince gobby little chancers who could only possibly come from Britain.” This was patently true, and yet—and yet—he was wanted, needed by the media: the loser Tartuffe figure from Walthamstow, who decried Britain as the corrupt Land of Disbelief, but sponged off its benefits system to support his large family.

  Walthamstow had a high volume of Muslims, and many sympathized with the core political views that animated groups like al-Muhajiroun. The majority of those sympathizers certainly did not condone violence against civilians. But certain underlying truths were easy to empathize with: the belief that the West, through its War on Terror, was waging neo-imperial wars in majority Muslim lands; that with each year the war’s geographic scope and brutality, its secret torture sites and drone strikes and targeting of civilians, grew more extreme; that through support for Israel and Arab tyrants, it enabled Muslim underdevelopment and suffering on a vast scale.

  There was a gap between agreeing with these truths intellectually and acting on them in a violent fashion. It was a slim, fateful gap that the majority felt condemned to and capable of living within. But for some, the gap felt so slight that it was easy to bridge. It was easy to lure an impressionable young person to the other side. ISIS called that gap the gray zone of complicity and sought to crush it. The tabloids called it “creeping Sharia”; a prominent neocon thinker called it “the strange death of Europe.” Walter Benjamin called it the “state of emergency” that had become, for the oppressed, “not the exception but the rule.” British Muslims just called it life.

  This was one of the reasons why it was especially hard for immigrant Muslim parents to spot deviance in their children’s behavior. Watching their kids behave more piously made many happy; it meant, actually, they could relax a little bit; there was less danger of their children losing their values and straying from the faith. They weren’t culturally primed to see more conservative behavior as worrisome.

  And as for the political views about the overarching tensions between Muslims and Western state violence, they were widely held. And because so many thousands of the community’s young men carried those very same attitudes, held the very same identities, but had some internal compass keeping them away from violence, it was extraordinarily hard for a parent to notice when conventional views suddenly became subversive. It was extraordinarily hard to know when a child’s internal compass was no longer functioning.

  But Walthamstow arguably had bigger problems than extremism. The neighborhood was awash with drugs and knife crime. Soheil, like most boys, had learned to avoid certain barbershops that were hubs for drug dealing, where the barbers’ eyes were glazed over. Dealing drugs was a fast way to rise in the standings of the neighborhood, and the Muslim kids who took this route assuaged their guilty consciences by pulling up to the mosque in their Porsches and passing the imam wads of cash for charity.

  The respectable path to a decent life was hard, because even in the 2010s, the old prejudices and systematic discrimination remained alive. A 2017 BBC survey found that an applicant called “Adam” was offered three times as many job interviews as an applicant with an identical CV and skill set called “Mohammed.” Half of Muslim households in London lived in poverty. Muslim students didn’t get into good enough universities, and didn’t emerge from good universities with strong degrees.

  Indeed, when it came to British Muslims, the challenges were arguably more socioeconomic than religious; the vast majority of Muslim immigrants to Britain from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh arrived from villages, bringing the norms of rural farming life with them. Had they stayed in Pakistan and moved to cities, being exposed to education and work in a language they already spoke, the women in these families might have arguably secured greater independence and decision making than they did in Britain. Two generations after arrival, British Muslim women often remained less educated and less likely to work than women from British Indian families of Hindu or Sikh background, who had emigrated from urban centers and were already better educated.

  This social disparity was also evident in the academic achievement of second-generation Pakistani and Bangladeshi kids, who tended to perform poorly compared to second-generation Indian kids from Hindu families. In modern Britain, what came to be seen as a problem of “oppressive Muslim culture” leading to lower attainment was more a reflection of socioeconomic migration patterns: a need for more education development, and opportunity rather than a problem of faith.

  * * *

  —

  THE POLICE CAME ON MONDAY night, two days after Soheil had left. Sabira was in her bedroom when she heard the banging at the door. In the kitchen, her mother was sitting at the table, an untouched cup of tea beside her. There were two officers, a man with glasses and a fat upper lip, and a woman who looked around their living room and announced that they would need to search the house.

  But it was too late by then anyway. Soheil had already texted his mum to say he was in Turkey and about to cross the border into Syria. The hardest part, at first, was figuring out what to say to the rest of the family when they asked where he was. Early on, Sabira made excuses for him. “Soheil’s busy.” “Soheil’s at the gym.” “Soheil’s at work.” Eventually, they had to tell the truth.

