Quotes from Azadeh Moaveni

You can have an elected parliament that makes laws, but if the judiciary is appointed by the Supreme Leader - who is a representative of God - then you're kind of at an impasse.

As a prominent conservative told me that year, "We need to go out into the wilderness for a long time, and figure out how we can one day return.

We had slipped into each others lives seamlessly, as though we had known each other for years.

You're perfect for each other, she had insisted. "both of you act like you're already retired, always stuck at home reading books.

If they wanted to know why she had tried to go, why were they asking about the "Islamic thoughts" in her head? Didn't they realize a naïve, broken-bird of a girl might follow a beloved brother to the very ends of the earth? Didn't they realize abused girls were easy prey for charismatic men with dubious intentions?

Terrorism, as the word is presently used, is a condition of ideological wickedness, stripped of any rational or legitimate context or motivation, and associated culturally with Islam and racially with Muslims.

Hatred of Muslims sold. As the editor of The Sun said after facing a ruling on a separate incident, he would do the exact same thing again.

It was a fake, mash-up concept of layered misrepresentations: one, that women were traveling to Syria as comfort women to fighters; two, that they justified this behavior theologically.

The "sex jihad" coverage emanated from media outlets associated with either the Tunisian security services or the Syrian state, both of which were keen to portray the fighters and women flowing into Syria as deviants or terrorists, or, in this instance, deviant-slut terrorists.

This view was born of his long years in Islamist movements, witnessing countless young hotheads mellow with time through long-term engagement with politics. Political scientists call this approach the "inclusion moderation hypothesis," which holds that the more a society democratizes and allows radical groups to participate politically, the more such groups are inclined to soften their rhetoric and behavior.

She learned from the passport office that she would need her husband's permission in order to leave the country with the baby, and her father's permission to leave at all. To stem the flow of young Tunisians to Syria, the government had started imposing often arbitrary travel restrictions on citizens under thirty-five. The cost of the journey, the air tickets alone, amounted to more than she had.

They had been harsh in taking over new towns in Syria, and had alienated local women. For the caliphate to be able to function as a state, it needed more women, and they would need to come from abroad.

Jamal, the Communist in Kram, said around five hundred men from the district had gone, and that the recruiters received a generous fee, about $3,000, for each young man they sent to a battlefield. Female recruits garnered slightly less.

They prey on the most vulnerable, exactly at the moment when they're not educated enough to know better, but religious enough to feel the impulse," he said. "They ply them with YouTube sheikhs and fatwas and nasheeds, and six months later the guy finds himself in Syria, smoking weed, convinced it was the right thing to do.

The point of freedom was that everyone could dress however they wanted, was it not? Was it genuinely such a point of offense to women who dressed more liberally that she, Nour, chose not to?

As ISIS grew more savage, many Salafi clerics condemned its acts of violence. Nour seemed perplexed by not having any theological evidence for what she felt—politically, emotionally, morally—to be right.

But in the words of Olfa, who struggled with this question every day, "What is the difference between an extremist and a very upset Muslim?

If the widows were widows twice or even thrice over, as was the case with many women, the problem of envy took on monstrous dimensions. To be a widow in the Islamic State was to be condemned to a rough, deprived existence in a guest house for widows.

In this age, women like Khaled and Bouhired would certainly be called terrorists. But in the 1960s and 1970s, their popular appeal reflected a worldview that was more understanding of armed struggle. Such opposition, in those years, was seen as an expression of legitimate political aspirations—a symptom of asymmetrical conflict rather than evil ideology.

If anything, Prevent, the government's counterterrorism policy charged with identifying young people at risk of extremism, was primed to overreact.

Though much of serious academia rejects the notion of "radicalization"—there is no empirical basis for predicting when an individual will commit acts of violence—the approach generally followed by law enforcement, whatever its flaws, follows the "bunch of guys" theory: the idea that young people join radical groups through peer pressure and in clusters.

Behavior that had in the past been acceptable—being in contact with your family, being on the internet when you weren't supposed to—was suddenly grounds for intense suspicion. Not fighting was not an option. Not fighting other Syrian rebel groups, composed of Sunni Muslims, was not an option. Being a private citizen who stayed at home was not an option. The only option left to her looked to be escape.

By the time her husband eventually went to the front and was killed, Kadiza rued her decision to travel to Syria. The caliphate was not a land of honor and justice where Muslims could hold their heads high, where the call to prayer filled the air and the pavement was littered with roses. Instead it was a vortex of violence and corruption where men hoarded cars and women settled scores against neighbors and foes, as though it were one long mafia war.

In 2015, the government redefined its thinking around counterterrorism, declaring that radicalism wasn't fueled by economic marginalization or political grievances, but by the ideology of conservative Islam. Prime Minister David Cameron set out the new approach in a speech that year: Britons who rejected "liberal values" were "providing succor" to violent extremists.