Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims

by Yasmine Mohammed

The west had indeed empowered radical Muslims to the point that not only were Islamists comfortable expressing their hate through megaphones, the scores of useful idiots who empowered them were right there with them declaring their support of terrorists. Groups like ‘Queers for Palestine’ and ‘Strippers for Gaza’, repeated nonsense ahistorical rhetoric from folks so ignorant that they did not even realize that they’d be the first ones killed by the so-called ‘freedom fighters’ that they were championing.

And now it’s here. As we try to find light in this darkness, we can find solace in the fact that a visible enemy is easier to fight. In the past, Islamists slipped into our governments and media and education and public policy undetected. Now there is a concerted effort to weed out those who speak in forked tongues and who are clearly only interested in the destruction of freedom and of western values.

This is an incredibly important time in history to get right. We must absolutely, unequivocally, turn this ship around and correct course. Western leaders and the western public need to be vigilant in recognizing who their enemies are and they must unapologetically respond to the threat accordingly. Pay attention, dear western friends, to the ways that your policies are empowering those who hate you. I hope this book will offer you the insight you need in order to fervently fight for maintaining your freedoms and championing western values.

With intense clarity, a memory once again came to mind of a courageous thirteen-year-old girl sitting across from me in my office describing horrors perpetrated upon her that challenge one’s ability to believe that a human being could be so cruel to another, let alone another so helpless and harmless. She pledged determination to take her story to the authorities who would rescue her from her dreadful homelife.

“I just wanted to say thank you. Things didn’t work out, as the judge deemed it ‘cultural freedom’ for my family to abuse me.”

Bill recounted how his audience would raucously applaud for principles like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality for women, minorities, and LGBT, but the applause would abruptly halt if anyone mentioned that these principles were not being upheld in the Muslim world. Sam added that liberals are happy to criticize white theocracies, Christian theocracies, but they fail to criticize the same evils in the Muslim world. He clarified that Islam, the religion (a set of ideas) was very different from Muslims, the people.

As if on cue, Ben Affleck, an actor who played the part of a fallen angel in the movie Dogma, seemingly decided to volunteer as exhibit A to embody that exact caricature of a confused liberal that Sam was referring to by hurling charges of racism at both Bill and Sam.

Did Ben Affleck, the man who made a movie focused specifically on criticizing and mocking Christianity, feel that it was beyond the pale for Sam Harris and Bill Maher to have a civil, factual conversation about Islam?

Even though both Bill and Sam quoted statistics from the Pew Research Center—that approximately 90 percent of Egyptians believe people should be killed for leaving their religion, Ben still insisted that these bad ideas were only held by a nominal number of Muslims.

From my perspective, it was unforgivable for Ben Affleck to deflect criticism of this ideology that has caused so much suffering in the world. Generally, no one in the West cares if Muslim women were being imprisoned or killed in Iran or Saudi Arabia for not covering their hair. No one cared that bloggers in Bangladesh were being hacked to death in the streets because they dared write about humanism. No one cared if university students were beaten to death in Pakistan for questioning Islam. But now, finally, mainstream people on mainstream television were talking about these issues ...

Or, I could be brave. I could choose to step in, get myself covered in saltwater and seaweed, and even risk drowning. I could choose to share my perspective. I could choose to correct friends who insisted Islam was a religion of peace. I could choose to make people uncomfortable with my story. I could choose to deal with the backlash, the friends who would walk away from me and the death threats.

Please, no! Please, I’m sorry. Mama! Mama! Please!” I’m lying on my bed as I was ordered, pleading frantically as I’ve done many times before. I’m dreading the familiar scene, even though it’s unfolding right in front of me. He grabs my ankle and tugs me sharply toward the foot of the bed. I have to resist the urge to pull my feet away. I know that it will be worse if I do. I’m crying so hard I can’t catch my breath as he uses my skipping rope to bind my feet to the bed. He picks up his favourite orange plastic stick. It replaced the wood ones that kept breaking. At first I was glad, as this wouldn’t give me splinters, but I didn’t realize it would hurt so much more. For the rest of my life, I will hate the colour orange. He whips the soles of my feet. The soles of the feet are a preferred spot, as the scars will remain hidden from teachers. I am six years old, and this is my punishment for not correctly memorizing surahs (chapters) from the Quran.

“So, you think you’ll memorize properly next time?” “Yes!” I plead to my mother with my eyes. Why aren’t you raising your voice or your hand to protect me? Why are you just standing there next to him? What could possibly be holding her back? Was she afraid of him? She had asked him to come over. Was she partly to blame? In the moment, I cannot accept that the only parent I know would willingly give me up to be bound and beaten. He is the evil one, not my mother. That had to be the truth. So why, then, had she phoned him and asked him to come over? Why?

