'White widow': public enemy No 1

The very normality of Samantha Lewthwaite's background provokes, disturbs and fascinates

- Jamie Gilham
- theguardian.com, Wednesday 25 September 2013 06.06 EDT
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On Monday morning the front pages of the tabloids condemned "evil" and "fanatical" Samantha Lewthwaite, aka the white widow, as the Nairobi "bloodbath mastermind". The precise nature of the tragic events in Nairobi are still unfolding and, when the tabloids went to press on Sunday night, little was known about Lewthwaite's alleged involvement in the Nairobi attack. A few days on, we still don't know much, and the evidence against Lewthwaite is scant and contradictory. Nevertheless the Muslim convert and widow of 7/7 attacker Germaine Lindsay has become the symbol of home-grown terrorism, a target of fear and loathing.

Samantha Lewthwaite in a school photograph. Photograph: REX/Mark St George

An alleged involvement in terrorism is more than enough to provoke a hostile public reaction, of course. But there is something more potent about Lewthwaite's story. She is seen as being the first possibly violent radical British female convert to Islam. If true, there are precedents elsewhere in the west. A white Belgian convert, Muriel Degauque, perpetrated a suicide attack in Iraq in 2005. Then came Colleen LaRose, aka jihad Jane, a white American convert who, in 2011, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for his depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. LaRose had a traumatic childhood and fell into prostitution and drugs. Like many religious converts past and present, her conversion was precipitated by a crisis that acted as a catalyst for change. The teenage Lewthwaite was apparently traumatised by her parents' divorce, but it is the very normality of her background that provokes, disturbs and fascinates.

Lewthwaite is white English, female and university educated; a soldier's daughter who grew up in the home counties. Her transgressions are plentiful: she converted to Islam, took the veil and a Muslim name, married a black and notoriously radical convert, and is the mother of mixed-race children.

Despite a history of Britons – female and male – converting to Islam on British soil dating back to the 19th century, there is a definite distaste for women who choose Islam. Ordinary female converts are especially misunderstood, though we know that more women than men now convert to Islam in Britain.

History shows us that most women and men have converted to Islam as a sometimes liberal and at other times socially conservative faith, but one that is essentially tolerant, peaceful and therefore consonant with life in the west. It also reveals that, by converting to Islam, women disturb conventions – about ethnicity, gender and religion in particular.

In the 1890s, one of the first known female British converts, Francess Fatima Cates of Liverpool, was abused by her family (who threatened to burn her copy of the Qur'an) and attacked by strangers in the street – horse manure was rubbed into her face as she left the local mosque. Today, converts who are female Muslim experience what we now know as Islamophobia – at home, in the workplace and, still, on the street.

But Lewthwaite's is a case apart. She took a dramatically different path to her British Muslim sisters. She married Germaine Lindsay and, despite publicly denouncing the 7/7 attacks, was dubbed the white widow – an inversion of black widow, which is at once negative and ambiguous, with connotations of familiarity, danger and mystery.

Having apparently repudiated her pledge of loyalty to liberal values and society following 7/7, and with her alleged connections with the radical al-Shabaab, she is now public enemy No 1. Whatever the precise facts, a heady cocktail of gender, religion and alleged terrorism feeds into the story of the "white widow", making it likely to provide fodder for tabloid front pages for some time to come.

• This article was amended on 25 September 2013. A sentence about Belgian convert Muriel Degauque was changed to make clear that she was not the first ever female suicide bomber.