WOMEN’S GLOSSY MAGAZINES

Already after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) Al Qaida’s Bin Laden called for women to fulfill their role in the jihad: “Convenant, O sister, to slaughter them like lamb and let the Nile, al Asi and Euphrates river flow with their blood.” Already in 2003 Bin Laden said: “O, prudent Muslim women are also expected to play their role.” (Johnson Reference Johnson2007) The rising phenomenon of the female jihadi is not new. In 2004 Al Qaida’s Arabian Peninsula Women’s Information Bureau launched Al-Khansaa, the first online jihadi magazine especially for women. The monthly publication champions the ideology of former Al Qaeda terrorist chief Osama bin Laden. “Our main mission: push our children to the battlefield”, Al-Khansaa’s editor Umm Raad al-Tamimi declares in the magazine (Hassan Reference Hassan2004). Al-Khansaa magazine contained information on first aid for wounded family members and combat training for women.

The name of the magazine is not chosen without reason. It is the name of a female Arabian poet from the earliest days of Islam who wrote eulogies to male relatives who had died in battle. All four of Al-Khansa’s sons were killed in the Battle of Qadisiyah. When she received the news, she did not grieve, but said, “Praise be to Allah who honored me with their martyrdom. And I have hope from my Lord that he will reunite me with them in the abode of his mercy.” Al-Khansa is an exemplary role model for Muslim women, and is seen as the mother of martyrs. It is no coincidence that the women’s brigade of ISIS is also called the Al-Khansaa Brigade.

The magazine Al-Khansaa only lasted for a short while. Another jihadist magazine aimed at women, Hadifat Al Khansaa, was launched in 2010. Hadifat Al Khansaa means “granddaughters of Al-Khansa”; it was followed by the glossy Al Shamikha (“the majestic woman”) in 2011. Al Shamikha’s cover features an illustration of a veiled woman next to the barrel of a submachine gun. On the cover, two taglines are put as a teaser, “Meeting a Jihad Wife” and “Pages from the Pen of a Female Jihadist”. Articles also call upon young women to marry a “mujahid” (jihadi). Other parts of the magazine feature poems advocating revolutionary violence and calls for women to stand by their jihadist men.

The long history and the publication of the magazines are another sign of how radical Islamists have developed the Internet as an essential tool for the spreading of information and propaganda. The Islamic insurgents of ISIS continue to use the Internet as a recruitment tool, for both men and women. On March 30, 2015, the Islamic State released the eighth issue of its English-written magazine Dabiq, which features an article by a Muslim woman who calls upon all other women to immigrate to the Islamic State. This illustrates the still-rising phenomenon of the e-jihad (Internet jihad), or how the Internet has taken up a crucial role in the radicalization process of men and women.

INTERNET: THE ENGINE OF FEMALE JIHAD

In 2013 the Belgian justice emphasized the threat of e-jihad (De Brauwer 2012–Reference De Brauwer2013). The Internet can surely be considered as the engine of the female jihad. Radicalized Muslimas play a prominent role in the virtual world. Thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, women can pose themselves as influencing communicators. It is with the use of words – in a pure intellectual way – that extremist Muslimas take the position of active recruiter for the jihad. On the Internet the veil of the Muslima is the screen. Nobody can see her, but she beholds the world. Her words are her power. She becomes a compelling word artist. She takes part in a man’s world by proclaiming the virtual pen without striving to have a life outside the walls of her home. She and her jihadi-embracing sisters form a digital army of recruiters, poets and protagonists. Their way of emancipation reaches through the mind rather than the body.

The female ISIS recruiters seduce in words sometimes featured by utopic images of the so-called caliphate. In the view of the female recruiter the game of seduction is a fruit of her mind and not her body. They see the emancipation of Western women as an obsession with the body and an unexplainable urge to have a life outside the home. Instead, these extremist Muslimas prefer the use of the virtual pen within the walls of their home, the place where according to their ideology a Muslima should be. They use the limitations of their ideology to gain a crucial position in a verbal way. Just as male recruiters, the women too become the spin doctors in a widespread machine of propaganda and indoctrination. In the virtual world the extremist Muslima considers herself equal to her brother. Shortly, she becomes a female armchair politician on a keyboard.

