Muslim radicalization of European women
By Abigail R. Esman
World Defense Review columnist
19 December 05 International Desk
reportingwar.com
When it was learned earlier this month that Murielle Degauque, a pretty, blue-eyed Belgian woman wedded to a Moroccan, had traveled to Iraq and blown herself up in a suicide bombing, the world – and no less, the media – responded with surprise. How did this blonde, all-European girl become, of all things, a terrorist for Allah?
Get used to it. Radicalization among Muslims in Europe is on the rise, and not only those born Muslim are affected – nor are only males. In December of last year, the Dutch Intelligence Service, AIVD (Algemene Inlichting en Veiligheids Dienst), determined that young women were also beginning to join extremist Muslim groups.
"We can't really give a number," AIVD spokeswoman Miranda Hazinga told me at the time, "but we do see that there are women who are active, and that it's growing." Similar trends have been reported in Germany and England, though officials there were unwilling to speak about it further.
In Holland, the president of the Dutch chapter of the radical Arab European League, for instance, is a woman. Mohammed Bouyeri, a leader in the militant Islamist Hofstadgroep and the convicted killer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, surrounded himself with women before the assassination and his subsequent arrest. These "women of the Hofstadgroep," as they are generally referred to, are mostly the children of immigrants, enamored with male Hofstadgroep members whom they perceive as wise and gallant and strong – so much so that in at least one case, two women agreed to be co-wives in a bigamist marriage. (The second marriage, however, never took place; the husband/groom was arrested for suspected terrorist activity and has been in jail since last year.)
An increasing number of women are also joining radical Islam from the outside, as it were, first becoming Muslim and gradually turning to Takfiri, one of the more dangerous strains of the religion. One woman I know – call her Saskia – began dating an Egyptian immigrant she met in Amsterdam. "The next thing I knew," she says, "I was a Muslim and getting married in a mosque." Saskia and her husband are now divorced. She considers herself lucky that he was not particularly religious. "But I have a friend," she says, "married to a very devout Muslim. She stopped working, at his request, and started spending the whole day studying the Koran. Now she walks around in Islamic dress and busies herself with explaining Islamist beliefs to others." And speaking to a newspaper reporter last year, one of the Hofstadgroep women said, "It's the Dutch girls who are the most radical. They're almost like the men."
Why? And as more women join extremist groups, how likely is it that they, like Degauque, will sacrifice themselves for Allah, becoming suicide bombers for jihad?
Miranda Hazinga believes that, as for young men, these women seek an identity, a sort of "club" that will help define who they really are, while psychiatrist Carla Rus, who has worked for 20 years with Dutch-Muslim women, points to three other major influences: rebellion against parents or society; a longing for structure, for answers; and the desire to please a particular young man. And once the change begins, pressures from within the group can lead them to behaviors and ideas they'd never have imagined would become their own. "When women get out of it – and some do," Rus says, "they look back and say 'How could that have happened?'"
Islam in many ways makes life easy: your choices are made for you. There's no standing at the closet, wondering what to wear or what styles suit you best, no fretting about how to spend the day. In a Western society, too, it provides a sense of brotherhood: the women dress like one another and differently from their Western counterparts. They form a group, a kind of secret society or subculture, which can be particularly attractive for girls in their teens, while the freedom, as it were, not to have to choose a career, dress for success, or decide to stay at home, is equally appealing to women in their early 20s. (Similarly, some women have told Rus that they were drawn to Islam because of the lack of sexuality involved; disgusted by what they view as the objectification of women's bodies in advertising and other areas of contemporary culture, they find refuge in a world in which, they feel, they are appreciated not for how they look but for who they really are.)
Love will make people do all kinds of things, as many a song and tale will tell. "I can imagine," says Saskia, "that women who come into contact with these men, if you keep hearing that you're bad if you don't behave 'properly' (according to Islam) and you're crazy about the guy, then naturally, you want to be considered 'good.' And the pressure comes not only from the man, but from his whole family and his friends - including the women."
"They get into a kind of orbit," says Hans Jansen, an Arabic and Islamic Studies scholar in Amsterdam and the author of The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism as well as a Dutch translation of the Koran.
Once they're in that orbit, basic human responses take over. Rus points to classic psychology experiments that measure how likely we are to conform to social pressures, including one in which a group of subjects is presented with two lines, one clearly longer than the other. If one of the experimenters, anonymous in the group, insists that the shorter is in fact the longer line, gradually, most of subjects will begin to agree with him. "Sixty percent," says Rus, "can be persuaded to go against their own basic ethical beliefs or even what they see with their own eyes." That figure – 60 percent – remains stable across any number of similar studies.
Meantime, the girls' worlds grow smaller, peopled only by their fellow radicals, men and women who share the same views and continually reinforce them among one another, with less and less contact with the outside world. They go to mosque. They read the Koran. Often, their parents will not speak to them – or they, conversely, have rejected their families, viewing them as infidels or – in the case of Muslim girls who have simply become more radicalized, "too loose" in their Islam. There are no checks and balances in place. There is no other reality.
From here, the next step – towards martyrdom – isn't very far. Discussions with psychiatrists and Islam experts also indicate that a certain masochism, rage, and hopelessness often emerges in these young women: bulimia is frequent, for instance, and the suicide rate in Holland for Muslim girls is five times higher than that for non-Muslims.
The vulnerabilities are clear: by radicalizing, they no longer confront the conflicts of living in two cultures; they choose one, and one that tells them precisely what they need to do, quelling the uncertainty and sense of inadequacy many feel when torn between two worlds ("I was always an outsider," one of the Hofstadgroep women confessed in the Dutch press.). And when, having turned to Islamism, they now understand themselves as being secondary creatures, created solely to fulfill men and Allah, how easy it becomes to take the next step: insecure to start, now indoctrinated to believe herself to be of no use except to God, our young woman finds not only solace, but strength in the notion of becoming a martyr. Finally, she has a purpose. She has importance. She has value. Allah will take her in.
What's more, according to Jansen, the virgins said to await male martyrs in Paradise have their counterpart for women, described in Koran 56:17, which is commonly understood to read "amongst them, boys go round with cups." (In truth, however, says Jansen, "the proper translation would be: the peri ha-gefen – fruit, or sons, of the vineyard – goes round between them in cups." This same mistranslation is often cited concerning the proverbial heavenly virgins, an idea many scholars believe stems from a similarly erroneous translation for "fruit of the vine.")
But knowing this is only the beginning. How do we reach these girls? Is there anything we can do?
I don't know. It is too easy to come up with pat answers like "ballet class" and "after-school activities" and "girls' clubs;" but the fact is, this is a worldwide problem, and each culture, each community, works differently. (One possibility may be to encourage teachers to be alert for – and to respond to – emotional and behavioral changes in their students, starting, if possible, before things go too far (as, for instance, American teachers were encouraged to do after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School.)
What I do know is that something must be done, something that will help them find the answers and the peace that they are – so poignantly, so desperately – seeking; because if we don't, there are others waiting, preparing, ready to do it in our place.
— Abigail R. Esman is an award-winning author-journalist who divides her time between New York and The Netherlands. In addition to her column in World Defense Review, her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Salon.com, Esquire, Vogue, Glamour, Town & Country, The Christian Science Monitor and many others. She is currently working on a book about Muslim extremism and democracy in the West. |
