Introduction

One of the biggest on-going stories of 2015 was the Syrian refugee crisis with families attempting to enter Europe after fleeing the bitter four-year long civil war between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and opposition forces, including jihadist militants from the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).3 Amidst news of atrocities committed by ISIS against minority groups such as the Yazidis including the kidnapping and raping of Yazidi women, and filmed beheadings of kidnapped Westerners, the attraction of ISIS to some young Muslims born in Britain and their subsequent recruitment remains a source of bafflement and dismay. At the time of writing, approximately 700 British Muslims, including around 100 women, some with young children, were known to have left the UK to join ISIS (Witt, 2015). The sentiment expressed above, in response to the news that three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green, Shamima Begum (15), Amira Abase (15) and Kadiza Sultana (16) were believed to have travelled to Syria to join ISIS as so-called ‘jihadi brides’, is representative of the familiar racialised and gendered discursive frameworks used to objectify and infantalise Muslim women in the British media in both right and left leaning media publications. It is used to reify the notion that Muslim women are objects of pity, who do need ‘rescuing’ – from Islam, from their families, from their cultural backgrounds – and that ‘the West’ is the source of their freedom and safety (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Ahmad, 2003; Ahmed, 1992; Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2012; Spivak, 1988). Although this chapter opens with a quote referring to ISIS and its recruiting

of young British women – the so-called ‘jihadi brides’ – my aim is not to offer a

detailed critique or speculate on women’s motives for joining ISIS. Rather, I hope to contribute towards a process that seeks instead to move away from responding to pre-determined tropes of what young Muslim women should or should not do, or how they should or should not act. Instead, my intention here is to reclaim representations of young British Muslim women from the victim-focused and criminalised narratives currently dominating media and political agendas. I seek to do this through highlighting the agency of young British Muslim women through two particular spheres – their active participation in the public arena of higher education and their assertion of their Islamic rights through their personal marital choices. However, it is necessary to appreciate the socio-political context within which young British Muslim women’s lives are currently being interrogated. British Muslims have long been problematised by successive Labour and Conservative governments for failing to ‘integrate’ and held as examples of why multiculturalism is a ‘failed project’. Since the London bombings of 7/7, counter-terrorism strategies aimed at British Muslims through the PREVENT programme have effectively served to divide British Muslim communities and divert funds away from community projects and Muslim women’s support groups (Ahmad, 2013), in favour of ‘de-radicalisation’ and anti-extremist programmes that are widely regarded as having delivered little by way of countering terrorism while at the same time homogenising British Muslims as ‘suspect communities’ (Khan, 2009; Awan, 2012; Kundnani, 2009, 2014; Spalek, 2010). Despite the widely acknowledged failure of PREVENT, one of the first acts

of the newly elected Conservative government in 2015 was to attempt to introduce further powers aimed at silencing ‘non-violent extremism’ and from September 2015, made it a statutory duty for schools, universities, hospitals, councils and prisons to ‘prevent extremist radicalisation’ (Wintour, 2015). For universities, the new duty has been criticised for effectively turning university staff into ‘police informers’.4 Plans to extend the duty to include ‘vetting’ of external speakers to campuses were delayed after opposition in the House of Lords and later modified to only allow ‘extremist’ speakers as long as they were openly challenged by another invited speaker holding opposing views at the same event (Travis, 2015a). A number of academics (this author included) signed an open letter in July 2015 warning that the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 focused exclusively on religious ideology as the primary factor behind terrorism without supporting evidence, and ignored research highlighting the significance of ‘social, economic and political factors, as well as social exclusion’ as drivers of political extremism and violence (Letters, July 2015). In a further twist, attempts were made to create a ‘culture of spying’ on

Muslims and subvert attention away from political and structural contexts associated with extremism; the Metropolitan Police initiated a campaign entitled ‘Working with mothers to prevent tragedies’ (2015), which was aimed at Muslim mothers under the assumption that they were best placed to recognise and challenge any signs of extremist behaviour from daughters. Apart from

highlighting how responsibility for extremism was placed firmly within Muslim families – and specifically Muslim mothers – as noted by Kang (2015), Muslim women are portrayed as both the source and solution to extremism. Her research with Muslim women students on their views of media and government responses to young Muslims and radicalisation and specifically in relation to the Metropolitan Police’s initiative, showed how young Muslim women had begun to feel personally responsible and concerned for younger siblings and family members. However, there was also irritation at the prevailing stereotypes inherent within media and policy discourses exemplified in this latest attempt to tackle radicalisation, particularly the assumption that Muslim mothers were assumed to be nothing more than ‘mothers’ and were held as singularly responsible for their children’s behaviour, and that fathers were oddly ignored in the campaign material suggesting an assumption of emotional distance between Muslim fathers and their daughters. The impact on Muslim women’s civil liberties as a result of heightened levels of scrutiny is obvious and links into other research on the impact the shootings at the Paris offices of the satirical cartoon ‘Charlie Hebdo’ had on Muslim students’ right to freedom of expression (Grant, 2015; Khan and Mythen, 2015). This was not the first time attempts have been made to co-opt Muslim women

into spying on families through superficial programmes (Rashid, 2014). The establishment of the National Muslim Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG) in 2008 under Gordon Brown’s premiership was initially publicised to support the empowerment of Muslim women in Britain, even though the NMWAG was funded through PREVENT. It attracted widespread criticism from the outset with accusations that Muslim women were being used to ‘spy’ on their families and communities and that the group was not representative and therefore unable to deliver meaningful change at the grassroots. Two-and-a-half years later, the group collapsed coinciding with the public resignation of its Chair, Shaista Gohir, who accused the NMWAG of being little more than a ‘tick box exercise’ and ‘not serious about the role of women in influencing public policy…’ (Gohir, 2010). Here, it is worth drawing on Lila Abu-Lughod (2002, 2013), when highlighting issues around cultural relativism and ‘difference’. She deconstructs the notion of ‘saving’ and offers a timely critique of discourses framed within a concern for human rights typically used to construct an image of Muslim women as ‘needing’ Western intervention or pity. Directly engaging with issues of domestic violence, honour crimes, and female genital mutilation, she highlights how, contrary to Western insistence, disempowerment, inequality and abuse are rooted in – and products of – patriarchal authoritarianism at various levels of society and within the family, and poverty. Speaking within the context of the US-led military assault on Afghanistan in its ‘war on terror’, which it claimed was necessary in order to ‘liberate’ Muslim women, she urges caution regarding who Muslim women form partnerships with and asks us to:

[…] look closely at what we are supporting (and what we are not) and to think carefully about why. How should we manage the complicated politics

and ethics of finding ourselves in agreement with those with whom we normally disagree?