Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni

Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni

A gripping account of thirteen women who joined, endured, and, in some cases, escaped life in the Islamic State--based on years of immersive reporting by a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

FINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE * ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Toronto Star, The Guardian

Among the many books trying to understand the terrifying rise of ISIS, none has given voice to the women in the organization; but women were essential to the establishment of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's caliphate.

Responding to promises of female empowerment and social justice, and calls to aid the plight of fellow Muslims in Syria, thousands of women emigrated from the United States and Europe, Russia and Central Asia, from across North Africa and the rest of the Middle East to join the Islamic State. These were the educated daughters of diplomats, trainee doctors, teenagers with straight-A averages, as well as working-class drifters and desolate housewives, and they joined forces to set up makeshift clinics and schools for the Islamic homeland they'd envisioned. Guest House for Young Widows charts the different ways women were recruited, inspired, or compelled to join the militants. Emma from Hamburg, Sharmeena and three high school friends from London, and Nour, a religious dropout from Tunis: All found rebellion or community in political Islam and fell prey to sophisticated propaganda that promised them a cosmopolitan adventure and a chance to forge an ideal Islamic community in which they could live devoutly without fear of stigma or repression.

It wasn't long before the militants exposed themselves as little more than violent criminals,more obsessed with power than the tenets of Islam, and the women of ISIS were stripped of any agency, perpetually widowed and remarried, and ultimately trapped in a brutal, lawless society. The fall of the caliphate only brought new challenges to women no state wanted to reclaim.

Azadeh Moaveni's exquisite sensitivity and rigorous reporting make these forgotten women indelible and illuminate the turbulent politics that set them on their paths.

Azadeh Moaveni has been covering the Middle East for than two decades as a journalist, writer, and academic. While on a Fulbright fellowship at the American University of Cairo, she began reporting in Cairo in 1999. She worked as the Middle East reporter for Time magazine, based in Tehran, for the next many years, covering Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. She is the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and Iran Awakening, co-authored with Shirin Ebadi. As part of The New York Times' ISIS coverage in November 2015, she published a front-page feature on ISIS women defectors that was a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Her work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. She is a senior gender analyst at the International Crisis Group and teaches journalism at NYU London. She is also a fellow at the New America Foundation.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780399179754
ISBN 10	0399179755
Title	Guest House for Young Widows
Author	Azadeh Moaveni
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2019-09-10
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.