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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by kittin@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net

I have a good friend who is generally good politically, not one of us but not bad. A socdem who is aware enough to know NATO is bad and Palestine deserves justice etc.

They’re very strong on feminism, advanced. More than me by far and I value their pov on feminism. A lot.

But they have Islamophobe brainworms. Mostly surrounding sexual violence in Europe by Muslims. They have a suite of rage bait statistics or anecdotes of sexual violence by Muslim men in Europe.

“See this isolated and context-free statistic which shows really the problem is Islam and the cultural values of these immigrants.”

The discussion for them becomes rooted in feminism.

“Why should women pay the price for all the sexual violence Muslim men bring with them? Honor killings are 100% Muslim!”

“X% of rapes are by muslims when they are only Y% of the population.”

“Why are all the immigrants men? We should ban the male refugees from these places, but as a good pro-refugee progressive we should allow the women and children in because they aren’t a problem.”

It’s tempting to try and fight this on data but I think that would kind of be conceding the deeper clash of civilizations argument in some way?

It’s also tempting to fight this on the grounds of material circumstances and point out that gender equality largely follows economic development but then that’s really just entirely conceding to the world view that Islamic immigration is an affliction upon European women for several generations until they assimilate.

I think a core problem here is that I am completely disconnected and unaware of what feminism looks like in the Muslim worlds and so I can’t speak to or challenge the underlying Islamophobia.

Of course there are issues with patriarchy in the Islamic world and when my friend points to the veil in Iran being enforced by the religious police and it’s impossible for me to deny that and I completely agree with them (while disagreeing with them insofar as I totally accept many Muslim women choose to wear it but then it becomes a complex go-nowhere discussion about peer pressure and bikinis) but then there’s this bridge from that true fact to the assertion that Islamic men are a threat to European women which is just like woah man wtf.

How do I approach this? Where’s my Muslim-world feminist perspective at? What are some considered debunks or analyses of the use of isolated statistics on sexual violence?

Like the best internet gotcha would be a statistical analysis that simply debunks the sexual violence statistics and that would be helpful but I believe there’s a deeper Islamophobia and sense of western cultural supremacy, clash of civilizations, thesis that they don’t explicitly acknowledge and I sense that feminism is being abused to ennoble that.

And on the flip side, I’m a male. I’m very unlikely to be a victim of sexual violence at this point in my life. I’m not going to be a victim of an honor killing. Do I have privilege I need to check here?

Overall I think the best would be for me to discover and learn feminist theory and female perspectives from Muslim / Arabic / Palestinian / Iranian / Afghan / Pakistani authors, both in the “Muslim world” and from those living in the west.

Maybe it would also be useful to look at how panic about black men raping women was used and is used to justify racial oppression as a consciousness raising exercise?

Considered feminist critiques of Islam?

Considered feminist critiques of Islamophobia in Europe?

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[-] MuinteoirSaoirse@hexbear.net 26 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of sexual violence is committed against Muslim people in Europe (primarily by policing and border control agents) and that in general most sexual violence is a result of intimate partner violence regardless of a person's cultural or religious background, there's something so weirdly insidious about being angry about Muslim men "bringing sexual violence" to Europe when you look at the overwhelming centuries of European soldiers bringing sexual violence to the Muslim world.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but I think your request for Muslim feminist perspectives is absolutely the right move. So here's some recommendations, and I've added a bit of a focus on Palestine since you mentioned they were sympathetic to Palestinian liberation (including queer perspectives, which is intrinsically tied to feminism):

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one specifically addresses interventionist Western "feminism")

Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine - Nada Elia (look at feminist movements in Palestine, and the women's intifada)

Palestinian Women's Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism - Islah Jad

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality - Sara Ahmed (this is about the way that culture creates the stranger, and touches on exactly the issue you're dealing with: a repetition of myth-building about the dangers of a specific out-group. I also recommend a lot of Sara Ahmed's other books, like Living a Feminist Life, Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Post-modernism).

