Res Publica Simon Carr
Many Western feminists accept Islamic treatment of women as just a cultural tradition
A young woman interrupted the meeting by standing on her chair. All through the audience, smartphones went up in that modern Roman salute to record her. She wore a serene expression as she dug into a pot and held up a hand running with red paint. She smeared it down one side of her face, then down the other, then across the top of her forehead.
Some of us may not understand what she was saying. I didn’t, myself. It crossed my mind it might be a Native American protest, an anti-war gesture or a Dadaist declaration.
A friend translated. She was forcing the Western patriarchy to confront its misogyny. ‘This is what we women are,’ she was saying. ‘If you can’t take us in our totality, we will hold a mirror up to your uterus-hating bigotry.’
There are many video clips on the internet of what are disparagingly called social justice warriors demonstrating on behalf of all minorities and women. The patriarchy is challenged, called out, confronted. Misogyny is discovered, sometimes in innocent remarks or failed jokes. Sometimes people lose their jobs, and are ostracised by their peers.
The movement has been around for some years now. It is the new generation of political correctness. It has been weaponised. It is ever more of a church militant.
In last year’s column laying out my fear of Islam, particularly in the interpretation of its literalists and conservatives, I suggested that the battle between sharia and Britain’s common law would be won, or helped along, by feminists.
On the face of it, the practices of Koranic traditionalists are a catalogue of misogyny. So extreme are they that a social justice feminist might suspect they are a forgery made up by Islamophobes. Racists or fascists must surely have invented these Protocols of the Elders of Mecca. The inheritance rights that give half as much to females as to males, the weight of a woman’s word in court on murder and financial transactions being worth half that of a man’s, the restrictions on female freedoms to choose with whom to have sex – these are set out in black-letter law in Islam’s founding documents. As for the penalties for transgressive women! Such women are not patronised by mansplaining or humiliated by micro-aggressions, they don’t bump their head on a glass ceiling. They are stoned, hanged, flogged, decapitated or have acid thrown in their faces by freelance ‘honour brigades’.
Western women who rise in rage if they hear the word ‘girl’ misapplied are tying themselves in theological knots to excuse or explain away the patriarchy of Islam on the grounds that it is ‘cultural’.
The genital mutilation of girls is not always defended out loud, but you can find articles saying it’s not as bad as we think, and that sexual pleasure is still possible.
Feminists in the US are in danger of excommunication if they challenge, confront or call out this other patriarchy. This actual patriarchy. Therein lies a glimpse of the pathology of the social justice movement. It is motivated not by love of humanity but by hatred of the West.
So, if a jihadi were to say to an American feminist, ‘These Western men, they hate us. That is why we fight them’, she may reply, ‘I so know what you mean. They hate us, too. We can support each other in our struggles against our common enemy.’
They have taken their enemy’s enemy as friends. That’s a tactic that really needs 5,000 years’ experience of tribal rivalry to pull off successfully. Does it matter? Won’t these white upper-middle-class warriors grow up, get jobs and worry about their mortgages like the rest of us?
It hasn’t happened so far. Political correctness started in the same way at the same universities thirty years ago. And while being derided and criticised, it has transformed political discourse of the Western world from top to bottom.
When it started, many of us thought it was just a new, cumbersome way of being polite. It prescribed new ways of saying ‘Don’t point at people. Don’t make personal remarks. If you haven’t got anything nice to say don’t say anything.’ We laughed at ‘political correctness gone mad’ stories but we didn’t understand the loathing at its core, or how it was creating a mindset of astonishing reach and power. Such that feminists who might be thought to support the pursuit of equality and opportunity for their global sisters will excuse hate crimes of an intensity that we Western patriarchs can barely imagine.