A new magazine has piqued the interest of news websites worldwide; it has confused and perplexed us, as well having shocked and disturbed us. It’s called “Al Shamika”- which translates roughly as “the majestic”, and it has been heralded as a “cosmo-style” magazine for the women of Al Qaeda.
Al Shamika features a strange juxtaposition of the articles we expect to see in a glossy women’s mag- articles about finding love and recipes for home facials, with articles praising suicide bombers, poems inciting violence and calls for women to be faithful to their jihadist men.
It is no doubt a form of propaganda- and the magazine’s editor Saleh Yussef makes no secret of the fact that this was their intention, stating that;
“…the enemies [of Islam] are bent on preventing [the Muslim] woman from knowing the truth about her religion and her role, since they know all too well what would happen if women entered the field [of jihad]. The nation of Islam needs women who know the truth about their religion and about the battle and its dimensions, and know what is expected of them.”
What confronts us about Al Shamika is not the hatred and calls for violent action the magazine advocates, it seems to be the fact that it appears in a magazine. We are used to seeing extremist propaganda passed out in leaflets and books, on websites and blogs, but we are not used to seeing it right next to comparatively trivial articles about health and beauty. The sleek, glossy, and overwhelmingly classy format of Al Shamika brings these extremist ideas out of the realm of crazy radicals, easily dismissed, and into the everyday lives of regular women, as much as our concerns about how we look or man troubles plague our minds daily.
We have a perception that women’s mags are fun, light and a little bit silly, not somewhere that we see such strong religious views, especially from Islam, a religion many in the West perceive as sombre and serious. It is unclear and impossible to say whether Al Shamika represents a dangerous new development, but it certainly has us talking, and re-thinking our views concerning the different media used for expressing different types of ideas.
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