Chapter Eight

WIRED

The Internet

At speaking events, I’m often asked how one connects with religious extremists online. It’s simple, I tell them. Search for propaganda films on YouTube. Click on the film and hit the “Like” button. Or find comments posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites that call individuals to brave death for a cause by migrating to Syria to fight for injustice toward Muslims. In the virtual world, girls are alone, open to strangers, and free to be a different person. With enough clicks and posts, as well as questions about conflicts in the Muslim world, it is relatively easy for a male or female terrorist recruiter to flag a potential recruit. Often, girls take pseudonyms that begin with Umm for “mother” in Arabic, even when they are not yet married and have no children. It is a symbol of what’s to come, of the new life they will pursue in the land of martyrdom.

Girls create fictional accounts to hide their true identities and intentions. It’s also the easiest way for them to conceal their online activities from their parents. With “transient anonymity,” a term coined by Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, girls are uninhibited on the Internet. In their hyperconnectivity, they are free, spending hours of time away from the real world. This organic communication gives Muslim teenage girls looking for a purpose that includes marriage and martyrdom an online community of extremists, who are always available, accessible, and approachable. Since 2016, at least one hundred girls from Western countries have attempted to migrate to Syria.

The London girls were certainly not the first to join ISIS from Europe; security experts report that they were among at least fifty other young women to radicalize in 2015. The news of the missing Muslim girls sent shockwaves throughout the Muslim community in London, as well as the world, raising the question: Why and how did this happen? I remember the image of the three girls on the video camera footage the day of their departure from London’s Gatwick Airport, dressed in fashionable winter clothing, and then again in a short video clip of the three girls released in March 2015, only a month later, as they were gathering their luggage and stylish handbags in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep, just north of Aleppo, Syria. That video confirmed to the world that the girls had made their way into ISIS territory. Their disguise and deceit had worked. The girls proved to other girls contemplating the long journey from Western countries that anything was possible, if planned correctly—a journey that began by clicking a button on the Internet.

The three girls in the UK had known each other for years. They had attended the Bethnal Green Academy in southeast London, a haven for immigrants. In the 1880s, Huguenots and Jews from France migrated to this area. These refugees included Ashkenazi from Eastern European countries such as Poland. In East London, easily accessible by the Thames and Lea Rivers, commerce depended on shipbuilding, which also attracted the first wave of migrants from Bangladesh during the British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent. The would-be ISIS brides lived in the district of Tower Hamlets, mostly inhabited by residents of South Asian origin. The Bethnal Green Academy has a diverse ethnic student population. Three-quarters of the students speak another language other than English.

Of the three teenage girls, fifteen-year-old Shamima Begum was the youngest. A very pretty girl, she was known to be quiet, timid, and seemingly close to her family. She slept in the same bed as her mother, stayed home, and went online when she came home from school. Analysis of Begum’s tweets and hashtags showed that the teenager was following at least seventy extremists. Her home life showed signs of trouble and trauma. When her mother died of lung cancer, she moved into her grandmother’s house and then moved in with her father, following his remarriage less than two years after the family’s tragedy.

The trail of radicalization extends backward from Begum to Aqsa Mahmood, the recruiter whom Begum contacted, a woman who left for Syria when she was nineteen years old. Mahmood, who had been privately educated in Glasgow, persuaded British Muslim girls to migrate to Syria. On Twitter, Mahmood asked Begum to send her a DM, or direct message, before she left her home. Using the moniker Umm Layth (“Mother of the Lion”), Mahmood became the most important millennial muhajirah, or migrant, and propagandist for ISIS. “Our role is even more important as women in Islam, since if we don’t have sisters with the correct aqeedah [morals] and understanding who are willing to sacrifice all their desires and give up their families and lives in the West in order to make hijrah [the journey to Syria] and please Allah, then who will raise the next generation of lions?” she posted online.

