An interesting development on the growing terror-and-glossy-mags beat today: al-Fajer Media is reportedly distributing Al-Qaeda’s first women’s mag, Al-Shamikha (“majestic woman” in Arabic). According to Britain’s Daily Mail, it comes from the same people out of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who brought us the organization’s first big glossy magazine, Inspire, and is being called “Jihad Cosmo” in some glib corners. The electronic magazine is said to have thirty-one pages and thirteen articles in its debut feature. The Mail piece offers a taste:
There are exclusive interviews with martyrs’ wives, who praise their husbands’ decisions to die in suicide attacks.
The slick, 31-page Al-Shamikha magazine—meaning The Majestic Woman—has advice for singletons on ‘marrying a mujahideen’.
Readers are told it is their duty to raise children to be mujahideen ready for jihad.
And the ‘beauty column’ instructs women to stay indoors with their faces covered to keep a ‘clear complexion’.
As with Inspire, we should be careful about labeling any single publication as representative or “from” a group as diverse as Al-Qaeda. That magazine, by the way, is on its fourth issue—here’s a report from ABC back in January.
