FEMINISM: BIBLICAL, SECULAR, AND ISLAMIC
Bible-based cultures are the envy of the world, especially when it comes to women’s freedom and quality of life. Freedom from bondage for both men and women is all over the Bible. That is one reason why wherever the Bible went the status of women improved tremendously.
The Bible limits men and women equally in their sexual behavior, restricting both to within the boundaries of a monogamous marriage. Under Islamic values a man is not required to be responsible and control his sexual impulses. The Bible does not favor men or give them all kinds of sexual freedoms over women, as Islam has. Before Jesus restricted marriage to a holy covenant between one man and one woman, polygamy was a common form of marriage based on inequality between the sexes. Inevitably—as we can see both in the Old Testament stories of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah and in the Islamic world today—polygamy creates strained, hostile, and chaotic relationships between men and women. Monogamous marriage became the foundation upon which the Bible-based civilization was built.
The Bible placed boundaries of commitment, loyalty, holiness, and respect for family, especially on men—boundaries that had never been seen in human history before. With monogamy, the Bible exalted the woman and gave her a sense of security and dignity within the family. It also gave security to children, resulting in a wholesome family life, in which every member of the family could thrive.
With monogamy, the Bible also placed responsibility on the man to be in control of his sexual impulses for the sake of peace, family health, happiness, and law and order. Under the Bible, human civilization was on its way to a new beginning to be built on a solid foundation.
In the macho culture of the Middle East two thousand years ago, who could ever have imagined God telling men: “husband of one wife” (I Timothy 3:2); “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh” (Mark 10:7–8).
This is a groundbreaking divine commandment. If we were to apply modern-day terminology, Biblical marriage should be considered the number one, the one and only true “feminist” movement—brought to us by the one God of the Bible. But unfortunately most secular Western feminists do not recognize that the Bible is what set them free.
I often wish that angry American feminists could only see what I see. The difference between who I was in Islam and who I am today in Christ is like night and day. And the Bible is the source of my freedom from Islamic oppression. My freedom, equality, and dignity as a woman in America today is due to the Bible, not the result of the sixties feminist movement.
As I was adapting to and enjoying my new-found freedoms in America, I was extremely alarmed to hear several Islamic leaders in America demand sharia as a religious right. Well-organized and funded Islamic groups were popping up all over the U.S. with the blessings and financial support of oil-rich Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia. What was even more alarming was how the American public had no clue about what sharia and Islamic values are.
I feared that the same Islam that I escaped from was now chasing me in America. After driving the Bible out of the Middle East and into the West, Islam is now coming to the West to finish the job.
Six hundred years after Christ, the culture of the Arabian Peninsula reversed the achievements of the Bible regarding marriage, women, and monogamy in the Middle East. The core of what the Bible advocated was what threatened Arab culture the most: setting people free, especially women.
Why the Suppression of Women Is Necessary in Islam
While there are even female defenders of sharia who advocate to the West that “Muslims are the true feminists,”1 the fact is that Islam fears women. It fears their normal healthy role in a man’s life, especially under the Biblical form of marriage. A man’s love and loyalty to his family are without a doubt in conflict with the call to sacrifice his life in jihad against the enemies of Allah. Family happiness is not what Islam wants for a man.
Allah is in competition with women for the heart and mind of the man. Under Islamic law, the woman is always the loser.
The number one role of a man in Islam is to be trained to be a jihadist and the role of all citizens, young or old, male or female, is to train, bless, finance, support, and stand on the side of the jihadist who is at the center of Islamic values.
Since Islam is asking men to literally love death, nothing that the jihadist wants is denied to him. He is lured with the highest honors, plenty of money, and all the women he could want. He is even forgiven if he no longer obeys important commandments of Islam, such as to pray, fast, and so forth. The Muslim man is thrown into the wilderness of lust by Allah, who in exchange wants nothing less than his life, to be sacrificed for the expansion of Islam. The goal is what is good for Islam, not what is good for the man.
The lure and seduction of men to their deaths in jihad beggars the imagination. Allah’s promises of sexual promiscuity and infinite pleasure in the Islamic holy books were originally aimed at the most sexually deprived men in the most rugged and merciless area of the world, the Arabian Desert. Islamic law showered sexual privileges on them. The Arab male took the bait, but at what a cost!
Islam turned marriage from a holy covenant based on love, devotion, and loyalty between one man and one woman into a hostile relationship where women have to compete with Allah himself for a man’s devotion. And Allah always wins.
