2019/11/23

Women’s Business

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.