Women Activists From The United States

"When I reflect back on this particular strand of anti-Semitism, I see three distinct features. The first is demographic power: increase the number of people who believe that Jews are their enemies. The second is to use Islam as a vehicle to promote anti-Semitism. The third is psychological: present the Muslim as an underdog fighting a powerful and ruthless enemy."

"It is not only the prohibition against criticizing the Quran and the Prophet that closes the Muslim mind, and not only the life-long socialization of learning by rote. It is also the continuous construction of conspiracy theories about enemies of Islam who are determined to destroy the one, true religion. The chief enemy is the Jew."

"If there is an infallible mark of an advanced civilization it is surely the marginalization and criminalization of violence."

"In the madrassa, questions were not welcome; they were considered impertinent."

"In the text of the Quran and in Shari’a law, men and women are self-evidently not equal. Muslim women are considered physically, emotionally, intellectually, and morally inferior to men, and they have fewer legal rights."

"To claim that the oppression of women has nothing to do with Islam and is “only” a traditional custom is intellectually dishonest, a decoy. The two elements are interwoven. The code of honor and shame may be tribal and pre-Islamic in its origins, but it is now an integral part of the Islamic religion and culture. Honor killing asserts what Islam also asserts: that women are subordinate to men and must remain their sexual property."

"Even today virginity is the linchpin of a Muslim girl’s education. Growing up, I was taught that it is more important to remain a virgin than it is to stay alive, better to die than be raped. Sex before marriage is an unthinkable crime. Every Muslim girl knows that here value relies almost wholly on her hymen, the most essential part of her body, far more important than her brain or limbs."

"The fundamentalists seem haunted by the human body and neurotically debate which fractions of it should be covered, until they declare the whole thing, from head to toe, a gigantic private part."

"An element as powerful and potent as a Muslim girl’s virginity also has great commodity value, which means that virginity is above all a man’s business. Daughters are bait for attracting alliances, or they can be reserved for the highest bidder. Power, wealth, and the solidifying of clan relations may hinge on marriage alliances, so raising daughters of quality who are modest and docile is important. Using velocity to ensure their obedience and to warn them against straying is a perfectly legitimate reminder of the law in a system of values in which women have only a little more free will than livestock."

"Controlling women’s sexuality and limiting men’s access to sex with women are the central focus of the code of honor and shame. Muslim women are chattel, and every Muslim girl must be a virgin at marriage."

"In a clan society, every kind of human relationship turns on your honor within the clan; outside it, there is nothing—you are excluded from any kind of meaningful existence."

"Amira and Muna, like so many Muslim girls, were seen by their families as little more than incubators for sons."

"If your goal is to seek the truth, which education is supposed to do, then we cannot deny that a strict interpretation of Islam is preparation for bigotry, violence, and oppression."

"There are activist groups of every stripe on campus, yet nothing for girls fleeing Islam, no group fighting for the rights of Muslim women. When violence is committed in the name of Islam these student activists are silent."

"On campus after campus I would stare in despair at these confident young men and women, born in the United States, who had so manifestly benefited from every advantage of Western education yet were determined to ignore the profound differences between a theocratic mind-set and a democratic mind-set."

"The argument that by criticizing Islam you defame believing Muslims is specious. If I criticize George Washington, I am not defaming Americans; if I deplore Abraham’s lying to Pharaoh about his wife being his sister I am not slandering other Jews—or, for that matter, Muslims, who also recognize Abraham as a Patriarch. But a religion, Islam, based on a book, the Quran, that denies women basic human rights is backward, and to say so is not an insult but an opinion."

"Most American audiences reacted, first, with astonishment, and second with compassion to stories of the routine horrors of a Muslim woman’s life, even as they struggled to believe it was happening in their own country. There was one exception to this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest."

"Certainly much nonsense passes for culture in the United States, including an obsession with celebrities of all kinds. But that is scarcely representative of the vast wealth of extraordinary art, literature, and music produced by Americans in the almost two and a half centuries of the country’s existence."

"In a way these threats motivate me. They have given my voice more legitimacy."

"People often ask me what it’s like to live with bodyguards. The short answer is that it’s better than being dead."

