Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims

by Yasmine Mohammed

“Yes, don’t worry. We will get our own place as soon as we can.” My mother told me many, many lies over the years, but this one still hurts the most. I cannot understand, now that I’m a mother, how a woman could make a decision that terrified all three of her children so intensely. She knew we hated him and why. She knew she was lying to us. She just didn’t care. In Egypt, she had had the support of her sisters and her extended family. She wasn’t alone. But they were all married, and she felt inferior. She could have saved us from Mounir’s wrath. We could have stayed in Egypt. But she was divorced, and she saw herself as nothing if she wasn’t attached to a man—even if that man was violent and would beat her children. So she preferred to make us all live in misery if it meant she could be attached to a man.

And so, we moved into his one-bedroom, partially finished basement in British Columbia, Canada. It didn’t even look like a home. It was a weird mishmash of living room, dining room, bedroom, and storage area. Legally, he didn’t have a permit to finish his basement, so we had to live in an unlivable space. The living arrangements were meant to underscore the hierarchy. Upstairs, Mounir lived with his real wife and his real children. As the second, inferior, illegal wife, my mother was relegated to the basement with her children.

Some people just keep having children and dropping them off here or there, as if they were things and not human beings. My mom dropped my brother and sister off in Saudi Arabia, my dad walked away from the three of us, my “uncle” walked away from his kids, and now his ex was walking away from their three children. I don’t know how people can do that. But it seems to be a common story in my life.

Mounir usually led the meetings, but my mom would sometimes add some damning betrayal. If any of us missed a prayer, for example, she’d make sure to mention that. His wife was usually quiet unless she had something to say about his two remaining children who lived upstairs with her. She rarely talked about the three of us downstairs children. The meetings would invariably end with someone getting whipped. I suppose this was their version of Saudi Arabia’s Chop-Chop Square. Their aim was to publicly humiliate the perpetrator.

It was only part of the training, though. To be a girl in a Muslim household has to be a fate worse than Hell. You are taught to be ashamed of everything you do, everything you are. “Don’t laugh like that. You’re a girl!” “Don’t sit like that. You’re a girl!” “Lower your voice. You’re a girl!” “Lower your eyes. You’re a girl!”

Girls are not ever allowed to look a man in the eyes. We have to keep our heads lowered like a dog to be reminded of our place as lesser than. It was endless. The word for shame was snapped at me in a loud whisper thousands of times throughout my childhood. “Eib! Eib!” It was the only word I heard more often than haram. In whatever culture, if Islam is the dominant religion, there are variations of the word eib being spat at girls. Somali girls hear ceeb and xixhood; Turkish girls hear ayip; in Malay, girls hear aib; in Pakistan, girls hear hiya, etc. Girls are all hearing this because the family’s honour lies with the girls in the family—specifically between the legs of the girls in the family.

Girls are how the level of a man’s, or his family’s, honour is measured. The more control he has over his wife and daughters, the more honourable he is. It is his responsibility to guard his family’s honour by making sure the women in the family dress modestly by covering themselves up in hijab, and that they act honourably by keeping their voices low, keeping their eyes cast downward, by being demure. The most important aspect of honour is a girl’s virginity. It must be guarded at all costs. Girls must not ride bikes, horses, or engage in sports lest the hymen break. Families must keep a close eye on girls making sure they do not demolish the family honour by losing their virginity—whether they ...

If a woman dishonours her family by dressing too Western or not Islamically enough, or by having male friends, or by a plethora of other mundane things, she could pay for that rebellion with her life. Honour violence and honour killings are frightfully common in Muslim communities across the world. There are thousands of cases per year. And there is strong evidence that these crimes are unde...

These cases are not limited to Muslim-majority countries. There have been cases of honour violence and honour killings all over Europe, an Egyptian man in Texas shot and killed his two daug...

I completed grade three and started grade four. It was in grade four that I finally started to feel comfortable in my new school. One of the cool girls invited me to take part in Secret Santa, and I was over the moon to be included with all her cool girlfriends. I came home and told my mom the exciting news. “I’m not buying anything for that kafir and her stupid kafir holiday,” she said, briefly turning away from the TV screen. “Can I bring something from home? Can we just buy wrapping paper?” I stood there, wringing my hands, hoping, hoping. “Why are you such a kafir lover?” The words exploded out of her. “Do you know that it is haram to be friends with them? Do you want Allah to curse you? Allah does not love those who love his enemies.” She turned back to her program.

