Tarek Fatah: Who are Joshua Boyle and Caitlan Coleman?

...Boyle’s description of himself as a “pilgrim” was missed by many journalists, who apparently don’t know most Muslim places of pilgrimage are in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and India. And not in the valleys of Wardaq where Boyle says he went with a sense of mission — to help people, "to fix things”, as he told the CBC’s Susan Ormiston.

When Armiston gently asked Boyle why he wanted to go to Afghanistan with a pregnant wife, he portrayed his decision not as an error of judgment, but as an act of sacrifice, to do “things that nobody else is doing, so I think I have to do it.”

What things? He didn’t elaborate.

The fact Afghanistan’s Wardaq province has been a Taliban- dominated area from the time the jihadis came to power seems to have had no bearing on Boyle’s and Coleman’s decision to move there.

Coleman, at least in the media, has demonstrated a characteristic we would expect of a Muslim woman living under Taliban rule. She has let her husband do the talking for her, although she did change out of her black burqa into a stylized Egyptian hijab...