"I quickly felt that I belonged at the American Enterprise Institute. The week I arrived in Washington I was introduced to a man I had long hoped to meet, Charles Murray, who in 1994 cowrote The Bell Curve. When his book was published I was still a student at the University of Leiden, where it seemed everyone was talking about this horribly racist book that argued that black people were genetically of lower intelligence than white people. I read it, of course, and I found it to be the opposite of racist, a compassionately written book about the urban challenges that confront black people more than white. All black people should read it. When I as introduced to Murray, I couldn’t help thinking that even his head was shaped like a precise bell curve. While we exchanged greetings, I mentioned that I recognized his name from reading his book, at which point he gritted his teeth, no doubt bracing himself for another attack from an offended black person. When I said how great I thought his book was, his smile was so broad and so surprised. We became instant friends."

"American liberals appear to be more uncomfortable with my condemning the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives are. Rather than standing up for Western freedoms and against the totalitarian Islamic belief system, many liberals prefer to shuffle their feet and look down at their shoes when faced with questions about cultural differences.… Even though their predecessors had once agitated for the rights of workers, the rights of women, and the rights of blacks, American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam. So Brookings said no to me and the AEI said yes."

"Grandmother, I have compared the infidels’ morals to those that you taught us, and I must report that they have, in practice, a better outcome for humans than the morals of your forefathers. You taught us the virtues of suspicion and distrust, and Islam taught us to survive by taqqiyah, pretending to be something you are not…. The infidel does not see life as a test, a passage to the hereafter, but as an end and a joy in itself…. Because the infidel trusts and studies new ideas, there is abundance in the infidel lands. In these circumstances of peace, knowledge, and predictability, the birth of a girl is just fine. There is no need to pout and sulk and every reason to celebrate and rejoice. The little girl sits right next to the little boy in school; she gets to play as much as he does; she gets to eat as much as he does; she gets the same care in illness as he does; and when she matures she gets the same opportunity to seek and find a mate as he does…. The bloodline is tired and impotent; adhering to it leads only to violence. It is no strategy for unity and progress…. Grandma, fevers and diseases are not caused by jinn and forefathers rising from the dead to torment us, or by an angry God, but by invisible creatures with names like parasites and bacteria and viruses. The infidel’s medicine works better than ours, because it is based on facts, inquiry, and real knowledge…. Grandmother, I no longer believe in the old ways. The world began changing in your lifetime, and by now the old ways are not useful to me anymore. I love you, and I love some of my memories of Somalia, though not all. But I will not serve the bloodline or Allah any longer. And because the old ways hamper the lives of so many of our people, I will even strive to persuade my fellow nomads to take on the ways of the infidel."

"Gone with you is that bloodline, for better for for worse, and gone is the idiot tradition that meant you cherished mares and she-camels more than daughters and granddaughters. When a boy was born into the family you rejoiced. Your eyes twinkled, you smiled, and with a burst of energy you would weave impossible numbers of grass mats to give away as gifts. As you wove you would tell us your warrior legends—about courage, resistance, conquest, and sharaf, sharaf, sharaf. Honor, honor, honor. When we heard news of the birth of a girl in the family you clicked and pouted and sometimes sulked for days. Squatting under the talal tree in Mogadishu, on the huge straw mat, you wove, your fingers orange with henna, working away with your muda needle. You would chase us away and speak of ominous events. Then, when you have been quiet for days, you would tell us endless tragedies of the misfortunes that befall a family of too many girls—gossip, betrayal, bastard children, and a’yb, a’yb, a’yb. Shame, shame, shame."

"As a tribe we are fragmented; as clans, scattered; as families, dysfunctional."

"I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind."

"Yet both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between value. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook."

"Life is not about projecting onto others your inability to cope, nurturing hatred and then going off either to self-destruction or to annihilate those who have been more successful than you."

"We make our sons. This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the firstborn son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people—women—to maintain the other group’s self-image."

"I thought, I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny. He is arbitrary and incoherent. Faith in him demands that I relinquish my responsibility, become a member of a herd. He denies me pleasure, the adventure of learning, friendships. I am feeble in faith, mother, because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman—because I don’t want to be like you."

"We who are born into Islam don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy. (Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the prophet Muhammad elevated it and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live happily, in union. Polygamy creates a context of uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the other wife getting? Who is the favored child? If security, safety, and predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for power."

"The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind sick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires—what small space in your life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex."

"The message of Nomad is clear and can be stated at the outset: The West urgently needs to compete with the jihadis, the proponents of a holy war, for the hearts and minds of its own Muslim immigrant populations. It needs to provide education directed at breaking the spell of the infallible Prophet, to protect women from the oppressive dictates of the Quran, and to promote alternative sources of spirituality."