There is a very telling hadith about Muhammad’s hostility toward happy marriage: “During the lifetime of the prophet, we used to avoid chatting leisurely and freely with our wives lest some Divine inspiration might be revealed concerning us. But when the Prophet had died, we started chatting leisurely and freely (with them)” (Bukhari, 7:62:115).2
In other words, during Muhammad’s life, his fighters were too scared to chat with their wives even in their leisure time—because if they did Muhammad was bound to come up with a Koran verse reprimanding them for being nice to their wives. Only after Muhammad’s death were they finally able to talk normally with their wives.
These are the same fighters Muhammad encouraged to rape women captured in war and promised a hundred times the virility of a hundred men and the enjoyment of many “houris”—gazelle-eyed virgins whose beauty was never seen on earth—in Paradise. Muhammad clearly viewed a normal marriage as an impediment to jihad, and he thus discouraged his men from being thoughtful, kind, loyal, and loving to their wives.
The wholesome and loving Biblical marriage between one man and one woman is an existential threat to Islam. If Muslim women fully understood the huge difference in the concept of marriage between the Bible and the Koran, they might rebel. But women in the Islamic world don’t get to see what Biblical marriage is like. They are restrained, suppressed, used, and abused under the harsh rules of Islamic law so that men are freed for the business of Allah: jihad. Islamic law was created to limit human rights, and especially women’s rights, for the purpose of facilitating jihad.
Thus there is a strong correlation in Islamic culture between Muslim manhood and devotion to Allah, on the one hand, and the mistreatment of women, on the other. It is not uncommon for a Muslim man who is loyal to one wife and treats her with love and respect to suffer ridicule for not being man enough. In fact, a Muslim woman whose husband actually loves her is often accused by her in-laws of having put a spell of some kind on him. It is not a coincidence that Islam puts pressure on men to denigrate women and treat them as property, especially in public. A man who allows freedom to the women in his family can end up being treated as a pariah in Muslim society, where pride and people’s opinion is everything. If a woman “shames” a man, Muslim society requires him to “cleanse” his “honor.” This is where the expression “honor killing” comes from: a man is subjected to intolerable social shaming until he takes care of his dishonor by beating, denigrating, or even murdering his wife, daughter, or sister.
While Muslim men cannot tolerate any hint of infidelity, Muslim women must accept their husbands’ disloyalty during jihad, when they are given the right to rape women won in war. Sadly, as we have seen, some Muslim women have completely bought into this mentally sick system. To give one more example, a top female Islamic scholar in Al Azhar University, Suad Saleh, recently stated that captured enemy women could be punished with rape by jihadists.3
What Islam demands from women is inhumane and intolerable. It has a devastating effect on the healthy psyche of the whole family.
Even today, my ninety-six-year old mother still expresses her pride in her sacrifice when my father lost his life to jihad sixty years ago. In a recent interview on Egyptian TV entitled “Mustafa Hafez, the Shadow Man,” Egyptian TV dedicated a show to the great old jihadist heroes and their triumphs over the Zionist entity. My mother, who was an honored guest of the show, proudly showed old photos and letters she received from my father when he was in the 1948 Arab war against Israel. Watching the interview was overwhelmingly sad for me; it opened old wounds.4
Under Islam, women have abandoned their roles as givers and protectors of life and been reduced to cheerleaders for jihadists, who are not playing a football game, but literally gambling with their lives and the lives of their family. Islam has no respect for women’s nature. The Koran and hadith are replete with derogatory descriptions like these:
• “Women are deficient in intelligence and religion” (Koran 2:282)
• The Koran regards “Satan’s tricks as weak, but the guile of women as great” (Koran 12:28 and 4:76)
• “Muhammad said: I saw that most of the inhabitants of Hell-fire were women” (Bukhari 1:2: 28)
Women are also described in Islamic scriptures and preaching as untrustworthy, harmful to men, the devil’s gateway, and like dogs. If they are not properly covered the Islamic way, they can be accused of seducing men and would be responsible for their own rape. This is a sample of the depraved advice given to men in mosques: “Women on Earth is cursed and bad because she makes herself beautiful, but the virgins in heaven are OK to show their full breasts and be as beautiful as men want.”5 This hadith clearly asks men to resist women’s attraction on earth, which is described as bad; but in heaven women’s exposing of their breasts to lure men is okay.