Mahmood, a beautiful South Asian girl, had been in touch with a male ISIS recruiter who groomed the Scottish resident for months. Her mother, Khalida Mahmood, told the press that she found a suspicious text from an English-based ISIS recruiter, Adeel ul-Haq, on her daughter’s mobile phone in May 2013, just six months before Mahmood’s escape to Syria via Turkey. Only after ul-Haq was jailed and began serving a six-year sentence for recruiting girls like Mah-mood did the family tell the press that they had spotted signs of radicalization, but it’s unclear how or if the parents tried to stop her. Her father said, “They [ISIS men] prey on the vulnerable, brainwash the kids, then break them from their families and, of course, it’s all a secret and exciting for the young people until it’s too late.”

In a CNN interview, the father said that Mahmood “was the best daughter we could have, and we don’t know what happened to her, no.” According to her parents, Mahmood was a model child from a loving family. She was studying medicine. She liked Western things: Coldplay, cosmetics, and Harry Potter. Unlike the UK girls who went to Syria, who were raised in an immigrant neighborhood in East London, Mahmood grew up in Pollokshields, a placid residential suburb in southwest Glasglow. Mahmood’s father went to Scotland in the 1970s; a former famous cricket player from Pakistan before he settled in the West, he opened a successful line of hotels, earning enough to raise a family of four children. He paid for his daughter’s tuition at private school. Known for her ambition and attention, Mahmood went to Shawlands Academy and then enrolled at Glasgow Caledonian University to study diagnostic radiotherapy.

There are few details about her social life except from her online messages. In social media, she talked about the pressures of her family to do well and the evils of feminism that force young women to want material things. Once a fan of J.K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard character, Mahmood denounced Rowling’s creation as pagan. She dropped out of university in her second year and expressed anger at the Syrian regime’s treatment of Muslims. On Twitter, her circle of friends expanded; she followed blogs and sites that reinforced a destructive worldview.

Two days before Mahmood left home, she persuaded two friends to go to Glasgow’s Buchanan Street bus station and store a rucksack for her in a locker. Not knowing what was in it or why, they agreed. Inside was everything Mahmood needed for her oneway journey to Syria: a plane ticket, money, toiletries, and clothes.

Then she disappeared.

Three months later, Mahmood called her parents from Syria and told them her plan had worked: their prospective son-in-law was an ISIS fighter. She promised her family that she would meet them in Heaven.

I can’t imagine the pain of her mother, who, after learning of her daughter’s escape, said, “I never slept, I felt as though I was dying. My children, my in-laws, my husband, every one of us, cried through the night. My baby had gone and nobody was doing anything to stop it.”

I certainly don’t know what the parents should or could have done to prevent their daughter from sliding down the slippery slope of savagery. Could the mother have taken away the phone? Or stopped her daughter from chatting with a strange man? Did the parents allow Mahmood to have friends outside the home and her extended family? Did the girl feel restrained, restricted, or reserved? What kind of life did Mahmood have before an ISIS recruiter brainwashed her? And why didn’t the family see signs of radicalization? Did they notice the change in their daughter’s behavior? These are the kinds of questions that are useful, not only to law enforcement agencies, but also to families struggling to keep their children safe from terrorist recruiters.

After Mahmood left Scotland, she helped the British girls prepare for Syria. She sent them a checklist and a step-by-step guide on what they should pack. In electronic messages, Mahmood wrote, “If you are married or plan to marry, you might want to bring things you would like to wear in private. You’ll also want to bring clothes for both summer and winter that you can maybe wear around your husband, maybe things that aren’t so appropriate around sisters, for example short dresses.”

In a post on her Tumblr site, Mahmood told the UK girls to bring beauty products, medication, and electronics, as well as prenatal vitamins and painkillers should they become pregnant. Her list was very specific, including everything from waterproof warm boots in winter to mosquito after-bite cream and spray. She wrote, “If I could advise you to bring one thing it would be organic coconut oil (maybe grab an extra jar for me as well lol). This is such a helpful product with multiuse—body moisturizer/hair oil, etc. . . . and large zip lock bags very useful for keeping things in place as well as travel cases, as you can be living out of your suitcases for months so it helps keep things organized . . . and a charger—they only sell fake phones here [in Syria].” (Mahmood was right about coconut oil—it’s the one beauty product I live by.) As one of the few girls who left early for Syria, Mahmood served as a travel and survivor guru to other girls.

