In January 2023, I started listening to season two of journalist Josh Baker’s podcast, “I’m not a Monster.” In it, he investigates the case of Shamima Begum—the young British woman who, at age 15, ran away from her home in London with friends to join ISIS in Syria, ending up at a refugee camp four years later after the fall of the caliphate movement. The United Kingdom subsequently revoked her citizenship, forbidding her to return home to her family. As a young Muslim woman myself, drawn to progressive and feminist interpretations of Islam, I thought the situation was tragic—both that Shamima and her friends hadn’t had the exposure to the positive, compassionate, and peace-preaching faith that I had, and that the U.K. severely punished her for a mistake she made at the impressionable age of 15. I quickly grew fascinated—no, obsessed—with the case. And while the podcast and accompanying BBC documentary are detailed, there was much more I wanted to know. Shamima’s story stayed with me for months, and I wondered if anyone would make a fictionalized movie about it.

It may not be a film (not yet anyway) but two years later, we’re seeing the release of Fundamentally—a book by Nussaibah Younis, which follows the fictional plight of an academic who goes to Iraq to de-radicalize women who left their homes across Europe and the Middle East to marry ISIS fighters. It’s not the serious, investigative exposé that I initially hoped for—instead, Younis uses the thoroughly unexpected lens of comedy for her storytelling endeavor.

For me, this first seemed like a questionable, perhaps even offensive genre to explore young women’s experiences with the horrors of ISIS and the destitution of a refugee camp. I should pause here and, for the sake of transparency, be upfront about my biases. I identify as a practicing Muslim, and my writing is fueled by a desire to write positive representations of Muslims into the mainstream publishing world. Younis, by admission of her own Instagram bio, identifies as a “non-practicing Muslim” and isn’t motivated by the same mission to “improve” my religion’s reputation. “I chose not to worry about representation too much,” she tells me. “This novel is just my totally honest take on some of the worlds I have directly experienced or been adjacent to.”

Her perspective is being sought out and celebrated, and Fundamentally is already one of social media’s most talked-about books on Muslim women over the past few years. It has landed on numerous “must read” lists of 2025, with advance reviews pouring in—mainly from white readers.

Younis, a peace-building practitioner, has a B.A. in modern history and English from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in international affairs from Durham University. She is an expert on Iraqi politics, specializing in political mediation and combating violent extremism. She infuses some of these credentials into her book’s protagonist, Nadia, a scholar who has been disowned by her conservative Muslim mother and recently dumped by her female lover. Nadia accepts a United Nations job in Iraq to put her research into use on the ground, to de-radicalize and rehabilitate women from ISIS at a time when their home countries aren’t keen on welcoming them back. This broader storyline was directly inspired by Younis’s own experiences.

“As part of my career working in peace-building in the Middle East, I was asked by the Iraqi government to design a de-radicalization program for ISIS women,” she tells me. “Traveling to a refugee camp to meet some of those women, I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d have coped in their place.”

As a Muslim teen, Younis studied under a cleric named Sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki at Islamic School. “I found his sermons inspiring and captivating. I was shocked when he later joined Al-Qaeda,” she says. “He never tried to recruit me, but I’ve always wondered what would have happened if he had. Instead, I grew up, went to university, and moved away from religion.” Younis mentions this cleric by name in her novel, giving Nadia similar exposure to his rigid and ultra-conservative views on gender.

The fictional Nadia also distances herself from religion, in one scene telling someone at a bar, “I’ve transitioned out of being a Muslim,” while “scanning the bar for beards,” wary of being labelled an apostate—the penalty of which, she believes, is still beheading. Reinforcing the archaic death penalty for apostasy (which is hardly upheld in practice today), Younis depicts the massive chasm between her liberal protagonist and what she sees as the repressiveness of religion. “Nadia is a much more extreme person than I am, and it was fun to have a character do things I never would,” says Younis. “I love the way she speaks her mind, confronts people, and takes risks.”

