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?
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.