A prolific writer online, Mahmood reportedly became a leading figure in the Al-Khansaa Brigade, the feared all-female force in charge of enforcing strict laws on women and children. Among these laws: no woman is allowed outside the home unless accompanied by a male guardian; women must be covered in a full-length veil at all times in a public space; women must not talk to or shake hands with men; women must observe the ban on cosmetics; no woman is allowed to listen to music; women are encouraged to remarry, if a husband dies fighting; and so on. As a leading figure, Mahmood helped other girls coming to Syria adjust to their new lives.

She offered security tips to prevent the London girls from being detected by the police and airport authorities. “Avoid searching things from your home Wifi and devices you plan to bring, this way you have nothing that can be held against you in case you’re caught. Don’t download anything that could cause suspicion—do all that once you arrive. In fact, I would advise you have things on your devices that could throw the authorities off if they look through them.” She reminded the girls to be discreet, telling no one about their journey to Syria, especially the girls’ parents. “I can say from experience it’s not an easy thing but you need to think of what’s best for the people you love,” wrote Mahmood, who only called her family after she arrived at the Turkish border in November 2013, four days after her departure. The day she left home, she gave her father a long hug goodbye, saying, “Khuda hafiz,” a greeting in Urdu for “May God be with you.”

One of the first British Muslim women to travel to Syria was twenty-four-year-old Grace “Khadijah” Dare, who left in 2012 to join ISIS with her baby son, Isa (Arabic for “Jesus”). Born to Nigerian parents, Dare is unrecognizable in photographs when cloaked in black next to her young husband, Abu Bakr, a Swedish man. Unlike the other London girls, Dare was raised as a Christian and converted to Islam in her teens. Dare changed her name to Maryam, the mother of Jesus Christ, and became a prolific social media user, writing under the name “Muhajirah fi Sham” or “immigrant in Syria.” She tweeted about ISIS public executions and celebrated the beheading of James Foley. In a propaganda video, Dare is with a young boy named Isa. The little boy is wearing an ISIS headband and says, “We will kill the infidels over there.”

Dare set an example for other girls that life—a husband, children, and a home—is possible in war-torn Syria. Online, other women declare their love and desire for marriage and martyrdom. Writing as Umm Ubaydah, one woman posts, “I wonder if I can pull a Mulan and enter the battlefield,” making a reference to the Disney character who defied all odds when she dressed as a man to fight alongside men. A publication by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue titled Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS describes the flow of Western female fighters to Syria and details their day-to-day experiences in the new country.¹ In another post, Umm Ubaydah writes, “We are trying to build an Islamic state that lives and abides by the law of Allah.” Other women write about the Afterlife. Umm Khattab says she has “no desire to live in this world [as] her aspiration is the hereafter [because] we love death.”

Despite their new lives, some women miss their families. Although Mahmood never returned to Scotland, she admitted that the greatest struggle “in the land of jihad is your family.” She wrote a verse for her mother titled “Ya Umee” (“O Mother”) on her blog site to express her sorrow for not saying goodbye to her:

I swear to God preparing yourself to leave [your family] is difficult because you are leaving the woman who kept you in her womb for 9 months . . . even if you know how right this path and decision is and how your love for Allah comes before anything and everything, this is still an ache which only one who has been through and experienced it can understand.

No matter how committed Mahmood was to ISIS, she was conflicted. She knew her family was begging her to return to them. She heard her mother crying on the phone when she called Scotland. She wrote, “I swear to God, it’s so hard to hear this and I can never do justice to how cold hearted you feel.”

This duality of emotions creates conflicts for some young women, who then try to leave when most cannot. For those who want to escape, it is a heart-wrenching struggle to live one way, with an unshakable belief that Syria is the new land of Islam, and also to know that they had another life, perceived as less spiritual or worthy but one that included their parents, siblings, school, and friends.

Unlike the three UK girls, Mahmood traveled alone. The London girls had each other, and because they were classmates, one former radical told me it was unlikely that they would have gone to Syria on their own. Together, they planned the trip, making a shopping list of items to take with them, and ultimately making the journey together.