My heart sank. I knew there was no way she would change her mind. Just once I wanted her to care about what was important to me. Just once I wanted her to put her religion aside. But I knew that would never happen. Her religion would always be paramount, regardless of what misery it demanded I endure. I knew about the verses of the Quran that forbid Muslims to be friends with Jews and Christians or any nonbelievers. Quran 5:51 says “O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them. God guides not the people of the evildoers.” What could be worse than Allah considering you to be one of the evildoers because you are friends with them? But still, I wanted to be friends with them.

I truly appreciated that my friends were trying to help. I always loved my friends, even though they were kuffar. I knew I wasn’t supposed to love them, but I did. How could I not? I was surrounded by kind, loving, and funny friends. I enjoyed being at school. I enjoyed being around them. I loved the carefree life of a non-Muslim.

Fourth grade was the year I told my mother that her “husband” was molesting me. I didn’t have the vocabulary, but I told her what was going on. I had been taught to “always listen to grown-ups,” especially a grown-up that would beat me if I didn’t listen. So I never thought to question his actions. I was used to him hurting me physically—used to being forced to endure it—and not having my mother’s protection. This just seemed like a continuation of the same. But there was something about the way he reacted to hearing someone in the hall that made me suspect he was doing something he knew was wrong. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I would tell my mom just in case.

Her first reaction was to get angry at me and accuse me of instigating or inviting the abuse. I was confused at her line of questioning.

The statistics for how common this kind of abuse is in Muslim- majority countries is truly sickening. High-profile cases, like that of Zainab Ansari, a six-year-old girl in Pakistan whose body was dumped in a pile of garbage after she had been raped and murdered, have forced the international community to take notice.

According to the Islamabad-based nongovernmental organization Sahil, an average of eleven cases of child sexual abuse are reported daily across Pakistan— daily. Zainab was among the dozen children who were murdered in Kasur District in Punjab Province in 2018.

It is not just girls, either. In highly segregated Muslim societies, predators are not likely to have access to girls unless they have a daughter, but they have access to boys. In Afghanistan bacha bazi means “boy play,” and it refers to a young boy who is being sexually exploited by men. In the 2003 novel The Kite Runner by Afghani American author Khaled Hosseini, the practice of bacha bazi is depicted. In the plot, the protagonist’s half nephew is forced to become a dancing boy and sexual slave to a high-ranking official of the Taliban. The same official had, years earlier, raped the boy’s father when he was a preteen and the official was a teenager.

The sexual exploitation of children is, unfortunately, sanctioned by Islam. Muhammed, the greatest example of humanity for all time, married a girl who was just six years old. For this reason, the practice of raping children is not taboo but actually revered—as long as the person is married to the child. Child marriage is therefore rampant in Muslim-majority countries. In Pakistan and Iran, calls to raise the legal age of marriage are shot down as un-Islamic. Nearly every two seconds a girl under eighteen is married. Some of those cases may be because the girl was raped. Many Muslim-majority countries have enacted the marry- your-rapist law, which stipulates that if a girl is raped, she must marry her rapist because no one else will want her. She is used goods, her seal has been broken.

It is important to remember that these ideas travel across borders. People with this mind-set do not magically change their minds when they move to another country. Girls all over the world are subjected to the same dehumanization, even if it is not the law in the new country they reside in. That is why it is essential for Western countries to protect their young gir...

Jews

The point of reading wasn’t to understand it; it was to memorize it. This is important. Muslims are not encouraged to learn or to understand what they are reading or reciting; they are celebrated for successfully regurgitating it.

I learned that for the past few years, nearly twenty times a day, I was referring to non-Muslims as the enemies of Allah. I was chanting that Muslims who became friends with non-Muslims were doomed to Hell, that non-Muslims were the vilest of animals, only fit to be used as fuel for the fires of Hell, that Jewish people were subhuman. Many verses accused non-Muslims of being liars who could not be trusted.

According to Islam, only Muslims have value. It’s okay to rape non-Muslims or take non-Muslims as slaves. All other people—other than devout Muslims—are to be met with varying degrees of hate. The most hated of all are the Jewish people. This cannot be overstated. The hatred for Jews in Islam is very clear, very deep, and unrelenting.

Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli rhetoric was part of my life from the moment I was born. Hating Israel and all the Jews was a daily diet I consumed before I can remember; it was always just an accepted given. My mom forbade us to watch Seinfeld as it was all Jews. She would immediately hate a person if they had a Jewish-sounding name. The word yahoodi or Jew is used as a curse word reserved for the vilest of people. Among Muslims this hatred was generally blasé.