"Right now, there are two extremes in Christianity, both of which are a liability to Western civilization. The first consists of those who damn the existence of other groups. They take the Bible literally and reject scientific explanations for the existence of man and nature in the name of “intelligent design.” Such fundamentalist Christian groups invest a lot of time and energy in converting people. But much of what they preach is at odds with the core principles of the Enlightenment. At the other extreme are those who would appease Islam—like the spiritual head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who holds that the implementation of Shari’a in the UK is inevitable. Those who adhere to a moderate, peaceful, reformed Christianity are not as active as the first group or as vocal as the second. They should be."

"The second institution that can and must do more is the feminist movement. Western feminists should take on the plight of the Muslim woman and make it their own cause. Their aim should be to help the Muslim woman find her voice. Western feminists have a wealth of experience and resources at their disposal. There are three goals they must aspire to in helping their Muslim sisters. The first is to ensure that Muslim girls are free to complete their education; the second is to help them gain ownership of their own bodies and therefore their sexuality; and the third is to make sure that Muslim women have the opportunity not only to enter the workforce but also to stay in it."

"I believe there are three institutions in Western society that could ease the transition into Western citizenship of these millions of nomads from the tribal cultures they are leaving. They are institutions that can compete with the agents of jihad for the hearts and minds of Muslims. The first is public education. The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century gave birth to schools and universities run on the principles of critical thinking. Education was aimed at helping the masses emancipate themselves from poverty, superstition, and tyranny through the development of their cognitive abilities.…This public education was geared toward grooming citizens, not preserving the separateness of tribe, the sanctity of the faith, or whatever happened to be the prejudice of the day."

"The West tends to respond to the social failures of Muslim immigrants with what can be called the racism of low expectations. This Western attitude is based on the idea that people of color must be exempted from “normal” standards of behavior. A well-meaning class of people holds that minorities should not share all of the obligations that the majority must meet."

"The “problem family”—people like my relatives—will become more and more common unless Western democracies understand better how to the newcomers into our societies: how to turn them into citizens. I see three main barriers to this process of integration, none of them peculiar to my family. The first is Islam’s treatment of women…. The second obstacle, which may seem trivial to some Western readers, is the difficulty many immigrants from Muslim countries have in dealing with money. Islamic attitudes toward credit and debt and the lack of education of Muslim women about financial matters means that most new immigrants arrive in the West wholly unprepared for the bewildering range of opportunities and obligations presented by a modern consumer society. The third obstacle is the socialization of the Muslim mind. All Muslims are reared to believe the Muhammad, the founder of their religion, was perfectly virtuous and that the moral strictures he left behind should never be questioned. The Quran, as “revealed” to Muhammad, is considered infallible: it is the true word of Allah, and all its commands must be obeyed without question. This makes Muslims vulnerable to indoctrination in a way that followers of other faiths are not. Moreover, the violence that is endemic in so many Muslim societies, ranging from domestic violence to the incessant celebration of holy war, adds to the difficulty of turning people from that world into Western citizens. I can sum up the three obstacles to the integration of my own family in three words: sex, money, and violence."

"I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of Western life."

"As I learned Dutch I began to formulate an almost impossibly ambitious goal: I would study political science to find out why this society, although it appeared to me to be godless, worked when every society I had lived in, no matter how Muslim it claimed to be, was rotten with corruption, violence, and self-centered guile."

"The Prophet said, “I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.”"

"Today you have this horrible alliance between the far left and the Islamists and they’re using the modern media tool to shut people like me out by smearing us.”"

"I cannot think of a system of law that dehumanizes & degrades women more than Islamic Law."

"I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim."

"Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.""

"Of course, I also encountered hostile reactions in campaigning. People called me names, even spat at me; I received more threats. The most remarkable people, to me, were those who apparently approved of everything I said but nonetheless wouldn't dream of voting for the Liberal Party. It reminded me of Somalia: they wouldn't vote outside their clan."

"In October 2002, I flew to California. It was the first time I had ever been in the United States, and I realized almost immediately that my preconceptions of America were completely ludicrous. I was expecting rednecks and fat people, with lots of guns, very aggressive police, and overt racism – a caricature of a caricature. In reality, of course, I saw people living perfectly well-ordered lives, jogging and drinking coffee."

"Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage."

"Women like this never pressed charges. The prospect of making their way alone seemed to them impossible. They were convinced that by accepting systematic, really merciless abuse, they were serving Allah and earning a place in Heaven. They always went back to their husband."

"Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas."