Islam’s Feminist Fantasy

As a feminist who has been involved in the campaign to end male violence against women and girls since I was 17 years old, I am familiar with many different forms of human rights abuses that are carried out in the name of religion and culture.

After September 11th 2001, I became increasingly aware that, in comparison with other mainstream religions, Islam was getting the benefit of a free pass when it came to beliefs and practices that are harmful to women. I assumed all feminists would be outraged and vocal in their anger – but I was wrong. In fact, many women seem willing to tie themselves in knots in their efforts to believe that “Muslim feminism” is a thing.

The Left has allowed its tendency to blame the West for everything to offer a justification for terrorism as resistance to colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. As someone who is both a lifelong feminist and of the Left, I have long been bitterly disappointed with those who claim to campaign for women’s rights yet capitulate to Islamofascist men. In the UK, France, and other European countries, such women have supported sharia courts, the wearing of the full-face veil, arranged marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and gender segregation in public places. Supporting traditional Islam flies in the face not just of feminism, but of even the most basic equality between men and women.

Christine Delphy, renowned feminist intellectual and co-founder of the journal Nouvelles Questions Féministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1977, is a long-term member of the feminist organisation Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF). With such impeccable credentials, one might assume that Delphy would be opposed to such misogynistic practices as the requirement for women to cover up in order to appear “modest” – but no. Delphy believes that feminists who consider the veil to be a symbol of women’s oppression are Islamophobic. “White feminists should accept that [veil-wearing] women want to develop their own feminism based on their own situation”, wrote Delphy in a Guardian article in 2015, “and that this feminism will take their Islamic culture into account”.

In the not too distant past, it would never have occurred to me that feminists might either support Islamism or be too cowardly to condemn it. In 2006, some years after I became aware that there were organised gangs of men abusing girls for both financial gain and personal pleasure, I pitched a story to the Guardian newspaper on the topic. I had heard from one of my police contacts that a 14-year-old girl called Charlene Downes had disappeared from her home in Blackpool, a deprived town in northwest England, three years earlier. She had never been found, but it was known that prior to her going missing she had been abused by several men who run takeaway food outlets in an area known as “Paki Alley” in the town centre (many of the men running them were Middle Eastern and South Asian).

The then features editor, now editor in chief Katharine Viner, initially turned down the story, telling me that she thought we would be seen as racist for publishing a piece that explored both the endemic child sexual abuse in the region, as well as the high predominance of minority ethnic men involved in the crime. I took it to The Sunday Times Magazine, and it was published the following year. Five years later, The Times newspaper claimed to have “broken the story” of Asian grooming gangs in the north of England.

Partly as a result of liberal Leftists refusing to engage with the grooming gang phenomenon in case they offended the multiculturalists, bona fide racists took the story and ran with it, distorting it to the point where child sexual abuse was ignored in favour of a narrative about immigration.

Very soon after my article in The Sunday Times was published, my name was added to the website Islamophobia Watch, a website, now inactive, founded by white, male, hard leftists who believed that any criticism of Islam was rooted in prejudice and racism. It was to be the first honorable mention of many over the years, in fact whenever I wrote or spoke about the horrors of the full-face veil, sharia courts, FGM, or forced marriage.

At the time of the attack on the Twin Towers, Ken Livingstone was Mayor of London, having been appointed in 2000. Livingstone served as Mayor until 2008. One of the founders of Islamophobia Watch, Bob Pitt, was a press officer for Livingstone, who, we may recall, had close and extremely amicable connections with the Islamic cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has defended both suicide bombing and the persecution of homosexuals.

As an out-and-proud lesbian since 1977, I am staggered at the number of “queer” identified individuals who support Islamic fundamentalists above and beyond the gays attacked and threatened by them.

In 2011, 18-year-old Mohammed Hasnath put up stickers declaring London’s East End a “gay free zone” and citing verses from the Quran. He was later caught, convicted of a public order offence and fined £100, and I was a signatory of a letter sent out as a press release shortly after this. His Facebook page continues to reveal fundamentalist sympathies; for example, Hasnath lists Sheikh Khalid Yasin as one of his interests – a man who is on record as abusing “homosexuals” and saying they should be put to death.

