When Moaveni asks her subjects why they went to Syria despite reports of
cruel punishments and repression of women, they say they didn’t believe
what they heard. Nour, the Tunisian, provides some of the most detailed
testimony. Suspended from school for wearing a hijab, she is drawn to
an extremist mosque and becomes close to young men who seem to respect
her and who provide her with a theological justification for ISIS
ideology. When the Islamist political party she favors is banned, the
obvious answer is to go to Syria, where she and her husband hope they
can live by their religious beliefs. To her, “the crucifixions and sex
slave markets were the fanciful propaganda of the group’s opponents.”
According to Moaveni, Nour regarded the media as the tool of an
oppressively secular Tunisian state, while Islamist women in the West
filtered out information from news sources that they saw as
anti-Muslim—in other words, most media. Like those Americans who
discount everything from sources deemed “fake news,” they simply
dismissed information that contradicted what they wanted to believe.
