#175 — Leaving the Faith
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Summary
Yasmin Muhammad is a human rights activist and a writer. She s a very eloquent advocate for women living in Muslim majority countries and in the muslim community generally worldwide, and a very effective critic of religious fundamentalism. Her new book is Uncovered: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. In this episode, Yasmin and I talk about her background and indoctrination into conservative islam, and the double standard that western liberals use to think about women in the Muslim community, as well as the dangers of criticizing other cultures and other related topics. She shares her story of growing up in a strict Islamic family, and how she fought for human rights and secularism in the face of her religious indoctrination. She also shares the story of how she managed to break free of her strict Islamic upbringing, and become a free thinker and human rights advocate in the modern world. She s brave and courageous, and her wisdom and bravery will inspire you to live your best life as a Muslim woman in the 21st century. She is a hero to many, and she is a beacon of hope and inspiration to many who are struggling to find their voice and a voice in a world that is too difficult to listen to them. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Making Sense Podcast. Make sure to check out the excellent podcast, "Making Sense" wherever you get your listening device. Make sure you don t miss out on the making sense icon! (Make sure you're a supporter of the podcast? ) The Making Sense icon will show up in red, not black, rather than black? This is not a black, not a white, it's a red + white, rather a black + black, it'll show up a white + a brown + a blue + a grey + a black rather a brown rather a grey, a kind of thing, a point that you'll be a making sense ... You'll get the Making sense icon that shows up in Red + a white I'm not missing that I'm making sense, I'll show you that you're not missing an icon, I'm going to show you a red or a black more than black, you'll get that I'll be showing up in that you won't be in a place like that, I am not getting that in a black or a white not a place ... you'll have that ... I'm NOT NOT THAT ... I'll say that I am NOT THAT?"
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris okay no housekeeping today just a reminder
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got the subscriber feed in your favorite podcasting app thereafter the making sense icon will show up
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in red rather than black today i'm speaking with yasmin muhammad yasmin is a human rights activist
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and a writer she's a very eloquent advocate for women living in islamic majority countries
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and in the muslim community generally worldwide and a very effective critic of religious fundamentalism
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and her new book is unveiled how western liberals empower radical islam and i've been in yasmin's
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corner for a little while when she was getting ready to write her book and it was at the proposal
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stage i blurbed her this is the blurb that appears on the book but uh this is a blurb really for her
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as a person before her book was even written and i'll just read that here to give you some context
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women and free thinkers in traditional muslim communities inherit a double burden
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if they want to live in the modern world they must confront not only the theocrats in their homes
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and schools but many secular liberals whose apathy sanctimony and hallucinations of quote racism
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throw yet another veil over their suffering yasmin muhammad accepts this challenge as courageously as
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anyone i've ever met putting the lie to the dangerous notion that criticizing the doctrine of islam
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is a form of bigotry let her wisdom and bravery inspire you and so you should and here yasmin and i
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talk about her background and indoctrination into conservative islam and the double standard that
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western liberals use to think about women in the muslim community we talk about feminism generally
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the validity of criticizing other cultures and other related topics so now i bring you a very brave
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woman and one of my heroes yasmin muhammad i am here with yasmin muhammad yasmin thanks for coming
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on the podcast thank you so much for having me sam so this has been a long time coming i forget where i
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discovered you was it twitter or where did how did we get introduced i sent you an email just a cold
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email well we were i was supposed to do a talk in australia with majid about the islam and the future
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of tolerance documentary and then i had to cancel it because i was going through a lot of you know
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basically i was having consistent panic attacks and um i had to take some time off work and then i just
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had to cancel all of my my speaking engagements so i sent you a letter to sort of apologize that i
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wasn't going to be able to make it and then you wrote back to me and started asking me about
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the panic attacks and everything that was going on with there and so then that's how i got into
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meditation actually oh interesting yeah okay so yeah i remember that but i don't remember that being
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the first contact did you not have a twitter presence yet i did have a twitter presence but you
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weren't following me yet oh okay well uh someone could have been forwarding your stuff i feel like i saw you
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there first but maybe not anyway you go hard on twitter that's uh something we're going to talk
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about yeah it's the arab in me so uh let's just take it from the top we're talking about your book
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unveiled in the end but let's let's just start with your story from the beginning where where did you
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come from and what were your parents like and what was your upbringing like this is the beginning of
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of your story that has for better or worse made you one of the most courageous voices i can name at the
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moment so to the beginning i guess would be my parents meeting each other in university in
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egypt so my dad's from palestine and my mom is egyptian but palestinians could go to university
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in egypt it was all covered like they were treated as egyptians but they weren't given citizenship
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so they met in university in egypt and my mother's family were very angry at her for marrying a
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palestinian because they thought he was so beneath her but they got married and then they moved to san
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francisco together and they were there during the peace love hippie era and they had my sister and
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it was a bit too much peace and love and so my mom wanted like a quieter place to raise the kids and so