Neurologist David Eagleman, in his acclaimed book The Brain: The Story of You, offers a physiological reason for why peer pressure strongly compels behavior in teens. He writes,

Areas involved in social considerations (such as the mPFC) are more strongly coupled to other brain regions that translate motivations into actions (the striatum and its network of connections). This . . . might explain why teens are more likely to take risks when their friends are around. How we see the world as a teenager is the consequence of a changing brain that’s right on schedule. These changes lead us to be more self-conscious, more risk-taking, and more prone to peer-motivated behavior. . . . [Therefore,] who we are as a teenager is not simply the result of a choice or an attitude; it is the product of a period of intense and inevitable neural change.²

Mahmood used her Tumblr blog, titled “Diary of a Muhajirah” (Arabic for “migrant”), to promulgate her views: “The media at first used to claim that the ones running away to join the Jihad as being unsuccessful, didn’t have a future and from broke down families etc. But that is far from the truth. Most sisters I have come across have been in university studying courses with many promising paths, with big, happy families and friend and everything. If we had stayed behind, we could have been blessed with it all from a relaxing and comfortable life and lots of money.” Mahmood did not fit the overrated profile once used to identify potential recruits: a low-income or middle-class individual from a broken home who showed signs or symptoms of distress or trauma. She was an example that someone from an entirely opposite background could be susceptible to radical messages.

On Al Jazeera English’s Everywoman show, I was asked about girls who joined terrorist groups years before ISIS existed. My answer and research at the time focused on women choosing violence as a means of protest. “Women protest the loss of their (male) family members, the loss of their communities and the meltdown of society, and the loss of their homeland,” I said. Today, the same argument can be applied to the way girls and women join terrorist groups to protest their mundane, meaningless lives and find meaning in religious extremism. Some protest the current conditions of war and conflict, believing that participation in violence will change the status quo; this could explain why some girls, like Mahmood, express their desire to fight for Muslims in Syria: they want to bring peace and stability to Muslims in a war-torn country. They believe that they are agents of change.

Other girls and women protest the West in general, believing that a puritanical, live-by-the-book way of life is the “true” practice of Islam. Years ago, before the Internet played a major role in radicalizing girls, male recruiters used offline networks and sometimes depended on older women to recruit young women. I remember an earlier website, which has since been deactivated, called Mujahidaat (“Female Fighters”), with writings by and for women on how to join violent groups. This was before the takeover by ISIS as the premier extremist group that needed female members to help men create the mythical Muslim state.

At a conference held at Tufts University in Massachusetts several years ago, I gave a presentation on the writings of men to implore women to join religious extremism. Some of these men are now dead, but their written work lives on. Violent extremists and propagandists have released a stream of books, articles, and online publications that target Muslims for siding with the West. On the Internet, the forever vehicle of information, the writings of men are made tangible and are continuously relevant. Al-Qaeda’s former leader of operations in the Arabian Peninsula, Shaykh Al-Hafith Yusuf bin Salih al-Uyayri, also known by his nom de guerre Swift Sword, wrote the seminal book on the subject, titled The Role of the Women in Fighting the Enemies.³ He wrote, “The reason we address women . . . is our observation that when a woman is convinced of something, no one will spur a man to fulfill it like she will . . . the saying behind every great man stands a woman was true for Muslim women at these times, for behind every great mujahid stood a woman.”

In his book, Al-Uyayri cites examples of women from previous battles to convince modern-day women of their instrumental role. He urges women to be “the cradle of the men . . . [and] carry out [their] active role in the current war between Islam and all the disbelieving nations, without exception.” He says that without women, men will lose wars.

His counterpart, a cleric in Saudi Arabia named Shaykh ibn Jibreen, issued a fatwa, or legal edict, allowing a Muslim woman to participate in jihad on certain conditions: “When if she is fighting the kuffar [disbeliever], on foreign territory, and if the act [of violence] will ease her pain and inflict damage on the enemy.” At various speaking events, I have been asked if the late kingpin of terrorism, Osama bin Laden, endorsed women in terrorism. While he never called upon women to strap on the bomb, for example, or take up arms, he did recognize the role of women in warfare. In his famous “Declaration of War Against Americans,” Bin Laden said, “Our women had set a tremendous example for generosity in the cause of Allah; they motivate and encourage their sons, brothers, and husbands to fight for the cause of Allah in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and in other countries . . . our women encourage jihad.”