Women are to adapt their lives to fulfill the needs of jihadists. Often they must accept second, third, or fourth place in the order of their husbands’ priorities. That is their badge of honor, and those who don’t conform will learn the hard way. And defenders of Islam call women who sacrifice themselves for jihad “true feminists”!
The Rebellious Woman under Islam
Islam forbids women from any kind of rebellion, and even from complaining about sharia’s oppression, especially to non-Muslims. Being punished for complaining of abuse is perhaps the cruelest form of slavery. A true feminist movement in the Islamic world is thus out of the question because it would require women to unite and rebel.
The “nashiz” or “rebellious” woman is mentioned by name in sharia law, which authorizes her husband to beat her, stop his financial support, and imprison her in the home. Sharia courts issue orders declaring women “nashiz,” after which their husbands are allowed to implement these punishments.
As soon as a woman is married, the husband has the right to pick and choose her friends, and husbands often limit their wife’s friendships to devout hijab-wearing women. Women who show any inclination to rebelliousness are shunned not only by society at large but also often by other women.
Such severe religious and legal obstacles to rebellion by women make it almost impossible for women to unite, meet to communicate freely, congregate, or protest. In fact, to do so is a crime under Islam, even today.
Amnesty International recently announced that Iran intensified its repression of women’s rights activists during the first half of 2016 by threatening, interrogating, and imprisoning women connected to collective initiatives relating to women’s rights. Dr. Homa Hoodfar was recently arrested in Iran. Many other women in the Muslim world have suffered imprisonment and even death for campaigning or other concerted feminist activities that are deemed criminal under sharia.6
Complaining to the police is useless. Muslim women rarely report domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, or any kind of abuse by males. Women in Egypt say that they don’t resort to the police for protection from men because the police will mistreat instead of rescue them.
There was an opportunity for Muslim women to rebel against sharia during the Arab Spring of 2011. But when I looked at all the posters and signs carried by women in Tahrir Square in Cairo, I could not find one sign carried by a woman demanding equality under the law, or even calling for laws against domestic violence.
Why was that? Even during the Arab Spring, a Muslim woman could not risk being labelled “nashiz.” Remember, a “rebellious” woman can legally be beaten and confined to the house—for the rest of her life, until she dies.
Under Islam, a woman is expected to martyr herself, but in a different way from a man. While he goes to literally sacrifice his life, she must never complain, but willingly sacrifice everything. Even if her husband dies she must be a sacrificial lamb who expresses her pride to the community by saying she will now dedicate her life to her children and, if necessary, give all of them to jihad.
A woman like that is placed on a pedestal by Arab media, given a life-time pension, and often rewarded with a distinguished position in the government of a Muslim nation. They mingle with the powerful in their society. Such women tell the media they are happy and privileged to live under sharia and that Islam honors them.
The worst kind of oppression is when the victim is forbidden from complaining, rebelling, or even identifying the oppressor by name. And that is exactly what Islam has accomplished: Muslim women are afraid even to name the oppressor.
Islamic Feminism
“Islamic feminism” is different from Western secular feminism in many ways. While Western feminism is an anti-establishment and anti-Biblical rebellious movement, Islamic feminism is pro-establishment and pro-Islam.
The majority of Muslim women, even the educated ones, are in denial about the oppression of women in the Koran and sharia. They choose to blame the oppression of women in Muslim societies on misinterpretations, or on bad guys who have hijacked Islam. For example, Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, the director of the Arab American Association of New York, has said, “I am a feminist and the reason I am a feminist is because I am a Muslim.”7
Musdah Mulia, a Muslim professor who also claims to be a feminist, maintains that Islam is a religion of equality. She has said, “blame Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity.” According to Muslim anthropologist Ziba Mir-Mosseini, “The problem [for women in Islam] has never been with the text (the Koran), but with the context.”8
Saudi Arabia and Gulf states highly reward “Muslim feminists” who defend Islam to the West with well-paid government or academic positions. Like Muslim men who are proud of their jihad, these women are proud of their hijab and wear it with pride, as an expression of their support of sharia. These defenders of sharia who claim “I feel free in my veil” are a powerful class of Muslim women who project a holier-than-thou aura. What is written in the Koran about the punishments for disobedient or rebellious woman doesn’t seem to concern Muslim feminists; it is as though they feel it does not apply to them, but applies to other women, who probably deserve it. Such attitudes often create hostility between women in the Muslim world.
