Muriel’s wedding: News media representations of Europe’s first female suicide terrorist

Abstract

Muriel Degauque is reported as Europe’s first female suicide bomber, as such her life and death were covered in a wide variety of media. Given this combination, of coverage and non-standard profile, this article seeks to explore to what extent she and her death are defined by her ‘Muslimness’ and by her ‘sex’ in the news media. The construction of Muriel Degauque and her death in the news media can tell us something about our relationship to sex, security and religion as well as to the stability and hegemony of dominant social discourses. This article will demonstrate that the coverage of Muriel Degauque and her death is organised through three interlocking themes of gender, security and religion that combine in a particular trajectory to present her as ‘Other’. Indeed, it concludes that Degauque was fitted into the media mould because of her Islamic identity, and despite of her sex and white European heritage.

Keywords

Islam Suicide Terrorism Media Gender Orientalism

Introduction

Muriel Degauque’s suicide vest detonated in Baquba, Iraq on 9 November 2005. According to the military spokesperson in Iraq at the time, she killed herself but no others, although one soldier was injured.¹ Given that more than half of all suicide attacks occur in Iraq,² most attackers are identified as ‘Muslim’³ and most kill fewer than four people,⁴ by some measures her attack is not unusual. However, as a female francophone Belgian convert to Islam, her death is unusual as it contradicts a series of assumptions frequently made about the profile of suicide attackers by the press, government and security agencies.⁵ As Lord Stevens (former head of the Metropolitan Police) stated a year after her death:

I’m a white, 62-year-old, 6-foot-4-inch suit wearing ex-cop. I fly often, but do I really fit the profile of a suicide bomber? … The truth is Islamic terrorism in the West has been universally carried out by young Muslim men, usually of ethnic appearance. (Stevens, 2006)

Degauque clearly does not fit this profile. Additionally, all that is known about her death is from media reports and a brief statement from a military spokesperson in Iraq. Unlike other suicide terrorists, she did not leave a ‘martyr’s video’ to explain her actions, she was estranged from her family, and her husband died in a separate incident in Iraq. Despite this limited information, to date not only has her death been reported on, but her life, marriage and conversion to Islam have all been subject to media scrutiny.

Given this combination of coverage and non-standard profile, this article seeks to explore to what extent Degauque and her death are defined by her ‘Muslimness’ and her gender in the news media. This article will demonstrate that the coverage of Degauque and her death is organized in the English language news media through three interlocking themes of gender, security and religion that combine in a particular trajectory to present her as ‘Other’. Indeed, it concludes that Degauque was fitted into the media mould because of her Islamic identity and despite of her gender and white European heritage.

News media, Islam and gender

The media operates according to ‘a set of linguistic practices (in a broad sense) by means of which selective definitions of ‘the real’ [are] presented’ (Hall, 1982: 64). Consequently these media linguistic practices ‘continuously construct and reconstruct social problems, crises, enemies and leaders and so creates a succession of threats and assurances’ (Edelman, 1988: 1). This ‘reality’ of threat and assurance is emphasized in times of conflict and war, often creating intensified stereotypes of victims, villains and heroes (Klaus and Kassel, 2005). For example, one of the prevailing definitions created in the mass news media, especially since the declaration of the ‘War on Terror’, is that of a homogenous and threatening Islam situated in a violent transhistorical ‘clash of civilisations’ (Huntingdon, 1993; Parfitt and Egorova, 2003; Said, 1979).⁶ Due in part to economic and political globalization and centralization within the media industry, this definition of reality or narrative contains certain consistencies from country to country (Poole and Richardson, 2006: 2). Within this definition of reality, consistencies are found in the English-language media in the presentation of Muslims and Islam as backward, barbaric, inferior and the violent ‘Other’ of Europe (Akbarzadeh and Smith, 2005; Ameli et al., 2007; Benn and Jawad, 2004; Kirkup, 2011; Knightley, 2001; Moore et al., 2008; Nickels et al., 2009). Navarro (2010) also finds these characterizations in Spanish and French reporting. Accordingly ‘the media have therefore covered Islam: they have portrayed it, characterized it, analysed it, given instant courses on it and consequently they have made it “known”’ (Said, 1997: I).

Time after time, research on Islam and gender in western media shows that Muslim women become the visible symbol of difference from an assumed homogenous European liberal space, and are depicted predominantly as victims of their cultures (Brunner, 2005; Ehrkamp, 2010; Fowler, 2007; Jiwani, 2005; Macdonald, 2006; Naaman, 2007; Navarro, 2010; Stabile and Kumar, 2005). For example, the dominance of this ‘reality’ of ‘the Muslim woman’ is seen in the UK national media reporting of the UK MP Jack Straw’s confession that he prefers Muslim female constituents to remove their face veils in his surgery. The mass media amplified Straw’s concerns over other voices, such that Muslim women were presented as passive victims excluded from society by their veils (Khiabany and Williamson, 2008). This example is not atypical of news reporting generally, where the barrage of media representations regarding the veil has largely omitted the voices of (Muslim) women (Tarlo, 2006).

Another consistency found in media reporting is the stereotyping of women (not just Muslim women) as victims, passive and largely marginal actors in ‘serious’ news stories. Rhode maintains that marginalization of women in the media occurs ‘not only through the failure to represent their perspectives, but also through failure to recognise them as independent agents, apart from their men’ (1995: 690). This finding particularly holds in the news media’s reporting of women’s violence. Naylor finds that ‘women’s violence was more likely to be reported as irrational or emotional … whilst men’s violence was more likely to be presented as ‘normal’ or rational’ (2001: 180). In her study on the media representation of girls’ and women’s violence, Chesney-Lind reveals that ‘the overarching construction of a violent woman is a woman masculinised by some form of “emancipation”’ (1996: 131). She further argues that the ‘passivity’ of women is subsequently affirmed and women’s violence constrained by the vigorous and public demonization of her behaviour, ‘so that her experience will serve as a cautionary tale to all women about the profound risks associated with women accessing strategies of male violence’ (1996: 134).

There have been a limited number of studies looking at the media reporting of Muslim women’s violence specifically. In contrast with this study, such research focuses on non-European Muslim women and violence outside of the European security space. Nacos (2005) compares the media representation of female suicide terrorists to female politicians and finds that attention to physical appearance, family connections and women’s equality dominates both these public categories of women. Similarly, looking at the Israel–Palestine conflict, Brunner (2005, 2007) argues that female suicide terrorists are represented always in terms of corporeality: their bodies, virginity and motherhood. She demonstrates that the media representation of female suicide terrorists reveals gendered participation and representation and a gender order of conflict that subordinates the female-feminine. This is also found in a study on Russian newspaper reporting of the Chechen conflict, where female terrorists are portrayed as embodying a deviation in relation to male terrorists, ‘as they show a failure of ethnic identity, fail to meet religious requirements regarding gender and deviate from a social gender norm’ (Shcheblanova and Yarskaya-Smirnova, 2009: 250). Discussing the Chechen ‘Black Widows’, Jessica West demonstrates how the media, specifically CNN, The Guardian and the BBC, construct masculinity through a presentation of femininity:

Whereas women are ‘black widows,’ men are ‘terrorists’. Whereas women are victims, men are brutalizers. Whereas women are apolitical, men are political. Whereas women are instruments, men are actors. In the end this is a war between men. (2005: 8)

It would seem that male suicide terrorists cause terror only by their deeds, not by their gender (Brunner, 2006). These are all examples of Naaman’s more general argument: that the ways in which the ‘Western media grapple with the deviation from traditional womanly roles is by adopting a thesis that female suicide bombers are a victim of patriarchy’ (2007: 943). Thus, across all of these studies on media representations of women, we see a dominant, even hegemonic, construction of femininity, one which subordinates women’s actions and motives to men, places them on the margins of politics and demonizes exceptions. Although the media offer different explanations for women’s violence, they all ‘share the dual move of denying women’s agency in their violence and condemning women’s femininity’ (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007: 30).

Following on from this understanding of the construction of gendered narratives of violence and Islam, and while acknowledging that the relationship between the media and reality is contested, it is assumed here that by magnifying or minimizing particular components of phenomena, the news media do not ‘merely report the facts’ but are important ‘builders of realities’ (Allan, 1999; Byerly and Ross, 2006; Cottle, 2004; Manning, 2001; Navarro, 2010). Thus, the news media is a medium through which events are re-presented in particular ways, to the extent that the public ‘often responds not to events or social trends but to reported events’ (Page and Shapiro, 1992: 340; emphasis in original). However, the purpose of this article is not to assess how individuals or groups respond to the media; rather, through interpreting the meanings and ‘definitions of the real’ produced in these media representations of Muriel Degauque, we can learn something about ‘our relationships to key phenomena, such as war, sex and religion’ (Oliver, 2007: 16).

Method

The argument in this article rests upon a feminist news media content analysis that uses interpretative and hermeneutic methods which (among other elements) directly address questions of gender and anticipate the influence of gender on participants and subject data (Enloe, 1993; Lindlof and Taylor, 2002; Nielsen, 1990; Tickner, 2005). This approach carries some limitations, including the realization that there is no singular true interpretation of a text, so coding is subject to the researcher’s bias (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002). However, by following standard good practice guidelines and by accepting feminist critiques of traditional methods, this bias is not seen to detract from the validity of the research presented here (Creswell, 2003; Maxwell, 2005).

Data collection

The media sources came from a Nexis database search, which generated some 166 different items of ‘All English News’, of which 70 were newspaper articles, 42 were newswire and press releases, 27 news transcripts, 7 web-based publications, 8 magazines and journals, 8 aggregate news sources, 3 blogs and 1 newsletter.⁷ Of the 70 newspapers, 14 are ‘tabloid’ or ‘middle market’ and the remainder are ‘serious’ (following definitions from Sparks, 2000). However, many texts identified by the Nexis database search used identical or very similar text but assigned different headlines to them. Discarding these multiple versions of the same or similar text left 139 individual media texts that were primarily concerned with Degauque’s actions.⁸

Findings

Of the 139 texts, Degauque was afforded only a sentence or less in 67, and in 34 she was cited as but one example of the increase of converts to Islam in Europe and America and the security risk that they pose. In a remaining 40 that were published within three months of her death and a further eight during the trial, conviction and sentencing of the ‘network’ in Belgium which facilitated her attack (November 2007 to January 2008), Degauque was the primary focus of the text. These 48 texts were analysed in more detail and are listed in the Appendix (below). They were analysed for statements about ‘who’ she was; ‘what’ she did, and ‘why’ she did it.

On the one hand, all the articles referred to Degauque as European and female, the majority situating her as ‘Europe’s first female suicide bomber’ or ‘First Western Woman’ (n = 28) and as Belgian (n = 43). Other significant descriptors were ‘ordinary’ (n = 10) and ‘white’ (n = 10). Paradoxically, at the same time media texts emphasized her deviation from these by focusing on her veiling strategies (n = 16), conversion (n = 18) and ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ Muslim beliefs (n = 15). In many of the articles, the phrase ‘she became “more Muslim than Muslim”’ was present (n = 21). In a number of texts she was described as a woman who had been a troubled teenager (n = 17), had unstable sexual relationships (n = 8) and as a drug user (n = 13). Important to a number of the accounts of Degauque’s life and death was that she had married a Muslim of Moroccan descent (n = 27), lived in Morocco (n = 11) and had been estranged from her ‘natural’ family (n = 13). In addition, a few of the articles indicated that she was ‘working class’ (n = 9), although one stated that she was middle class, and implied that she was a ‘benefit cheat’ (n = 4). Some noted that she was ‘nice’ or ‘pretty’ (n = 5), two commented that she was unemployed, and another stated that she was ‘disenchanted’.

A variety of accounts emerged to describe what Degauque actually did in Iraq: 17 of the media texts said that she ‘blew herself up’, 17 reports defined her action as a ‘suicide’ attack or bombing, 17 argued that this was done by ‘attacking’ a ‘patrol’ in Iraq and two stated that she ‘attempted to kill Americans’ or ‘troops’. There were disagreements over how many people were injured or were killed in the attack, with the only consensus being that she was killed in operation – although for some this was not instant (n = 4). A minority of texts (n = 10) reported her action as a failure, and a further minority (n = 2) argued that her vest ‘detonated prematurely’, also indicating failure.

Very few texts gave explicit reasons for Degauque’s decision, but most gave an account of events in her life by way of explanation or simply ascribed it to ‘radicalism’. Of the texts, 19 presented her death as an inevitable consequence of her life story, starting with her ‘normal childhood’, moving to her ‘troubled’ life as a teenager and young woman, then focusing on her conversion to Islam and her increasing radicalization, which was linked to her second husband and highlighted to audiences by a focus on her veiling, her then-strained relationship with her parents and commenting on her frequent trips to Muslim countries. From this narrative of her life the main explanations offered were the fact that she believed in a ‘fundamentalist’ version of Islam and/or was carrying out the act for religious reasons (n = 8), that she was a convert and therefore particularly vulnerable to radicalization or indoctrination (n = 12). Ten texts implied that her husband was the primary reason that she carried out the act, and that it was he who radicalized or brainwashed her to the extent to which she would carry out the acts. Two texts perceived that her actions were inexplicable and irrational; one article argued that she carried out the act because her life lacked meaning and she was sexually promiscuous, while another linked it to suicide and unhappiness. None of the reports commented on the ‘War in Iraq’, ‘War on Terror’ or any other political motives, and only four linked her reasons to a function of Al-Qaeda’s influence.

Despite none of the reports mentioning any political motives or the wider geopolitical and geostrategic context, many of the stories emphasized security concerns (n = 12). Degauque is represented as the beginning of new trends in terrorism: first, as a female (n = 7); second, as European (n = 4); and finally, as a convert (n = 6). Nine articles quoted a ‘security expert’ to support their claims. Five articles explicitly commented on the ‘danger’ as ‘real’ and ‘worrying’, and a further two that the authorities cannot be ‘complacent’. The ‘threat’ is seen to emerge because they have European passports (n = 5), because they are ‘harder to detect’ (n = 4), and because they have the ‘zeal of a convert’ (n = 7). In the articles it is clear that the ‘security threat’ is to European states rather than to Iraq or other Middle Eastern states.

Definitions of the real

As a convert and woman, Degauque’s violence does not fit into easily racialized or gendered explanations of violence and terrorism (Hoffman, 2006; Sageman, 2008). Nevertheless, as will be demonstrated below, the patterns of news media reporting of her life and death stabilize categories of ‘woman’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘terrorist’. By locating Degauque both within and beyond these categories, the media enables her behaviour to continue to be understood via our inherited understandings of the ‘violent’ Other, and consequently the social order is not challenged by her actions. Three ‘definitions of the real’ expressed in the articles are discussed below and are not mutually exclusive, although they are sometimes contradictory and their boundaries porous.

Muriel’s wedding

The first ‘definition of the real’ emerging from these texts is that like reporting on other female suicide bombers, Degauque was located in a ‘support role’ and seen to be manipulated by her husband (in other cases another male relative may be identified). In news reporting female suicide terrorists are frequently denied agency in the public sphere and become the ‘pawns’ of men (Weinberg and Eubank, 1987: 255; Talbot, 2001). Consequently, the focus is on their private motivations and their domestic living arrangements, rather than the public/political context in which their actions occur (Brunner, 2005). In the case of Degauque, there were two core elements to this definition of the real: the role of her husband and her caring nature in childhood. In these accounts she was infantilized and domesticated.