I have argued this point for years: that women are valuable to male-dominated terror groups for the different roles they play as mother, daughter, and sister to men. Women have allowed male groups to survive; and women, half of any society, are the future of a state built on extreme religious practice. The Islamic State group, al-Qaeda’s stepchild, is more aggressively recruiting women than any other terror group and convinces its followers of a utopia that does not exist in Syria—this false narrative is a key political motivator for both men and women.

In the early days of Islam, Muslim women helped their men to victory. They tended to wounded soldiers. They carried messages and money. They called on men to fight to protect Muhammad. They were the mothers of the believers.⁴ Women were skilled in warfare. They were given swords to use in fighting by the early Muslim men. One of the most celebrated female fighters was Nusaybah bint Ka’ab, also known as Umm Umarah (“mother of Umarah”). She fought in Islam’s second Battle of Uhud in 625 CE, lost one arm, and suffered eleven wounds as she protected her Prophet.⁵ After Muhammad’s death, Muslim women continued to fight. A Bedouin woman, Khawlah bint al-Azwar, dressed like a knight and entered the battlefield with other women. She “slashed the head of the Greek,” a reference to the Byzantines who retreated after the Muslims declared victory.⁶

What the early women did not do, however, was commit acts of senseless violence. Only those who sacrificed their lives in defense of their honor, their homes, or the Prophet could be called martyrs. In Islamic law, the UK girls and the Scottish propagandist were disqualified as martyrs for joining the Islamic State, a violent group acting only in the name of Islam. The killing of innocent civilians, destruction of property, abuse of non-Muslim women, and suicide operations are all forbidden in Islam.

The eldest of the three London girls, Kadiza Sultana, was sixteen years old. An iconic photograph of Sultana with her two girlfriends is the typical image of ISIS women. But in truth, the girls and women of ISIS are no longer independent. They have been stripped of emotional, physical, and spiritual freedom and live within the confines of Raqqa; their lives, now tragic, will lead to senseless death, which is why some girls and women hope to escape. Sultana was one of those girls who died trying.

Her family lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, said that Sultana tried to run away from ISIS, which is “like trying to escape Alcatraz.” We know that ISIS has brutally killed girls and women planning to escape. Once you’re in, there is no going back. The lawyer told a British newspaper, the Guardian, that Sultana was probably killed in summer 2015 when an airstrike hit a residential building, most likely from a Russian bomber.⁷

In response to the news of her death, the lawyer told the press, “The family are devastated. A number of sources have said that she has been killed and she has not been in contact with the family for several weeks. Over a year ago, she had been talking about leaving. There was a plan to get her out.” Sultana’s conversations with her sister suggested that she wanted to leave ISIS. “I don’t have a good feeling. I feel scared,” she said. “You know the borders are closed right now, so how am I going to get out? Where is Mum? I want to speak to her.”

As a mother, I wonder if children who radicalize show signs or tendencies in advance, before taking the leap. In my own lectures, supported by two decades of research, I talk about how this happens. Online recruitment begins in the most benign way. A girl (or boy) expresses interest in Islam, and within hours, if not days, she gains new followers. She becomes part of an ongoing conversation about Islam and events in the Muslim world, including the crisis in Syria. Her interest in conflicts leads her into the ISIS pit—a recruiter eventually finds her. Suddenly, she has new friends—more friends than she could have imagined in the real, offline world. She is part of a larger community, a network of violent followers who have the same desire to belong to a violent extremist group.

A series of events and emotions explain radical behavior. Girls may be overwhelmed with rules and rituals at home. They may feel or actually be socially isolated. They might feel estranged from their families and friends, be marginalized by the school community, be victims of abuse or trauma experienced as a child or a young adult, long for something and someone, have a desire to know their religion, or have been bullied in childhood. Sometimes, girls are shamed if they are found with a boyfriend or take part in illicit sexual affairs. This crippling, burning shame is so toxic that a girl feels she has no option but to join extremism to restore her honor. Growing up Muslim in America, I could understand the difficult experience of having to embrace a mainstream Western culture while obeying the rules of tradition and norms practiced and expected of girls at home. This seeming contradiction between the two different cultures and identities often causes confusion and conflict, and it compels some girls to make unwise choices.