Islamophobia Watch had quite a different take on this incident: “Bindel and her friends are trying to set the LGBT community against the Muslim community by falsely claiming that the law discriminates in favour of the latter, thereby echoing the EDL’s own anti-Muslim propaganda. In short, they undermine the prospect of achieving any real change in the law while at the same time they give credibility to the lies of the far right.”

According to IW, the fault lay with the lesbians and gay men protesting the outcome of the case, rather than with Hasnath’s homophobic prejudice. Of course, with today’s pro-Hamas Queers for Palestine, this example seems quite tame.

However, over the years I have attempted to engage with religious Muslim women in an attempt to demonstrate to those that believe in the concept of Muslim feminism to think again. There have often been hilarious outcomes.

In 2014, I accepted an invitation to debate an anti-feminist Islamist, Zara Faris, at an event entitled Islam or Feminism: Which One Truly Liberates Women? This event (which was supposed to be held at SOAS – the School of Oriental and African Studies) was no sooner advertised than a petition, “Ban Islamophobic Transphobic speaker Julie Bindel from your event on Friday 28th Nov”, was posted on social media. It claimed I was “known for [my] Islamophobic, transphobic and biphobic views and thus should not be allowed to speak on a debate concerning Islam and feminism.”

It had been started by a woman who was at the time involved in student politics and now describes herself as “a non-binary disabled Muslim dyke of Pakistani heritage” who appears to be a prison abolitionist seeking “decriminalisation and liberation for all marginalised groups”. SOAS cancelled us, and the event went ahead at a different venue. Faris told the audience that domestic violence is more prevalent within lesbian relationships than within heterosexual relationships, which is an extraordinary lie. I realised I was being used by Faris to allow her platform to spread such prejudicial nonsense.

That same year, I was screamed at during a conference on rape and the criminal justice system by young, mainly white gate crashers who had been informed of my article in a national newspaper asking: “Why are my fellow feminists shamefully silent over the tyranny of the veil?” I asked what offended them about it, and pointed out that countless ex-Muslim women denounce the veil, but they clearly had not read a word that I had written.

Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers’ Party, Unite Against Fascism, Islamophobia Watch, and the (thankfully now-defunct) Respect Party all silence dissenters, and defend Islamism as a defence of “Muslims”. Perhaps the students had read some propaganda from the likes of them.

Even women that have been born into Muslim families, that have the temerity to denounce Islam, are labelled Islamophobic. Often they are attacked. For some, white, socialist men (and women) shouting at black and brown ex-Muslim feminists and calling them bigots and fascists are seen as on the right side of history. Maryam Namazie, founder of One Law For All, was attacked by blue-fringed “progressive” students when she gave a talk based on her own knowledge and experience, at Warwick University, in 2015. She was due to speak at an event hosted by, ironically, Warwick atheists, secularists, and humanists at the university student union. It eventually reversed the decision.

In December 2015, Namazie spoke about blasphemy and apostasy at Goldsmith University, but was disrupted when several men from the Goldsmith Islamic Society arrived and started shouting and throwing things towards the speaker’s podium. The Islamic Society said that Namazie’s attendance on campus was a violation of their “safe space”. As a female student tried to intervene the men shouted at her to “sit down”.

Namazie, who fled from Iran in 1980, is a committed feminist who has spoken about the abuse of women in Iran, and campaigns for an end to sharia law. Others, such as the redoubtable Nimco Ali who has brought about tangible change by campaigning to end FGM, have been similarly targeted.

The word “Islamophobia” was invented and used by Islamists to shut down debate, and prevent people from being liberated from Islam.

It seems that certain liberal faux feminists, and ultra-leftists in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe) are willing to bend over backwards to defend Islamism – even sharia courts. The irony being that these are the very people who should be ensuring that Islamist fascists can never come to power.