A review by worldlibraries
Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of Isis by Azadeh Moaveni
2.0
The author has done a useful service explaining these women as they are. She is able to do so because she shared their faith and because she was from an adjacent culture so she was more likely to develop rapport with the people in the book.
Spoiler: in the epilogue the author explains this is only part of the women of ISIS. It doesn't include women who engaged in atrocities and committed war crimes. So only the part of the spectrum of women who went to Syria to join ISIS are represented. I think the book could have been made more useful by including the war criminals as well, because aren't those the people who need to be studied the most? On the other hand, I don't know that I want to read about women like that.
I did not find this an easy read because it was really hard to identify with the women in the book. Spoiler: the author did explain in the epilogue that these women had more in common with the men around them than with women around the world. No kidding.
Things that made Western girls particularly vulnerable to getting swept up in ISIS are neglectful, absent, and/or unloving parents who didn't help them discover useful ways of contributing to the world, or immigrant parents who, while loving, hadn't a clue about what their kids faced in a Western culture and couldn't help them navigate it. For girls living in Muslim-majority client state-style countries like Tunisia, it was the lack of opportunity, lack of dignity, lack of justice in their culture, and a cultural lack of tolerance for their trying on different identities as teenagers are wont to do (for example, in Tunisia, a girl wanting to present in more pious dress when her culture demanded secular clothing), plus a lack of attention from their families that made them very easy to manipulate by ISIS recruiters.
Many of the girls and women in this book seemed completely 'reactive.' They didn't have their own goals and agency they were pursing and easily fell in with other people's suggestions of what they should be doing with their lives. It is easy to see why Tunisian parents didn't raise their female children to dream big dreams; Tunisian sons couldn't even find the most basic of employment.
The police come off horribly in this book. The Tunisian police sound absolutely savage. The British police sound like they watched these British Muslim girls sail off to ISIS almost as sport. They made no honest attempt to inform the girls' Muslim parents about the potential danger these girls were putting themselves in. How those families remain in Britain when officials were willing to 'use' their daughters for intelligence-gathering, rather than try and stop them and keep them safe, is beyond me.
This book is really good at pointing out the cost to the citizens of United States 'client states,' where the USA keeps some icky dictator in power rather than allow a country to grow and evolve and have a messy democracy like everyone else gets to experience. The 'client state' system seems completely dysfunctional, and a continual factory for making more disaffected citizens who lash out in dysfunctional ways as their lives lack opportunity and dignity. I find this system reprehensible. One of the girls equated Islamic terror with the state terror Muslim countries experience from the United States. It's easy to see why they would equate the two. They have no means to stop the US state terror.
Something that was unexplained in the book is that Britain chose to strip these people of their citizenship. How does that work exactly? I thought the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights said that everyone must have a state. So is it possible for a state to say, 'sorry, you aren't one of us anymore.' How does one live as a stateless person? I can't imagine that.
I only gave this book two stars because it was distasteful to read about. The writing and reporting are well done. The topic covered is important. I'm glad someone is doing it. It's just not for me.
Spoiler: in the epilogue the author explains this is only part of the women of ISIS. It doesn't include women who engaged in atrocities and committed war crimes. So only the part of the spectrum of women who went to Syria to join ISIS are represented. I think the book could have been made more useful by including the war criminals as well, because aren't those the people who need to be studied the most? On the other hand, I don't know that I want to read about women like that.
I did not find this an easy read because it was really hard to identify with the women in the book. Spoiler: the author did explain in the epilogue that these women had more in common with the men around them than with women around the world. No kidding.
Things that made Western girls particularly vulnerable to getting swept up in ISIS are neglectful, absent, and/or unloving parents who didn't help them discover useful ways of contributing to the world, or immigrant parents who, while loving, hadn't a clue about what their kids faced in a Western culture and couldn't help them navigate it. For girls living in Muslim-majority client state-style countries like Tunisia, it was the lack of opportunity, lack of dignity, lack of justice in their culture, and a cultural lack of tolerance for their trying on different identities as teenagers are wont to do (for example, in Tunisia, a girl wanting to present in more pious dress when her culture demanded secular clothing), plus a lack of attention from their families that made them very easy to manipulate by ISIS recruiters.
Many of the girls and women in this book seemed completely 'reactive.' They didn't have their own goals and agency they were pursing and easily fell in with other people's suggestions of what they should be doing with their lives. It is easy to see why Tunisian parents didn't raise their female children to dream big dreams; Tunisian sons couldn't even find the most basic of employment.
The police come off horribly in this book. The Tunisian police sound absolutely savage. The British police sound like they watched these British Muslim girls sail off to ISIS almost as sport. They made no honest attempt to inform the girls' Muslim parents about the potential danger these girls were putting themselves in. How those families remain in Britain when officials were willing to 'use' their daughters for intelligence-gathering, rather than try and stop them and keep them safe, is beyond me.
This book is really good at pointing out the cost to the citizens of United States 'client states,' where the USA keeps some icky dictator in power rather than allow a country to grow and evolve and have a messy democracy like everyone else gets to experience. The 'client state' system seems completely dysfunctional, and a continual factory for making more disaffected citizens who lash out in dysfunctional ways as their lives lack opportunity and dignity. I find this system reprehensible. One of the girls equated Islamic terror with the state terror Muslim countries experience from the United States. It's easy to see why they would equate the two. They have no means to stop the US state terror.
Something that was unexplained in the book is that Britain chose to strip these people of their citizenship. How does that work exactly? I thought the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights said that everyone must have a state. So is it possible for a state to say, 'sorry, you aren't one of us anymore.' How does one live as a stateless person? I can't imagine that.
I only gave this book two stars because it was distasteful to read about. The writing and reporting are well done. The topic covered is important. I'm glad someone is doing it. It's just not for me.