There is a prevalent impression that Islam is a religion of peace. Only people who have never cracked open a Quran can assert that. The Quran and Hadith are chock-full—chock-full—of violence. In the age of the Internet, there is no excuse for people to mindlessly repeat sound bites. Ignorance is now a choice.

At least five times a day over a billion people are droning on, calling for the death of all non-Muslims. This brainwashing undoubtedly infects many minds. Even if only 1% of the over billion people indoctrinated act on the demands, that is still 16 million people. And the truth is, unfortunately, that the number is a lot higher than 1%.

Before I could figure out how to escape, I heard my name being bellowed. He led me to the garage, where he tied my wrists together behind my back. I wasn’t sure what was to become of me when he instructed me to lie down on the garage floor. He bound my ankles together with rope, a familiar feeling that brought up the familiar anxiety. I lay on that garage floor having what I now know was a panic attack. In that state, I was hung upside down from a hook that he used to hang the Eid lamb. He had devised a plan to hang me upside down like a dead animal. I swung back and forth as he stood on a chair to reach my feet so he could whip them.

This is why ex-Muslims relate to people in the LGBT community so much, especially those who grew up in religious households. We know what it feels like to be told that the core of who you are is evil. Ex-Muslims use phrases like in the closet and come out because they are equally fitting. The plight of a Muslim gay person, a double whammy, has to be the worst possible scenario. A Muslim, gay woman—that has to be the worst fate possible.

At

felt so awkward, so uncomfortable, so hot, in those stupid oversized clothes. My whole body was suffocating. My head throbbed, and my skin oozed sweat from every pore. And every day, they told me that dressing like the kuffar was evil and that I would go to hell if I dressed that way. Besides, when the Caliphate rises, if you're not wearing hijab, how will you be distinguished from the nonbelievers? If you look like them, you’ll be killed like them.

Ah, the Caliphate. Always about the Caliphate. Every Friday khutba (sermon) there was the declaration that Muslims will succeed in turning the whole planet Islamic. Every Friday, we chant “Ameen” as the Imam makes a dua, plea to Allah, that the Caliphate rises soon and that we eradicate nonbelievers. Then there will be peace. It is why when ISIS rose in Iraq and Syria so many people from around the world- inexplicable people like university students from affluent families in Western countries-decided to join ISIS then burn their passports. The response from pundits was to assume that these people were all recruited online. That’s some pretty quick recruiting! The reason why all those young men and women so quickly joined ISIS was because, just like me, they were raised hearing about how it was their duty to join the ummah against the nonbelievers. They were taught that it was their duty to join the Caliphate when it rises.

It is important to clarify the distinction between culture and religion when talking about the hijab. A common response from people is that hijab is “cultural clothing.” But which culture are they referring to? Women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Indonesia share no cultural aspects. They do not have similar food or clothing or traditions or language. The only thing they share is religion. Hijab is worn by women in all those countries because of the religion of Islam, not because of any culture. Claiming the hijab is cultural clothing is as vacuous as claiming a Pope hat is cultural. Catholics from the Philippines, Italy, or South America share no cultural aspects—but they share a religion. There has been a deliberate conflation of religion and culture that only serves to erase cultures and replace them with the monolith of Islam. Dozens of countries lost their cultures to Islam. It is sad to see that there remains this pervasive idea that Muslims all share a culture. No. They do not. They each have distinct cultures that have just been shrouded by Islam in the same way each individual girl’s personality gets shrouded by hijab so that they all start looking the

same.

The direct response to that would be to have a day where we encouraged Muslim women to take off their hijab for a day, but of course we could not do that. Girls and women can be killed for removing their hijabs. Aqsa Parvez, a sixteen year old girl in Canada, was strangled to death by her father and brother with the hijab that she refused to wear.

Women all over the world are resisting. Women in Pakistan are riding their bikes in public. Women in Iran are dancing in the streets. Women in Saudi Arabia are wearing their abayas (the black cloaks they are forced to wear) inside out in an effort to recognize other dissidents when in public. And men are involved, too! Some men in Iran and, to a much lesser extent, in Saudi Arabia are joining in solidarity with the women protesting against the hijab laws. Of course, all of these people are punished for their crimes against Sharia. Either they are punished by their families in what is referred to as honour violence or honour killings or they are punished by their governments that imprison them for decades for defying the laws created to maintain modesty.

