Feminist siding with Muslims and Islam's weird nexuses

Submitted by Prashant, Jul 21, 2018 at 12:43

Dear Dr Pipes, your reader who called himself Anon, wondered why the western feminists allow Muslims to dictate their agenda. The partnerships between Islamic fundamentalists and feminists appear weird because everything that feminism stands for, Islam does not stand for. In fact, Islam opposes most of those things (how many western feminists will choose to become one of four wives of some man?)

Similarly, the partnerships between leftists and Muslims do not make sense because leftists are also more likely to decry religion(s). These people will become apostates if they were to pursue their beliefs in Islamic theocracies.

The nexus between Islam and leftists and feminists can, though, be explained.

From the side of Islam the connection makes perfect sense. The Islamic doctrine of Taqiya allows and encourages Muslims to misrepresent their true identity to advance the cause of Islam. It may, by implication, also allows Muslims to disguise as atheists and advance their agendas surreptitiously. Consider the case of actor/comedian Aziz Ansari. He has variously described himself as an atheist/irreligious-person but he has also routinely stood up for Islamic causes. Ansari's stands against Trump are very well known. The fact is that you can very easily hide an Islamic agenda under a secularist umbrella in a western or eastern democracy. That is what Muslims do.

But why the feminists and leftists side with Muslims? There are many reasons. First, leftists like to protest. They protest against everything and anything. So they like crowds and Islamists easily provide the crowds (both on the streets and social forums). In India, for example, most of the opposition of the nationalistic Modi government on social media comes from Muslims. Leftists protest against the governments and Muslims love to join. And leftists do not care to differentiate between protesters. They care for the size of the crowd and the bigger the better.

This is true to some extent for the feminist movement as well. Hijab by no stretch of imagination is a feminist issue. By its very definition Hijab is something that women --have to-- wear because men do not conduct themselves well. No woman will choose to wear a Hijab, for example, to protect herself from mountain lions or dogs or things. But Muslims lie and make hijab a feminist issue and the feminists do not oppose it either because they are too busy to see through or because they also love crowds.

What leftists should realize is that if two parties oppose the same thing, they are not necessarily on the same side. Your enemy's enemy is not necessarily your friend. As reader Anon implied above, the feminists will be able to oppose Hijab in Tehran. Similarly, the leftists will not be able to make people atheists in Islamic theocracies.

Before a social movement accepts the support of Islamists, it owes it to itself to make sure that Islam is not fundamentally against its cause.

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