The author of The Bookseller of Kabul tells the valid anecdote of two jihadi daughters and the father who travels to Syria to try to change their minds
Ayan is 19 and Leila only 16 when their parents receive an unexpected email from them. “Please do not be cross with us,it was sooo hard for us to leave without saying goodbye.” They are travelling to Syria to join Islamic State. They want to relieve Muslims, they say, and “everything from fetching water for the sick to working in refugee camps”.
The names of the two sisters have been changed,but the anecdote – related by Åsne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul – is entirely valid. The girls are Norwegian-Somalis, and from a devout but tolerant family. They’ve grown up and attended kindly schools in Baerum,the Norwegian municipality with the highest percentage of millionaires and the greatest divide between rich and destitute”. What disturbs in the account of their childhood is not its foreignness but its comfortable ordinariness. Ayan in specific is a promising student. She develops crushes on boys and expresses indignation at women’s oppression. Then she transforms from open and approachable to sarcastic, patronising and loud” – hardly an unusual adolescent trajectory.
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Source: guardian.co.uk