Seven articles explicitly addressed the role that her husband is supposed to have played in her decision to participate in a suicide bombing in Iraq, and another 10 implied that he was responsible for her radicalization to the extent that she would be willing to carry out the attack. Thus she was ‘brainwashed’ (n = 10). For Castle in The Independent:

[Her] life began to take a more sinister turn when the former bakery assistant met a Belgian of Moroccan extraction, Issam Goris, who took her to Morocco and helped her convert to Islam … the later attraction to Goris was to prove fatal. (Castle, 2005: 1)

This case is further dramatized by the fact that her husband was presented as the trigger or cause of her conversion to Islam – even though this is disputed. For Ford (2005), writing in The Christian Science Monitor, her marriage and conversion were the only notable facts about her. Similarly, The Australian pondered: ‘perhaps Degauque’s husband convinced her that Islam is at war with the rest of the world and she should die a martyr’s death’ (2005: 11). We see that her marriage and conversion become securitized (that is, understood primarily in security terms) and intrinsically linked to proscribed violence. Casert’s (2005) article on Degauque was headlined ‘Marriage Made a Radical of Belgian’. CNN’s Brian Todd, in The Situation Room, picked up on this theme in its discussion following the conviction of the ‘cell’ which was linked to her attack, and said that she was:

a Muslim convert only too willing to prove herself as a wavering soldier of jihad – not just for her self, but for her husband too (Blitzer et al., 2008)

and later in the report stating that

She was a true believer – undoubtedly under the influence of her lover. (Blitzer et al., 2008)

However, while allegations of ‘brainwashing’ persist in relation to female suicide terrorists, for male terrorists this is less likely to be the case, unless they recently attended a madrasa⁹ (Brunner, 2006, 2007; McClure, 2009).

Furthermore, in this case, Degauque’s action became the responsibility of a man who was represented as ‘non-European’. In the media’s eye, her husband was not any man, but a brown Muslim man, and he became the villain in the story and the focus for media attention. His alleged non-European ethnicity (he had a Moroccan father and Belgian mother) was often reported on, more than her whiteness (n = 20). The zeal of the convert in this case was attributed not so much to faith but to the undue influence of ‘Other’ foreign and religious husbands; these women become ‘race traitors’. Some texts also wrongly claimed that Degauque became a Muslim because of her marriage to him, whereas she had converted before they met. In order to focus on the migrant roots of Degauque’s husband, the media texts also reported on the trip made by her and her husband to Morocco, where they allegedly attended religious seminaries. Concentrating on this trip in the newspaper stories distanced her from her European roots and identity.

However, to maintain the domestic and privatized gender order that marriage implies (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007), reports attempted to show that prior to her puberty she had been a ‘normal’ girl (n = 10), in The Sunday Times she is described as having been ‘dreaming … about becoming a teacher or a nurse’ (Smith and Tihon, 2005). In The Independent, Castle argued that she was ‘a typical girl next door’ (2005: 2). The texts focused on her ‘real’ character as caring, mother-like and nurturing – roles which all typify a stereotyped feminine nature. As part of this ‘caring’ and ‘mother-like’ childhood identity, the news reports also drew attention to her Catholic upbringing and in particular note her first communion (n = 7). In this way the notion of an ‘idealized’ feminine European childhood can be maintained and that her marriage generated her desire to participate in suicide bombings.

‘You’re terrible, Muriel’¹⁰

That Degauque ‘deviated’ from this idealized feminine lifestyle and nature shapes the second ‘definition of the real’ within the media texts. Although not explicitly linked to mental illness, Deguaque’s violence was understood as pathology and deviance triggered by some trauma. There are two elements which create this second narrative: first, that a trauma or illness was motivating; and second, that she had a troubled sexual past. These two points are treated as the explanations for the presumed biological weakness and her susceptibility to such irrationality, thus for Smith in The International Herald Tribune, Degauque was ‘an incomprehensible aberration for many: she was a soul led astray’ (2005a: 2).

In the past, explanations for terrorism and suicide bombing have sought to explain it through mental illness and trauma, but Silke’s (2006) work demonstrates that there is little evidence to support this assertion. Nevertheless, in the case of Degauque, in line with criteria establishing newsworthiness, the media focused on the individual level and sought traumatic or mental health issues which would explain her behaviour. On CNN, Dickey, the Middle East editor of Newsweek, made similarities to suicide in the general population and the case of ‘this unhappy woman’ (Kagan et al., 2005b). The ANSA English Media Service (2005) reported that she had been ‘reckless’. This, combined with a linkage to contemporary constructions of suicide in the general population as a medical illness (Silke, 2006) reinforced the notion of individual irrationality and madness. Five of the articles focused on the death of her brother in motorcycle accident which, they argued, caused a substantial change in her behaviour, perhaps even making her suicidal. In addition, she is reported to be have had a ‘troubled youth’ where she ‘rebelled’ (n = 17). Her ‘route’ towards suicide bombing is seen to start when she became a drug user (n = 13), which was sometimes combined with the insights that she was ‘easily influenced’ (n = 2) and a ‘difficult teenager’ who ‘often ran away from home’ (n = 7). By focusing on the private life of the individual and emphasizing particular periods of difficulty, a narrative emerges which describes emotional irrational reasons as the cause of her vulnerability to the ‘terrorists’ message’. Importantly, in the articles there is no mention of any political motives.

