Here's the transcript of Martha Kearney's interview with Tanya Joya for your information. It's as accurate as I could manage.
MK
You’ll have heard the home secretary vowing to do anything in his power to prevent people who went to Syria to join so-called Islamic State from returning to the UK. Shamima Begun who joined IS at the age of 15 has been appealing to the authorities to come back with her newborn baby. One woman who understands what that’s like is Tania Joya https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-former-first-lady-of-isis-now-loves-reform-jews-plans-to-visit-jerusalem/ who was once nicknamed ‘the first lady of ISIS’ after marrying an American Jihadi. She grew up in Harrow in north London and now lives in Texas after fleeing from Syria with her three children.
TJ
I understand that she’s a product of her environment. What’s typical of Bengali Muslim families is that we prioritise religious norms and rules and we don’t discuss at home the rule of law and respecting due process. It’s more about mysticism, (which we know we can’t (?) ) understand and it’s about God and they use it to control girls and the men use it to control women and, communities and it comes like that.
MK
Is that what happened to you do you think?
TJ
It did happen to me because I moved from Harrow to Barking, and Barking is a hot pocket for extremists, but my parents, they’re from a generation that wasn’t too interested in religion, but it was cultural, so it wasn’t until they - after September 11th, like, I went away in 2003 to Syria and then I didn’t see my family for ten years and when I came back they were all really religious. And what was so ironic is that I stopped being a Muslim and I took off the hijab and things while after going to Muslim countries, to lived there, and I got turned off even more, and then I came back to London and all my family were practising and suddenly very strict on themselves and I noticed it wasn’t just my family, like, in London, in general, became a lot more… Islamic. (laughter)..it’s peculiar.
MK
What was life like for you when you went to Syria?
TJ
So I’ve been to Syria three times, before the war to Damascus and it was lovely, but it’s not like going back in time because they were so hard back from the rest of the world, so I left….everything was nice then, but when my husband took me the first time against my will and I wasn’t ready to do that, to go to Syria during a war because I had children and I was pregnant and I wasn’t ready to see my children die, so yeah, I went into - it was a war zone - I got a taste of hell and I knew I wasn’t going to put up with it, not for my husband, any more.
MK
When you heard what Shamima Begum has been saying since she left life under so-called Islamic State, what do you think about the kind of things she’s been saying - she’s come under criticism from some people, for not expressing enough remorse
TJ
Yes. I mean who wouldn’t be frustrated, it’s like a parent/teenager relationship - teenagers are obnoxious, and they’re not really fully formed in their maturity, She doesn’t know what to think. Everything she’s saying, she’s just a mouthpiece for Islamic State. She’s just repeating what she’s been told she has to say. She doesn’t have her own thoughts because she doesn’t know anything different, she hasn’t had enough exposure. That’s what I believe.
MK
She has caused some offence in this country by making comparisons between the Manchester Arena attack on the Ariana Grande fans and the kind of bombings that took place in Syria.
TJ
I think, with these people, their understanding of life is warped. They don’t believe this life is real. they think it’s temporary, like a dream, like as insignificant as a dream; they think the real, life, the eternal life, starts after death. So they’re delusional, they’re living out this fantasy cos at one point in their life I believe they want to escape reality, and we have to get them out of that mindset because it’s very dangerous. It’s important that these people learn that you live once. And you have to respect life. You just don’t think oh, I’m going to kill a child, it’s ok because he’s going to come back alive in heaven because we don’t have a ? in our religion. We don’t have to crack their way of thinking as they don’t know how to think straight.
MK
So what do you think should happen now to Shamima Begum?
TJ
I think the most humanitarian thing we can do is help her child, and we don’t want to separate mother and child, and she is a British citizen and she has rights and we’re going to show her due process and show her what justice is because she thinks a draconian lifestyle is justice, but it’s not; and she’ll learn that. She’ll mature, and she’ll learn where she’s gone wrong. She’s a smarter teenager than I was so I know she’s going to learn if she’s open to it, and I believe she’s just going to grow out of it eventually
MK
Although you’ll have heard what the Home Secretary Sajid Javid has been saying, he says whatever role the role who went to Syria took in the so-called caliphate they all supported a terrorist organisation and in doing so they’ve shown that they hate our country and the values we stand for.
TJ
He’s right, and he’s entitled to his views, but I don’t know if he’s a practising Muslim and I shouldn’t really judge him, whether he is or not, but there’s a child involved and now we know better, now we know she has an innocent life on the line, we can’t say ok you just have to die cos your mum was a
foolish girl. We can do better. We can bring them back and we can show them how western values are more compassionate to humans than Islamic law.
