Islamic Gender Apartheid: A New Book

by Phyllis Chesler (October 2017)

 

Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women, published by New English Review Press, October 2017.

 

Unlike many Western feminists, I do not view the Islamic veil or the burqa as either comfortable or sexy. It is, essentially, a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It violates a woman’s dignity and it gravely restricts her physical and social mobility.
 

In addition, those who practice gender apartheid may also engage in religiously and legally sanctioned sex slavery, concubinage, “temporary” marriage, and pedophilia, as well as the sanctioned sexual harassment and rape of naked-faced infidel women.
 

I’ve  interviewed  a  number  of  experts,  including  Muslim  free thinkers and reformers such as Asma’a Al-Gul, Nonie Darwish, Tarek Heggy, Asra Nomani, and Nadia Shahram. In addition, I document the extraordinary heroism of Lubna Ahmed Al-Hussein (Sudan), Nujood Ali (Yemen), Mukhtaran Bibi (Pakistan), Wajeda Huwaider (Saudi Arabia), Gulie Khalaf (Yazidi-Iraqi-American), Adoul Keijan (Yazidi-Iraqi American), Fauzia Koofi (Afghanistan), Kainat Soomro (Pakistan), Hans Erling Jensen (Scandinavia, Germany) and Sister Hatune Dogan (Turkey, Syria, Iraq).
 

Throughout the book, I express considerable anguish and anger about the relative silence of many Western feminists about gender apartheid.
 

Here’s why.
 

Second Wave Western feminists exposed, analyzed, and condemned rape. We pioneered rape crisis counseling and changed the laws about rape. Yet, by the 21st century, leading feminists became exceedingly cautious.
 

ISIS kidnapped young girls and raped them nine-to-ten times a day—sometimes thirty times a day—every day. These infidels—Christians and Yazidis—were viewed by Islamists as religiously permitted sex slaves and are auctioned off in videotaped slave markets. Many girls killed themselves or attempted to do so. Such slaves begged for the bombing of the brothels in which they were being held captive—or to be rescued.
 

May I suggest that we at least provide refuge to girls and women who live in the West and who are in flight from honor-based violence? Their blood should not be on our hands. We must also prosecute, not only their tormentors and honor killers, but their family-of-origin accomplices.
 

Today, my 21st century colleagues are Muslim and ex-Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish feminists, dissidents, conservatives, and libertarians. With some precious exceptions, radical and liberal Second, Third, and Fourth Wave Western feminists are silent on the subject of Islamic gender apartheid.

 

Today, my colleagues and I are anti-Islamists or anti-Sharia-ists: As the feminists of yore, we share one universal standard of human rights. We support post-Enlightenment Western values such as the separation of religion and state, freedom from and freedom of religion, free speech, fact-based knowledge as opposed to mere opinion, intellectual diversity, the right to dissent, as well as individual and human rights. We oppose herd thinking and totalitarianism in all its forms.
 

Some of my allies write under pseudonyms. Others live with round-the-clock bodyguards. This Muslim and infidel anti-Islamist movement is the major resistance movement of our time. It has been marginalized and silenced by Western governments.
 

Gender apartheid and honor-based violence are crimes and cannot be justified in the name of multicultural relativism, political “correctness,” tolerance, or anti-racism.
 

The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle for Western values. It is a necessary part of true freedom and democracy. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the twenty-first century is joined.
 

 

 

__________________________
Phyllis Chesler, Phhere.