The circuit of Islamic translations in Belgium and The Netherlands counts considerably more active women in its ranks than man. “The reason lies in the fact that Muslim boys are more present on the street, while girls are kept at home, studying. Therefore they really master the Arabic language,” says Maurits Berger, senior research associate at the Dutch Clingendael Institute for International Relations (Fraihi Reference Fraihi2006a). Back in “the time of Al Qaeda” – I interviewed Berger in 2006 – the result showed that considerable amounts of Islamic documents were translated. “The religious experience of women is very textual,” said Berger. “As a matter of fact you can roughly say that women touch the pen and man the sword. The question is: which is worst?”

One woman, however, has risen to the top and is formally seen by IS as the Al-Khansa of the 21st century. It is Ahlam Al Nasr, a young woman in her twenties, with roots in the Middle East. Ahlam’s marriage with Abu Usama Al Ghariba, a Vienna-born jihadi close to the movement’s leadership, was announced in October 2014 on Twitter. ISIS social media rarely make marriage announcements, but al-Nasr and al-Gharib are a jihadi power couple. Al-Gharib is a veteran propagandist, initially for Al Qaeda and now for ISIS. His bride is a burgeoning literary celebrity, better known as “the Poetess of the Islamic State”. Her first book of verse, “The Blaze of Truth”, was published online in 2014 and quickly circulated among militant networks (Haykel and Creswell Reference Haykel and Creswell2015).

The case of the court poetess Ahlam illustrates how ISIS has increased its female-focused efforts, giving women the role of a hidden orator. It is a well-thought-out strategy: in Islamic expressions women are described as a pearl that should be protected, a valuable human being mystified in the security of her shell. In poetry that consideration returns in words that are wrapped in a bilayer evocative message. Verses play hide and seek on the rhythm of rhyme. The idea of poetry is the idea that ISIS seems to have of woman. Present and at the same time invisible, she touches hearts and minds. The woman embodies an art form that is projected by ISIS as a mirage of herself (Fraihi Reference Fraihi2015).

However, the play of words is not always innocent. Ahlam Al Nasr has not only written poems in praise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his self-declared caliphate. Last year, Ahlam wrote a 30-page essay defending the leadership’s decision to burn the Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh alive, a severe punishment which is not permitted under Islamic law. Moreover, the place of execution was remarkable too. According to Syrian activists the Jordanian pilot was executed at the same place where in October 2014 several women of the ISIS brigade (Al-Khansaa Brigade) died in an airstrike by the coalition. Reportedly Ahlam signed the verdict of a horrible and very remarkable execution. That is when blood flows from the power of the pen. Her ink was fire, a form of torture that in Islam is exclusively God’s deed. Or we can put it like this: Ahlam played Allah, with a stroke of her pen.

DIVERSITY WITHIN THE PROFILES OF ISIS WOMEN

This brings us to a significant amount of diversity within the profiles of women becoming radicalized and migrating to ISIS territory. According to a report published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, Muslim women are drawn to the Islamic State by a number of factors, one of them being a sense of isolation as a reaction to feelings of marginalization by the West, and also a feeling that the international Muslim community is under threat. Others believe that they are joining a utopian, apocalyptic movement. For some women, it is a quest for identity. They feel peer pressure to be part of something bigger than themselves or are attracted by a promise of sisterhood, which is especially important for teenage girls. ISIS territory is their Islamic “eldorado”, a mythical land of gold where in this case they can express and experience their particular vision of woman power. To practise the Hijra (Migration) is seen for women too as their Islamic duty. This kind of escapism is, however, not new either.

Back in 2006 I wrote a series of newspaper articles on the topic of female Muslim radicalization (Fraihi Reference Fraihi2006b). For these articles I spoke with a young girl in Antwerp who was planning to do the Hijra to Afghanistan. Her nickname was Oem Ammar, she was 18 years old and of Moroccan origin. For her, Afghanistan seemed like a holiday destination. “A sandy landscape, the mountains with their dark caves, the shelter land of Osama Bin Laden, … I love that country, even though I only have seen it on television and Internet.” Oem Ammar did not believe that the Taliban were misogynistic. “That is propaganda,” she replied. “The Taliban base their female rights on the Sharia. There is nothing wrong with that. Do you think a woman is better off in a democracy?”

