Guest House for Young Widows: Among the women of ISIS

"The importance of this book is the way it gives voice to people whose motivations could easily be misunderstood, or subject to political forces that are completely unforgiving. This gives voice to a series of women whose voice is hard to listen to, hard to hear. In doing so, it makes us reflect on the politicisation of religion, how people of different faiths live together. There’s also one of the book’s contentions: that something as orthodox as Islamism can be seen to be revolutionary if your life is otherwise lacking in choices. To my mind, it makes you think about what options that fields for people. Because at one level, these are women entering a system that is extremely misogynistic, extremely limiting to women—getting drawn into ISIS. And yet the reality of their life before that has no great aspect of freedom, no great aspect of modernity, either. And so this gives colour and it gives perspective and it gives three dimension to stories of people that it’d be easy to dismiss as another person who’s joined an obscene cult. Which is a very straightforward narrative and one which has some arguments for it. But this serves to say: Let’s listen to people. Let’s hear why they do the things that they do, and give them the dignity having their story told. No, I think that’s different. I mean, there is an aspect of victimhood, in the sense that often they are placed in situations where there are very limited choices. One expects to have sympathy for people whose lives aren’t straightforward. It’s not that everyone who joins ISIS is evil. But the corollary isn’t straightforward, either—that everyone who joined ISIS is a victim. I think there is balance. Certainly they have made grotesquely bad decisions. But they are looking for answers in a world that doesn’t give them. And in certain contexts you can understand why they made the decisions that they made. I think that’s the bravery in this book, it looks to understand why people made decisions which, to third parties, seem completely inexplicable. I think that’s the argument. It is a timely and important book."