The second area that builds this definition of the real is Degauque’s ‘sexual deviance’ and allegations of her promiscuous past. Ten different newspapers reported that she had a ‘number of boyfriends’ or ‘failed relationships’. In The Sunday Times and The Times her mother was reported to have said that Degauque was ‘only interested in boys’, and that she ‘didn’t know how many’ boyfriends Degauque had had (Browne and Watson, 2005; Smith and Tihon, 2005). There was no explanation in the texts as to why this was relevant to her death in Iraq and therefore newsworthy. However, her sexual past was assumed to be important in her decision to convert, radicalize and commit an act of ‘martyrdom’. This focus on her sexual behaviour, as with the focus on her troubled youth, denies political agency in her decision to be a ‘martyr’. Combined with the absence of a discussion of any political motives or political context of Iraq, the dominant reading was that she could not have done so for political motives because she ‘wasn’t interested in studies, only boys’ (The Australian, 2005: 11). Indeed, a journalist for City Journal linked these different elements:

[Swiss TV] made no connection between Muriel Degauque’s promiscuity and drug abuse on the one hand and her subsequent conversion to a murderously puritanical form of Islam on the other (she wore the most extreme of veils). It requires little imagination to make such a connection. (Dalrymple, 2006: 15)

The reporters implied that her ‘interest in boys’ was also that which made her vulnerable to manipulation. This attention to her sexual past is similar to news media reporting on male suicide bombers, where focus is given to cases of male terrorists who attended strip clubs and used prostitutes prior to an attack, and emphasis is placed upon the Qu’ranic promise that martyrs will have sexual satisfaction in heaven. In those cases, Arab masculinity is questioned through their excessive sexuality (Brunner, 2005; Cook, 2005). However, this emphasis in reporting on Degauque is more significant than news media simply providing background information on a ‘celebrity villain’. Rather, confirming Chesney-Lind’s (1996) analysis, the media discussions on her alleged promiscuity suggest that a certain aspect of female sexuality is linked to violence. By emphasizing her sexual past and troubled youth, she is presented as outside of the dominant middle-class ideal of the ‘European women’.

‘I have to go. We’re being raided again’¹¹

The previous definitions of the real focused on Degauque as a woman (or a faulty one); however, the third definition, coexisting with the first two, prioritized her religious identity. Within this definition of the real, two elements constructed it: first, as with other contemporary Orientalist narratives shaped by ‘the war on terror’, state security concerns dominate discussions (Jackson, 2007); and second, as with other discussions on Muslim women, there is a focus on her veiling practices (Tarlo, 2006).

This security approach was taken by 12 of the texts; another seven of the articles saw Degauque as an exemplar of a new trend in suicide terrorism, namely the use of ‘white’ Europeans and women, highlighting this as particularly worrying for security officials. The journalist for the International Herald Tribune cited a senior official in the anti-terrorism division in Belgium’s police force:

Women married men connected to the first wave of Europe’s militant Islamists a decade ago, some of whom followed their husbands to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. While they supported their husbands’ militancy … they never acted themselves. (Smith, 2005a: 2)

So in the past, such women were not ‘serious’ threats, but now security officials are concerned because of their engagement. Indeed, Dickey on CNN argued that as a foreign woman carrying out the attack in Iraq, she had shamed men for not being brave enough (Kagan et al., 2005b). Thus her action has symbolic meaning not only targeted at the ‘far enemy’, but also for the local population and potential recruits (Schweitzer, 2006). The articles implied a legitimate fear of converts, because like Degauque they ‘became more Muslim than a Muslim’ (n = 20) as ‘the religion was totally ingrained in them’ (Browne and Watson, 2005: 4; Bilefsky, 2005). In CCN’s The Situation Room (2008), they noted that ‘she was in love, but she was a true believer. And she was as dangerous, as would be any Islamic fundamentalist.’ Thus for the news media, although marriage was important, it was her religious belief that is seen to provide the motivation, and by association, for all Muslim suicide bombing – we are told that Degauque ‘only lived for that [her religion]’ (Browne and Watson, 2005: 4; Casert, 2005). Her attempts to abide by her ‘most radical rules’ when visiting her parents was used as an indication that she was ‘totally indoctrinated’ (ANSA English Media Service, 2005). Here, her faith was presented as irrational. Thus the Daily Mail dismissed her faith as a ‘death cult’ with the headline: ‘Muslim convert becomes first European woman to embrace death cult’ (2005: 23). Others saw Islam as entirely apart from Europe and its religions, so Castle in The Independent focused on ‘the struggle to understand “the enemy within”’ (2005: 2).

However, as this last quote indicates, the fear of the convert alone does not entirely explain the security perspective. Also stressed by the news media was that these women’s engagement in violence pointed to weaknesses in counter-terrorism profiling techniques. According to Mia Bloom (2011), Degauque is indicative of a decision by such organizations to recruit ‘Jihad Jane’. Nine of the newspapers reported on Degaque’s European complexion in this context. For example:

The Belgian woman Degauque, with her European passport and her north European looks, could have gained easy access to soft targets in many western countries (Dickey, 2005).

Yet the focus on Degauque’s and other European converts’ ability to ‘blend into Western society’ (Ganley, 2006) was somewhat contradicted by the emphasis also allocated in reporting to her decision to wear a burqua or chador which would hide these very same features.