“Being in love, or in a state of infatuation, runs a neurobiology that can rival being on drugs,” Dr. Anne Speckhard, an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Georgetown University and director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, told me. Love online feels real and is rewarding. An artificial love affair. Their desire for romantic fatalism escapes logic. Finally, the girls of ISIS can belong to someone other than their parents. Kalsoom Bashir, codirector of Inspire, an organization dedicated to educating and empowering British Muslim women, is widely interviewed in the UK on the ways young women turn to violence and highlights early signs of radicalization. According to a 2015 Independent article, “Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show, [Bashir] said the group’s ‘very specific campaign’ was targeting vulnerable young Muslim women and capitalizing on their sense of injustice, isolation, alienation and the struggle between cultural expectations and the demands of a liberal society.”⁸ This was an all-too-common theme that I heard from young women and girls in my own interviews—their lack of knowledge about Islam coupled with familial and societal pressures can create personal conflict and confusion (e.g., how to be a “good” Muslim).

For years, I have been speaking and writing about the importance of context and culture and why it’s important to understand the personal background of each woman or girl who joins violent extremism. Although each case is different—no two Muslim women are alike—there are common themes that explain why some females join ISIS. It could be “religious illiteracy,” a term Bashir uses to provoke discussion about Islam in Muslim families and communities to contradict violent propaganda and misinformation about a peaceful religion.⁹ Of the barriers that contribute to female radicalization, Bashir believes the lack of religious knowledge in some families and their unwillingness to discuss extremism and religion widens the intergenerational divide. Ignorance of Islam along with cultural expectations for girls to be honorable and homebound can also contribute to the difficulties they face when expected to live in two very different worlds—one that is faith-based while the other is secular and Western.¹⁰ Other barriers for females include the lack of “strong credible Muslim leadership” and fear of challenging the extremists’ hateful narratives.¹¹

Since 2000, Bashir has committed herself to educating the youth. As a former Muslim chaplain at the University of Bristol, she helped improve the rights of students: equality, freedom of speech, the right to study, the right to question, the right to be protected from prejudice and extremism, and the right to live in a safe and nurturing environment. In her work, Bashir believes in strengthening the Muslim youth through education from credible Muslim sources. In an article for Inspire, she writes, “Education is the cornerstone of our society. It is crucial to building the knowledge and skills of our young people, and also in nurturing their values and beliefs.”¹² That education should include learning and understanding Islam as a peaceful, loving religion, which involves critical thinking skills.

Bashir continues, “Teaching students to constantly question what they are told or shown is so important in developing the skills needed to resist those who aim to force ideas and values upon them. . . . My concern is that in our misguided anxiety not to offend, we actually risk failing those who we should be helping to protect. Extremist ideologies, unless challenged, can find fertile breeding grounds among vulnerable members of society.”¹³

Learning about Islam online or from unlearned Muslims is a dangerous trend. Rather than turn to a born-again-shaykh on the Internet, it’s absolutely essential to seek information from credible sources, scholars and educated Muslims who have a nonliteral approach to faith. Luckily, being raised in America and gifted with a secular education, I had the right to question everything about faith: What is the meaning of jihad? Why do Muslims pray? What is the purpose of fasting? What is the path to Heaven? And much more. However, for many Muslim girls and boys in ultraconservative families, questioning the faith is perceived as blasphemous, bad-mannered, and, at its extreme, sacrilegious.

Therefore, questioning authority is not always accepted. I know this from presenting my own questions to imams and scholars throughout the Muslim world. Ultraconservatives argue that questions about scripture, law, and oral traditions cannot be asked. Bashir has spent her adult life trying to answer some of the most difficult questions, or at least find answers to them. In order to empower the youth and women, she wants women to know that they are equal to men in the eyes of God. Like Bashir, I believe that educating women and girls on their rights in Islam can empower them against violent extremists, Islamophobes, and ultraconservative men and women.

