Women of Al Qaeda

While gender roles are evolving in many of today's societies, Al Qaeda has hoped to freeze them in a time of feudal traditions. Many of the organization's leaders have been intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and engineers who are perfectly at home with other aspects of modernity. But they differ violently with the West about the way women should be allowed to participate in daily life, viewing females as chattel in some cases, as revered mothers in others and almost always as icons to be protected from outside influences.

In jihadist propaganda, the invasion and violation of Muslim lands is intimately tied to the violation of Muslim women, either directly or through the corrupting role of Western values and attitudes. In its 1988 covenant, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas laid out its view of "the Muslim woman" as "the maker of men" and the educator of future generations--the person who prepares future fighters. "The enemies have realized the importance of her role," says the fundamentalist manifesto. "They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up the way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle."

In fact, many Arab and Muslim men, not just jihadists, see foreign occupation as a form of emasculation. (Just weeks after Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, Qasim Alsabti, the cosmopolitan owner of a Baghdad art gallery, told NEWSWEEK the U.S. occupation was "part of a plan to steal our souls--to castrate us.") Years under Israeli rule have broken down the structures of Palestinian families. "The image of the strong, providing father who can protect his women and children has been badly damaged and the male role has been eroded away," says Dr. Eyad Sarraj, director of Gaza Community Mental Health. That opens the way for radical groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad to teach young boys that the way to be real men is to be religious--and to be ready to die.

The recruitment of men and boys for radical Islamic groups exploits not only their anxieties and fears but their basic sexual needs and desires. For years, well before anyone had heard of Osama bin Laden, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood exploited the frustrations and confusion of people whose patriarchal societies were being challenged by urbanization and the inroads of Western ideas. In Cairo, where middle-class tradition demands that a man offer his wife a fully owned and furnished apartment before a marriage can be performed, or consummated, men often have to wait until they are in their 30s. The brotherhood preaches that piety is far more important than kitchen appliances, and couples can wed earlier if they follow the proper teachings. When the Iranian-backed Hizbullah militia started the systematic recruitment of holy warriors to fight the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s, its mullahs approved so-called mut'aa marriages, involving contracts of matrimony that could be almost as short as one-night stands.

Muslim men who come from traditional conservative backgrounds, or yearn for them, find themselves surrounded by the temptations of Western media. Increasing numbers actually find themselves living in the West, but on the margins of society and out of sync with its mores. The young men in the outer-city ghettos of France who recently rampaged for three weeks of nihilistic violence were, for the most part, brought up amid a confusing mix of their immigrant parents' conservative traditions, the casual sex of the hip-hop culture they see on the streets and in school, and denigrating pornography on the Internet. A women's organization called Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Passive Victims) has fought for years against a plague of gang rapes and horrific "honor crimes" in these neighborhoods. Last month, when a girl from a Muslim background in a Paris suburb refused to go out with a Pakistani immigrant, he doused her with gasoline and set her aflame. She remains in an induced coma with burns over 60 percent of her body.

The pressures of sexual frustration in this life and the lure of sexual as well as spiritual rewards in the next are exploited as part of a cynical spiel by jihadist recruiters looking for boys and men to be suicide bombers. Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians, and the various incarnations of Al Qaeda have all played on Muslim teachings that promise 72 houris--virginal beings with black eyes and alabaster skin--to attend the martyr's desires in paradise.