“Next time I come here, I want to hear all three surahs, you understand?” “Yes . . .” “Which three surahs are they?” I hesitate for a fraction of a second, and he raises his hand aga...

When there is no fresh skin for his blows to land on, they fall on my already bruised and torn feet. My body is slick with sweat. My heart is racing. It’s difficult to breathe, but I know this will never end until I find the strength to push on. “Al Fatiha, Al Kauthar, and . . . Al Ikhlas.” Three short surahs necessary for the five daily prayers. The words come out of me, rasping, chok...

Finally, he unties the rope, throws it on the floor, and walks out. I lie there waiting for my mother to come and console me. She doesn’t come. I wait after every beating, but she never comes. She always follows him out the door, and I listen to their voices and laughter as they tell stories. I wait breathlessly to hear the front door close. I cannot relax until I know he is out of the apartment. It’s hard to steady my breathing as I watch the lights from the cars on the stre...

I awaken groggily in the middle of the night with the familiar cold wet spot underneath me. One of my feet touches the spot, and the unbearable stinging forces me wide awake. I know I have to make my way to the washroom, but the thought of the pain of bearing my own weight on my torn feet makes my eyes well up with tears again. Carefully, I dangle my feet over the side of the bed. They are swollen and covered with bubbles of blood.

I brace myself before stepping down. I know that if I put all my weight on them, they might burst, but I have to move quickly to wash off the pee that stings the open sores. I walk on the outer sides of my feet so that my sores can avoid the carpet. I hobble slowly, steadying myself with every step—first with my bed, then my dresser, then the doorknob, then the wall in the hallway. The sensation of the squish as the wounds inevitably tear open is one I still remember vividly almost forty years later.

All this pain is nothing, I am assured, compared to the fire of Hell if I do not memorize. Before I learn to bite my tongue, I question. “If Allah burned my flesh off, and then regrew it, and then burned it again for all eternity, won’t I eventually get used to it?” “No,” my mom replies. “Allah will make sure that every single time it hurts as much as the first time.” I was terrified of Allah, of the Day of Judgment, of...

The Internet is full of YouTube videos of children being viciously attacked in madrasas. Girls getting grabbed by the hair and being pulled to the ground for not wearing hijab (head covers), boys being whipped and kicked as they fall to the ground. The abuse I endured, as barbaric as it was, is light in comparison to stories I’ve heard. A girl in Somalia told me of how her mother poure...

According to recent reports, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 70 percent of children aged two to fourteen years are disciplined in a violent manner. In some countries— like Yemen, Tunisia, Palestine, Egypt—over 90 percent of children report being violently abused. What is the reason for this? Why do those countries have such incidences of violence against children? The co...

According to Hadith, the record of sayings and actions by Muhammad, he said, “Teach your children to pray when they are seven years old, and smack them if they do not do so when they are ten.” (classed as saheeh by Shaykh al-Albaani in Saheeh al-Jaami, 5868) He also said, “Hang your whip where members of your household (your children, wife, and slave...

So when parents beat their children, they do it out of religious duty and fear; they have to ensure that their children are devout Muslims. If they are not, the parents are the ones who have failed, and they will have to answer to Allah on the Day of Judgment. If their children are not devout Muslims, the parents’ souls are in jeopardy of burning in Hell for eternity.

Research shows that 7 in 10 children on average are subjected to psychological aggression with the highest rate in Yemen (90 percent). Around 6 in 10 children experience physical punishment. The highest rates are in the Central African Republic, Egypt and Yemen (more than 80 percent).

For the most part, households employ a combination of violent disciplinary practices. Most children in a majority of countries or areas are exposed to both psychological as well as physical means of punishment. This confirms that these two forms of violence often overlap and frequently occur together within the context of discipline. Such exposure to multiple ...

Although the abuse and threats of abuse petrified me, I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t push back. Listening to music, for example, was forbidden. Music is from the devil. Nonetheless, when no one was home, I would turn the dial on our clock radio to LG73 and listen to the po...

But I feared the wrath of Allah. Singing along to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” I always fell silent when it came to the line “imagine no religion”—too scared even to hum it, lest I apostate myself. Being an apostate, a kafir (nonbeliever), is the worst possible sin in Islam. Punishable by death. I remember wondering, how could I love 99 percent of this song so strongly but be so completely avoidant of this one line? So avoidant I couldn’t ev...

I have quite a few memories like that, of times when the light glinted momentarily through the cracks of the binding cement of Islam that was slathered on me...

