Finding the West in ISIS Propaganda
Reading ‘Women of the Islamic State’ with Xenophon’s Oeconomicus
While teaching a course on sex and gender in Greco-Roman antiquity last spring, I came across a Washington Post article announcing the publication of an English translation of “Women in the Islamic State: A Manifesto”. We had spent half a semester analyzing literary works by authors such as Aristophanes, Ovid, and Plutarch in order to understand ancient attitudes concerning the capabilities, roles, and relationships of men and women. We approached every text with the goal not of reconstructing the real experiences of ancient women, but instead of looking beyond the rhetoric of these texts to the values and concerns that animated them.
Immediately, I knew that my students and I could tackle this piece of ISIS propaganda with the same tools we had used to examine the gender ideologies of Greek and Roman texts. On the one hand, I wanted my students to realize that they didn’t just know how to analyze Greek and Roman sources: they had developed a critical reflex they could apply outside of the discipline. I also hoped the exercise would help me understand how ISIS attracts women to its cause, not only from the Arab world, but also from the West.
This interest in engaging in a rational, rigorous reading of ISIS propaganda was admittedly motivated by a desire to overcome my own visceral feelings of outrage and aporia. It’s hard, as a classicist, not to feel a profound sense of loss at the images of the fallen temple of Bel, or news of the gruesome death of one of Palmyra’s most devoted scholars, Khaled al-Asaad. These scenes — along with the growing refugee crisis, horrendous violence against women, and brutal murders of Westerners — make me feel helpless: what can I, a classicist on the other side of the world, do to end ISIS’s destruction of human lives and irreplaceable cultural artifacts?
Using my training in Classics to analyze the ISIS manifesto became a way for me to try to understand the causes of the violence I was seeing, instead of simply hanging my head in despair. What neither I nor my students expected, however, was that in a polemical treatise that is explicitly anti-Western we would find so much in common with one of our ancient Western texts, the dialogue between Socrates and Ischomachus in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. We were shocked by the degree to which the ancient and modern texts shared similar ideals about the role of women in society.
Both ISIS partisans and their Western opponents ought to be deeply disturbed by this observation, because it undermines a basic rhetorical tenet both sides use to galvanize their followers: the enemy is a barbaric “other” whose lifestyle, customs, and beliefs are diametrically opposed to our/their own. For millennia, great cultural clashes between Europe and the ‘barbarians’ of Asia have been played and replayed in the literary accounts and artwork of the Western tradition since its very beginnings: the Achaeans and the Trojans, the Greeks and the Persians, the Romans and the Parthians, if we limit ourselves just to antiquity. As recently as the last Republican presidential debate, Mike Huckabee said the controversy over the Iranian nuclear deal “is really about the survival of Western civilization.” At the same time, ISIS has been very clear that it wants to create a caliphate that will bring about an apocalyptic war with Western civilization, which it blames for nearly every ill faced by the global Muslim community.
Yet given the manifesto’s similarities to Xenophon’s text, are those who migrate to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS truly escaping Western society — or are they just adopting an earlier version that has been filtered through a Quranic lens? And if ISIS propaganda concerning women looks so much like the writing of Xenophon, an historically popular and influential author for Western thinkers, what does that similarity say about our own intellectual heritage and assertions of cultural enlightenment? When we focus on how the role of women in society is imagined in the ISIS manifesto and in early Western tradition, the stark rhetorical differences give way to reveal that “us” and “them” are much less distinct categories than either side may be willing to admit.
Originally published in Arabic by the Al-Khansaa Brigade, an all-female paramilitary police force in ISIS territories, the manifesto seems to be aimed at recruiting Saudi women to the cause. It begins with a general attack on Western secular culture and its far-ranging and pernicious influence on all aspects of Muslim society. “Confusion” is a key term used to describe what has happened to Muslims because of Western secularism: confusion about the importance of religious devotion, the proper studies to pursue, the interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims, and most of all, about the roles of men and women (pp. 11–2).
