The West's Dangerous Enchantment with Islam
Muslim Women Thrown "Under the Bus"

by Uzay Bulut • November 9, 2014 at 5:00 am

There are no women's rights in Islam; there are no women's rights in most Muslim countries. And there is no freedom of expression in these countries; people have become virtually voiceless.

To make a positive change in Muslim countries, we need to be able to speak openly, without putting one's life at risk, and tell the (too-often criminalized) truth about what Islamic teachings and traditions actually contain.

If one is called "racist" or "Islamophobe," the answer is that these are the accusations bullies always use to silence those who disagree with them. The real Islamophobes are those who degrade, abuse and kill their fellow Muslims.

If oppression of women is rooted in the culture, shouldn't one be asking, 'what makes a culture that misogynous?'

There is a situation even more frightening. It now seems to be difficult to speak openly about fundamentalist Islam even in Western countries. The worst thing any Western progressive or feminist can do is to stay silent.

Left: Canan Arin, a feminist lawyer arrested in Turkey for "insulting religious values adopted by a part of the society" and "insulting the President," after she mentioned that the Muslim prophet Muhammad married a 7-year-old girl and the President of Turkey married his wife when she was 15 years old. Right: Mohsen Amir Aslani, an Iranian psychologist who was hanged in Iran for the crimes of "heresy" and "insulting prophet Jonah," after he said that the biblical prophet Jonah could not have emerged from a whale's belly.

The loudest voices in the West now seem to come from many progressives who say that criticizing of Islam is racist, intolerant, bigoted and Islamophobic. Injustices, they claim, take place all around the world, not just among Muslims or in Muslim countries. The criticism, they go on, comes from wrong interpretations of Islamic teachings. They say that Islam respects women, and that there are good and bad Muslims, just as there are good and bad people in all religions.

In just seven years, however, between 2002 and 2009, the rate of murdered women in Turkey has increased by 1400 percent.[1]

There are also more than 181,000 child brides in Turkey.[2]

When those figures are provided by state authorities, they are based on factual statistics. But when they are expressed in a critical manner by Canan Arin, a lawyer and women rights activist, they are, apparently, a "crime."

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