Muslims are required to observe the Five Pillars of Islam: profession of faith, five daily prayers, alms-giving, fasting during Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca. Repeating the rhythmic patterns and hypnotically moaning the foreign words during the five daily prayers keep us forever in line. No time to stray from the right path if the next prayer is constantly impending. No time for the cement to chip off before a new layer is troweled on.

The prayers are mind-numbingly repetitive. There is no room for the slightest variation. Every ceremonial motion and every word is specific and methodic, stripping the ummah (the community of Muslims) of any individuality. Get in line. Follow the herd. No distractions. During hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, everyone is actually stripped of their individual clothing, and all the hajjis dress alike in simple white cloth.

Preparing to pray was as repetitive a process as the prayers themselves. The first step was a washing up ritual called wudu. Each step of wudu needed to be repeated three times: wash your hands three times, rinse out your mouth three times, wipe your nose three times, wash your face three times, rinse your arms from...

Then we would line up—boys in front, girls behind. At the Mosque we attended, men enter from the main doors, while women enter through a rear entrance just off the kitchen, near the dumpsters. The issue with the gender segregation in Mosques has been highlighted by Muslim reformers like Asra Nomani. She wrote an article in the Washington Post on how she once entered a Mosque through the main doors with her father. She and her father were both harassed until she left the area and joined the women in the basement where she belonged.

Men generally pray together and women together. If they must be in the same room, then men are in front and women behind, usually with a divider of some sort in between them. In their separate lines, they stand as close as possible to one another, shoulders touching, feet touching, so that the devil can’t get in between them.

Even though the majority of the day was taken up in prayer, doubt found a way to sneak in. I wished I could just submit—that is, after all, the true meaning of the word Islam. Good Muslims stop struggling and just submit to the cement drying them in place.

“He was over fifty years old, and he married a six-year-old?” “So? Do you think that you know more than Allah’s prophet? Who are you to question his actions?” “Was he a pedophile?” “No! Of course not! He only had sex with her after she became a woman. After she got her period. Before that, he only did other things with her, to prepare her. So she would be comfortable with him when the day came. Subhanallah, Allah’s messenger was always thoughtful and considerate like that.” “Oh, so she was all grown up . . . ?” “Yes, in the eyes of Allah she was grown up. You become a woman when you get your period, and all your sins start to get counted. Before that, you are a child, and nothing you do is recorded.” “So how old was she?” “She was nine.” “Nine? That’s not a woman!” By now I was shouting.

This was one of the most difficult things about leaving Islam— making decisions, relying on my inner thoughts and voice that had been regularly stifled in the past. Now I had to conjure them up again and figure out how to hear and trust myself. I was not taught to think. Thinking was discouraged and, in fact, punished. I was taught to do as I was told. Every single aspect of life was prescribed for me. No decision was mine to make: how to use the bathroom, how to drink water, how to cut my nails, how to put on my shoes—and everything in between— was specifically outlined. I was nothing more than a vessel created to spread the word of Allah, and, hopefully, to give my life in that endeavour—the perfect life of a good Muslim, no more, no less.

I was never happy with the role I’d been cast in. I remembered a time when I was free of any cement, before that hideous man entered our lives, and so I struggled with each layer that was piled on me. I remembered the years before my mother met him and embraced fundamentalist Islam and started covering her hair and calling everything haram (forbidden) I remembered taking swimming lessons and playing in the park. I remembered not having to get up before dawn to mumble into the carpet. I remembered being allowed to play with my Barbies and with the non-Muslim neighbour’s kids. I remembered celebrating birthdays and swimming and eating Oreos. All of these things and so much more were now forbidden.

Now, unfortunately, Egyptian Christians are killed by the hundreds as they pray in their churches. And even Muslims not deemed Muslim enough by the Sunni extremists, such as Sufi Muslims, are killed in Egypt as they worship in their Mosques. The whole Middle East and North Africa have become more extreme, and those extremists are spreading into Europe and North America as well. Other sects of Muslims are not even tolerated. An Ahmadi shopkeeper in the UK was killed by a Sunni extremist because he wished his patrons “Happy Easter.”

In my mother’s day, it was common for people to identify loosely as Muslim but not take their religion so seriously. Women did not wear hijab, people would drink, and Islam was as casual as religion is for most Christians today. But things have changed significantly.

I was angry that my mother had gotten to live such a glamorous life while I was forced to study surahs from the Quran, not allowed to ride a bike for fear I might lose my virginity or learn to swim because bathing suits showed too much skin. Why didn’t she want me to have the same freedoms she had? She had Christian friends, but I wasn’t even allowed to play with my friends down the hall, Chelsea and Lindsay, because they were kuffar, non-believers. Day after day, they would knock on the apartment door. “Can we come in and play with Yasmine?” “No, not right now,” my mother would answer. I would stand in the hallway, wringing my hands, desperately hoping she would relent.