The relationship at the crux of the novel develops between Nadia and one former ISIS bride named Sara, who Nadia vows to rescue from the refugee camp and reunite with her infant daughter. In Sara, Younis successfully debunks myths and challenges stereotypes about the supposedly submissive Muslim woman who would join ISIS. Embodying the spirit and vocabulary of a “hijabi rude girl from Mile End [a London neighborhood],” Sara reminds Nadia of her younger self.

“The novel was born when I imagined a fifteen-year-old version of myself as an ISIS bride, sitting across from the thirty-year-old version of myself as an aid worker,” says Younis. “It was immediately funny to think about how my teenage self would respond to me as I am today. She’d be so disappointed, would call me a sell-out, and have an annoyingly superior attitude with her half-baked political idealism.”

I immediately agreed with Younis’s expression, “half-baked political idealism,” to describe the catalyst driving Sara—and Shamima, who Sara’s character was likely inspired by—towards the supposed utopia of an Islamic Caliphate. For me, the safe, calculated, and politically correct response to the Shamima Begam debacle would probably be, “I can’t imagine why young Muslim teens in the West would want to join ISIS!” But the truth is, I can empathize. For disenfranchised young women growing up in the shadow of post-9/11 Islamophobia, grappling with identity crises—too “Western” for their conservative parents and too “Brown” and “backward” for their European and American peers—an organized society promising inclusion, fulfilment, and religious salvation, must have sounded enticing. Many of us practicing Muslims will “condemn” extremist factions of the faith in a heartbeat—yet we still understand why they might attract naïve young Muslims in search of some direction, identity, structure, and acceptance.

(Image of Shamina Begum. Source: Laura Lean/Getty/The New Yorker)

In Fundamentally, Nadia shares this empathy and understanding, having experienced the magnetism of the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, first-hand. And while an encounter with an Al-Qaeda recruiter could come across as dramatized and over-the-top, for me, Nadia’s drastic departure from Islam seemed even more exaggerated. The moment that triggered her mother disowning her, for instance, was the sight of a photo of Nadia without a headscarf, with her arm around a male friend—something that seems quite trivial, hardly warranting a family schism. Later, when visiting her grandfather, he apparently refers to Nadia as a “whore” because of the tattoo on her wrist.

Nadia carries this trauma with her to Iraq, and her descriptions of Muslim women initially reinforce negative stereotypes. “My sweat turned cold as a group of women walked in wearing long abayas and headscarves. They were dressed no differently to my mother, but still, I was terrified,” writes Younis, connoting abayas with extremism and fear. However, the next scene lightens the tension—and my apprehension, as she weaves layers of nuance and humor into the text: “The girl leaned on her forearms, her severe facial expression incongruous with her diamante-trimmed headscarf. I too had loved diamante headscarves, back when I was religious, bringing a hint of the 90s WAG to my glamour-less Islamic life,” she writes.

Throughout the book, Younis reveals many such juxtapositions between the supposed danger and violence of these ISIS brides, and their comedic naivety and mediocrity. Some of these instances, I have to admit, are quite funny—such as when Eli, a Finnish girl who joined ISIS, says, “I never left my home in Mosul, except for the market. I didn’t shoot guns; I just made a lot of stuffed aubergines. Really, a lot. I couldn’t kill anyone, except with cholesterol.” Sara also admits, “It didn’t live up to the hype. They just wanted the women at home. I was like, if I wanted an arranged marriage and to spend all day cooking and cleaning, I could’ve stayed in East London, you get me?”

Nadia’s own voice is equally effective in relaying comedic relief as she makes the prospect of ISIS brides a little less threatening. “I’d heard that ISIS considered white converts to be the most desirable brides. Imagine fleeing Europe for the land of Islam, and you’re still second fiddle to some white girl who’s lost control of her gap year,” she reflects.

Of her earlier, religious phase, she writes, “Sometimes it was hard to kneel on my prayer mat and believe the words I was reciting. Was there really some big daddy in the sky who massively wanted me to abstain from getting down to Flo Rida on Thirsty Thursdays at Oceana?”