Working with Bashir is her partner and the codirector of Inspire, Sara Khan, who is an award-winning counter-extremism and women’s rights campaigner. In January 2018, Khan was appointed lead commissioner for the newly created Commission for Countering Extremism by British Home Secretary Amber Rudd. Khan is unafraid of the hard-line Muslims who defame her for her opinions. Interviewed by the Sunday Times in an article titled “I’m taking on the Islamists. But where’s your backbone?”¹⁴ Khan is not concerned by the threats she receives and the abusive messages on social media—threats of gang rape or death. Her new book, The Battle for British Islam: Reclaiming Muslim Identity from Extremism, is peppered with stories such as one about a thirteen-year-old girl from Birmingham—an hour’s drive from London, with a diverse and divided Muslim population—who was radicalized online and believed that Syria should be an “Islamic Disneyland.”¹⁵ Khan says the girl’s behavior was flagged early enough, and she is now back in school. Her story reminded me of the East African girls in Denver, which I discussed in chapter 5. The girls were captured on their way to Syria and returned to their families. They, too, went back to school again.

In the UK, the government and law enforcement agencies are actively involved with local Muslim communities to prevent radicalization. A leading activist in Birmingham and radio talk show host named Ahmad Bostan believes in the UK government’s goodwill to address the risks of radicalization in the Muslim community, despite the backlash. In his kind voice, Bostan told me, “First of all, terrorism and extremism are dealt with in different ways. The government has allocated separate funding and separate initiatives to deal with extremism under the Stronger Britain Together campaign and the Prevent strategy.” We agreed that the principles of the government’s programs, such as tackling terrorism and protecting society, are also based on Islamic values.

Birmingham is the UK’s second-largest city. Famous for its musical scene, the densely populated city boasts of ethnic diversity. Emerging from an average eighteenth-century market town as the birthplace of the “Midlands Enlightenment,” the city became one of the country’s first manufacturing towns and today is the fourth most visited city in England by international visitors. A native of Birmingham, Bostan described for me the different Muslim communities, some of which he believes to be intolerant of other Muslims and the British way of life:

A huge tragedy we’ve had in this country [the UK] is how our mosques and madrasas are regulated. The reality is that they’re not regulated and that has been a problem for a very long time. We have girls and women who go to the mosque and madrasa and are taught Islam, perhaps for a few hours every day, and there is no way to know what they are learning, and what interpretation of Islam is preached. What do we know about the teachers? Do the teachers have a previous criminal record? Many of the Muslim teachers come from overseas countries, and it’s important to know their background, the practice of Islam, and their views of women.¹⁶

Bostan believes that male community leaders have a responsibility to provide opportunities for women.

The title of the community leader is used too often, when the central problem is that we don’t have enough women coming forth and taking leadership positions in the Muslim community. We, as a community, are not doing enough to put women forward, which is a major issue. . . . It results in young women growing up with a serious lack of role models from their religious community.

Bostan began his first radio show when he was eleven years old. Now in his twenties, he’s an experienced television host. Bostan encourages dialogue on the most sensitive issues: women’s rights, ultraconservative preachers, and the rise of religious extremism. An irrational interpretation of Islam with a moderate mask feeds the hard-line narrative that bars Muslim girls from achieving success.

Girls grow up with this idea that they are inferior to men, that Islam dictates this, that they have certain shortcomings or insufficiencies that come from their faith. As a result, girls are searching for answers. When they go to the mosque, they are taught the Quran and the hadith but they don’t know what the Quran means. They don’t know the context of the oral traditions. So, when ISIS comes along and offers a translation of the Quran that empowers girls, then they no longer feel inferior or insufficient. They don’t think they are a lesser class than men.

Bostan blames the narrow, literalist, and Wahhabi doctrine for the radicalization of girls and young women in Europe. “Historically when we speak about Wahhabism, it is in the context of the Middle East and North Africa, but now we see an increasing number of women and girls from South Asian communities being drawn to this ideology, and that is new.”

The challenge lies with identifying the right people, Bostan continued. “It’s important for Muslims to be passionate about fighting extremism and to come forward and work with women. We have a lot of self-appointed leaders in the community, but we need people who live normal lives as Muslims in the UK. They are proud to be British, confident in faith, and stand up for girls and women’s rights.”

