Imagine being a teenage girl who’s coming home from school. Your name is foreign, Yasmine (with a Y), but because you’re trying to be cool and make friends you’ve been writing your name with a J. You’ve left some school work on the kitchen table with the alternative spelling. Your mum sees it and shows her boyfriend. In response, he leads you to the garage, ties your wrists behind your back and tells you to lie down on the cold concrete floor. 

‘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.

Hanging like a lamb after slaughter, blood rushing to my head, snot and tears filling every cavity of my face, I discovered how to go into myself and somehow block out all physical feeling […] There was nothing I wanted more than to get out of this body, this life that I was stuck in.’

All for writing your name with a J.

This is just one of Yasmine’s Mohammed’s horrific stories of the abuse she suffered growing up in a fundamentalist Islamic household in Canada. She’s now a human rights activist. In Unveiled, Yasmine tries to contextualise her abuse for Western readers, which is to say she wants you to know her experience isn’t unique. She documents that more than 70% of children in Muslim majority countries in the Middle-East and North Africa (aged 2-14) are violently disciplined. And it’s around 90% in Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, and Tunisa. In fact, Unicef have said that lockdowns will have made the situation far worse.

For Yasmine, there’s a very clear reason such violence happens, not the only reason, but an important one. It was rather obvious to her from the first beating: scriptural justification. The Hadith are the record of sayings and actions by Muhammad. There we find commands, such as: ‘teach your children to pray when they are seven years old, and smack them if they do not do so when they are ten’ and ‘hang your whip where members of your household will see it’.

Yasmine heard this scriptural justification time and time again when her husband beat her. She writes:

‘He refused to apologise because he was within his rights. My mother took his side entirely. According to the Quran, Allah instructed men to beat their ‘arrogant’ or ‘disobedient’ wives. I was outnumbered and scared. How could I fight against clear directives from Allah?’

When Yasmine’s brother tried to force-feed her baby daughter grapes — nearly choking her — he was empowered by scripture, by a world view which subordinates women to him: 

‘He was yelling, he grabbed my child, flipped her horizontally and savagely shoved a handful of grapes into her screaming mouth.

I leaped up and threw myself between him and my daughter. In response, he punched and kicked me.’

What of Yasmine’s subtitle? — How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. Remember, Yasmine is living in Canada when this is happening to her. At one point, she managed to get in front of a judge who had the power to save her from this tyrannical family life. But the judge told her that corporal punishment wasn’t against the law in Canada, and, due to their “culture”, sometimes punishments could be more severe than in the average Canadian household. Looking back, Yasmine wonders what he would have said had she been a white German girl.

One of the best examples Yasmine gives of liberal hand waving is clothing and the common failure to distinguish between culture and religion when talking about something like the hijab. She writes:

‘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.’

Yasmine believes Western liberals further demonstrate their complicity through encouraging campaigns such as International World Hijab Day. The celebration consists of Muslim women encouraging non-Muslim women to wear hijab for a day. It’s this indignant outrage which fuels her most powerful writing:

‘While women in the West have gained their freedom to the extent that they are now calling to ‘free the nipple’, women in many parts of the Islamic world just want to free their face and free their hair!

[…]

'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.

[…]

‘Feminists in America would never cheer Nike for putting a swoosh on Mormon underwear, yet they cheer for it being put on religiously prescribed modesty clothing from a different religion.’

Yasmine Mohammed is a voice the world desperately needs to hear more of. If you would like to hear more, I highly recommend her conversation with Sam Harris. They discuss the interesting double standards at play (usually, it has to be said, on the left) when former Christian fundamentalists become apostates:

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/175-leaving-faith

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