Excerpt from Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Generations of young Tunisians grew up identifying as Muslims, but their worship and religious identity were fraught with political meaning. For many, being religious became a language through which to demand freedom from the state's intrusion into daily life.

When school started back up a week later, Nour showed up at breakfast in her pajamas. Her mother told her she was too young to make her own decisions about her future, and that she had better go get dressed. She consented. But the incident had doubled Nour's conviction to wear the niqab, and now, instead of changing surreptitiously by the bakery after she left the house, she put it on openly at home, wore it through the streets, and only took it off outside the school. In the classroom, she felt like a specter, a girl the teachers refused to look at or speak to.

"You should be wearing it too," she told her mother reprovingly. Nour's mother, a housewife with four other children to look after, didn't know what to say to this aggravating teenage daughter. Nour often lectured her mother about taking Islam more seriously. Her mother, it seemed to Nour, had no thought-through position on why she didn't cover her hair, apart from it saving her humiliation on the street and visits to the police station. These were weak positions, Nour thought; not even positions, just a base instinct for self-preservation.

President Bourguiba had famously called the veil "that miserable rag" and banned it from schools and public offices in 1981. There was grainy footage of him pulling the white scarf off a middle-aged woman's head, on the street on the day of the Eid festival at the end of Ramadan; the woman looks startled and embarrassed, and her fingers flutter to pull it back up, but the president pulls it down as if correcting a child, and pats her cheek indulgently. Since 1981, Tunisian women were obliged to go bareheaded in public spaces such as schools, universities, banks, and government buildings.

Like other modernizers in the region, Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, Bourguiba didn't explicitly advocate that women abandon Islam, but he made clear that he wanted them to act secularly: to mingle bareheaded in mixed company, to dress in modern Western fashion. Along with this, he granted women sweeping rights in voting, marriage, and child custody that rapidly made Tunisian women the most literate, educated, and independent in the Arab world. liberator of women is engraved on Bourguiba's mausoleum, but whether it was liberation for all women or just for some women would become clear in later generations.

Nour's mother, like many in her generation, went along with this model pragmatically, because there were more people than jobs in Tunisia, and she had a family to support. Everyone saw what happened to the families of the resistant women in the neighborhood, the stubborn women who insisted on covering their hair and engaging in religious activism. These families were nervous wrecks, in and out of police stations, living at the brink of poverty, with fathers, husbands, and sons who were imprisoned or in exile for dissident activity. Nour's mother recounted these ghoulish stories often, hoping her daughter's ears would catch some basic truths: the story about the woman who married an Islamist and arrived at the wedding reception to find it swarming with police ripping the headscarves off guests; the stories about nighttime home raids of those suspected of "religious" activity.

She told Nour about a woman three blocks over who was raped by policemen one night during a raid on her house and went mute for a whole year. "A whole year, Nour, she didn't utter a word. Every week, we would ask, 'Has she said anything?' And they always said, 'No, not yet.' "

Nour understood these stories were meant to scare her, but she remained stoic. "If it was easy, it wouldn't be a test then, would it? Allah loves those most whom he tests the hardest." That was true, according to the Quran, but that line had also become a rose-filtered meme popular among teenage Muslim girls.

Excerpted from Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni. Copyright © 2019 by Azadeh Moaveni. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.