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique - Saed Atshan

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times - Jasbir Puar (examination of the leveraging of "progressive" Western values in creating the terrorist body subject to Western violence and dehumanization, and how "feminism" was used as a primary tool in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan)

Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon - Nicola Pratt

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures - Gul Ozyegin

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature - Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (kind of an old ethnography, but interesting nonetheless)

Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation - Geraldine Moane

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror - Mahmood Mamdani (this one isn't about feminism, but rather about the way that Islamaphobia has been inserted throughout western society and the shaping of western discourse on Islam. Mamdani has a lot of great books)

Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism, and the Politics of Dress - Stephanie Cronin

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one is more about getting to know the cultural feelings of womanhood in bedouin society)

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories - Lila Abu-Lughod

Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study - Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (This one is about the weaponization of sexual violence, which is an important piece of understanding how the West are the largest perpetrators of sexual violence against Muslim women, not Muslim men)

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International - Sarah Schulman

Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel-Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude - Saffo Papantonopoulou (quick essay on how Israeli "progressiveness" is leveraged to oppress queer Palestinians and pinkwash Israeli violence)

Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism - Harsha Walia (not specifically what you were asking for, but has a lot of great information about how militarized borders are one of the largest vectors for sexual violence against women; anyone arguing about keeping certain people from immigrating is, de facto, arguing for supporting the funding of militarized borders to keep those people out, and thus adding to the amount of sexual violence)

[-] kittin@hexbear.net 12 points 2 months ago

Thank you so much this is amazing. I really appreciate the effort you’ve made here.

[-] Dolores@hexbear.net 20 points 2 months ago

"Honor Killing" is such a ridiculous bugbear i'd actually forgotten islamophobes liked to use that. it has literally no relationship to islam, it's a special colonial descriptive applied to colonized people in Europe. when a white Belgian murders their wife & someone she's cheating with, that's not an "honor killing" but us-foreign-policy and magically it becomes so

[-] stink@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 2 months ago

I know that I sound cringe right now saying "as a muslim ☝️🤓" but honor killings still exist, even in western puppet states like Jordan.

I remember when I was little hearing my Mom cry in the living room and I asked her what happened. A Jordanian woman went on a walk with her fiance and his friend spread rumors about them going alone somewhere and her family ended up killing her. It was big news at the time. It's not normalized, neither are child marriages, but they still occur which is an issue sadly.

[-] Dolores@hexbear.net 13 points 2 months ago

of course they exist, but the characterization of them as unique to muslims or the global south is completely manufactured for racist scaremongering. murders about miscegenation and adultery, murders over lgbt identification by family members---these occur in the cracker-sphere but don't get an orientalist legal proscription

[-] stink@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 months ago

True!!! Thank you for being so nice :)

[-] kittin@hexbear.net 8 points 2 months ago

Yeah that’s one thing I notice with a lot of the statistics.

Like “religiously motivated violence against women” or “honor killings”… this is literally just when a man who is Muslim commits an act of gender violence since of course they’re going to use their ideology to justify their actions just like how if a men’s rights activist commits an act of gender violence they’re going to justify themselves using MRA bullshit or an incel will justify themselves with red pill nonsense.

It’s just drawing a circle around “when Muslim men do it”, defining a post hoc category of violence designed to capture violence when the perpetrator uses Islam to justify themselves, and surprise surprise the majority of them are Muslim.

[-] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 18 points 2 months ago

They’re very strong on feminism, advanced. More than me by far and I value their pov on feminism. A lot.

Prepare to be disappointed by liberal feminism when you come to develop your own understanding of feminism.

Anyways I would strongly recommend you look into Lady Izdihar and her appearances on Tedx and The Deprogram and so forth, she's a woman communist and convert to Islam living in Seattle, and she sometimes talks about the islamophobia of these sorts of faux-progressive liberals.

My own stance is basically that if someone doesn't know shit about Islam, then that person has basically no right to speak on Islam.

"What do Muslims say before reciting the Qur'an?" — "Uhmm... Allahu akbar?"

"What is the name of the last surah of the Qur'an?" — "Muhammad...?"

Now people like myself will occasionally forget or be ignorant about Islamic things, but you should still hopefully be able to distinguish between someone who genuinely tries to understand this major world religion but doesn't have the ingrained knowledge of it that an actual adherent would have, and someone who has consistently refused to actually engage with Islam in any meaningful way ever. The latter type will in my experience at best get through like a fourth of al-Baqarah, act like they've "seen enough" or that they don't have the time or energy to finish the Qur'an, and then basically make fun of anyone who's read the Qur'an in full or say that they "don't get what other people get out of it"; these islamophobes will then get the rest of their "understanding" of Islam through half-remembered secondary school classes, Internet memes, and fearmongering by liberal news.