The document responds to such confusion among Muslims by clarifying the role and ideal life for Muslim women, revealing the truth about how women are treated in ISIS territories, and exposing the deceptive model of Islamic theocracy in Saudi Arabia. As the manifesto explains, ISIS’s ultimate goal is to restore the entire Muslim community to a righteous path of devotion to God. The author(s) set their exposition of the ideal role of women within this grand vision for the ummah.
Relying heavily on quotations from the Quran, they espouse a complementary view of gender in which men and women have separate (yet equally important) natures and roles that need to be fulfilled in order for society to function properly (pp. 17–8). These roles were established by God, and “if roles are mixed and positions overlap, humanity is thrown into a state of flux and instability. The base of society is shaken, its foundations crumble and its walls collapse” (p. 19). According to the manifesto’s author(s), Muslim men and women are suffering around the world today because modern secular society’s false notions of gender equality have created a fundamental confusion about gender roles. As a result, men have become emasculated and women must do men’s work in order to survive. The manifesto claims that ISIS will restore the divine order and thus alleviate Muslim suffering.
How do the author(s) describe this divine order? The essence of womanhood is defined as “sedentariness, stillness and stability”, while men are characterized by the opposite qualities of “movement and flux” (p. 19). As a consequence, women are expected to stay within the physical confines of the home, except in extenuating circumstances, such as jihad, religious study, or working as a teacher or doctor (p. 22). Traveling to pursue a secular higher education — trivialized as studying “the brain cells of crows, grains of sand and the arteries of fish” (p. 21) — is deemed contrary to the sedentary nature of women and a threat to the divinely established roles for men and women. In contrast, the wearing of the veil and the concealment of women within the household are praised as ways that Muslim women can preserve their sedentary serenity against corrupting outside influences.
Given the restrictions of their divinely-created natures, women in ISIS are to fill only two roles in society: wife and mother. As wives, they are subordinate to their husbands, but no less crucial to the running of the household: the man is described as “a commander who oversees and is capable”, while his wife “obey(s) him and carr(ies) out his requests.” The position of a wife in the household is equated to that of an executive or, even more glamorously, “a director, the most important person in a media production, who is behind the scenes organizing” (p. 22). The author(s) are clearly aware of ISIS’s reputation for violence against women, and they take time to emphasize that good Muslim men (i.e. ISIS men) love, honor, and support their wives — only weak men use their dominant position to overpower women.
As mothers, women are responsible for raising devout Muslims. Not only did God give women the physical and psychological capability to endure birth and child-rearing, but in the afterlife He will repay them for their labors. Mothers are tasked with the role of educators, and consequently, the manifesto is emphatic in its denunciation of female illiteracy and ignorance — another nod to how many people in the rest of the world perceives radical Islam as a belief-system opposed to women’s education.
The type of knowledge suited to women, however, is strictly limited: the manifesto prescribes a detailed curriculum for the education of girls from ages 7–15, including lessons in religion, Arabic, Islamic history and Sharia law, as well as household skills like accounting, knitting and cooking (p. 24). Their education is intended to prepare them as Muslims, as wives who need to manage a household, and as mothers who will someday need to educate their own children. Study, the pursuit of religious truth, is distinguished from work, which is activity located outside of the house and ideally performed by men.
The author(s) of the manifesto give a nod to the fact that women’s lives are not always ideal and that they will at times be forced to go beyond the home to work. Yet women in the workforce in ISIS are emphatically not to be treated as equal to men, since, as the author(s) argue, a notion of gender equality does not accommodate the physical needs of women (menstruation, pregnancy) or her responsibilities to her family and religion. In the exceptional case when a woman must work outside of the house, the manifesto stipulates that her workday and workweek will be limited, daycare services, family leave, and a minimum of two years (!) of maternity leave will be provided (p. 25).
My students and I were shocked to find such progressive-sounding solutions to the problem of work-life balance in such a conservative text. Indeed, up until this point in the text, the manifesto’s depiction of women in society generally ran along the lines one might expect in a fundamentally theocratic, patriarchal culture. Yet here we discovered that ISIS rhetoric contains more than an exhortation to fundamental Islam and a call to arms against Western civilization.