As Palestinian Media Watch reported, a survey in Gaza showed that a high percentage of women felt that domestic violence is justified on certain occasions: “41% of the women agreed that violence was justified if the woman leaves home without notifying her husband, while 74% agreed that violence was justified if she neglected her children.”9
In Britain, the first female sharia law judge has issued a brazen warning that flies in the face of UK law, stating that “the government cannot ask Muslims not to have more than one wife.” This is a prominent and intelligent Muslim woman defending polygamy.10
Centuries of severe oppression have taught Muslim women to mold and adapt themselves to fit the sharia requirements, at least in public. Like men, women have learned that sacrificing their own happiness and that of their families is the only way to achieve a degree of respect, power, and dignity in Muslim society. Some women even go as far as becoming more radical than men in support of sharia, the very laws that oppress women. That is the assured route to acceptance and respect in Muslim culture. Everyone must sacrifice for Allah, especially women.
It is not uncommon to see seasoned older women report on and turn in misbehaving younger women and girls; such reporting is considered a badge of honor for committed Muslim women. ISIS created an all-female brigade for the purpose of apprehending women who did not follow the harsh interpretation of sharia law—something similar to the virtue police in Saudi Arabia, except that this is by women against women. The all-female force arrests women and school-girls, keeps them locked up for hours, and even subjects some to whipping and humiliation for reasons such as showing hair, or wearing a thin veil that does not meet proper Islamic standards.11
Islam has succeeded in turning women against one another. Instead of joining together to uplift and improve one another’s lives, powerful Muslim women unite with men in authority to enforce sharia against other women.
There are no Saudi or Egyptian women’s groups formed to support or rescue Christian and Yazidi women who are being raped by Muslim jihadists. Muslim women are not even there for their fellow Muslim women, such as Kurds, who are also being killed and raped.
There are dozens of volunteer Western Christian and Jewish women’s outreach groups and missionaries in the Muslim world but hardly any volunteer aid work by Muslim women. Western female American missionaries Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer were imprisoned and then miraculously freed by American forces. A ten-member Christian medical team headed by a British female surgeon was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2010.12 While female volunteers from the West are helping the war-torn Muslim world, hijab-wearing Muslim women are seen busy shopping in Paris, London, and Rome. It is not at all a part of Islamic culture for women to go and help other women. Women helping women is a Western phenomenon that grew out of Biblical culture.
Perverted Feminism
Strong women do exist in Islam. In fact because of the tremendous pressure from life under sharia, Muslim women have developed a perverted form of feminism: a kind of coping mechanism like Stockholm syndrome. Like kidnap victims identifying with their kidnappers, women in the Islamic world have learned to defend sharia and be protective of Islam’s reputation. Many are proud and assertive in their defense of Islam, especially to a Western audience. They claim they are not oppressed. But in a world where jihad is above life itself, life is cruel and such cruelty produces many aggressive women, who turn their aggression on those who are dependent on them—in private and away from public display.
Muslim women are well trained. They know that if they want to enjoy a certain level of power and respect, they must never defy sharia but embrace it. The rewards for compliant Muslim women may explain why most of the Muslim college professors in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries never criticize sharia but claim it to be harmless.
Muslim culture has produced women with such a high tolerance for oppression that most don’t even recognize it as such. Growing up in Egypt, it never occurred to me that Islamic laws are unfair to women. I never even made the connection in my mind between Islam and the tolerance for domestic violence there.
Living under the warped and twisted conditions that Islam has created, women take pride in their own bondage. They have developed learned helplessness, not only with respect to themselves but also to other women. Muslim women’s thinking about Islamic oppression of women seems to be: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
I once gave a lecture at Wellesley College in which I criticized the polygamy and mistreatment of women in Islam. A number of very assertive female Muslim students were extremely hostile to my criticism. They defended sharia, polygamy, and male-only divorce rights. They even dismissed my criticism of the child marriage of girls, saying it does not really happen much, even if it is legal on the books.
The fact is, Islamic feminism has to be sharia-compliant.
In fact, “Muslim feminists” seem to spend a lot more time and energy promoting sharia than they do defending women.
In London, Muslim women wearing full black niqabs and carrying signs protesting British law and supporting sharia warned Europe of another Holocaust and another 9/11. Here in America, the angry mother of the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing threatened, “America will pay,” instead of apologizing for what her sons had done. These are the kind of women that Arab TV uplifts and places on pedestals. The message to Muslim women is that this is the only kind of feminism Islamic society will tolerate. “Muslim feminism” is essentially the feminine form of jihad: women defend sharia, promote jihad, and even emulate the Islamic virtue police against other women.