Seventeen articles referenced Degauque’s increased veiling practices and nearly all of them noted that she veiled. The veil in European media, literature and public discourses operates as a powerful symbol of strangeness and otherness, signifying cultural distance, religious fanaticism and a fundamental violation of women’s rights (Macdonald, 2006). Debates in Europe have focused on the appropriateness of veiling in public spaces by women and children, and on ‘unveiling’ as a symbol of liberation in Afghanistan. Within these discussions, veiling is largely assumed to be oppressive to the expression of individual identity and autonomy which are constructed as core values of ‘liberal European states’ (Moghadam, 1994). Expanding on this theme, for Dickey in Newsweek, the veil was important in understanding the backwardness of the jihadist cause:

‘wanting a return to crusader days of old when knights were bold – and fair maidens were kept behind veils, their virtue protected, their lives entirely controlled by men’. (2005: 27)

Through the veil, the ‘Muslim world’ was presented as backward-looking, as well as ‘medieval’ or undeveloped through its insistence on the visibility of Islam in the public sphere. This is despite the continued complexity and challenging of secularization within European states and thinking (Asad, 2002; Yeğenoğlu, 2006). In the articles analysed, given this broader Orientalist framing of veiling, Degauque’s veil symbolically distanced her from the rest of Europe and marked her as a radical, but it also served to silence her and depoliticized her activities further – she becomes a concealed victim of Islam/Other men. Mernissi argues ‘the veil means that the woman is present in the men’s world but invisible’ (2003: 142–143). For example:

‘when she first converted she wore a simple veil. But with her last husband she wore a (head to toe) chador’ (Watt, 2005: 3)

‘with nothing but her eyes showing, even wearing gloves’ (Smith, 2005b: 10)

‘She cloaked herself in a burqa, wearing gloves that concealed her pale hands.’ (Smith and Tihon, 2005: 3)

All of the texts which talked of her burqa or chador used terms such as ‘cloaked’ and ‘concealed’, thereby emphasizing her veiling choices as suspicious and rendering Degauque unknown or unknowable in the public sphere – and hence more of a security threat. In the first piece on CNN’s Live Today (Kagan et al., 2005a), they mentioned that it can ‘conceal a suicide belt’ more easily.

However, in the European context the veil also made her visible and forced the gaze (Winter, 2004). As Fanon (1967, 1991[1952]) argues, the veil is both the dress and mask of Muslim women. Veiled in black, Degauque became non-white and non-European and stood in contrast to other modern Western European women mentioned in the texts analysed. The fact that she covered her face and hands as well as her hair was used as emblematic of radicalization. Her life, or rather her death, was reduced to her chador/burqa and as with media narratives on veiling, her agency was denied. For example, for Watt (2005), writing in The Guardian, her journey towards her detonation in Iraq was understood by her transition towards full veiling. The black face-veil appears to function as the signifier of the ‘radical Muslim terrorist’, and it is assumed that the media’s audience can ‘know’ her faith and her violent politics by seeing her veil. Furthermore, there is a persistent fantasy of women’s place and face behind it, allowing the veil to operate as a frontier of European knowledge power (Fanon, 1967). Yet in these media texts this frontier is broken and Degauque is revealed to us through additional photographs, for example in The Daily Telegraph:

Looking shyly out of a photograph taken long before she converted to Islam and enveloped herself in an all-concealing chador, Muriel Degauque has the appearance of an ordinary young Belgian woman. (Rennie, 2005: 17)

The photographs accompanying the stories are of Degauque before her conversion to Islam and adoption of veiling practices, which the captions and headlines suggest is her ‘real’ self. In the photographs she is literally and symbolically unveiled. While the text focused on her veiling, she was ‘naked’ before the reader, asserting the power of the media to make her knowable to the Western audience. Degauque in the European context is both present and absent, the multiple reactions produced by her agency are covered by a focus on her clothing.

Conclusion

Even though Muriel Degauque’s death in Iraq is newsworthy precisely because she is female and European, the above discussion reveals how the news media constantly prioritize her Muslim identity – albeit in highly gendered terms – over these characteristics. They have done so by constructing three definitions of the real. First, they have emphasized her marriage to a Muslim, and through this she is seen to have taken on her husband’s ‘foreign identity’. Her Muslim identity is attributed to her husband in several ways: in some reports by the erroneous claim that he was the reason that she converted, or in other reports that he was the reason that she adopted a ‘more radical’ form of Islam and by the comparisons to her ‘normal’ childhood. Second, the way that they prioritize her Muslim identity relies on a contrast with her ‘ordinary’ childhood. This mode suggests that she was ‘susceptible’ to radicalism because of her troubled teenage years and risky behaviours, which are seen as deviant. This implies that her conversion to Islam is not rational and that similarly her radicalism is outside the bounds of normality, thereby denying her agency. This notion that radicalism is not rational is strengthened by the absence of any discussion of political motives. Her decision to act as a suicide terrorist is seen to result entirely from her private life, and the actions of NATO or the Iraqi State are entirely absent and unrelated. Third, despite the lack of reference to politics, the definition of the real that places Degauque’s Muslim identity at the forefront of reporting relies upon the securitization of politics and the dominance of the ‘War on Terror’. Her attack in Iraq threatens European security spaces because in the reporting she has become an ‘enemy within’ – even though she was an outsider in Iraq. Although some texts locate Degauque as part of a ‘growing trend’ of European radical female terrorists, reports made great effort to demonstrate that she was exceptional, and in particular not a ‘real’ woman or not a ‘true’ European. This racial Othering of a ‘white’ suicide bomber shows not only the ways in which inherited accounts of gender (femininity) and race are disrupted by her actions, but also how prevailing narratives stabilize dominant characterizations of ‘women’ and ‘Europeans’. However, these are not entirely stable constructions of Europe and womanhood, as the various definitions of Degauque in the news media are contradictory. On the one hand, her marriage and her alleged domesticity and obedience to her husband offer an image of an unproblematic femininity, while on the other hand, alleged excessive emotion through trauma and ‘risky’ behaviours ascribes to her a faulty femininity. In order to rationalize this contradiction, the new media prioritize her Muslim identity in highly gendered terms. Nonetheless, although religion is granted a dominant presence in news media reporting, it is presented as irrational and foreign. This understanding of Islam as foreign to Europe ignores the recent developments of vernacular Islam and its presence in Europe for centuries. Furthermore, the marked articulation of religion in the public realm (through acts of veiling and terrorism) destabilizes the dominant account of modernity as articulated in many European states (Moors and Meyer, 2005; Yeğenoğlu, 2006). Consequently ‘religious subjects’ (as well as women) are denied agency in the public realm. This combined approach – which presents her Muslim identity in terms that rob women committing violent acts of their agency, and as the unproblematized Other of an accepted white secularized Europeanness – indicates the salience and stability of the dominant gendered, racial and religious constructions in the news media’s definitions of the real, which even Degauque’s violence could not escape.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix: News media analysed