Not only in the discussion of work accommodations, but also in the case-studies in the text’s final section, the manifesto is attuned to modern, earthly concerns. These case-studies tell of allegedly real women in Mosul and Raqqa who have enjoyed the restoration of many rights and privileges due to ISIS’s occupation, including their right to wear the hijab, increased public safety, access to fair trials, welfare for the impoverished, free healthcare, and access to education. Of course, the manifesto’s claims that ISIS creates a paradise for Muslim women contradicts the reports of many real women who have escaped ISIS-controlled territories. But whether or not these case-studies are true accounts, their stories of security, justice, religious freedom, and an improved quality of life would be understandably appealing to women — in the Arab East, but also the West — who are socially and economically vulnerable.
As we worked through the manifesto in class and tried to piece together how the author(s) imagine the role of women, the qualities of the ideal woman, and the relationship between the sexes, my students kept coming back to Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. The two pieces couldn’t be more different in tone, audience, and readership: “Women in the Islamic State” is a polemical treatise written (ostensibly) by women for a female audience, whereas the Oeconomicus is a more playful philosophical dialogue between male interlocutors, written by a man for a male audience. Despite these differences, the ways the ISIS manifesto and Xenophon schematize their discussions about gender are remarkably similar.
In the Oeconomicus, Socrates is doing what he does best: asking Athenians what they do and how they do it. While discussing the meaning and value of wealth with Critobulus, Socrates reports what he learned from a conversation he once had with one Ischomachus. Ischomachus is a “noble and good man” (καλὸς κ᾽ἀγαθός, i.e. an aristocrat), and Socrates probes him to find out what is so noble and good about his occupation: managing his own assets (6.12–7). While the dialogue covers agriculture, buying slaves, and other aspects of being a wealthy landowner, the very first topic they discuss is Ischomachus’ wife: how did she become so adept at managing the household that Ischomachus can spend much of his time away from home (7.3–5)?
To answer Socrates’ question, Ischomachus recalls a few important conversations that formed his training of his wife. Once he deemed his wife (whose name is never given and whom I will hereafter refer to as “Mrs. Ischomachus”) tame enough to hold a civil conversation, he led her — via the Socratic method — to an understanding of the essential natures of man and woman and the essential roles of husband and wife.
According to Ischomachus, the god designed men to be able to withstand the physical challenges of outdoor work, like fighting, farming, and herding, so that they can bring the fruits of these labors home. Women, on the other hand, are confined by their weaker physical constitutions to indoor work, such as weaving, but they are endowed with physical and intellectual capabilities to bear children and manage the household. The wife acts as a queen bee, tending to the hive, rearing the young, and keeping the drones (slaves) working hard for the colony by supporting their health, morale, and education. Marriage is therefore a mutually beneficial partnership between man and woman that leads to the procreation of children and the prosperity of the household.
Ischomachus’ second conversation with his wife teaches her the benefits of an orderly, organized household, so that she can better fulfill her duty as the overseer of what comes into and goes out of the home. While this section mostly consists of comparisons to the arrangement of armies and the outfitting of ships, it also reinforces the central executive role of the Athenian wife. Ischomachus may be the man who shows his wife the possibilities of their house, but she is the one who operates its day-to-day organization: “I therefore told my wife to consider herself as guardian of the household laws, and to examine the equipment when she saw fit, just as the garrison commander inspects the guard, and to check whether each item is in a good condition, as the Council examines horses and cavalry” (9.15, trans. S. Pomeroy).
Ischomachus’ view of gender and marriage is part of the same complementary school of thought that underlies the ISIS manifesto. Although the manifesto defines femininity in terms of sedentariness and masculinity in terms of movement, the end result of women remaining within the house and men working outside of it conforms to Ischomachus’ division of the genders. Even the emphasis on the executive and didactic roles of women in the household is the same in both texts, with the one major difference being that Muslim women are teaching their children to become devout Muslims, whereas the Athenian wife is expected to teach her slaves to be loyal to their master.
