Two Sisters by Asne Seierstad
Two Sisters By Asne Seierstad Virago £18.99 Oldie price £12.90 inc p&p
Whatever happened to the schoolgirls who ran off to join the jihad? They went from all over Europe after the Syrian war began, creeping from loving homes, carrying suitcases packed sensibly according to advice posted online by Isis brides: bring thermal undies, a torch, good-quality bras. I felt terribly sorry for them.
Those three British schoolgirls from Bethnal Green or the two Norwegian sisters described by Asne Seierstad – it’s really not hard to see why they left. They were told they were special, destined for a higher cause. It’s what every teenager dreams of. There’s also the promise of a holy warrior husband, not to mention the catalogue of Isis eye candy on Twitter.
Behind many a teen girl inclined to martyrdom, there’s a charismatic man. Seierstad tracks back the sisters’ indoctrination to Mustafa, a handsome Koran teacher with links to Al-qaeda.
Sarah, the girls’ mother, thought Mustafa’s extra Koranic tuition would shore up her daughters’ faith against the corrosive effects of secular Norway. Instead, it tipped them into extremism.
Seierstad’s tremendous, eye-opening investigation takes us step by step through the events that led Ayan and Leila Juma to leave safe, liberal Norway for a war zone. She chose the Jumas because, as she says in her explanatory afterword, only a few of
the ninety-odd Norwegian families (including Sarah and Sadiq Juma’s) whose children joined Isis, have ever come forward. Most parents of Isis runaways hope, if they lie low, the shame will subside and the problem pass.
Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam (2006) was the first exploration of the peculiar stress suffered by the children of Muslim immigrants to secular Europe.
Seierstad’s Two Sisters, a decade later, proves the same difficult point. Sarah and Sadiq are Somali refugees, grateful to be rescued by Norway. They have fractured identities, but they have chosen them. Their children, caught between cultures, feel unsettled, neither one thing nor another. They’re open to suggestion. ‘Somali children who grow up in Norway become either extremists or atheists,’ observes Sarah.
Ismael Juma, her son, is the atheist Sarah is thinking of – almost more of a disgrace in her eyes than his vanished sisters. Ismael, funny, uncertain and sad, is the book’s most attractive character. His correspondence with his sisters is fascinating. The girls rebuffed Seierstad’s attempts to get in touch, but continued chatting online to Ismael long after they left, keeping him updated on their lives in Raqqa (‘It’s so cooool here’) and trying to persuade him to join them.
‘You accept so many things I never thought you would,’ Ismael writes to Ayan. ‘How can you believe it’s morally correct to force people to convert or pay a tax because they see things a different way?’
Ayan replies: ‘Do you know I get money from the state here? I don’t lift a finger and I get everything I need!’
Ismael: ‘You’re boasting about being handed everything on a silver platter? You sound pretty spoiled.’
‘Be realistic, Aya,’ he says in a later conversation. ‘I know you’re smart. You’re going to get killed in the bombing. You think that’s a good way to die because then you’ll feel you stood for something and took part in jihad. That’s it.’
Ayan: ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA better to die than to live life like a loser.’
Ismael: ‘You’re not a loser if you don’t live like one.’
No one will find Two Sisters a comfortable read. It’s grist to no one’s mill and that’s why it’s so very good.
I had idly assumed that all the runaway girls who grew up in the West would in the end regret their decision. I had imagined that, when they saw the beheadings and the misogyny in Isis, they’d pine for liberal Europe. Two Sisters has set me straight.
Seierstad records an online chat Ayan has with a friend, an Iraqi, who mentions how shocked she was by the rape of Yazidi and Kurdish women by Isis.
Ayan interrupts her: ‘They’re not women, they’re spoils of war.’ ‘What?!’ ‘It says so in the Koran. It’s allowed.’ ‘They’re being abducted and used as sex slaves!’
‘ Ghanimah,’ Ayan repeats. ‘Spoils of war.’
Whatever happened to the girls? We don’t know. Seierstad doesn’t know.
Perhaps they were long gone, even before they left.