That bomb was the man who took my mother as his second wife— “Uncle” Mounir. His entrance into our life was truly explosive. No tremble, no warning, no change of wind—just suddenly there, a violent sociopath tearing through our life. He walked into our home like he owned it, with his disheveled beard and his calloused hands. He rarely interacted with me, unless it was to bind my feet to the foot of my bed. I had no idea my mother was a second wife. We called him uncle, and he had his own wife and children. It wasn’t until I was in college that my mother finally revealed this truth. Polygamy is against the law in the liberal democracy of Canada, and so she didn’t trust us children with that damning information. Little did she know that our government routinely turns a blind eye to Muslim men with multiple wives. Millions of dollars of government funds are being funneled to support a man who is breaking the law. If a man can’t afford to support all his wives, he simply gets them to all apply for social assistance as single mothers, and voila! Problem solved. My mother was one such woman. Because she was only Islamically, not legally, married to him, she could collect social assistance as a single mother and the government ignored the fact that she was married to this man because to question it would be racist or something.

Even though he was technically a stepfather to me, I never called him that. And we never had a father-daughter relationship. He was just the man who would beat us, and (I would learn later) occasionally have sex with our mother.

It’s a weird feeling to know that your mother is lying. I didn’t think she was capable of it. They kept insisting that I was wrong. Eventually, I found myself agreeing with her, even though it contradicted what was right in front of me. I didn’t see what I saw, or hear what I heard, because she told me differently. And I had to believe her. She was my mother, after all. I trusted her more than myself. So I relented and accepted that they weren’t in the shower together. I must have been mistaken.

She found herself alone in a new country with no support system and three children. She was desperately searching for community, a support network, and, unfortunately, this search led her to the local Mosque. There she found that monster who offered to marry her, to make her whole, and to financially provide for her three children. She must have felt so alone, so abandoned. And without any belief that she had any agency as a woman, without any confidence that she could be a successful human being on her own, that she did not need a man. She saw herself as a parasite looking for a host. She clung to this man who was beneath her—as per the Egyptian class system—and who beat her children, but she felt like her only option was to shrug and accept what she could get.

In her depressed and confused state, the simplicity and order of Islam must have been so enticing. It offers a structure that is so rigid it outlines how you should cut your fingernails. There is a precise order in which to cut them, followed by a specific manner in which to dispose of the clippings. Nothing—no decisions—are left up to the individual.

She told me many times that she didn’t like children. She would tell me how others would ooh and aah over babies and she found it so strange—she could not figure out what they were all excited about. A blob that drools and cries? But the culture she grew up in did not allow her the option of not having children—it was just what was expected. I never felt she actually wanted any of us, though, or even had a maternal bone in her entire body. Her culture also made it impossible for her to exert any power over her life. Quite often, unfortunately, in misogynistic societies, mothers are vicious to their daughters. Exerting power over their (female) children is the only domain where it is acceptable.

With no dad to save me, I used to imagine that I was adopted and that my real family was out there. I fit with them. I wasn’t the black sheep of that family. Until we were reunited, I had no choice but to endure this horrible man that my mother had married who was becoming more and more a part of my life. I had to endure whatever aggressive, violent, or humiliating things he chose to do to me on any particular day.

One of the first things he did was break all of my mom’s records and destroy our record player. He broke her Hank Williams, Dolly Parton, Fat Albert, and Kenny Rogers records with savage anger as we looked on confused. Why wasn’t our mom stopping him? Why was she allowing this man to break her things? She stood sheepishly off to the side. She was so different when he was around. Suddenly, she was meek and quiet and incredibly accommodating. She was all I had to protect me, but she was nothing like Wonder Woman on TV. I understood in that moment that she would never stand up for me. She would never defend me from his beatings. She wouldn’t even defend her records. He encouraged us to get in on it, but I had no desire to destroy the albums. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the very first coat of cement. It had not yet hardened, and so I didn’t hesitate before questioning. I picked up the sharp, shattered pieces of Bill Cosby’s stand-up album and asked my mom why he was doing this. “Because these are all haram!”

Haram. How that word would grow to infuriate me! To this day, I have an issue with denying myself anything because of all the years...

I awoke to the searing whine of the adhan, the call to prayer that is blasted from speakers atop Mosques all around, the last vestiges of the night’s cool air—and the odour. Each building had its own personal landfill. Garbage was just thrown out the window down to a heap below on the street. Cockroaches and stray cats were as common as houseflies. We were living in the heart of Cairo, overpopulated, overheated, and overwhelming with its endless stench of either warm garbage, sewage, or both.