Oem Ammar’s nickname is no coincidence; in fact, many women’s nicknames are not. Most of them refer to a woman of importance in Islamic history. Oem Ammar, for instance, based her nickname on Soumaya, the first female martyr. Soumaya lived in the early Islamic era, was married and the mother of Ammar. She was a Muslima from the very beginning. But Soumaya, her husband and son were tortured by non-believers. Ammar and his father succumbed to the polytheists and eventually joined them. Soumaya, on the other hand, held on to her Islamic belief and died. Hence, in these radicalized environments a name is not merely a nickname but a name of honor.

The phenomenon can be seen as a romantic longing for the early Islamic times and in particular the empowered female warriors that fought against the adversaries of the prophet Muhammad. In fact, the honoring of these pioneering female warriors reveals a hidden emancipatory struggle. Acts of war of Muslimas throughout history, in particular the early Islamic era, are being hyperbolized and offer a special starting point for a small group of Muslimas to develop and emancipate themselves. The historical female warrior is put into a contemporary battle to inspire women of the 21st century. This emancipatory struggle is based on a remarkable U-turn. For their struggle in modern times these Muslimas grab ancient anchors. The U-turn makes a bridge between the past and the present. The question, however, is: what about the future?

In this particular profile women flirt with the jihad. Oem Ammar was a huge fan of Bin Laden, back then the most wanted terrorist in the world. Still now we can see on social media how some Muslim girls keep on admiring Bin Laden.

The mania of these jihadi groupies has an adolescent character and can somewhat be compared with boys band mania. The difference is that these idols from the jihad scene are certainly not as innocent as the vedettes of pop music. We can thus consider these jihadi fans as a potential danger. These girls fall for the bearded looks of many jihadi men. For many of these (teenage) girls the men of ISIS are not terrorists but popular heroes. They see them as the Islamic versions of Robin Hood or Che Guevara. Another comparison in an attempt to explain this strange infatuation is that some women tend to fall in love with a bad boy. It is the attraction of what is forbidden, the kick of an evil alliance contrary to the Islamic enshrinement and a romantic note to history?

Despite the many different reasons for joining, the primary role of Western women in ISIS-controlled territory is to be the wife of the jihadist husband they are betrothed to and to become a mother to the next generation of jihadists. However, these women are also playing crucial roles in propaganda dissemination and the online recruitment of more women, both directly and indirectly. These female forces are also used for a range of activities including logistics, recruitment, political safeguarding, operations, suicide bombing and combat, even though this is not always allowed under the Islamic State’s interpretation of Sharia law. For a few years I have been following some Facebook accounts of ISIS women like Sara Umm Abderrahma, who is married to a Belgian foreign fighter and lives in Syria. “Today I whipped together with my husband.” A girl’s reaction sounds surprised: “O, so women can do that too?” Sara Umm Abderhaman answers: “Women must do that (whipping) to other women.” Another Facebook friend wants to know how it feels like. “Yani, did you mind?” Answer of Sara Umm Abderrahman: “No, it is Shar’ allah, she didn’t get it for nothing. It is an advantage for her. 3adaab in dunya is better dan 3adaab in akhirah (To suffer on earth is better to suffer in the hereafter).” Another woman replies: “Hey, I want to do that too.” Answer of Sara Umm Abderrahman. “Yallah come!”

THE UNDERVALUED FORM OF EMANCIPATION THAT REINFORCES TRADITION

Why do women choose a role that is so aberrant from the traditional pattern expected by society? Many criminologists see violent women as “double aberrant,” wrote Eileen MacDonald in her book Shoot the Women First. The book, a collection of interviews, is based on the author’s encounters with female terrorists (MacDonald Reference MacDonald1991). “They do not only commit a crime, but they also undermine our perception of how a woman should be: soft and law-abiding.” It is like their violent acts hit us twice.

On a side note, it is also striking that ISIS attracts highly qualified women too, a fact that we cannot seem to explain. The participation of highly qualified women to IS is contrary to the philosophy of the European integration sector, which states that better education results in better integration into society. These highly educated women who migrated to IS make me wonder what their motives are. Presumably the feeling of not being accepted by society as they are, even after long study, is one of those motives.

