A lot of bile — much of it from ignorant middle-aged men — has been directed in recent months on social media and in print at the young women who, having fled their homes in the West to join ISIS over the course of the last five years, this year following the collapse of the 'caliphate' in Iraq and Syria have found themselves homeless, friendless, stateless. Some of them, most famously Shamima Begum, have sought to come back to the lands they left, to the horror and disgust of many. These young women, most of whom were children when they abandoned their families in search of belonging, are often treated as a mass, undifferentiated, even inhuman. Few commentators trouble themselves to examine how they might differ from each other in their motivations, their histories, their beliefs, their choices. Fewer still actually endeavour to speak to these young women, these girls, to hear from their own mouths why they have done what they have done, what the experience has taught them, and what has changed in their lives and in their principles since they made the journey east.
Azadeh Moaveni has spent the last five years doing just that, travelling around the Middle East, around the Mediterranean and in northern Europe, talking directly to and following the stories of more than a dozen young Muslim women headed east, and now, in some cases, wanting to head back west again from the refugee camps that have mushroomed to shelter them. She grants these young women the time and space and dignity to explain themselves, to tell us their stories, to show the complexities and joys and discontents and misapprehensions of their lives, without bias, without prejudice, without kneejerk judgement. They tell us their views of the Arab Spring, the opportunities for dissent, feminism and Islam, the role of American military intervention, social media, the West's tolerance of despots like Sisi and Assad. The book that has resulted from all these conversations is perhaps the single most enlightening offering yet about the young women drawn to radicalism, the variety of their histories and their intentions, the variable levels of disillusion and disappointment in their lives, and their relationships with the men on whom they have relied, by whom they have been inspired, and in whom they have vested their hopes and dreams. It is a masterpiece of immersion journalism, and written with all the skill of a great realist novelist.
Philip Gwyn Jones in London and Henry Rosenbloom in Melbourne have acquired UK & Commonwealth rights for Scribe from Natasha Fairweather at RCW and will publish Guest House for Young Widows: Among the women of ISIS this October in hardback in both the UK and Australia. It will be published in the US at the same time by Random House, thus reuniting the tricontinental team that together published Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, to which Moaveni’s book has been compared — when Jones was Publisher at Granta/Portobello. It is a similarly majestic and important achievement.
Azadeh Moaveni has been reporting on the Middle East for two decades, and was the Middle East Correspondent for Time Magazine, based in Tehran, until 2013. She is a citizen of the UK, US and Iran, the author of Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran (neither of which was published in the UK), and now teaches journalism at NYU in London. She is the Gender Analyst for the ICG, and lives in Cambridge.
