Islam’s backward cultural practices, social attitudes and behavioural norms are imported to the West by Muslim immigrants and are continued by their Western-born descendants. All immigrant groups inevitably bring some or all of their social values and cultural beliefs but Muslims pose a special problem in this regard concerning Islamic attitudes to, and strict regulation of, female Muslims (and Western females, too).
3.3.1 Hijabs and Burkas
The most visually-evident reminder of the oppression and secondary status of Muslim women, is Islamic dress code, especially compulsory religious headwear. It is mandatory for Muslim women to wear some headgear equivalent of a bin-liner to at least partially cover their hair and face (whilst beards are de jure for Muslim men) to ensure the concealment and self-effacement of Muslim women. Muslim females’ head-and-body-covering attire are religiously justified because a psychotic seventh-century warlord designated women as vessels of sin designed by Satan to tempt men. Under Islam, women are considered second-class citizens and the property of men – only the Muslim male may see the Muslim female’s face and hair.
Burkas, niqabs and hijabs (and the ludicrous burkini) are not simply a fashion choice for Muslim women, as Western apologists for Islam assert. Such headgear is both a symbol of and tool for female Muslim oppression under Islam’s antiquated view of women. The wearers of these archaic and anti-social garments are sending out a conspicuously visible message that they are not interested in (or are prevented from) integrating into wider, secular, non-Muslim society or interacting with non-Muslims.
The hijab and its clothing cousins are totally at odds with female dress autonomy in the West and with other hard-won freedoms for women. If any other community was forcing its women to dress in discomforting ways, there would be justified uproar by liberal opinion centres but when it’s the Muslim community treating their women as chattel, and dressing them as men decree, the West’s feministic elites turn away, saying ‘Hands off the hijab! It’s part of their culture. So shut up.’
The hijab is at the symbolic forefront of Islamic penetration of the West, marked, early in February every year, by ‘World Hijab Day’, a campaign initiated by US Islamists and officially supported, or at least shielded from criticism by, ‘Diversity’-besotted liberals, in 145 countries. Booths are set up in universities and government buildings to hand out hijabs for non-Muslims to wear for the day in multiculturalist solidarity with Muslims who are allegedly being persecuted by the West. World Hijab Day is nothing more than a political statement by identity liberals. In the US and other Western countries, the hijab has become an anti-Trump symbol. Its ostentatious visibility makes it the obligatory target for all ‘woke’, PC-aware, multiculturalist, liberal news media and cultural production houses seeking to contrast their tolerance, diversity, inclusion and all-round moral goodness against the dark forces of the nativist, nationalist, populist right and their Trumpian Svengali.
Lost in all the frantic hijab-focused ‘Diversity-worship, however, is the simple fact that there is nothing at all liberal about the hijab (even the fashionably-coutured hijab) and the other black, shapeless ‘modesty’ garments of Islamic culture. The hijab partially erases Muslim women from society at large, consigning them to second-class citizenry. The hijab is the very opposite of women’s liberation and feminism. If a Muslim woman were to remove it in any Muslim-majority country, or in some Muslim communities in the Islamicising West, and the woman will face very real persecution up to and including death.
Fortunately some of the world is starting to get wise - the full-dress burqua is now illegal in Latvia, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, Quebec and much of Germany. Oh, and, er, Morocco (which must make that Islamic country ‘Islamophobic’, such is the ‘logic’ of multiculturalism).
3.3.2 Female genital mutilation
Muslim men’s control over ‘their’ women is also demonstrated, more gruesomely, through female genital mutilation (FGM) - the home-surgery amputation of the clitoris, and sometimes the entire vulva, from a young girl’s genitalia. FGM is inflicted on girls to make sexual intercourse less pleasurable, once the girl becomes a young woman, in order to make the developing Muslim female more liable to remain virgins before marriage and to keep them faithful to the men whose property they become in marriage. Muslim men’s sexual pleasure is not diminished in any way.
FGM is an agonising, terrifying experience, and often condemns those who undergo it to a lifetime of pain and ill-health, including (according to the WHO) ‘severe bleeding and problems urinating, and, later, after the ‘operation’, cysts, infections, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths’.
Dating back to Bedouin Arab and African cultures, FGM is widely prevalent in mainly Muslim countries. It is spreading to Europe and America as a result of increased Muslim immigration. At least 200 million girls and women in 30 countries (mainly in Muslim-dominated countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia) are estimated to have undergone FGM according to the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF).
This is a conservative estimate because it excludes countries where the practice exists but where large-scale, representative data is not available, including the large Muslim populations in India, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, as well as in pockets in Australia, North America and Europe where large numbers of Muslim immigrants from FGM-prevalent countries live.
In Britain, hospitals report an average of fifteen botched cases of FGM per day. Four thousand cases were reported in 2014. In the US, at least half a million women have been subjected to, or are at risk of, genital mutilation (survey estimate from the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based non-profit organisation, based on the U.S. 2013 American Community Survey). In Australia, in just one public hospital treats between 600 and 700 women annually (all costs accrued to the taxpayer, by the way, under Medicare-funded free public hospital services).
Despite the practice being illegal in the West, prosecutions are exceptionally rare because it is deeply embedded in Islamic culture and few are prepared to inform on the perpetrators - mothers who take their children to a backyard FGM ‘practitioner’ in the Western country or abroad, or who perform the slicing and hacking procedure themselves.
FGM is practiced only by Muslims, and, because the identity Left, and Western feminism, is so politically-correct, it adopts the ludicrous position that to object to the mutilation of young girls’ genitals with knives and broken glass would be ‘Islamophobic’.
3.3.3 Muslim females’ second-class citizenship
Muslim women’s lives are also strongly circumscribed in other areas such as freedom of movement, independence, education and employment. Muslim women are regarded as Muslim men’s chattel and confined to breeding and domestic chores. They are forbidden to appear in public unaccompanied by their husbands or male relatives. They are treated as minors in need of male guardianship. Segregation of the Muslim sexes is routine. Marital rape, child marriage, forced marriage, polygamy, ‘honour killings’ are all condoned. Harsh punishments for adultery or for being a rape victim (being raped can make a Muslim woman guilty of adultery) are sanctioned by Islam.
Domestic violence is acceptable (only as ‘a last resort’, of course). The religion of the woman does not matter but the religion of the husband is crucial to the outcome: Non-Muslim British women married to men of Muslim background in the UK, for example, are eight times more likely to be killed by their Muslim husbands than are those non-Muslim British women married to non-Muslim British men.
Thousands of young, white, British working class girls were drugged, beaten and raped over forty years by Pakistani, and other Asian-heritage, Muslim gangs in Manchester, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Newcastle and other cities. The Muslim perpetrators and those Muslims who knew about the crime spree had brought with them a cultural outlook, strongly connected to their Islamic faith, which casts white women as legitimate sexual prey for Muslim men. On a similar basis in Islamic culture, mass sexual assaults by Muslim immigrants of German women are a regular phenomenon at public New Years’ Eve events.
Progressives in the West, however, soft-pedal or are stonily silent on Islamic abuses of women’s rights because critical inquiry would ‘disrespect’ Islam and ‘offend’ its adherents: these are politically-incorrect sins according to the multiculturalist hegemony. Many feminists and multiculturalist ideologues downplay FGM and other anti-woman abuses because to acknowledge and condemn them would require making negative judgements on Islamic culture and the liberal identity Left sees such criticism as racist or ‘Islamophobic’.