Quotes from Azadeh Moaveni

Out of this historic interlude of hope and chaos, into the resulting vacuum of instability, the Islamic State emerged. It was sophisticated, organized, and determined to exploit all the grievances, cracks, and disorder the lost revolutions so generously offered. And it had perceptively noted women as a rising political force, even as it proposed a radically patriarchal form of family organization and politics that stripped women of their autonomy.

These supposedly better-for-women dictators were not opposed to imprisoning women or using sexual violence—gang rapes, virginity checks—to punish women who opposed them. For women who wanted more—more dignity, more public and civic influence, more room to practice their religion—the status quo had no room for them.

In January 2016, Cameron established a new fund for teaching English to Muslim women. He warned that those who failed language tests after a couple of years might be deported, because non–English speakers were "more susceptible to the extremist message coming from [ISIS]." The approach was something akin to integration at gunpoint: The more English you know, the less likely your kids will be to blow themselves up.

Parenting of millennial Muslims in the age of the War on Terror demanded levels of awareness that immigrant parents often didn't have the capacity for.

But to the government, integration had come to mean acceptance of "British values," full stop. Britain's core national identity was enshrined in gender liberalism, women's physical visibility, an acceptance of homosexuality, and UK foreign policy, especially respect for Israel.

Islam was too big a religion for such constraints against women, and too noble a religion to countenance viewing non-Muslims with contempt, she thought.

But there were hundreds of thousands of families who were already barely surviving, or who were making it within the strictest of margins, who felt they had little choice but to stay. Taken together there would be 6.2 million Syrians displaced within their own country—the largest displaced population anywhere in the world.

Iran, the Syrian regime's only regional ally, began dispatching military advisers to bolster Assad. (Syria had been the only country to support Iran during its eight-year-long war with Iraq, a conflict that ended in 1988, in which Saddam Hussein liberally used chemical weapons and Iran lost a million young men.) These intrusions transformed the Syrian revolution into a proxy war, where regional powers fought for influence.

The political fractures from which it arose have not been fixed. History has shown that unless conditions genuinely change, a new insurgency always arises from the ashes of an old one.

Foreign fighters, known as muhajireen, or migrants, began streaming into town—answering the call to fight Assad, to build a state in God's name, to find some dignity and purpose in the plains of Syria that had been absent in their lives in Europe or Tunisia or Morocco or Jordan. These foreigners became the leading lights of the transformed city.

Had they stayed in Pakistan and moved to cities, being exposed to education and work in a language they already spoke, the women in these families might have arguably secured greater independence and decision making than they did in Britain. Two generations after arrival, British Muslim women often remained less educated and less likely to work than women from British Indian families of Hindu or Sikh background, who had emigrated from urban centers and were already better educated.

She could not attend her university, which was closed; she could not earn money, because public work for women, save a few specialized jobs, was forbidden; she couldn't even go on a walk through the neighborhood and watch the finches dart from tree to tree.

In Syria, being poor narrowed the world, especially for women. Dua never could have hoped to attend university, couldn't even have explained, probably, what a marketing course would entail or set her up for.

Leaving to do jihad in Syria became a dignified exit from a life that offered nothing else, Emad said, which made vulnerable young men easy prey for militant recruiters.

As under any occupation, reality was a muddle, the ethics of not collaborating clanging against the instinct to adapt and survive. During wartime, ideals were a luxury.

The argument in response often went like this: Such brutality was certainly not desirable, but the West had left the militants no choice, there was no other way left to resist; nonviolent protest would not sway the dictator Assad, whose military was torturing and killing scores in detention centers, nor would it sway the United States, which had invaded and occupied Iraq, killed countless civilians, and sustained and protected Arab tyrants.

The UK Home Office argued this was "in the public good" and that citizenship was "a privilege, not a right," even as it rendered these individuals stateless, leaving them without the recourse or oversight of any state's legal process or rules. As a security measure intended simply to block the return of European citizens who had fought in Syria, it worked. But it was an approach bound to fuel more conflict and more resentment.

The problem is that political Islam believes in Caliphate.

In government-controlled Syria, the broken land over which Bashar al-Assad presided as nominal victor, there was no sign that the regime would cease the policies of repression and violence that had provoked the original uprising. In July 2018, the government issued death certificates for sixty thousand people who had simply disappeared in government detention.

Women may certainly experience wars, volatility, and state repression differently than men. But ultimately gender does not define their experience, it simply particularizes it; the women of this book have far more in common with the men around them than they do with women of wholly different countries.

As we drove away, I asked Dariush whether it was not a relief that under Khatami, such run-ins happened a couple times a year, instead of every weekend. He gave me a searching look. "However infrequent, I do not find any consolation in the fact that my fate is determined by the whim of an armed sixteen-year-old.

To the public, they were either naive jihadi brides or calculating monsters. But most of the women in this book were neither passive nor predatory, and trying to pin down their degree of agency seemed to be only one line of inquiry, and certainly not the most revealing. Some collaborated or acted knowingly; some were so young that, despite the outward appearance of deliberate choice, they were not mature enough to exercise anything approaching adult judgement.

Why do they get to do whatever they want?" Aws complained. They really were completely spoiled. It was appalling to her that a European teenager should have more power than she, an educated and formerly middle-class woman of Raqqa, in her own hometown. But Dua, the good military wife, always reluctant to criticize the militants, offered a justification: "Maybe because they had to leave their countries to come here, it was felt they should be treated more specially.

How little they knew what awaited them. They would soon find out that the caliphate ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi troubled itself little with the Prophet's law. That his men used the ancient punishments meant to instill an otherworldly fear—the chopping off of hands, of heads—as bloody, nihilistic gang rituals. The girls seemed to imagine they were en route to some Romeo and Juliet scenario in the desert. How could they not know?