This is the book I’ve been waiting for—only it’s richer, deeper, and more intriguing than I could have imagined. A Road Unforeseen is a major contribution to our understanding of feminism and Islam, of women and the world, and gives me fresh hope for change.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Living With a Wild God
A Road Unforeseen
Women Fight the Islamic State
In war-torn northern Syria, a democratic society—based on secularism, ethnic inclusiveness, and gender equality—has won significant victories against the Islamic State, or Daesh, with women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders.
A Road Unforeseen recounts the dramatic, underreported history of the Rojava Kurds, whose all-women militia was instrumental in the perilous mountaintop rescue of tens of thousands of civilians besieged in Iraq. Up to that point, the Islamic State had seemed invincible. Yet these women helped vanquish them, bringing the first half of the refugees to safety within twenty-four hours.
Who are the revolutionary women of Rojava and what lessons can we learn from their heroic story? How does their political philosophy differ from that of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Islamic State, and Turkey? And will the politics of the twenty-first century be shaped by the opposition between these political models?
Housatonic Book Award Finalist
Third Place Books Staff Pick and “Bookseller Top Tens” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781942658115
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781942658108
Meredith Tax speaks with the American Scholar, Publishers Weekly, Lilith, Rising Up With Sonali, Keeping Democracy Alive, Indypendent, and Joy of Resistance about her book A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.
Meredith Tax writes about the women fighting ISIS in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Nation, openDemocracy, Indypendent, and Dissent magazine.
Watch Meredith Tax discuss Rojava and A Road Unforeseen, with Carne Ross and Debbie Bookchin, at the Left Forum (beginning at approx. 15:30 min. mark).
Read an excerpt from Meredith Tax’s A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State in the Utne Reader.
Discover more about the women of Rojava and the guerilla fighters of Kurdistan on cover photographer Joey L.’s website.
Meredith Tax (September 18, 1942 – September 25, 2022) was an international women’s rights activist and founding president of Women’s WORLD, a global free speech network of feminist writers, as well as international board chair of the Centre for Secular Space and cofounder of the PEN American Center’s Women’s Committee and International PEN Women Writers’ Committee. She was also a frequent contributor to The Nation and the author of many seminal books, including A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.
visit author page »Praise for A Road Unforeseen
Swift, intense and forensic. . . . [Tax] brings the habit ‘optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect’ to [A Road Unforeseen]. The journey takes her deep to the history of Middle East and the fate of Kurds [where] now [women] are improvising a new model of living in an enclave that is not an ethnic state but a confederation of half a dozen ethnicities, organizing co-operative economy in an egalitarian borderland called Rojava. Meredith Tax wonders whether they can survive. But she is inspired. And reading her book, you will be, too.
Exceptional. . . . Not only informative but heart-wrenching. . . . It is the analysis that situates what is otherwise described as a struggle against terrorism or a struggle for national freedom as a more complicated struggle for the emancipation of women, and thereby the emancipation of society, that gripped me as a reader and activist.
With her combined expertise on fundamentalism, feminism, and human rights, Tax . . . shows what it means to view aspects of the Middle East through these basic prisms. . . . [A Road Unforeseen] is a welcome addition to the growing literature in English on the Kurds and will be mined for its perspectives and insights for years to come. ‘Any movement for real transformation,’ she insists, ‘must make the demands of women central.’ This superb book will be an essential resource for this question in the years to come.
We’re fortunate to have the patient, politically astute voice of Meredith Tax [and her] remarkable book to explain the history and meaning of these amazing events.
— Herizons
Thorough and well-documented. . . . Readers interested in geopolitical issues and history will no doubt be grateful for [Tax’s] lucid explanation of events involving countries like Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran and for illuminating the plight of the Kurdish people in the Middle East.
— New York Journal of Books
A Road Unforeseen is essential reading to understand the extraordinary democratic revolution led by the Kurds in Syria. This is compelling history but also a clarion call to the US and the international community to support this fragile project that elevates and celebrates human rights, democracy, and equality for all genders, races, and religions.
— Carne Ross, author of Independent Diplomat and The Leaderless Revolution
Meredith Tax tells the tangled and amazing history of Kurdish politics—from family feuds to terrorism to radical democracy and feminism—with just the right mixture of admiration and concern.
— Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars and The Paradox of Liberation
We in the West are so unused to thinking of Middle Eastern and Muslim women as liberated, let alone as feminist revolutionaries, that Meredith Tax’s remarkable book, A Road Unforeseen, comes as a welcome correction. By tracing the historical and political evolution of a group of Kurdish feminist guerrillas, Tax shows us what revolution looks like with feminism at its center, even in the midst of the repressive and violent attacks on women and Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. This powerful and persuasive book is a must-read for anyone who takes the plight of women seriously.
— Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier and Sand Queen
At last we have a book that tells us what we crave to know each day as we open the newspaper to read about IS, Islamists, shifting alliances, enslaved women, fleeing immigrants, and shocking cruelties. Meredith Tax shows us how the Kurds of Rojava are trying to put in place a system of equality between men and women and take local, democratic control of their lives, which would be remarkable anywhere, let alone in a war zone. As Tax so clearly demonstrates here, putting women at the center of a struggle for freedom changes everything. It’s time to learn about the extraordinary Rojava and the hope it offers that another world is possible.
— Ann Snitow, author of The Feminism of Uncertainty
This book lifts the lid on one of the best-kept secrets of our times, the birth of a revolution in the Middle East driven by gender equality and direct democracy. Meredith Tax makes a well-researched, cogent, and passionate case for why we should all get behind this experiment, at once fragile and gutsy, in Rojava, northern Syria, and Turkey.
— Rahila Gupta, author of Provoked and Enslaved
An indefatigable political thinker and activist takes us on a forensic journey into the gendering of geopolitical conflict and resistance.
— Beatrix Campbell, author of Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy and End of Equality: The Only Way Is Women’s Liberation
If you have any interest in the fight against totalitarian theocracy, then you must read A Road Unforeseen. I found it to be a thorough, well organized primer on Kurdistan, ISIS, and the self governing region known as Rojava. Meredith Tax is a phenomenal researcher, and makes this deeply complicated topic very readable. Still not convinced? THIS IS ABOUT WOMEN FIGHTING AN INSANE DEATH CULT.