After explaining what a wife is in abstract terms, and then showing her how to do her daily duties most efficiently, Ischomachus discusses a final matter with his wife: her appearance. One day, he calls her out for wearing a full face of makeup and platform heels (10). He compares her augmented appearance to him lying to her about his wealth, or instead of staying healthy merely painting himself to look ruddy and muscular. These examples prove to her that makeup is a deception of nature and one’s partner, not an enhancement. The way for Mrs. Ischomachus to be truly sexy to her husband is to be fresh-faced, hardworking, driven to learn and teach, and fit from her household exercises like kneading bread dough and doing the laundry. Her sex appeal, therefore, should not only be natural, but also a result of excelling at her wifely duties.
As far as feminine aesthetics, the ISIS manifesto literally demonizes revealing clothing, hair removal, piercings, and plastic surgery (“This urbanisation, modernity, and fashion is present by Iblis (the devil) in fashion shops and beauty salons”), instead favoring concealment rather than modification of God’s creation. Ultimately, women in both societies are charged with reinforcing and replicating a patriarchal system within their household, and they are promised a sort of freedom and equal honor if they stay within the strict confines of their roles.
Over the course of our class discussion, my students successfully applied the tools of close reading they had developed to pick apart the ideology, appeal, and rhetoric of the manifesto. We all left that class with a much better idea of how ISIS imagines and projects itself to the Arab world, and what about their rhetoric might actually resonate with real Arab women. At the end of the class, I asked my students what we should make of the similarities between the ISIS manifesto and the attitudes found in Greek and Roman sources. We all struggled to articulate what this surprising confluence of ideologies meant, but looking back, I have a better sense of the significance of this classroom exercise.
Essentially, what we did in that class was to look at our (alleged) enemy with sympathetic eyes, or rather, to try to look at the world through their eyes in order to understand the reasons for their beliefs and actions. This is the exact opposite of conjuring up an image of a barbarian “other” to describe our enemies; instead, it is the ability to find our shared humanity even among our greatest enemies. Like the rhetoric of the barbarian “other”, this capacity to sympathetically imagine the enemy is part of the legacy of Classical civilization. It is as old as as the Iliad, with its compassionate depictions of Hector’s farewell to his wife and son, Priam and Achilles’ shared tears of grief, and the laments of the Trojan Women at the return of Hector’s body. Instead of following the Western intellectual tradition of alienation, my students and I explored the possibilities of the Western tradition of assimilation.
There are hopeful signs that some of those in power in the United States are moving away from the alienating, culture-clash rhetoric of the past towards a more sympathetic, assimilating view when discussing the conflict in Syria. This past July, President Barack Obama said with regards to ISIS: “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas and more attractive and more compelling vision.” In the most recent Republican presidential debate, Gov. John Kasich (OH) asked us to reflect on “why young people, and educated people, rich people, schooled people, have tried to join ISIS,” the very question that inspired me to bring the ISIS manifesto to my class. He then continued to say that it is the West’s duty to “to live a life bigger than ourselves…to make centers of justice so that we can battle the radicals, call them out for what they are, and make sure that all of our people feel fulfilled in living in Western civilization…”
To this end, we should reflect on the issues raised by the manifesto’s case-studies that resonate so much with liberal concerns: a society that does not support an individual’s decisions about family and work, an inability to freely express one’s religious beliefs, a lack of access to affordable education and healthcare, a corrupt justice system, and a lack of economic opportunity. In fact, almost exactly the same list of socio-economic issues was the heart of President Obama’s address on how to close the gap between black women in America and their white peers at the recent Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual awards gala. When a society neglects these fundamental issues, it affects not only women, but also the men around them — truly, the whole community. Admittedly, it’s easier said than done, but finding long-lasting, global paths towards these goals will ultimately be the best way to diminish the appeal of destructive, radical movements like ISIS.
Mallory Monaco Caterine received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2013 and is now a Lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include Greek biography and historiography, Hellenistic history, political culture and rhetoric, and female leadership in antiquity. She is currently working on a monograph on the depiction of Hellenistic political life in Plutarch’s Lives.