Quite often I hear people wonder what’s the big deal if you have to wear a scarf on your head? The big deal is that women are not even allowed agency over their own bodies! Hijab is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the physical representation of the subjugation and dehumanization and absolute gender apartheid that is commonplace in many parts of the Muslim-majority world.

Women in the West generally support one another in their resistance, but it’s important to note that in societies that are highly patriarchal and highly misogynist, women rarely support one another. Each woman is too concerned with saving her own skin to be concerned about any other woman’s skin. This is by design, of course. If women are too busy viewing one another as competition—as their husbands can marry up to four women—then there is no threat that they will work together against the common enemy. Keep the women fighting one another so they are too busy to join forces against their oppressors.

Muslim

We would hide out in the washrooms and sneak makeup on and tell one another stories about boys and the bittersweet excitement of getting our periods, which gave us a reprieve from the mind- numbing daily prayers. A woman on her period was impure, unfit to pray, touch the Quran, or even enter a Mosque. Allah makes you this way and then curses you for it. That’s fair.

I’m not surprised she had such a low opinion of herself. She was raised in a misogynistic culture that taught her that her only worth was between her legs. She had never bothered to cultivate any part of her intellect or personality. Someone that empty is the perfect raw material, the perfect vessel, to fill with religious fundamentalism. My mother was a stereotypical religious zealot. No sympathy, empathy or logic gets through to a zealot. There are no tactics or manoeuvres to get through to their human side. They are programmed to follow, and nothing interferes with that unbending single-minded goal.

The thing about her that scared me the most was that she could marry me off to an old man in Egypt. She threatened it constantly. I knew if she made that decision, I was a goner. There would be no recourse, no discussion. She would drag me to fulfill her wishes as she had dragged me, unwilling, countless times before.

Since the Muslim school only went to grade seven, all the boys were excited about starting high school, but the girls were terrified of what would become of them. The summer before high school was notoriously the time when girls disappeared. It was the perfect time to send them back home unnoticed. In the extreme cases, it was a popular time for so- called honour kil...

Petrified

The judge ruled that corporal punishment wasn’t against the law in Canada, and due to our “culture,” sometimes those punishments can be more severe than in the average Canadian household. The scariest thought crouching in the back of my mind became a reality with one swift smack of a judge’s gavel. I never felt so betrayed in my life. It had been my only hope, and it had been dashed. How disgusting to allow a child to be beaten because her abuser happens to come from another country! What has that got to do with anything? All children should be protected. It doesn’t hurt children any less physically, emotionally, or psychologically if they’re from a different culture. Beatings and sexual abuse are equally damaging to all children, whatever their culture. If my abuser had been of German or Dutch descent, would he not be in prison? How does that make any sense?

These laws are still in place in Canada. I cannot even imagine how many children have been ignored or thrown back into the lion’s den like I was. I have had so many people who were or are Child Protection Social Workers contact me to tell me how sorry they are. One man was so disturbed by the fact that he had to leave abused children to be abused that he had to switch to another role in the ministry. He just couldn’t do it. He told me that he has been haunted by what he was forced to do for 31 years. People that have devoted their lives to protecting children are being forced to actively leave children to continue to be abused because their government is hell-bent on cultural and moral relativism. The need to seem woke supersedes the need to save actual children from abuse.

In their effort to be “culturally sensitive,” my own country ended up being viciously bigoted toward me instead. I knew that if I had come from a family of “white” parents, I would have been protected. This is the typical result of regressive-left thinking, when their minds are so open, their brains fall out. They onl...

If a white person refuses to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, everyone will yell bigotry and assert that it is unacceptable. But when bakeries with Muslim owners refuse to bake cakes for a gay couple? The response is deafening silence. It’s their culture, and...

spent

The Muslim School kept getting bigger and bigger. Soon we had school buses bringing in children from miles away. We still didn’t have a proper curriculum or classrooms or anything that identified it as a school. At some point, the government took notice, and suddenly the school was in danger of being shut down. Soon after, money flowed in from Saudi Arabia. The money would allow for the construction of dedicated elementary and secondary school buildings equipped with the latest technologies available. Along with the Saudi money came the Saudi indoctrination. The fundamentalist Muslims that you’ve undoubtedly heard about—the ones blowing up buildings, burning school children alive, and throwing gay people off roofs. They are all of the same school of thought.

The old principal from India was relieved of his duties and an Egyptian man replaced him—an Egyptian man with a long beard and a wife who covered her whole body, even her face and hands, in black. It was the first time we had seen such a sight. Some kids called her a penguin or a bat, others called her a ninja.