Source	Author	Title of piece	Date	Page/location/other information
Agence France Press (Brussels)		Suspected recruiters for suicide attacks in Iraq on trial in Brussels	Monday 15/10/2007	Newswire Brussels
Agence France Press (Brussels)		Head of Iraq suicide cell in Belgium jailed for ten years	Thursday 10/01/2008	Newswire Brussels
ANSA English Media Service		Terror: Belgium bomber	Thursday 01/12/2005	Newswire, Brussels
Associated Press (International News)	Raf Casert	Belgians seek to come to grips with fact that suicide bomber in Iraq was one of them	Thursday 01/12/2005	Newswire, Brussels
Associated Press (World Stream)	Jamey Keaten	Homegrown militants present Europe with new terror threat	Thursday 08/12/2005	Newswire, International News
Associated Press (International News)	Raf Casert, Associated Press	Belgian trial starts of 6 accused of joining group that allegedly sent female bomber to Iraq	Monday 15/10/2007	Newswire Brussels; Summary repeated in Xinhua General News Service
Associated Press (International News)		Five men in Belgium found guilty of sending fighters to Iraq include female suicide bomber	Thursday 10/01/2008	Newswire, Brussels
The Australian		Senseless slaughter	Monday 05/12/2005	.11
BBC Monitoring Europe – Political		Belgian suicide network said to have links with Iraq’s Al-Zarqawi paper	Saturday 03/12/2005	Original Source by Mark Eeckhaut ‘Muriel lost her life for terrorist Al-Zarqawi’ in De Standaard, Belgium, Friday 2 December 2005
BBC Monitoring Europe – Political		Terror suspects studied at Syrian Koranic schools while on Belgian welfare	Tuesday 23/10/2007	Original report by Belgian newspaper De Standaard, 23 October 2007
BBC Monitoring Europe – Political		Iraq kamikaze defendants terrorists, not freedom fighters – Belgian prosecutor	Wednesday 07/11/2007	Text of report by De Standaard website, Belgium, 7 November, Report by Mark Eeckhout: ‘Bilal Soughir’s Terror Co.’
BBC News Online		Journey of Belgian female ‘bomber’	Friday 02/12/2005	http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4491334.stm
The Brussels Journal	Paul Belien	Belgian export: Suicide bombers	Wednesday 30/11/2005	www.brusselsjournal.com/node/530
Canberra Times (Australia)	Claire Soares	Gang on trial for recruiting suicide bomber	Wednesday 17/10/2007	Final edition, p.14
China Daily		Mother grieves for ‘brainwashed’ daughter	Saturday 03/12/2005	www.chinadaily.cn (no page)
Christian Science Monitor	Peter Ford	Why European women are turning to Islam	Tuesday 27/12/2005	.1
City Journal	Theodore Dalrymple	Soundings: ‘The empty fanatic’	Friday 01/01/2006	Vol. 16, No. 1, Manhattan Institute, p.15
CNN.com		Belgian paper IDs ‘suicide bomber’	Thursday 01/12/2005	0637 EST, ‘world’ section.
CNN Live Today	Daryn Kagan, Nic Robertson, Jim Bittermann, Tonya Terry, Anderson Cooper	The fight for Iraq: women bombers – just a bus ride	Thursday 01/12/2005	Transcript: 120104CN.V75; 1000 EST; Bitterman reporting; (repeated five times during CNN broadcasts that day)
CNN – The Situation Room	Wolf Blitzer, Nic Robertson, Jamie McIntyre, Kacki Schechner, B Todd, et al	Clinton weighs in on Iraq War: civilian contractors caught on tape	Thursday 01/12/2005	Transcript: 120103CN.V16; 1600 EST; Brian Todd Reporting on Degauque
CNN Live Today	Kyra Philips, Nic Robertson, Ed Henry, Jim Bittermann, Tony Harris, David Ensor	Roadside Bomb kills 10 marines; questions raised about Alito’s abortion views; community looks for answers to Belgium suicide bomber	Friday 02/12/2005	Transcript 120202CN.V85; Jim Bittermann reporting, Belgium
CNN Your World Today	Daryn Kagan, Aneesh Raman, Brian Todd, Jim Clancy, Zain Verjee, John Vause, Delia Gallagher	Vice President Cheney makes case for war in Iraq; Saddam Hussein trial; The rise of women terrorists	Tuesday 06/12/2005	Transcript 120601CN.V 10, Christopher Dickey (Newsweek) guest;
CNN – The Situation Room	W Blitzer, J Meserve, J, McIntrye, P Newton, K Cafferty Brian Tod, C Costello and A Velshi	Strait of Hormuz incident; secure dirvers licences; Not happy with Hillary Clinton; Thompson takes the gloves off, Giuliani’s cash crunch; Campaign with a difference	Friday 11/01/2008	(Typo in title original) International News, 1700 broadcast. Transcript 011102CN.V16
