The Devil We Don't Know

by Nonie Darwish

  Unfortunately, Mutairi is not the only one who advocates the official open return of sexual slavery. Some Islamic sheikhs have spoken about their right to indulge in sexual slavery on national TV in Egypt and elsewhere. A female expert on sharia once stated on Egyptian TV that under sharia, it is permissible to rape Jewish women.

  What Mutairi advocates is indicative of the pathology and the warped thinking that some Muslim women have fallen prey to, while attempting to adjust to the system. It has been documented that in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, or anywhere that sharia permits it, a good number of Muslim women accommodate the existence of a sexual relationship between their husbands and their maids, who are considered sexual slaves under the control of the home. Cases such as this have been discovered right here in the United States, where, in one instance, a Saudi man who pursued this lifestyle was sentenced to jail for enslaving his maid. In Saudi Arabia, he would have gone unpunished. Not so in the West. Here, the man was punished, along with his wife—as an accessory.

  In the United States, there were two high-profile kidnappings for the purpose of sexual slavery: the cases of Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard. The abductors succeeded and went undetected for many years because their deranged wives were willing enablers who posed as mothers to those poor girls. Their enabling was similar to the role of most Muslim wives who accept the sexual enslavement of maids by their husbands, a situation found in many homes, especially in Saudi Arabia. Mutairi represents the worst in women: those who sell out their gender in order to gain honor and attention in a Muslim world that gives them no respect. The entire Islamic culture has succeeded in pitting women against one another and has normalized the pathology of women accepting the enslavement of other women.

  Convincing Muslim women to be on the side of sharia has even reached as far as U.S. academia. Islamic and Middle Eastern studies departments in the United States have a good number of Muslim female professors who defend the veil as “liberating.” In an article titled “Veil of Ignorance,” Leila Ahmed, the author of A Quiet Revolution, wrote, “The veil, once an emblem of patriarchy, today carries multiple meanings for its American and European wearers. Often enough, it also serves as a banner and call for justice—and yes, even for women's rights.”3

  “Ignorance” in the title of Ahmed's article obviously refers to the American people who need to remove the veil over their eyes to see how liberating the Islamic veil really is. This is the kind of pride in bondage that the Islamic state has convinced many women to live by. For Ahmed and those who share her viewpoint, even the veil, an established symbol of Muslim women's slavery and oppression throughout the history of Islam, has been turned into a positive sign of freedom. What Ahmed is trying to say is that many Muslim women are wearing the veil not necessarily for personal religious reasons, but to make a statement to the outside world (a banner) to demand justice. But what justice? And if they are demanding rights in the United States, what rights is she talking about? The West is the only country to offer freedom and dignity to Muslim women, even to those who defy Western culture by wearing Islamic garb. The happiest Muslim women on earth today are the ones who are living under the U.S. constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  Some Muslims in the United States claim that they have been discriminated against after 9/11, but I believe that claim is unfounded. I, an Arab and a former Muslim, have never been discriminated against in the United States after 9/11, and perhaps it is because I did not celebrate but rather mourned that day with my fellow U.S. citizens. Arab and Muslim Americans who originally came from the Middle East should know better, because compared to the Middle East or any country on earth, America is the most tolerant, welcoming, and forgiving nation. Just imagine what would have happened if nineteen American men had flown commercial airplanes into buildings in Riyadh or Mecca, Saudi Arabia. When one Danish cartoonist drew a picture of Mohammed, the entire Muslim world, governments and media, erupted with extreme anger and violence. Muslims did not say that they must not discriminate against all of the Danish people. Instead, Muslim crowds set the Danish embassy on fire, boycotted Danish products, and sent death threats to Danish people and businesses. There was no understanding on the part of any Muslim entity that this was only one cartoonist who had freedom of speech under his country's laws and who did not represent all of Denmark.

  American female Muslim students who wear the hijab to protest injustice in the United States (which is the only kind of feminism allowed by Islam), are misplacing their anger, just as feminists in the Muslim world do. Compared to what Muslims would have done in similar circumstances, if Western terrorists had attacked a Muslim country on the scale of 9/11, the American people have shown more heroic self-control, grace, and tolerance than anyone could have expected. This is something that Muslims in the United States should have noticed—instead of playing a game of defiance with a country in mourning.

  Muslims who immigrated to the United States from the Middle East, including Ahmed and myself, all have dual citizenship. If the situation in America was so bad after 9/11 that some felt forced to wear Islamic garb simply to make a point, that act was silly and juvenile. The Islamic attire movement on college campuses cannot be for justice and equality, as is claimed. I think it is done as an expression of defiance against American culture. If the goal of these Muslim women is really equality and justice, then let them demonstrate on behalf of women in Cairo or Mecca, where women cannot legally leave their houses without their husbands' permission.