  Winter came as it always did, a sudden early descending of darkness that compressed the day’s prayers into a short succession. Some mornings Sabira woke up for the dawn prayer and crept past her mother’s bedroom, deliberating whether to wake her or to let her sleep. Her mother alternated between proud stoicism and blank-eyed despondency. She spent whole days wrapped in a blanket, preparing bland meals that tasted of resignation. There was pride to be felt, certainly, for a son who had chosen to donate his life to God in the protection of others; but there would have been pride as well in a son who stayed by his mother’s side, working to grow prosperous and start a family, creating a shade under which she could have sheltered. Their mother felt selfish when she had such thoughts. Perhaps that was not the path that God had set out for him. Who was she, to question His wisdom?

  It was shocking, his sudden absence, and distressing, because he would never come back. But it was the early days of the Syrian civil war, back when it was a clearer conflict with good and bad sides. Sabira felt no shame about her brother’s decision. More than anything, she felt abandoned, now for the second time. Their father had left when she was eight, when th
e fighting at home with their mother had gotten too intense and he said vaguely that there were “important things” he had to do elsewhere. He was a gentle man who worked as a postal clerk, though he had ambitions of doing something else. Once he left, her mother began cursing him, and Sabira realized the only real adult in the house was gone. Soheil had filled their absent father’s role unconsciously, always caring, always solicitous.

  She continued attending the Muhajiroun women’s circles, because they felt like a thread tying her to Soheil, but she felt increasingly detached from their talk. The women sat in a circle, speaking in a rough, black-and-white way about the West and its conflicts. Sabira filtered out the politics. She was fifteen, and those politics had stolen her brother. She wanted only to be a good Muslim, to have as much trust in Allah and his plan, as much tawakul, as Soheil had. Most of all, she aspired to his level of spiritual clarity. But the version of Islam the ladies at Muhajiroun were dispensing at the meetings felt like a death sentence.

  Sabira and her cousin spoke about it one evening as they were walking through Bethnal Green, where they had gone to have dessert and look through the abayas at a local boutique. There was a new collection out, with high-waisted robes in regency colors like dusty rose pink and powder blue. There was so much beauty and purpose in the world, she felt, so much room to serve Allah and also gain some earthly happiness. The extreme views of the women’s circle allowed for none of these possibilities. “What are they trying to do, get blood out of a stone? If you want to do everything as they say, it strips you of everything, the possibility of studying or working. Talking to men is ‘free mixing.’ What is there left to do but just stay at home?”

  She and Soheil were in touch a lot. They chatted on Telegram and he eventually managed to get back onto Facebook. He sent her pictures of himself playing in the snow and swimming in the Euphrates. She peered at the images for long minutes, noticing how much thinner he seemed, his cheeks gaunt. Sometimes he asked in advance if the family could be together, and they would Skype him from the living room at their grandmother’s. It was always just a few short minutes, but Sabira was happy to see his face, to hear his voice. She didn’t know what to say, so he did most of the talking. “Sabira, you have to come,” he said. “You can stay with us, and we can get Mum, the whole family to come. Try and save up some money, get yourself to Turkey.”

  “It’s never gonna happen,” she said. She explained she had just applied for a job, was waiting to start work. He tilted his head and smiled at her. “You’ll be happy here, you’ll see.”

  Not long into the new year, Sabira’s cousin Nadim left for Syria. Soon it seemed everyone knew someone who had gone. A well-off local businessman’s daughter. The bookseller’s son. Joining the caliphate was like an infectious fever dream, spreading among the neighborhood’s youth.

  Edging Toward Baghdad

  ISIS lays siege to the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, home to the Yazidi religious minority and strategically located near the crossroads of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The Yazidi heartland has been caught up in regional and national rivalries since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the minority group suffers discrimination under successive rulers.

  As ever, ISIS proves to be the most extreme. The fighters launch a genocidal campaign of massacres and kidnappings, taking Yazidi women and girls as sex slaves. Thousands of Yazidi families are stranded on Mount Sinjar; the United States, together with Kurdish forces it now relies on as ground troops, organizes rescue corridors.

  In an important victory that could shift the militants’ power on the battlefield, fighters capture the Mosul Dam, which controls the flow of water to the city and to millions of Iraqis living downstream along the Tigris River.

