Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims

by Yasmine Mohammed

I was only a bit nervous when Morsi, an Egyptian president for a short time after Mubarak, let a group of Muslim Brotherhood operatives out of prison. The truth is that Essam hated the Brotherhood; he thought Islamists were a bunch of pansies. He was actually aligned with a more militant group in Egypt called Al Jihad, who were the Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda. Both Islamists and jihadis have the same goal—to spread Islam, but they have different methods. Islamists want to do this through passive means such as politics, immigration, and childbirth. However, jihadis prefer the method used by the first Muslims: the sword.

“The

And there was such a comfort in knowing that he loved me more than I loved him. That gave me the control. I never feared that he would ever hurt me.

He met my mom once, but only after he said his shahada and became a Muslim.

am

Wayne

I learned so much from Wayne. I learned that I was worth loving. I learned what it was like to be in a loving relationship. I learned that I could keep breaking barriers and defying Allah and nothing would happen! Even though I no longer believed in all the nonsense, the fear and doubt that maybe I was wrong would creep in now and then. But I’d had premarital sex, the ultimate sin for a woman, and I was still in one piece! I learned that I had married him because he was safe and secure, and I was vulnerable and broken. I learned that he was great for me at the time, and I am grateful that we could be there for each other when we each needed the other. I cannot honestly say that I was ever in love with him, but I definitely loved him. That’s not good enough to sustain a marriage, though.

Doha

I didn’t want people to get wind of the fact that I was, or rather had been, a Muslim. I was living in a country governed by Sharia. The punishment for apostasy was death. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. This is the most dangerous part about Islam today: Sharia. There are no other theocratic nations in the world except for the countries under Islamic law, including, of course, the fifty-seven countries that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. That is scary. As long as those countries are following Islamic laws, they will never progress beyond seventh-century barbaric, misogynistic, and homophobic laws. People can be free to believe in all the sky daddies and fairy tales they choose to believe in, but they cannot impose the musings of their imaginary friends on others—at least not in a modern democracy.

Luckily, in comparison to Arab countries, obsession with identity is pretty much nonexistent in multicultural Canada.

So

Everything came to a crashing halt a few months later when a car bomb blew up the local theatre. The theatre was just for expats. It was full of British, American, Australian, and Canadian people. I had tickets to go to that night’s performance, but I had bailed because my daughter wasn’t feeling well. The Egyptian who drove the car into the building died on impact. Everyone in the theatre was able to escape when they heard the huge bang. Once they were all out, the director went back in to make sure everyone had been evacuated, and that’s when the bomb went off. The Director did not survive. It was a day that hit me as hard as 9/11 did.

I could now finally be a true feminist, not a confused and constantly apologetic Muslim feminist. I didn’t have to make excuses for why Allah gives a girl half the inheritance her brother gets or why in a court of Sharia a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s or why Mohammed said women are deficient in intelligence. I could happily denounce all that misogyny without feeling scared that I might be punished in some afterlife. I could proudly say to myself and my daughter, you are worthy. You are second to none.

In Qatar, everything was dictated, starting with your place in the racial hierarchy: Qatari Arabs at the pinnacle, followed by Whites (American, Canadian, Australian, Brits), other Arabs (Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, etc.), then people from the Philippines, and finally, at the bottom, people from South Asia (Indian, Pakistani, Bengali, etc.). What you wear is dictated, especially for women, as is what you eat, what you drink, where you go, and where you live. You have your place in that society. And if you want to live in Qatar, you need to know your place.

They

Gaining my confidence took about a year and was not an easy process, but it was definitely facilitated by being one of the very few single women in a country full of single men. Most of the men were disgusting perverts who came from countries where it was perfectly acceptable to leer at women. I thought the men in Egypt were bad— the men from the Indian subcontinent and South Asia were all much, much worse. But at least they kept their distance. None of them would ever dare speak to me, so I just avoided eye contact and kept my distance.

Love

My second year began very differently. I was fully confident and secure in my new identity. I was completely established as the woman I had always wanted to be. I was ready to take on the world. I wanted to finally embrace life as a single woman. I wanted to be like Ally McBeal or one of the women from Sex and the City!

I refused his advances over and over again because I didn’t want a man ruining my cool single-girl vibe.

I would find reasons our relationship wouldn’t work, and by the time I would see him again, he’d have eradicated whatever it was—even if I hadn’t said anything! He just instinctively knew.

He effortlessly rolled with the punches and jumped through all the hoops.

Writing

Hope

A deep disconnect exists between the feminists in the Western countries and the feminists in the Muslim-majority countries.

They are women in Iran who get lashed and imprisoned for refusing to wear a Sharia government-mandated cloth on their heads. They are women in Saudi Arabia who are tortured in prison for demanding the right to drive a car or to travel without a male guardian’s permission. They are young girls in Afghanistan who are shot in the head because they want to attend school. They are little girls in Sudan who burn themselves because they do not want to be married off. They are young women in Egypt fighting to keep their bodies intact, unmutilated by razors.

Yet, tragically, most prominent Western feminists are not standing alongside me and these brave freedom-fighting women.

Many feminists in the Western world are afraid that by supporting their fellow sisters, someone might misconstrue that as ethnocentrism or racism. And even worse than just ignoring them, at times Western corporations actively support the very things that these brave women fight against. The 2019 swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated featured a burkini. And most egregious, the poster for the Women’s March depicts a woman in hijab.