Avoiding Islamophobia

"We're still waiting for a march against honour killings, child marriages, polygamy, sex slavery or female genital mutilation."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Q. Nomania (Muslim Reform Movement)

"If one finds white male sexism intolerable, then one should find all male sexism just as intolerable. Excusing men of colour, Muslims, immigrants or men living in non-Western societies for bad behaviour toward women is an expression of the bigotry of low expectations."
"The result of this mindset is that Christianity is criticized for every misstep against women but Islam is protected from the glare of scrutiny."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim Somalian, writer, activist

"What I describe as a 'faux feminism' has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and post-colonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason."
"[Today's Western feminists] are too nervous about being called Islamophobes, racists or colonialists] to dedicate themselves to rescue of victims of rape from Islamic communities]."
"In recent years, I fear that the 'peace and love' crowd in the West has refused to understand how Islamism endangers Western values and lives, beginning with our commitment to women's rights and human rights. The Islamists who are beheading civilians, stoning Muslim women to death, jailing Muslim dissidents, and bombing civilians on every continent are now moving among us both in the East and in the West. While some feminist leaders and groups have come to publicize the atrocities against women in the Islamic world, they have not tied it to any feminist foreign policy. Women's studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They do not. More than four decades after I was a virtual prisoner in Afghanistan, I realize how far the Western feminist movement has to go."
Phyllis Chesler, American feminist

Women wearing the Chador. Getty Images

The campaign by women fed up with their secondary, unentitled place in society engaged in a protracted campaign to shame society with the understanding that in institutionalizing a social contract that diminished the stature and the intelligence and opportunities of women, not only were women and their children suffering great harm, but society itself, like those it targeted, would never reach its full aspirational potential. Equal-pay legislation, marital rights, equal access to education, opening up politics and the professions to women has enabled Western societies to move forward and grow.

All of which have been a tremendous benefit to the societies which finally accepted equality for both genders in every aspect of social, political, and working life. Yet, since those victories were established, with feminists forever cautious that nothing occur to set back the advances that took so many years to accomplish, it is women in the West who have benefited, not women universally. There were overtures to some societies to improve the lives of women virtually held in bondage to patriarchal societies who were condemned for the strictures they placed on women's lives.

But the issue of women living under Shariah law in Islamic countries where it is traditional and a vital part of the culture to assert female inferiority to the place of men has been consistently and deliberately overlooked. Women who ascribe great value in the feminist ideal and the men who support them have hesitated to criticize those cultural practices that dominate and repress women. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fierce critic of Islam and Asra Q. Nomania, co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement recently called upon western feminists to re-adjust their focus.

Noting the women's march across the United States decrying the ascension of a crude sex predator to the presidency of the United States, they declared their dissatisfaction, yet while bringing attention to a man whose exploits as a braggart and a bully has brought infamy to the office of the president, pay no attention whatever to the plight of women and girls living in Islamic societies, both abroad and within Western countries where the cultural and religious traditions that have kept women as disadvantage chattels were brought as baggage to be practised in the West.

Feminists, so swift to denounce Western men for not recognizing women as equals and respecting them for the same traits and capabilities that men gain respect for, have chosen to overlook the attitudes and behaviours of Muslim men. Are they regarded as underdogs and therefore to be pitied should they be deprived of "their last source of pride: their domination over their women"? For this is what Islam views as a man's 'honour', that complete control of a woman be exerted. Any Muslim woman's father, brother, uncle, husband, son or brother-in-law has explicit control over her, dominating her life as seen fit lest family honour be shamed.



Phyllis Chesler's feminism dates back to the 1960s and 70s, when she campaigned with the National Organization for Women and allied organizations with the understanding that they were meant to support women everywhere. That has changed. In lock-step with the emergence of Islam as a factor and a growing one by leaps and bounds in the world of the West thanks to rampant immigration and migration. Now, Western societies are aware of child marriages, of female genital mutilation, of social forces that ghettoize Muslim women, of honour killings taking place within Muslim communities.

The heart of Islam beats hard for the misogyny they feel is the correct social order of relations between the sexes; women are not to be trusted, and must be firmly held in place under the heavy fist of a man, and if she requires physical punishment to emphasize her obligations, that is readily arranged. At one time feminists organized rape-crisis counselling centres and helped to bring in new rape laws; even in India which has a long tradition of violence against women has brought in new rape laws though violence has scarcely abated, so engrained is it in the culture of male entitlement.

Now, Phyllis Chesler hopes to influence feminists of their moral duty to advance human rights to aid girls and women "who are being beaten, stalked and threatened with death by their own families because they refuse to veil or to marry their first cousin". She feels there is an obligation to erect shelters as havens from honour-based violence, all the cultural 'norms' of Islamic society imported with immigration to the West. To each thing there is a season and a time for everything....

Muslim women in Amsterdam, wearing different styles of veils