I appreciated some of these moments of comedy, but while humor might make the heaviness of the issue more palatable for readers, I couldn’t help but wonder if some things just aren’t laughing matters. Younis, though, believes this element was key in helping readers view ISIS brides in a more nuanced light. “The news is full of misery all day every day, and we come to novels for something else. I wanted my novel to be a gripping, hilarious page turner that would also open readers’ eyes to a totally different part of the human experience,” she tells me. “This is not a sermon; it’s a great ride that will make you think and allow you to come to your own conclusions.”

Indeed, Younis’s writing makes one thing evident—that many of these women were victims of brainwashing, rather than killers or criminals themselves. “Everything pointed to the same conclusion: the girls were young, naïve and reckless, but they weren’t terrorists,” she writes—a sentiment many of us insist is true of Shamima Begum.

And while much of the plot takes place over Nadia’s journey to de-radicalize these women through a program she creates, the details and depth of this process felt like an afterthought. “For each woman who’d come in, we’d ask a set of questions to determine the psychological and social assistance they needed, before drawing up a personalized support plan,” she writes. It would have been interesting to see this further developed. Instead, we read about the hiring of Sheikh Jason, a Muslim convert from California, who acts as both counsellor and spiritual advisor to the girls, yet often comes across as a bumbling hippie out of his depth.

And therein lies my fundamental discomfort with Fundamentally. The book’s representation of Islam tends to fall into extremes—those who join ISIS, and those who are like laid back, flip flop-wearing Sheikh Jason, who at least gets it right when he describes Islam as “peace-loving and peace-seeking.”

Younis believes that through comedy, she can highlight a variety of personalities from this religious demographic. “There are many different types of Muslims, who interpret and practice the faith in their own ways, and the novel tries to honestly portray this wide range of experiences,” she says. “There’s a bitchy fundamentalist, a yoga-loving Imam, a pansexual with co-dependency issues, and everything in between. It’s by getting to know, and love, specific individual characters, that we break down religious and cultural monoliths that can feel scary and alienating to people who don’t understand them.”

Upon reflection, perhaps I unfairly seek characters who I personally identify with when I read books about Muslims. And feasibly, the target readership for this book is not Muslims like me who are already familiar with, and quite passionate about the Shamima Begum case, but rather, those who are unaware of the realities underpinning the radicalization of young people, and who may find comedy to be a helpful tool in connecting with characters. Perhaps that’s why most of the pre-release social media reviews commending the book are from white, non-Muslim readers. Maybe we Muslims are too distraught with the results of Shamima’s various trials, too defensive of radicalized women like her, and too sensitive to Islamophobia (which has only increased since the escalation of the crisis in Palestine) to appreciate comedic interpretations of an issue that hits too close to home.

For Shamima Begum, and women like her, are clearly the muses of this story. And their lives remain in limbo, sentenced to remain in refugee camps—sometimes with their children, or worse, with just their memories. Shamima, after marrying an ISIS fighter at age 15, had three children with him. All died young—the last, while still a newborn, in a Syrian refugee camp, after her British citizenship was revoked. In August 2024, she lost her final appeal and cannot challenge her citizenship removal further in the U.K. courts. Today, she remains in a Syrian detention camp.

Young women like Shamima continue to suffer tremendously because of pivotal mistakes they made as minors. Humanizing them is the first step towards advocating for their release back home—where they can be fairly tried in courts of law. “We can’t prevent something we don’t understand,” says Younis. “Demonizing people who have been radicalized is the same as giving up. If we dismiss them as ‘evil’ or ‘insane,’ then we are missing an opportunity to create change.”

Hafsa Lodi is an American-Muslim fashion and culture journalist who explores the intersection of faith and feminism. Her non-fiction book, Modesty: A Fashion Paradox (Neem Tree Press: 2020) investigates the causes, controversies and key players behind the global modest fashion movement. Her debut fiction novel, Turbulence (Unbound: 2026) releases in February 2026.