  Wearing Islamic attire on U.S. college campuses is simply an in-your-face way of saying “We support sharia.” I once asked a Muslim woman whom I personally know not to be religious at all about her reason for wearing the head cover. Her answer was, “In America, the ethnic look gives one more power and respect.” I think she is right. The United States unnecessarily bends over backward to accommodate people who refuse to assimilate into American culture. It is a bad sign that many of us immigrants are getting from the politically correct crowd in the United States; they constantly remind us that they love us just the way we are. Americans who try to protect immigrant cultures, thinking that it is honorable and normal not to assimilate, are actually hurting, rather than helping, immigrant communities. After moving to another country, as I did, most people actually find it very hard not to assimilate or learn the new language and way of life. That is why we chose to come to the United States in the first place, to be Americans. But some Americans try to welcome ethnic communities by going overboard in rewarding them for remaining encapsulated in their own culture, language, and pride of their national origin. I think this has produced a few pockets of immigrant groups, even on our college campuses, who use ethnic power to their personal advantage.

  I also find it extremely hypocritical when Muslims riot, burn, and kill when an American threatens to burn the Koran, as was the case when a Florida pastor, Terry Jones, said he was going to burn the Koran. The reason this is hypocritical on the part of Muslims is because Muslim governments and individuals habitually confiscate and burn Bibles and other people's holy books. Most Westerners don't realize that the government of Saudi Arabia has engaged in burning Korans—yes, Korans—that belonged to the Shiite minorities in Eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. I received this information about Muslims burning other Muslims' Korans from Bahraini Shiites who were surprised by the audacity of the Sunnis who threatened to kill any American who would dare burn a Koran.

  The Koran-burning incident has exposed a one-sided respect for Islam by the U.S. media and politicians that is not reciprocated by Muslims toward Shiite Korans and mosques. The U.S. media failed to do its homework and expose this hypocrisy, and, instead of protecting the right of free speech for Americans, they chose to throw that right to the wolves. The U.S. media have also failed to explain to the Muslim world that Americans as individuals are even protected under the law to burn the U.S. flag, the Bible, and the Koran. I would have liked to see the so-called moderate Muslims in the United States say they would
not go down in history as the reason behind America's suppression of free speech, and if that meant that someone wanted to burn the Koran, then that was his right under the U.S. law that we all enjoy. Unfortunately, no Muslim said that, and the U.S. government and the media caved in. I believe this will not go down well in the history of the United States.

  Muslim feminist defenders of sharia have influenced not only U.S. educational institutions but also political institutions in the United States. In 2009, when President Obama spoke to the Muslim world in Cairo, he talked about protecting a woman's right to wear the hijab but never mentioned a woman's right not to wear the hijab. Obama's speech was partly written for him by the head-covered White House Muslim adviser Dalia Mogahed, who was born in Egypt. She is an assertive defender of sharia, denies any connection between Islam and terrorism, and defends the Muslim Brotherhood. She is also a firm defender of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). These organizations have radical ties and are promoters of sharia in the United States. CAIR has been described as an unindicted coconspirator in the terror-finance trial against the Holy Land Foundation and its former officials.

  Mogahed's reasoning repeats the same old excuses we Egyptians heard, day in and day out, in defense of Islamic jihad and the oppression of women—she blames others for misunderstanding Islam. Her answers are always given with total confidence and conviction, as she tells her audience that any violent actions by Muslims have nothing to do with Islam. Never mind that Islamic mosques, education, art, and songs all glorify jihad as a holy war for the sake of Allah.

  Mogahed brings nothing new to Islamic propaganda, but she certainly sounds assertive, eloquent, and interesting to Americans who are unfamiliar with the same old Islamic propaganda and who find it hard to question a religion. Mogahed has a unique advantage over the classic Islamic sheikh, in that she brings to the United States the traditional views of Islamic sheikhs in a Western-style presentation. Yet in reality, she is not much different from the sheikhs who ridicule those who question Islam with statements such as “Who are you to speak for Islam? Leave the analysis to the experts on Islam.” Mogahed's logic is very similar, and, coincidentally, her book Who Speaks for Islam is a rejection of critics whom she believes not qualified to speak for Islam. It is a meaningless title. She provides statistics that are designed to confuse the reader in order to show that Muslims are very different and are not all terrorists, which is no news anyway.

  Of course, the 1.2 billion Muslims all over the world differ greatly. There is good and bad in every group, but one thing controls all of them, and that is the tyranny of sharia. What Mogahed refuses to admit is that reputable critics of Islam have nothing against the Muslim people, but they correctly deduce that the problem stems from the ideology of Islam and its scriptures and commandments. What Mogahed refuses to discuss are the actual laws of sharia, the history of jihad, the ideology and the education that produced 9/11, Islamic imperialism, the denial of human rights, and the oppression of women and minorities. Her answers are usually simplistic, such as the argument that sharia cannot be bad for women because the majority of Muslim women allegedly support sharia.

