Black Banners of ISIS: The Roots of the New Caliphate by David J. Wasserstein

Author:David J. Wasserstein [Wasserstein, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General, Religion, Islam, Law, Social Science, Islamic Studies
ISBN: 9780300228359
Google: EpYuDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 030022835X
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:40:47.781000+00:00

A Hidden Battle of the Sexes

Living a traditional, secluded lifestyle offers one way of fulfilling the IS female dream. Another way in which women are empowered by IS and at the same time fill an important, almost vital, service role for the movement is recruitment. Women not only constitute an ideal additional source of recruits; they also, as we saw in the case of Ahlam al-Nasr, work in other ways. Cooking is only one task they can take joy in doing for the menfolk: they can also encourage others to join the mission.41 One rather obscure study has looked intensively, by manual means rather than using computer algorithms, at those involved in “extreme networks.” It sought to see how important women are to the connectivity of users in those networks. While men terrorists far outnumber women, the authors sought to find out whether men were also more important in networking and encouraging others to take part. To answer this question, they used a factor that they called BC, or “betweenness centrality,” to measure how effective networkers of each sex were at receiving and sending along messages within the network. Heavy on jargon and mathematical formulas, and with a rich array of tables and diagrams, the study nevertheless comes up with easily understood conclusions: women “tend to be key players in both high-profile online and offline settings.” More strikingly, while men tend to dominate numerically, they found that “women emerge with superior network connectivity at the collective level that is associated with benefits for system robustness and survival.”42 In other words, it is women, not men, who are doing the bulk of the Internet communications that can lead some to join the movement. This does not mean, obviously, that women are communicating only with women, but it does mean that women are doing more communicating on the Internet than men, and more effectively—that is, they are doing more to spread the word. In an IS world that confines women to their homes, proselytizing on the Internet may not only offer a way out of the domestic sphere, but also represent a more useful and at the same time more enjoyable form of electronic activity than reading, whether Jane Austen or even Ibn Qayyim.

In the end, though, the proper way for a Muslim woman to be a woman is to understand that “the purpose of her existence is the Divine duty of motherhood.”43 She is there to bear children to ensure the future of Islam, and with it, the future of IS.

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