Segregation of the sexes is an
Islamist demand though it is often couched as a right
and demand of ‘Muslims’. When Islamists have state power
like in Iran or Saudi Arabia, it’s the law.
Transgressing it can mean fines, imprisonment or worse.
There, women must enter government offices via separate
entrances from men; they must sit behind men or boys in
classrooms and at the back of the bus...
Like
racial apartheid in South Africa, gender apartheid is
segregation based on the inequities between genders. The
‘logic’ behind it is that women are not equal but
‘complementary’ to men and if unveiled and unsegregated
are the source of fitnah and affliction in society.
Whilst this perspective is debasing to women, it’s also
demeaning to men who are seen to be unable to control
their sexual urges. An unveiled, unsegregated woman is
like uncovered meat or sweets, asking for it – a whore.
It follows, therefore, that the woman who refuses to
veil (or ‘properly’ veil) or segregate and who enters
the public space on her own terms is considered open
season.
One of the slogans of the Islamists
attacking women who had joined the 1979 mass
demonstration in Iran against compulsory veiling was:
‘Ya rusari, Ya tusari’ (either the veil or a punch).
Abdullah Mohammad Al Dawood, a Saudi Arabian writer,
recently asked his followers to sexually molest women
who work so as to stop women from leaving their homes.
In Egypt, the sexual violence against women is often
spearheaded by the state in order to prevent women from
protesting in the public space... This is also
fundamentally why the Taliban bombs girls’ schools and
why those who have sex outside of marriage are stoned to
death: to keep women/girls in their place – captive,
covered, segregated, disappeared, not seen and not
heard.
Whilst women and men often resist
these anti-women rules at great risk to themselves
across the Middle East, Asia and North Africa (and might
I add also in the west), the likes of Universities UK (UUK)
and Islamism’s apologists defend misogyny as a
culturally relative ‘right to religion’.
If anything, however, can be learnt
from the recent fight (and small victory) against the
endorsement of sex segregation at UK universities, it is
that gender segregation has nothing to do with the right
to religion; after all ordinary Muslims (not a
homogeneous group by any means) manage to go about their
lives whilst freely mixing with the opposite sex all the
time (and where mixing is banned, spend much of their
time getting round segregation).
Gender apartheid is an Islamist
demand to increase power and influence by asserting
medieval rules on women and the society at large. The
groups lined up to defend UUK’s indefensible position
are all hard-core Islamists who hide behind ‘Muslim’ and
religion to push forward their regressive and misogynist
far-Right politics: Hizb Ut-Tahrir, FOSIS (Federation of
Student Islamic Societies), Islamic Education and
Research Academy (iERA), and Islamic Human Rights
Commission...
FOSIS, for example, has just had their
winter council
in December with
Kamal El Mekki
as speaker who supports death for apostates.
Hizb-Ut-Tahrir
says
gays should be killed and has been
classified
as a hate group. iERA’s Abdurraheem Green
says
disobedient women should be beaten; iERA won’t even
publish
on their website the photos of their women speakers (for
women-only events of course)... The British jihadi
Iftikhar Jaman who recently died in Syria fighting for
Al-Qaeda affiliate
ISIS
was part of
iERA’s
dawah team...
The
irony of such groups defending sex apartheid out of
concern for ‘women’s comfort’ is lost on the likes of
UUK.
As
is the fact that Islamists have supporters amongst
women. Having women supporters who are pro-gender
apartheid doesn’t make segregation of the sexes
pro-woman just like having black South Africans
defending separate homelands for black people doesn’t
makes Bantustans pro-equality. Just like having a Sikh
spokesperson for the English Defence League doesn’t
makes that organisation anti-racist...
A 20 December meeting entitled ‘A
Muslim Women’s Unified Community Response: The attack on
gender segregation in Islam’ in London shows that in
fact segregation is the Islamist women’s demand (whilst
feigning representation of all Muslim women). Per
Islamist rules, the meeting is women-only because women
are not allowed to address men; their very voices will
cause fitnah if heard by men, which also explains why
women must write their questions down at meetings rather
than voice them. Speakers at this women-only event are
from Hizb-Ut-Tahrir, iERA, Islamic Human Rights
Commission, and University Islamic Societies. Another
speaker is Yvonne Ridley who used to work for the
Islamic regime of Iran’s Press TV. Her former employer
has also waded into the debate with a Member of the
Islamic Assembly
saying sex segregation has gotten attention in
non-Islamic countries because universities in the west
are ‘swamps of corruption’ and ‘Muslim students’ are in
a position to influence and act as role models for
non-Muslims...
Of course it is not just Universities
UK. Whilst many got it right this time around and
opposed UUK’s position that sex segregation is a
deeply-held religious belief (sadly only because they
see it as ‘their universities’ and not a Sharia court or
burqa which only affects ‘the Other’), many – including
the British government - have got it wrong countless
times before.
Which is why UUK thought it could get
away with endorsing gender apartheid and why Islamists
can dare to speak of ‘women’s comfort’ whilst
simultaneously waging an all-out war on women.
In other equally important fights
against other aspects of the Islamist project to
increase influence and power, there have been many,
including humanists and secularists, who have defended
Sharia courts as ‘people’s right to religion’ and the
burqa and niqab as ‘women’s right to clothing’.
But as Algerian sociologist Marieme
Helie Lucas says: “There is an ideological battle going
on, as well as very concrete ones. Introducing parallel
legal systems, making one's political presence visible
thanks to more and more women wearing a so-called
'Islamic dress', gender segregation, the revival of
medieval forms of punishment such as beheading ( let’s
not forget it happened in Woolwich not so long ago) or
stoning or flogging or amputation of limbs - all this
does not come in a vacuum. There is a correlation
between all these demands; and there is a deliberate
political will behind it.”
The demand for gender segregation
like Sharia courts and the niqab help Islamists gain
political ground at the expense of the innumerable,
including many Muslims who are Islamism’s first victims.
The only way to stop Islamists from
gaining more ground and in order to push them back,
‘progressives’ must begin to recognise this far-Right
movement for what it is, defend universality and
secularism, and fight it politically on all fronts in
solidarity with the many women and men battling it from
Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia to Iran.
La lucha continua (the fight
continues)... |