ISIS has increased its female-focused efforts spreading the message that women are valued, not as sexual objects, but as mothers to the next generation and guardians of ISIS ideology. On January 23, 2015, a manifesto on women was released by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade (Winter Reference Winter2015). This document was clearly designed as a means of drawing in women from countries in the region, in particular those in the Gulf. We can learn from it that the list of responsibilities outside the household given to women is very short. The emphasis throughout the manifesto lies in the importance of motherhood and family support. The guidelines for Muslim women in this manifesto correspond mainly to the findings of Astrid Gorris, the mother of Tatiana Wielandt (a Belgian teenager who left for Syria to join her husband and IS-fighter Mujahid). She testifies that young girls are lured into marrying a jihadi fighter by painting a false picture of a romantic adventure within the boundaries of Islam. “I think she left with a very romantic idea of a rebellious struggle, but the only reason why ISIS is bringing girls into Syria is to produce offspring. More fighters for the cause.” (Sanchez and Van Herck Reference Sanchez and Van Herck2015)

The female jihad is a bitter form of so-called emancipation or even feminism. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of the jihad bride and the jihad mother is an undervalued revolution for women. By passing on extremist thoughts to their offspring the women reinforce their traditional role of motherhood.

In an extreme convincing missionary way, she becomes the very first teacher of her child’s jihadi ideas. She lays the foundation of the architecture framework of the global jihad. Hence, the martyr becomes the mother’s creation. By strengthening her traditional role of mother these women become part of the jihad. Indirectly she takes part on the battlefield that is exclusively reserved for men.

However, for women there is an added allure of the prominence gained by marrying an ISIS fighter, a status that grows even larger if her husband is killed. “A martyr, that is what I will become.” (Fraihi Reference Fraihi2006b) She laughed somewhat roguish; nevertheless she stayed serious. After all, her martyrdom is inseparable from her marriage. I met Oem Zaid 10 years ago in Antwerp; she was looking for a man who wanted to give his life for the jihad. “I want to marry a jihadi. He is my door to martyrdom, my door to jennah (heaven).” Oem Zaid was very firm about the education of her future son. “I will raise him to become a jihadi. I want to make him ready for al akhira (hereafter). Why? For instance, take the body of a martyr, it remains intact. No worm will eat it. And if my son dies as a martyr, he will receive 72 virgins at the doors of heaven. Moreover, his martyrdom will give 72 members of our family access to heaven. As the mother of the martyr, I surely count myself in.”

This sounds like fiction. Unfortunately, it is not. In Brussels the family Aberkan-Lachiri counts 10 foreign fighters in Syria. They are all connected to several terrorist attacks, from 9/11 to Paris. The engine of this family is mother Fatima Aberkan, aged 55 years old with three sons in Syria. She urged them to go. “Then you can die as a martyr.” Fatima is a good friend of the primeval mother of all female jihadists, Malika Al Aroud, the widow of Abd Al Settar, the jihadi who killed the anti-Taliban leader of the Northern Alliance Ahmed Masoud. The Belgian Justice Department considers Fatima as the “pasionaria” of the Brussels jihad scene, the breeding ground of the attackers of Paris. Fatima went several times to Syria, where she was a “cooking mother” for a jihadi company. Her role, however, was not limited to the kitchen. She recruited her sons and daughters and supported a recruiting network between Syria and Brussels. But she also walked around with a gun marked with her name (Van Vlierden Reference Van Vlierden2016).

By far, Fatima illustrates our one-dimensional view of female jihad. She can be a teenager, even a child, a mother, a lover. And sometimes everything in between. Behind every great man stands a great woman, behind every mujahid stands a great woman. Behind every child stands a warrior. And sometimes a woman just stands by herself. Being a warrior. Period. And that is not emancipation, is not feminism, it is another -ism: “oemmaism”Footnote ¹ . The question is finally, “What does ISIS want?” Children is what ISIS wants. The youth is the future, and they seem to know this in the so-called caliphate too. Since its foundation ISIS is staging new generations of little fighters. In training camps young boys learn techniques to kill unbelievers in an efficient and horrible way. In other camps, on the Internet, young sisters orate as professional protagonists their love for ISIS. They form a brother-and-sister chain with an undivided goal. The building of a new era. The building of a new empire. Sisters and brothers, the oemma is ready.