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A review by syni
I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad by Souad Mekhennet
4.75
Very good book; well written, engaging, and only sometimes confusing (which is impressive given the amount of times she had to debrief complex geopolitical contexts!).
I did have a couple of gripes though:
There was a weird thing where things the West had done wrong were stated (Except in the case of the Western-backed Israeli colonisation and genocide of Palestine, which she only refers to as the 'Israeli/Arab conflict',) but at the same time Muslims seemed chastised for seeing themselves as victims and not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps (even if the individuals she was interviewing did pursue further schooling, that wouldn't resolve the systemic poverty in the community).
- Sometimes it seemed that she wrote herself to be more naïve ? than she was, e.g. repeatedly emphasising how she couldn't understand how people became terrorists even though by that point we'd already discussed the main reasons. Of course there's a difference between intellectual and emotional understanding, but it still seemed ??.
But these were just side-eyes, as the point of the book I found was more focused on how Western actors (governments, media, society) contribute to extremism.
I did have a couple of gripes though:
There was a weird thing where things the West had done wrong were stated (Except in the case of the Western-backed Israeli colonisation and genocide of Palestine, which she only refers to as the 'Israeli/Arab conflict',) but at the same time Muslims seemed chastised for seeing themselves as victims and not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps (even if the individuals she was interviewing did pursue further schooling, that wouldn't resolve the systemic poverty in the community).
- Sometimes it seemed that she wrote herself to be more naïve ? than she was, e.g. repeatedly emphasising how she couldn't understand how people became terrorists even though by that point we'd already discussed the main reasons. Of course there's a difference between intellectual and emotional understanding, but it still seemed ??.
But these were just side-eyes, as the point of the book I found was more focused on how Western actors (governments, media, society) contribute to extremism.