The Development of Western Feminism
The suffrage movement in the early twentieth century gave women voting rights and fostered their personal growth and economic power. The fight for women’s voting rights in America was a bloodless one; in the U.S., feminists met very little opposition. The fact is, Western culture and Biblical values never opposed improving the lives of women and giving them freedoms.
As a result of the achievements of American women, the feminist movement grew around the world. Even Muslim society experienced some changes. But they were more cosmetic than substantive. Women in the Muslim world enjoyed the most freedom during the time after the Ottoman Empire had ended and before petro-dollars helped Islam recover from the long period of ensuing weakness.
In the sixties a different kind of feminist movement emerged in America. I was a teenager in Egypt at that time, and it was fascinating to watch the feminist protests. We Egyptians could not understand the sexual revolution, since we considered Western women as already having achieved all the cultural and legal freedoms that we girls in the Middle East could only dream of.
After seeing a glimpse of America’s sixties feminist movement on Egyptian TV, I remember flipping the channel to watch an Egyptian movie about the honor killing of “bad” women who had sinned sexually. That movie, entitled Bedaya wa Nehay, Beginning and an Ending, quickly brought my mind back to the reality of women’s lives under Islam.
The cultural difference between two opposite worlds on the same television set was phenomenal. What was more amazing to many Muslim observers was the calm and respectful reaction of the American public and legal system to the feminist revolution of the 1960s. There were practically no ugly confrontations and no real suffering by the women protesters—essentially no opposition at all. Certainly there was no “honor killing” of women who were burning their bras in public. To the contrary, feminists like Gloria Steinem became instant celebrities, media darlings, and popular culture icons.
Even though the sixties feminists’ movement rebelled against the Biblical values of modesty and monogamous sex within marriage, there was no bloody confrontation. This was a demonstration of how the Bible, unlike Islam, allows people freedom.
Nineteen-sixties feminism has been largely discredited. But its negative effects can still be felt in American culture, which has adopted values that are anti-male, anti-family, anti-Bible, and pro-abortion.
The feminist movement that promoted the sexual revolution in the 1960s was arrogant and reckless. And even today, proponents of that kind of secular, leftist feminism are still dedicated to destroying their political opposition. Conservative women are mercilessly attacked while leftist women are given carte blanche to use their femininity as a shield of protection. That is not genuine feminism; it has become feminine tyranny.
Western Secular Feminism
Defining marriage as a God-created covenant between one man and one woman was in itself the most powerful feminist advance ever. And Christianity is the most revolutionary feminist movement. True liberty in Christ was meant for both men and women.
But secular Western feminists do not see the Bible’s blessings to women and the family. Instead they blame the Bible for what they call the “patriarchal” family. As a result their movement is anti-Bible and anti-men.
Western feminists have decided to throw the baby out with the bath water. They deny the revolutionary freedoms the Bible has given women, men, and the family and consider as “oppressive” Bible verses such as “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22). Such a narrow reading of the Bible ignores verses such as Galatians 3:28—“there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”—and Ephesians 5:25—“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.”
There is no doubt that when the New Testament was originally written it limited men a lot more than it limited women. The impact of the Biblical values limiting sex for men to within a monogamous marriage benefited and honored women at a time when women were regarded as property. But Biblical marriage was not meant to favor one gender over another; it provides the best conditions for a wholesome and loving family, in which men, women, and children can all thrive.
The Bible teaches distinct divinely ordained roles for men and women, not on the basis of preferential treatment to promote ulterior goals (as Islam does with jihad), but to give both men and women freedom to achieve their full potential. For the man to conform to God’s command to be loyal and devoted to one wife and not commit adultery even in his mind, he must constantly be aware and in control and fight his natural male urges. The Bible asks a man to love his wife sacrificially, laying down his life for the woman he loves.
And it asks a woman to be understanding and supportive of the man who loves her and puts her on a pedestal, obeying his lead. That is not in any way demeaning to women, but Western feminists do not seem to appreciate this kind of mutually loving relationship between men and women. They deny both sexes any specific physical or psychological needs and measure everything in terms of absolute equality and pure rights.