  They come within fifteen miles of Erbil, one of the two capitals of Iraqi Kurdistan, and again advance toward Baghdad. It is only a flurry of U.S. air strikes, backed by Kurdish forces and Iran-led militias, that prevents Erbil from falling. It becomes apparent that the only thing holding ISIS back is U.S. military might from the skies.

  The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

  —JEFFREY EUGENIDES, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

  They’re calling me a terrorist

  Like they don’t know who the terror is

  When they put it on me, I tell them this

  I’m all about peace and love….

  —LOWKEY (THE BRITISH RAPPER KAREEM DENNIS), “TERRORIST”

  SHARMEENA, KADIZA, AMIRA, AND SHAMIMA

  December 2014, East London

  It was a truth universally acknowledged that all young women traveling from Britain to the Islamic State needed to go shopping first, and in that strange winter when girls started to go missing, Westfield Stratford, a sprawling mall in East London, emerged as a favorite final destination before the journey.

  It was almost dark as the four teenage girls got off the Jubilee line. They had come straight from school, Bethnal Green Academy, where they excelled in their studies and were admired by teachers and fellow students alike as examples of fine young women: intelligent and well-spoken, joyful and vivacious. They were all fifteen or sixteen and best friends, passionately close as only adolescent girls can be, and so protective of their group friendship that they often tweeted warnings about the danger of keeping secrets. It was early December and the mall was draped in glowing stars and lacy angels, teeming with women carrying bags of Christmas shopping. The four girls walked past the trendy steak place with the halal menu they would now never try, past the champagne bar where the bag-laden women took refuge, past an advertisement for the film American Sniper (“The Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History”).

  Sharmeena needed a new mobile phone and some winter clothes, because it was already snowing in Syria, the clothes she’d ordered online from Forever 21 had not arrived, and she was leaving the next day. Button-nosed, with a soft, round face and steely eyes, Sharmeena was the fast-talking, opinionated personality in their group. Her friends watched her face carefully for reactions, the flicking lights behind her eyes that meant she was deliberating, the few moments it would take for her small mouth to open and tell them they were being either ridiculous or perceptive. Everything that came next, everything that followed, turned on her, for Sharmeena was the first among them to walk through real darkness.

  A year prior, Sharmeena’s beloved mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and died after six months of illness. Sharmeena was stunned it could happen that quickly, how a mother, still a young woman in her thirties, who seemed radiant and perfectly sound, could speed-decay from the inside. She became skeletal and wheezy in a few short months, at the end barely able to speak, coughing up her insides through a tube that her daughter held to her mouth. Sharmeena had grown up with her mother, grandmother, and maternal uncle in a small council flat in Bethnal Green, a neighborhood in East London. The plan was always for her father, who was back in Bangladesh, to join them once he saved enough money, but in 2012 the UK government imposed a new income threshold for spouses coming to Britain that was beyond what her mother made, and so her father lingered in Bangladesh. Sharmeena knew him only as a faint, questioning voice on the phone: How is school? Are you being good? When he eventually made it to London, she was already a teenager. He was convincingly her father: her face was precisely mapped on his. But she scarcely knew him.

  After her mother died, her father secured a council flat in Shoreditch, but he worked long evening shifts as a waiter, returning home well past midnight. Often Sharmeena stayed at her grandmother’s instead. When her mother was alive, it hadn’t mattered so much that they lived, like so many immigrant families, not in a nuclear unit but with extended family. But now that her mother was gone, Sharmeena felt orphaned, as though she had no proper place anywhere. She started spending time nearly every day at the mosque, t
he one in East London in the backstreets of Whitechapel, a short walk from home. It had a separate building for women, with a spacious, softly lit, warm prayer area on the second floor. Stepping inside instantly soothed her. She often didn’t realize her body was clenched and that she was holding her breath until she knelt down and put her forehead to the inviting turquoise carpet. She felt such release that she stayed in that position for long moments.

  Sometimes, after evening prayer, Sharmeena would linger at the mosque and read a book, delaying the return to the home where her mother’s absence filled all the space. Other women from the neighborhood did the same. There weren’t that many places for young Muslim girls from conservative families to go to in East London that were socially acceptable to their parents. To meet your girlfriends regularly at a dessert café was excessive, bound to elicit a “Weren’t you just there yesterday?” and the suspicion that your true motivation was boys, not waffles. The mosque was an immaculate, incontestable destination.