Women & Islamic StateISIS releases an instructional manual for women in ISIS-controlled areas

An all-female militia set up by the Islamic State (ISIS) has published a 10,000-word manifesto on how women in Islam should live according to the group’s interpretation of the Quran. Girls are told to marry at the age of nine, women are banned from going to work, and both must remain indoors and leave the house only in exceptional circumstances. “It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by 16 or 17, while they are still young and active. Young men will not be more than 20 years old in those glorious generations,” the document reads.

The Guardian reports that the document, Women of the Islamic State: Manifesto and Case Study, was released in Arabic last month on a jihadi forum. Believed to be written by the media wing of ISIS’s al-Khanssaa Brigade, it has been translated into English by Charlie Winter, a researcher on jihadism in Syria and Iraq at the London-based counterterrorism think tank Quilliam Foundation. The treatise notes that it has not been sanctioned by “the state” — meaning ISIS or its leadership, but it will help “clarify the role of Muslim women and the life which is desired for them” and “to clarify the realities of life and the hallowed existence of women in the Islamic State.”

According to the document, from ages seven to nine, girls will learn three lessons: fiqh (understanding) and religion, Quranic Arabic (written and read), and science (accounting and natural sciences). From age ten to twelve, girls will undergo more religious studies, learn about the position of women, and the rulings of marriage and divorce. Domestic skills including textiles, knitting, and basic cooking will also be taught. Ages thirteen to fifteen will encompass lessons on motherhood and Islamic history, focusing less on science.

In his analysis, Winter says the document, written in Arabic, is aimed at recruiting women living in the Gulf. The manifesto insists that women in Saudi Arabia have suffered “barbarism and savagery,” and should migrate to ISIS strongholds.

“In a jihadist perversion of feminism, then, the importance of women is championed. She is deemed to play a central role,” Winter says. “However, this is only insomuch as the jihadist ideology permits her. She may be important, but she faces myriad restrictions and an imposed piety that is punishable by hudud (fixed) punishments.”

The manifesto goes on to claim that the Western model for women has failed, corrupting them with ideas and “shoddy-minded beliefs instead of religion.” “The model preferred by infidels in the west failed the minute that women were ‘liberated’ from their cell in the house,” it reads. The ideal Islamic community should not focus on uncovering the “secrets of nature and reaching the peaks of architectural sophistication,” it should instead concentrate on the implementation of sharia law and the spreading of Islam.”

In a section entitled, “How the soldiers of Iblis (the devil) keep women from paradise,” the document denounces materialism and states that the “fundamental function” of a woman is to be at home with her family, although women may leave home to serve their community, but only in exceptional circumstances, such as to wage jihad when men are unavailable, and to study religion. Female doctors and teachers are permitted to leave home, but “must keep strictly to sharia guidelines.”

The treatise further explains that the group supports educating women, as long as they do not work. “Yes, we say: ‘Stay in your houses,’ but this does not mean, in any way, that we support illiteracy, backwardness or ignorance,” it reads. “Rather, we just support the distinction between working — that which involves a woman leaving the house – and studying, as it was ordained she should do.”