The Courier Mail (Australia)	Reuters	Mum’s sorrow as only child turns into a suicide bomber	Saturday 03/12/2005	World section; p.17; Largely taken from The Guardian
The Daily Mail		Girl from the bakery who turned into a suicide bomber	Friday 02/12/2005	3rd edn, p.23
The Daily Star		Face of bomber	Friday 02/12/2005	1st edn; News, p.2
The Daily Telegraph	David Rennie	Face of Europe’s first woman suicide bomber	Friday 02/12/2005	.17
Fox News (Associated Press)		Belgian Woman ID’d as Iraq bomber	Thursday 01/12/2005	www.foxnews.com
The Express (Lancashire edn)		Suicide Bomber was ‘nice shop assistant’	Friday 02/12/2005	.6;
The Guardian	Nicholas Watt	From Belgian cul-de-sac to suicide bomber in Iraq	Friday 02/12/2005	.3
The Houston Chronicle	Elaine Ganley, Associated Press	Radical Islam drawing more western converts: Security officials fear that the naive are easy recruits for terror planners	Friday 05/02/2006	.8, section A, Evry France, 2 star edn
The Independent	Stephen Castle	Girl next door who became a suicide bomber	Friday 02/12/2005	.1,2 repeated: The Houston Chronicle, 3 star edn; 02/12/2005, p.22
The Independent	Claire Soares	Gang accused of recruiting Europe’s first female suicide bomber go on trial	Tuesday 16/10/2007	.18; summary repeated in The New Zealand Herald, 17/10/2007 and in The Jawa Report 16/10/2007
International Herald Tribune	Craig S. Smith	Police try to fathom Belgian’s path to terror	Wednesday 07/12/2005	.2.
International Herald Tribune	Dan Bilefsky	Belgium says France endangered terror raid	Saturday 03/12/2005	.3
Newsweek	Christopher Dickey and others	Women of Al Qaeda	Monday 12/12/2005	p.27–36
The New York Times	Craig S. Smith	Raised Catholic in Belgium, she died a Muslim bomber	Tuesday 06/12/2005	.10
The Straits Times (Singapore)	Jonathon Eyal	Asia this week	Saturday 03/12/2005	n/p
The Sunday Independent (Ireland)	Conor Sweeney	Belgian first white suicide bomber in Iraq	Sunday 04/12/2005	n/p
The Sunday Times	Nicola Smith and Francoise Tihon	Making of Muriel the suicide bomber	Sunday 04/12/2005	London, p.3
The Times	Sam Knight and Agencies	Mystery of Europe’s first woman suicide bomber	Thursday 01/12/2005	http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article598536.ece
The Times	Anthony Browne	Western white woman a suicide bomber	Thursday 01/12/2005
The Times	Anthony Browne and Rory Watson	The girl who went from baker’s assistant to Baghdad bomber (Front page leader: ‘The waitress, the wife, the suicide bomber’)	Friday 02/12/2005	London p.4 – Summary repeated in Weekend Australian, All-round edn, . 10 03/12/2005; summary repeated in The Calgary Herald (Alberta) 02/12/2005, p. A15.; repeated in Ottowa Citizen, early edn, Friday 02/12/2005, p.10
The Times	David Charter	Arrests over plot to bomb Brussels	Wednesday 21/05/2008	.40
UPI	Gareth Harding	Portrait of a female suicide bomber	Wednesday 07/12/2005	Brussels, Newswire
The Washington Post	Raf Casert, Associated Press	Marriage made a radical of Belgian	Friday 02/12/2005	.A18; repeated as Newswire ‘Belgian’s shocked to learn Baghdad Suicide Bomber was local woman’
The Windsor Star (Ontario)		World Report: Star News Services: Baghdad bomber was typical girl-next-door	Friday 02/12/2005	.C2
Xinhua General News Service		Belgium arrests suicide bombers poised to depart for Iraq	Thursday 01/12/2005	Newswire

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Caron Gentry at Abilene Christian University, for her helpful comments and insights and for allowing me to review her forthcoming piece (Gentry, forthcoming).

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

The analysis, opinions and conclusions expressed or implied in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College, the UK MOD, or any other governmental agency.

Notes

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Muriel’s wedding: News media representations of Europe’s first female suicide terrorist

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

News media, Islam and gender

Method

Data collection

Findings

Definitions of the real

Muriel’s wedding

‘You’re terrible, Muriel’ 10

‘I have to go. We’re being raided again’ 11

Conclusion

Footnotes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

‘You’re terrible, Muriel’¹⁰

‘I have to go. We’re being raided again’¹¹