What does engagement look like online? I wondered. It seemed clear to me that extremists’ narratives were easily recognizable—we know hate when we see (or feel) it. Countering hateful ideologies falls under an entire field of study called “strategic communications” that develops the stories, messages, and images that reinforce true Islam and rejects ISIS’s use of narratives to seduce its followers. For years, I have been working with various local and international partners to implement programs and strategies to defeat the violent narratives that come from religious extremists.

On my desk is a propaganda guide from March 1990 written in Peshawar, a northern town in Pakistan. Titled On the Jihadi Media: How to Communicate with the Public, it is infused with misquoted scripture and a list of communication tools to reach the Muslim population. These tools include pamphlets, posters, printed slogans, cassette tapes, radio, rumors, and more. Some of the earlier tools are outdated, but the need to influence populations is the same. Long ago, extremists recognized the power of media messages and the importance of their distribution and delivery. Today, we know that extremists are tech-savvy, broadcasting their messages via online newsletters, communiqués, blogs, and a wide range of social media sites. Their reach is unlimited and their mastery of the Internet inexhaustible. In 2015, ISIS released a newsletter titled How to Survive in the West, encouraging the use of propaganda to gain public support and providing lessons in Internet privacy: “Your normal Internet activity might consist of you checking your emails, playing some games, searching for recipes etc. All this will ensure you are ‘clean.’ Nothing guilty can be traced to your IP address.”

Laura Scaife, a lawyer and technology consultant, offers a practical approach to engaging young people before they radicalize.

There is so much content generated every day [online]. There needs to be more done to filter it . . . and we need more involvement from the government. Let’s say you search for anything on terrorism or terrorism-related material online, it’s important to see something that will encourage you to think again, with different arguments to challenge the views you might have. A lot of this is tied to Google Advertising, where they can encourage people from the first page rather than page seven of extremist content. We need to make sure we have access to the counter-narrative or at least balance what girls are informed of and what they search for.¹⁷

Others have argued that this approach is an infringement on an individual’s right to privacy and an attack on freedom of speech. But Scaife believes that social media intervention is necessary to protect young people from being exposed to extremist messages. She said, “Social media sites need to be more active in developing tools to facilitate the process; there needs to be more discussion on how surveillance works and what the government can do to search results of young people online. . . . There is a very negative public perception and a lack of general understanding on how cyber-security works.”

While online surveillance is controversial, proponents argue that it’s the only way for governments to know what curious teenagers are viewing. In her own guide, Scaife made a list of social media sites that young people should avoid. “I can’t get anyone in the UK government to engage me on this issue. Not a lot of government departments believe it’s in their remit or you get ignored,” she said.

A single-path solution is simplistic. Helping young people to be Internet-safe is one way to manage their online fake friendships and activities. In my lectures, I have emphasized the need to strengthen Muslim families, a priority for community leaders, government programs, faith-based groups, and schools. We know that in the absence of strong families, girls turn to other authority figures. Many girls who feel isolated at home by their parents from the broader community turn to the online space for safety, sex, and a sweetheart.

In the short term, parents can give their girls more freedom and the opportunity to maintain an open and loving relationship with them at home that provides an environment without fear of punishment for wrongs committed or thoughts revealed. In my work, I have interviewed numerous girls who are afraid of their parents, too scared to tell them what they need. One girl expressed her desire to be an artist. Her father disagreed, and the mother, submissive to her husband, said nothing. Before the girl turned twenty, she was married to a man twice her age and then later taken from her husband’s home by her overbearing brother for reasons that remain unknown. In less than a year, she was divorced from a man she scarcely knew. Years later, this girl, now a thirty-something woman, is half-mad. She screams at the wall, fights with her mother for trying to force her into another marriage, and turns to painting once again, in silence. That woman is my cousin.

In the long term, Islam is countering violent extremism. I speak openly about the need to connect with the Quran; to learn the intricate meaning of scripture; to understand the context of revelations; to live with charity, compassion, and concern for one’s immediate community; and to avoid Google Shaykh.