  The bottom line of Mogahed's propaganda and others like her in the United States is the same old complaint that the West does not understand Islam and that with some education and sensitivity training, the West will finally accept Islam as a religion of peace. Her position, as well as that of some other Muslims in our government, has given her a powerful opportunity to enhance the standing of radical Islamist groups in the eyes of the U.S. government. Unfortunately, there is no equal voice given to the reformists and the anti-sharia Muslims or the former Muslims. Yet the responsibility falls on our leaders, who hired and entrusted Muslim Brotherhood figures to work in sensitive positions in our government. Mogahed, who is rumored to be, and I personally believe is, a Muslim Brotherhood member herself, has written speeches for the U.S. president to address the Muslim Brotherhood. I believe this was a glaring conflict of interest that the White House should not have allowed. The end result of the speech was an overwhelming impression on the Arab street that Islamism won and secular reformers were defeated. I will go into more detail on the impact of Barack Obama's Cairo speech in chapter 7.

  It may surprise most Americans that the influence of the U.S. women's suffrage movement reached all the way to Turkey and Egypt. The only time that Egypt saw a relatively successful, but mostly cosmetic, feminist movement was in 1919, the year American women acquired the right to vote.

  Around the same time, Turkey was also undergoing major reforms instituted by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and hosted some women conferences, one of which was attended by an Egyptian feminist, Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947). That same year, she led the first women's street demonstration in Egypt, and later in 1923 she founded the Egyptian Feminist Union, which never had more than 250 members and was composed mostly of wealthy upper- and middle-class women. Shaarawi herself was born into a wealthy family and was married against her will to her cousin, a strong tradition in Egypt at that time. She spent her early years in a harem, an experience she wrote about later in her memoir Harem Years. In May 1923, she attended the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Rome. In a speech at this conference, Shaarawi said that women in ancient Egypt had equal status to men and that only under “foreign domination” had women lost those rights. Shaarawi was correct in saying that it was foreign domination, but she probably was not referring to the Arabian domination that actually diminished the status of women by bringing Islam to Egypt in the seventh century. Sadly, she then used the same argument that all Muslim feminists rely on, when she said that Islam granted women equal rights with men, but that the Koran had been “misinterpreted” by those in power.

  On her return from Rome in 1923, Shaarawi did the unthinkable for her time: she took off her veil in the middle of the Cairo train station, declaring the end of the veil. This bold act became the central symbol of her movement.

  Because of Shaarawi, my grandmother, my mother, and I have never worn the veil. This courageous woman was not only inspired by a global feminist awareness movement but, more important, was also helped by a more open political climate at the time in Egypt. Islam had become weakened in the early 1920s, particularly because Saudi Arabia was a poor country that could not finance the radicalization of the world around it. Egypt was then a Western-leaning kingdom with some residue of influence from the Ataturk reforms. It had several opposing parties with their own newspapers and a parliament that was not only for show. Sharia law was not in the Egyptian constitution, as it is today. Yet above all, the British and the French had considerable influence in the entire region, and their presence had a positive influence on protecting the human rights of minorities. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was not yet established, and Wahabi Islam, the most radical pure Islam, was limited to and localized inside Saudi Arabia.

  Mainly, the 250-member Egyptian feminist movement succeeded in bringing about cosmetic changes, such as giving women freedom not to wear the veil. In the period after World War II, my baby-boom generation of Egyptian middle- and upper-class girls had been encouraged to go to college and later on work. Men and women, however, were still segregated, and dating was never allowed. I am grateful to Hoda Shaarawi because, without her movement, I would never have received the education I did.

  Yet Shaarawi probably never could have imagined that her movement, which liberated Egyptian woman from the veil, would be overturned some fifty years later, not by the government but by Egyptian women themselves, who opted to go back to the veil. I remember the growth of Islamist infiltration in Egypt, which started in the seventies after jihadist wars with Israel. Many Egyptians fled the harsh poverty of Egypt to go to countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states—the same countries that were financing Egypt's wars with Israel. Very quickly, Saudi petro-dollars started to change Egyptian culture and the entire region. This coincided with the powerful radic
al Islamist movement that swept the Middle East as a result of the Iranian revolution. Saudi Arabia radicalized Sunni Muslim countries, and Iran radicalized the Shiites, and both groups ended up feeding on each other.

  At that time, just like my mother and my siblings, not all of the women in Egypt wanted to wear the veil, and a small number refuse to do so even today. Yet the copycat tendency spread quickly, and many women who had initially rejected the veil were left in a quagmire: whether to be perceived as devout Muslims or as outcast rebel apostates. The majority chose the former, because perception is everything in Muslim society.

  How can feminism be practiced openly, let alone survive under such conditions? Again and again in the Middle East, the passage of time has not necessarily led to progress, liberty, and positive results. Throughout the history of Islam, there have been cycles of reform and attempts to change society that ended with no gains being made. Muslim feminists have never succeeded in achieving serious reforms, such as the abolition of polygamy, equal inheritance rights, or the right to marry whomever they wish. These are all demands that go against sharia, and, as I mentioned earlier, women who make these demands are called apostates. To muzzle Muslim feminists, the Arab media will usually accuse them of borrowing corrupt and subversive ideas from foreign infidel Zionists and enemies of Islam.