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then they moved to vancouver canada and that's where i was born but then their marriage fell apart in the
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end anyway so when i was about two years old my dad you know left us went to the other side of the
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country so here my mom is now in a new country no support system no community three children
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and she's feeling you know depressed vulnerable sad lonely all that stuff and how religious were
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they at this point no religiosity whatsoever neither of them they're both grew up very secular
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my dad had like zero connection to religion it's just like a cultural thing it's very anti-israel
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just being palestinian but there's no religious like him personally he wasn't very um he wasn't
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practicing and then my mom's all alone and so she goes looking for a support system and she goes looking
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at the mosque for community and at the mosque she finds a man who is already married already has three
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children but he offers to take my mom on as his second concurrent wife right so you know she is happy to
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have somebody take care of her and take care of her kids and so she's willing to put up with whatever
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he's dishing out my dad was abusive towards her he used to hit her and this man never hit her he'd hit
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us of course but he never hit her so she felt like this was a better relationship for her so she stayed
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with him as a second concurrent wife we lived in his basement and he is very like my life changed
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completely when he entered our lives so before him i used to be able to you know play with my
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neighbor's friends like we play barbies together i'd go swimming i'd ride my bike i'd go to birthday
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parties listen to music ever just like a normal childhood and then once he entered our lives it was just
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immediate everything is haram everything is forbidden and all of a sudden my mom started
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covering her hair and we had to start reading from this book of this you know these words that
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i didn't understand and i had to start praying five times a day and i resisted it from the beginning
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of course i missed my old life i was especially upset that i couldn't play with chelsea and lindsey
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anymore they'd always come knocking on the door wanting to play barbies and we never
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i was never allowed to go and they were never allowed in and you're going to the same school
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at this point or yep but not for long then i got as soon as the islamic school was i mean it wasn't
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built it was in the mosque but as soon as it was established that we would have an islamic school
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and my mom was teaching in it then i started going there was this associated with any religious
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awakening on your mom's part or she just needed a man to take care of her and it was just
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practical and romantic well i don't know if romantic is part of it i think you practical
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for sure and it was a combination of both of those things so she needed i think she was happy to have
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somebody to take care of her but then also she just became a full-on born-again muslim so she just
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entered it like she just jumped all in it was never like you know if you see her wedding photos she
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looked like a bond girl like short wedding dress big huge beehive you know there was a belly dancer
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at her wedding and to go from that to the woman that raised me that i remember is just a pretty
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shocking difference and i used to always you know resent that i'd be like how come you got freedom how
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come you got to live like this look at your pictures when you were a kid you know how come i don't get
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that life and she'd say because my parents didn't know any better and i'm raising you better and
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you're going to be a better person and you're going to go to heaven and my parents did the best they
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could but they were wrong and so how old are you when you're expressing these doubts or well i was
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about you know about six years old when he entered our life and i just i resisted all the way up at
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probably about nine years old is when i stopped because that's when the hijab was put on me and i
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started going to islamic school and it was just too much so you can't really fight anymore when
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everything in your life is you know pushing you in one direction you just you know succumb especially
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when you're a kid but according to my mom i was never you know good enough i the devil was always
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whispering in my ear and making me question i always asked questions right like if a law created
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everything who created a law and stuff like that like how could i even these are such blasphemous
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you know if adam and eve are you know the parents of all people are we all children of incest so these
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basic questions of you know that a kid would ask i'd get in trouble for them so was there any point
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where you just went hook line and sinker and fully adopted the worldview without doubt did you or did
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you always have some doubt humming in the background the the doubt humming in the background finally went
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quiet once i was forced into the marriage with hasam so okay once i married him and i wore naqab so that's
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like full face covering the gloves everything i was so diminished that i didn't have anything left
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there was and i also kind of made the conscious decision that i mean i was desperate for my mom's love
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and approval my sister was always the good girl that always listened and never questioned and
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and my i wanted that i wanted to have you know that relationship with my mom so she kept on pressuring
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me to marry this man and i eventually gave in because i thought you know what maybe she'll actually love me
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if i follow what she wants me to do i'll marry the man she tells me to marry i'll do everything the way