I will never forget the horrific campaign that secular feminists waged against the Promise Keepers movement. These were godly men who wanted to promise their wives to be better husbands, to share what is in their heart and mind, to share in housework and changing diapers. But this healthy movement was totally assaulted by the leftist feminists, with the help of the media. There was no logical explanation for their assault on the Promise Keepers—unless secular feminists are an angry group of bitter women who hate to see men and women happy under the values of Biblical marriage.
And now their agenda has become much clearer, and it is truly outrageous. It is to eliminate all differences between the sexes, even in the use of the bathroom. They are now pushing unisex bathrooms on the public, rewarding businesses and states that go along with the latest step in the sexual revolution, and punishing those that don’t.
But Western feminists want to have their cake and eat it too. They insist on absolute equality, but they also insist on preferential treatment for women. For example, women should be able to have any job a man can have—including soldier or firefighter—but the physical requirements of those jobs have to be changed for women, to accommodate the obvious physical differences between men and women. Far-left female politicians demand special treatment, too. They can humiliate their male opponents, who must not respond in kind without being called bigoted sexists.
How Feminists Have Failed Muslim Women
When I first started speaking against sharia and its oppression of women, I naïvely thought that secular feminists would be eager to take up the cause. Unfortunately, they showed no interest whatsoever. They ignored Islamic crimes against women: the legal tyranny, kidnapping, sexual slavery, and the stoning and flogging of women in the Muslim world.
Rather than objectively researching Islamic laws regarding women, marriage, and family and evaluating both the pro-sharia and anti-sharia viewpoints, secular feminists have chosen to take the official Islamic side propagated by Islamic governments and Muslim feminists.
American feminists have made their choice. They have chosen to stay silent rather than expose Islamic misogyny, even in the West—such as rapes of European girls, child marriage, honor crimes, domestic violence, and female genital mutilation. And they are certainly no friends of outspoken former Muslim women.
When several formerly Muslim women, including Wafa Sultan, Ayan Hirsi Ali, and I, started speaking publicly on the dangers of Islamic values and laws—and on the plight we were in on account of having left Islam—we still had no support from feminists. To them we did not exist. Even feminist student groups refused to sponsor us when we spoke on college campuses, and many have called us “Islamophobes,” a term of opprobrium suggesting an irrational fear of Islam.
How can we be accused of an irrational fear of Islam when we live under Islamic threats and fatwas of death? None of us can visit any Islamic country, including our countries of origin, because if we did we would be killed. And our killers would be considered heroes.
Secular progressive feminists, just like Muslim female defenders of Sharia, clearly have no interest in criticizing sharia. They appear to have no sympathy for the women who are suffering under Islam.
But guess who sympathized with our plight, listened to our stories, and gave us support? It was ordinary Americans, and especially Christian and Jewish women and men of faith. To them, Islamic tyranny was as clear as black and white—while progressives view Islam in shades of gray. Surely they must see that women are oppressed in the Muslim world. But that appears to be outweighed, for them, by the opportunity to respect and even celebrate a culture that is a contrast and a challenge to the Western, Bible-based culture that they hate. I am grateful for the ordinary Americans, who are free from enslavement to political agendas and motivated instead by human decency and Biblical values.
Are Secular Feminists the Heroes They Claim to Be?
American popular culture and media regard the sixties feminists as heroes. But the secular feminist movement’s image as the saviors of women and the champions of their rights has crumbled before the eyes of those of us who can see that they have nothing to say about the institutionalized oppression of women in Islam and the current epidemic of rape of Western girls by Muslim males in Europe.
The question now is, if sharia’s oppression of women even inside Western borders cannot capture the interest of feminists, then what is their cause? It cannot be women, as they claim.
The truth is that feminists have a kind of respectful fear of Islam because Islam could not care less about feminism. Islamic society will not hesitate to react violently—with terror—to any kind of rebellion by women. Western feminists are not exactly the brave bunch they claim to be. They would rather fight the Bible than fight Islam—Christians won’t hurt them!
Another important reason why Western feminists will not touch Islam and its harsh treatment of women is because Islam shares secular feminists’ disdain for Biblical family values. Like feminists and the rest of the ultra-Left, Islam has more important goals that are in conflict with the health of the family unit.
In the case of Islam, it is the expansion of the Islamic state through jihad that comes first, before women, men, and children. As for Western feminists, they too have lofty goals—to change the nature of sexual relationships, to eliminate any gender differences, and to enforce all of that through a stronger government and less individual freedom—and the end of the Biblical family that is the tradition in the West.