So I would say you should force your friend to acknowledge their own ignorance. They may talk big about "cultural values" but they do not know what those cultural values actually are nor anything about their history or background. Now if you can make them acknowledge their own ignorance and they then try to become knowledgeable and make amends for their own Western chauvinism, then that's great; if they double down on their islamophobic drivel, which is frankly more likely, then you should really just cut this person out of your life. They would have demonstrated that they deliberately put their own prejudices in front of truth, and it is not your responsibility to fix this, nor can you derive any value from this person's knowledge that is not tainted by their bigotry.

[-] Vampire@hexbear.net 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

“X% of rapes are by muslims when they are only Y% of the population.”

They are 25% of the population

It's to be expected that ~1.75 billion people commit lots of bad acts

Edit: there are more Muslims (1.75 billion) than there are black people (1.2 billion)

[-] D61@hexbear.net 15 points 2 months ago

These arguments from your friend, even though they are using statistics, are appeals to emotion more than anything else. Probably don't need to worry about trying to found counter statistics to their claims.

I'd probably be using more pointedly shitty counter questions.

X% of rapes are by muslims when they are only Y% of the population

Yeah, rape is bad though. Does it matter if the assailant is an immigrant, Arab, Muslim or your non-immigrant neighbor? Does being an immigrant/Arab/Muslim make the sexual assault ... worse somehow?

Why are all the immigrants men? We should ban the male refugees from these places, but as a good pro-refugee progressive we should allow the women and children in because they aren’t a problem.

So, because some members of a group did a SA, all members of that group should be mass punished? Men (who haven't SA's anybody) forcibly separated from wives, children pulled from one of their parents, leaving a single parent to try to raise their kids as well as get a full time job to pay bills? What even would the cutoff be? What age would a boy be deemed "a threat of doing SA" and be deported or denied travel with their families to a new home... nine? ... ten? ... twelve years old? This doesn't make any sense to me.

[-] SkingradGuard@hexbear.net 9 points 2 months ago

Yeah, rape is bad though. Does it matter if the assailant is an immigrant, Arab, Muslim or your non-immigrant neighbor? Does being an immigrant/Arab/Muslim make the sexual assault ... worse somehow?

On this point, conservatives believe that they're bring protected by the media/police/government because they don't want to be accused of racism or because of some great replacement bs

[-] D61@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

On this point, conservatives believe that they're bring protected by the media/police/government because they don't want to be accused of racism or because of some great replacement bs

My counter to this would be something along the lines of:

"So, you're telling me that whenever you see a news article or watch some news segment about somebody being arrested for rape, accused of rape, or that a group of people living somewhere have a higher than average instance of reported rape... nobody talking about this mentions the immigration status or nation of origin or culture or religion of the accused rapist? Never? Not once? That's super weird because you're (the person I'm talking at in this hypothetical) specifically adding illegal immigrant/Arab/Muslim/Mideastern/Kenyan/etc qualifiers to this conversation. So where did you get those qualifiers from that you are using in this conversation?"

[-] hypercracker@hexbear.net 15 points 2 months ago

their honor killings our intimate partner violence

[-] hypercracker@hexbear.net 14 points 2 months ago

The comic series Palestine by Joe Sacco includes a short section of him talking to Palestinian feminists. It was interesting; they spoke of "the lesson of Algeria", where women took great risks to assist in its liberation (you can see some depictions of this in The Battle of Algiers) and yet were not rewarded with rights after the French were kicked out and the country was organized according to Islamic principles. So there is that internal struggle between feminism and hardline Islamism, it does exist. Some feminists in the scene believed Islamic law actually provides a solid theoretical basis for women's rights, others disagree.

I would say this is one of those "let Muslim feminists lead the way" but that has difficulty because they'll always be able to find some western ex-Muslim liberal feminist validating all of their most racist beliefs. It has all the same pitfalls that, like, "listen to black people" has with the black faces in high places phenomenon.

I never recommend books without reading them but one book I am planning to read in the near future which probably covers this is Orientalism by Edward Said.

[-] homhom9000@hexbear.net 13 points 2 months ago

My first question whenever someone saying "X group commits Y% of crimes eventhough they're only Z% of the population"is asking why are we splitting crimes into race/religion? What are we gaining if we're only focusing on a subset of the aggressors? Sometimes people can recognize it's just racism after they're asked.

Regarding feminist critique of Islamophobia, I don't have any. I don't think Muslim women are any more or less oppress than other women of the world, like in the Congo or India. I think it's oppression that can be directly tied to something else and is not necessarily the religion or race. (Though, I could argue women in the Congo or Palestine are "more" oppressed at the moment due to the active genocides but that's another conversation.)

this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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