[LINK] "My daughter, the terrorist"

[rfmcdonald]

"Bonnie and Clyde '10"
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is the second time I've featured this striking image. The first time was in April of this year, when the woman shown here, 17 year old Dzhanet Abdullayeva, gained posthumous global fame when she joined another woman from the autonomous Russian republic of Dagestan in becoming a suicide bomber on the Moscow subway after their Islamic terrorist husbands were killed in battle with Russian forces. This image was widely interpreted as the icon of a 21st century Bonnie and Clyde, a couple bound to each other by their cause and vice versa, making use of and remaking the conventions of popular culture to show just what someone would do for love. This Guardian article, written by Luke Harding, goes into the fine sociological and biographical detail that got passed over in the immediate aftermath of the suicide bombing, examining the life of the other woman, 27 year old schoolteacher Maryam Sharipova. In visiting her family and her village, in trying to understand the dynamics of the civil war waged by Islamist terrorists across the North Caucasus and the dirty war waged in retaliation by the federal government, Harding illuminates a lot of stuff. Paradoxes feature prominently, as people like Maryam's father Rasul try to understand how (and try not to recognize that) the very together and competent and normal young woman they knew could become a suciide bomber.

Washing hangs on the line in the front yard of the family home; shoes are neatly stacked; there is a satellite dish; sparrows flit past a trailing vine. Mariam lived in the downstairs front bedroom. She decorated the walls a tasteful magenta. Her possessions are still there: L'Oréal moisturisers; a bedside table and mirror. There are books in Arabic. More surprising is the heap of women's fashion magazines – Health And Beauty, Good Advice and Glamour.

Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, Rasul tells me he finds it impossible to believe that his daughter was a suicide bomber. "I don't know what happened," he says. "We, too, are seeking answers. She knows. Allah knows. That's it." He offers his condolences to the families of Muscovites blown up on their way to work. Typically, bombers leave a last testament before going on their final mission. But Mariam left no note of any kind. "We've looked everywhere. We've found nothing."

I examine Mariam's old schoolbooks: they are covered in neat, diligent handwriting. She had been taking classes in Arabic. Rasul shows me the verbs she was busy noting down in her exercise book on 7 February, weeks before her death. "She wasn't the kind of person who could do this," he says. "She was self-confident, someone who defined clear goals, and who wanted to achieve them."

The collapse of the stable Soviet order, and the increasing immiseration and political oppression of the isolated territories on Russia's Caucasus border like Dagestan, seems to have triggered a sort of a phase transition: the old share in the same Soviet-era culture as the other people in their age demographic, while the only really standout option for the young is another glittery supranational ideology demanding a certain amount of sacrifice. Harding's not optimistic.

Back in Balakhani, Rasul talks eloquently of the 300-year struggle that has been waged in the mountains of Dagestan against Russian occupants. He mentions Sheikh Mansur, who in 1785 organised the first large-scale rebellion against Russian expansion into the Caucasus highlands. It was Mansur who also issued a call for gazavat, or holy war, against the Russians, a slogan still used by today's guerrillas. (Increasingly, thanks to the internet, they see their campaign not as a local struggle but as part of global jihad.) The most celebrated anti-Russian warlord, Shamil, surrendered in 1859 just down the road after Tsarist forces trapped him in the Dagestani village of Gunib. At the same time, Rasul also expresses his fondness for Russian writers Pushkin, Lermontov, Sholokhov and Tolstoy: "I admire Tolstoy for his stand against violence."

I leave with few answers, but the tragedy of Mariam Sharipova, it strikes me, may ultimately be a generational one, with today's disaffected Muslims far more radicalised than their Soviet-educated parents. These days, the major platform for revivalist Islam is no longer the madrasa but the web, an area in which Mariam was a specialist and through which she may have been pursuing a secret life. Rasul quotes a line from Tolstoy's War And Peace: " 'Good people make up the majority. Evil people are fewer in number, but they are very organised and can control the masses.' This is still the case today."