Secular and Islamic Feminism Converge
There are many commonalities between Western feminists and the defenders of Islam. Their common enemy is Biblical values, and especially the lifelong marriage covenant between one man and one woman. Both belief systems are ruthless about sacrificing family happiness for what they see as loftier goals.
While the ultra-Left feminist carries a sign that says, “I am proud of my abortion,” the Muslim feminist says, “I am proud to sacrifice my son and husband to jihad.” Both ideologies obviously stand against the nature of women and what is best for them.
Under a pretense of being pro-woman, both secular and Muslim feminism have sold out the best interests of woman for the sake of their ideological agenda. And that agenda feeds their egos. The bottom line for many activists in both camps is maintaining personal power and preferential treatment for themselves. They believe that they are better and more deserving than the other women, who are not like them. Just look at how secular feminists treat conservative women, and how Muslim feminists ignore the rape of women at the hands of jihadists.
Leftist women who were supposedly appalled at Mitt Romney for using the word “binders” to describe a list of qualified women are the same feminists who defended Bill Clinton against accusations of sexual abuse and even rape. These are the same women who stood by Hillary Clinton when she muddied the reputation of her husband’s accusers, who were called “trailer trash.”
Western secular feminists and elite Islamic feminists have been coming closer in recent years. Several assertive Muslim women, some hijab-wearing and some not, have risen to high positions in the American political system, especially under the Obama administration. Dalia Mujahid was the first veiled woman adviser in the White House and Huma Abedin was Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and also served as vice chairwoman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president. Abedin, who is a practicing Muslim, said that she leaned on her faith during the sex scandals involving her husband, Anthony Weiner. The connection between leftist feminist Hillary Clinton and a devout Muslim feminist such as Huma Abebin is a development worth paying attention to.
The Obama administration also followed the lead of Islamic governments, which single out hijab-wearing women for special respect and attention. Olympic fencer and hijab-wearing Muslim Ibtihaj Muhammad, for example, garnered attention in the U.S. after teaching the First Lady Michelle Obama how to fence. She also appeared on The Ellen Show, was chosen as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people of 2016, and met President Obama at the White House.
Even CNN jumped on the bandwagon, promoting the Muslim athlete as more deserving to hold the American flag of the opening ceremony of the Olympics than Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time.13 Despite all her popularity in America, the Muslim athlete does not sound particularly grateful to be living in the United States. During the Rio Olympics she told the world that she doesn’t feel safe because of anti-Muslim sentiments in America.
Meanwhile secular Western feminists like Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, regularly pander to Islamic values, blaming Westerners for problems actually caused by Muslims. In 2001 she called Norwegian women who had been raped by Muslim immigrants “blind and naïve”: “I will not blame the rapes on Norwegian women, but Norwegian women must understand that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it. . . . Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes. For example, by not inviting into their homes Muslim men with little knowledge of Norwegian culture.”14
Another sign of the confluence between Western feminism and Islamic values was an article posted by CNN entitled “I Am a Feminist and I Converted to Islam,” in which the author speaks positively about converting to Islam, wearing a hijab while at the same time preserving her feminist way of life. This Muslim feminist convert still lives in America, enjoying freedoms under the U.S. Constitution that she would not have under the Islamic law she should embrace if she is truly a devout Muslim.15
Why Secular Feminists Will Not Fight Islam
Why are Western feminists buying Islamic propaganda on how Islam honors women?
Western secular feminists have succeeded in convincing many Americans that the impediments to women’s rights were Western patriarchal culture, Biblical values, and men. And that is how they want to keep it. Their enemy must always be family Biblical values. If secular leftist feminists decided to take on Islam with its outright misogynistic laws, then the feminists’ theory about their own cause against Western Biblical values would collapse.
Fighting Islam’s oppression of women—even just opposing acts of legalized violence in the Middle East, or Muslims’ rapes of Western women in Europe—would open a Pandora’s box for Western secular feminism.
So feminists in the West have chosen to limit their defense of women to the fight against Western Biblical values and Western men. They will never admit that Biblical values are the true reason why they are enjoying freedoms never enjoyed by women in any other culture in the world and that the American legal system, Constitution, and Bible are no impediments to women’s freedom and happiness.
It is difficult to predict where feminism is heading. But one thing that feminists need to understand before it is too late is that the only thing standing between them and the wrath of Islam is the Holy Bible.