Azadeh Moaveni.
AZADEH MOAVENI: WOMEN OF ISIS BIOGRAPHY
GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS: AMONG THE WOMEN OF ISIS (2019)
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OUTLINE
In early 2014 ISIS urged Muslims around the world to come join the caliphate. At the heart of this story is a cast of young women who responded. They include Emma, from Germany; Sharmeena, from Bethnal Green, London; and Nour, from Tunis. These were women — some still in school — from urban families, some with university degrees and bookshelves filled with novels by Jane Austen and Dan Brown; many with cosmopolitan dreams of travel and adventure.
Azadeh Moaveni chronicles the lives of some of the thousands of young Muslim women - from the UK, USA, Europe, and Russia - who answered the call of ISIS to join them in creating an Islamic State. They were lured by the promise of adventure and the opportunity to create an ideal Islamic community. The reality was very different. Their hosts were violent criminals, who deprived the women of any freedom, and plunged them into a brutal, lawless, community in which they were repeatedly widowed and re-married.
The New York Times wrote of the book: ‘Azadeh Moaveni has written a powerful, indispensable book on a challenging subject: the inner lives and motivations of women who joined or supported the Islamic State militant group. It is a great read, digestible and almost novelistic, but it is much more than that.’
MEET THE AUTHOR
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Azadeh Moaveni (born 1976) is an Iranian-American academic, author and journalist who is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. She took her degree in politics and history at the University of California, Sant Cruz, and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo on a Fulbright Fellowship. Her first job in journalism was in Cairo, working for the Cairo Times. She later spent three years based in Tehran for Time Magazine. She then joined the Los Angeles Times, reporting from Iraq on its invasion by the USA. She has written several books, including ‘Hneymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran’.
