Īlmost everything ISIS has officially published on the role of women since the circulation of the al-Khansaa document reinforces the position set out in its pages. But it does license the suspension of this norm under exceptional emergency circumstances, where there are not enough men around to protect ISIS-controlled territory from enemy attack, and only then after a religious leader has issued a fatwa validating this desperate measure. (As the Atlantic’s Kathy Gilsinan nicely put it, “‘jihadi girl power’ often comes at other women’s expense.”) According to a “ manifesto” circulated by the al-Khansaa Brigade in January 2015, a woman’s preeminent role is the “divine duty of motherhood.” The document also advised that it is incumbent on women to “remain hidden and veiled.” Addressing the issue of whether it’s permissible for a woman to participate in combat, the document is clear in forbidding any such participation. You can define the role of mother, wife, recruiter, and even religious enforcer as “active,” if you like, but it’s primarily as a supporter that ISIS women find their calling in the global jihad.įor an organization so elaborately permissive in its use of violence, ISIS has proved obsequiously conformist on the matter of gender, adhering to the strictest conventions of misogyny and male rule-implemented, ironically enough, with the active and enthusiastic collusion of their female supporters. ![]() ISIS, in marked contrast, has strongly opposed any such innovation, although it has enlisted women as propagandists and established an all-female morality police-the notorious Raqqa-based al-Khansaa Brigade. ![]() While the precursor to ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq, found a more proactive role for women, this was done largely as a tactical innovation and to shame wavering male supporters into action. A woman’s involvement in jihadism, according to the conventional jihadist line, is crucially important, but best performed from within the confines of her home, where she can service the emotional and sexual needs of her husband, procreate, and raise the next generation of “lions.” But, as terrorism scholar Nelly Lahoud has meticulously demonstrated, jihadist ideologues have “explicitly excluded” women from discharging this obligation. The classical doctrine of jihad stipulates that all able-bodied Muslims, regardless of sex, are obligated to fight in defense of their territory and faith. She is also almost entirely fictitious, conjured up by ISIS’s foes to amplify the group’s demonic extremity and desperate unravelling. She is a deviant among deviants, exploding the most elemental code of the jihadist worldview: namely, that men are men-which is to say, first and foremost, warriors-and women are women-which is to say, first and foremost, wives and mothers. Burqaed and belted-up to the nines, she is the ultimate Other, transgressing not only civilizational prohibitions against murder and suicide, but also deeply ingrained assumptions about what it means to be a woman in patriarchal societies where women are accorded lesser status. ![]() In the historical pantheon of societal folk devils, few figures are as rivetingly transgressive as the ISIS female suicide bomber.
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