Simon Cottee is a writer with an interesting mission:  he wants to clarify the intentions of Muslims.  He is not an apologist.  He just thinks that we are not being sufficiently respectful if we do not take seriously their real intentions.  Towards that end, he wrote a book about former Muslims who have left Islam (The Apostates).  This book describes those once belonging to Islam who decided to leave, and how hard it is to do so, and how much “elements in the left and academia are happy to denounce Muslims who exercise their freedom to abandon their religion as ‘native informers’ who have gone over to the side of western imperialism.”  Respecting those human beings who elect to become Muslim apostates means taking seriously both their basic right to leave a faith, and their real reasons for doing so.

Now Cottee has penned a piece in Foreign Policy that takes on several similar claims about why Western women elect to join the Islamic State (ISIS).  Here, too, his principal interest is seeing the truth of these actors as human beings.  He rejects specious claims that they were seduced by attractive jihadis, or that they were merely “groomed” by recruiters.  Rather, he says, the overwhelming evidence is that these women seek out the recruiters themselves.  They join ISIS on their own, and for reasons of their own.

Over the past year, I have spent an unhealthy amount of time tracking the social media activities of Western English-speaking female Islamic State supporters as part of a wider research project on the subculture of Western jihadism…. And what these women – or at least the more brazen and vocal among them – want they have made abundantly clear. Far from being slaves to their sexual desires or victims of the predatory machinations of men, many Western women join or aspire to join the Islamic State because they want to – because the Islamic State, unlike the secular liberal democracies in which they live, makes sense to them and reflects their fundamental moral and political convictions. What they want is to live in a properly authentic Islamic state in which Islamic law – sharia – is fully implemented. Specifically, they want to live under the “caliphate,” which, they believe, it is their divine duty to support. What they do not want is to live in the West, for a multitude of reasons. They do not want freedom, as understood by classical liberal scholars as negative freedom – the freedom to do what you want, so long as you don’t harm others. And they do not want feminism.

They want submission: to God’s will and his divine law.

Cottee cites further studies supporting his own independent findings.  There is no reason to doubt the validity of his work, however.  It lines up with the specific claims of even American female Muslims who have sought membership in ISIS.  In the case of Jaelyn Young for example, the young woman from Mississippi whose father was a police officer, she made very clear that she saw herself as the leader.   “I’m the one who made the contacts,” she told her family in a letter she left behind when she fled to join ISIS.  “I’m the one who made the plans.”

The rest of Cottee’s profile is worth reading for those who want further psychological insight into these women.  His basic point is made, however.  The women who seek out the Islamic State should be taken on their own terms.  They are nobody’s fools.  They are very serious and intensely committed, and this is what they have decided that they want.