Manipulated, Maltreated Muhajirat -- Or Not?

Umm Hafs / Twitter   A March 2015 image of a group of women in head-to-toe Islamic coverings sitting on a BMW and waving automatic rifles that was spread online.

"As I speak, terrorists are methodically and intentionally targeting young people and children in this country. They are radicalizing, indoctrinating and grooming young, vulnerable people to carry out acts of terrorism."
Jonathan Evans, director general, MI5, Britain

"Just like child abusers groom their victims online and persuade them to leave their homes and meet them, male jihadists contact women through social media and online chatrooms, and build trust with them over time."
Sara Khan, founder, co-director, anti-extremism NGO Inspire

"ISIL are using similar online grooming tactics to pedophiles to lure Western girls to their cause."
Hayley Richardson, Newsweek

"Hey UK security, how do you feel that your citizen left your filthy country whilst listening to Salil as-Sawarim on the plane? Pathetic."
"Everytime I look at the map of Britain I think of how the mujahideen of Dawla [Islamic State] will conquer the land and take over spreading Islam by the sword."
Umm Muthanna, 21, British-born Muhajirat

For every young woman who falls victim to the blandishments and promises of pioneering a brave new world of Muslim female empowerment through jihad with the Islamic State, a dozen more are self-enrolled willingly in an excess of religious zeal and determination to fulfill obligations imposed by a Koranic-inspired injunction to become a female warrior for Islam. Proud of themselves, and the honour they impose upon themselves, they dress in the full 'modest' attire of retiring Muslim females knowing their place in Islamic society, with an impressive update; cradling not a child, but an AK47.

Not all women need to be recruited into the Islamic State caliphate, lured like moths to a flame. There are Muslima who gravitate of their own volition to become exemplars of all that a woman can be in Islam: a shrouded figure in black, yes, but how imposing that is, exuding the power of womanhood while posing at the same time as ferociously as any man carrying a lethal weapon and meaning to use it. Women have double lethality; their function as fecund mothers of future warriors and as themselves capable of fighting alongside men.

How utterly romantic. Who needs the pedestrian role of a refined woman whom violence repels, when one can instead present as resolute, courageous and indomitable as any man schooled to jihad. And, in fact, there is no dearth of such women eager to take up the challenge. ISIL's fourth Clanging of the Swords video, of battle montages, executions and massacres was accompanied by a jihadi a cappella song and it was this song that Umm Muthanna gloated over appreciating en route to Syria.

Remarking on the ISIL atrocity of a slaughter at a Shiite Mosque in Kuwait, she wrote: "Doesn't this bring peace to your heart?" She is also fond of upbraiding Muslim women for insufficiently covering themselves: "When all the non-mahrums [non-relatives] are able to see your lips, teeth, that is fitnah (deviance/trouble) beyond belief." And how is it that a 21-year-old former university student from East London has become a template for ISIL female warriors?

She took it upon herself to leave all that was familiar to her in Britain; her upbringing, her family, her friends, her university education, to clasp instead the imagined but unfamiliar role of heroine in a brave new world of Sharia, her destiny. Her religious idealism and conviction in the divine ordination of Islamic State as the new caliphate to transform first the Middle East, then conquest of the world, has carried her forward to meet her future fortune.

It may be puzzling to rational thinkers, but over 550 women have left their Western homes to go East. They initially go no further than online, to search ISIL propaganda. Once fully entranced with the images purveyed they are prepared to abandon the familiar and take up the creed that describes their future. It may be debatable whether they fully realize what lies in store for them, but it is a decision, to embark on that journey that they take, as fully functioning adults, capable of independent thought.

And they can, if it so happens, repent at leisure.