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she says to do it i've been fighting against this my whole life what happens if i just let go and see
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if she's actually right and how old are you at this point so i'm a 20 and i did let go and i did follow
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exactly what she said and until i had my daughter and held her in my arms and saw that she was about to
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grow up in the same environment that i grew up in my mom was talking to her the same way she had
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talked to me her father was talking about fgm and her dying a martyr for a law and things like and i'm
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like okay enough you know i'm not i could maybe accept this world for myself but i'm not going to
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accept it for my daughter there's no way she's going to live this same life and was he egyptian yeah
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yeah and i think people aren't generally aware that fgm is practiced in egypt like 98 percent
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so it's basically like somalia in terms of the prevalence of that practice so and this was just
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a fully arranged marriage or or it had been encouraged once you had met him so it wasn't
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fully arranged in that i didn't know i was going to marry him my whole life sometimes people arrange
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marriages for their kids like from the get-go but it was definitely a forced marriage which is a very
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common thing in the arab world so it's like this is the man we want you to marry and then you
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basically just get introduced to him and the the woman doesn't need to consent like in islam it says
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silence is consent so if you just sit there and cry it's like okay we're good yeah you're you're now
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you know that's like saying i do and so there it was you know you get pressured into it in the same
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way you get pressured into everything else so it's just like wearing the hijab and you you get you get
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given two choices like do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell do you want to be a good
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pure clean girl or do you want to be a filthy whore like these are your choices make the right choice
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so forcing you into a marriage is similar kind of coercion so it would be things like uh there's a
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hadith that says heaven is at the feet of your mothers so your mother gets to decide whether
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you're going to go to heaven or not so this was the one that was used all the time and it's a very
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dangerous weapon for an abusive mother to have so she would use that one she'd say you're never going
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to go to heaven unless i approve you to enter heaven and if you don't marry this man you will
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never go to heaven you will burn in hell for eternity and you will suffer here on earth because
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you are no longer my daughter i want nothing to do with you i won't even allow you to come to my
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funeral because i don't like as far as anyone is concerned you're no longer my family and then
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when you die you'll burn in hell for eternity so go ahead and make the choice yeah yeah
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reading your book it's a fairly harrowing account of what your childhood and adolescence
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and young adulthood was like and i think it's useful to differentiate what is just
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the sheer bad luck of having an abusive and perhaps mentally ill mom and having married somebody who will
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will get into his story in a moment but that's bad luck that could happen to anyone in any culture
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with or without religion then there are the cultural practices which aren't necessarily
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mandated by islam and maybe don't necessarily represent every muslims or even most muslims
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experience and then there's just what is fairly common under islam because you can just play connect
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the dots and see that it is mandated or at least encouraged in the texts so where how do you kind
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of carve out those different strands for me what is just the sheer bad luck of the based on the
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personalities involved and where where is the contribution of islam yeah so the problem is these
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a lot of these elements are sanctioned in islam so islam says for example tells a man if you fear that
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your wife is you know arrogant or disobedient then you know go through these steps and then beat her
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so it's not like a law is telling men if you fear that your wife you know is going to give you any
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trouble beat her right so not every single man is going to beat his wife and not every single man is
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going to you know viciously beat his wife there's going to be you know different men are going to react
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in different ways but the problem is the fact that it is sanctioned so if you complain about it like
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in my example when i went to my mom and said he just punched me in the face when he saw that i wasn't
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wearing hijab in the house on the 17th floor because he was afraid people like i don't know seagulls
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people in helicopters might see me through the window and her response was he has every right
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to be you you are his it says so right there chapter 4 verse 34 so that's the problem the problem is
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that it's it's it's codified it's in the religion and so it can be used in different ways you know
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like not like i said not every muslim man is going to beat his wife but those who do have scriptural
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support yeah yeah and the debate really is not whether or not that support exists but
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what is meant by beating it's like how hard you can beat your wife that's very subjective yeah you
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know and there's scholars that come forward and they say things like oh no you know you just it's
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like as like with a toothbrush or whatever but those are just scholars offering their interpretations
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as far as the hur'an is concerned it doesn't say that it just says that's it it offers no
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you know there's no asterisk there but that's subjective anyway like you you don't it depends
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on the country that you're in depends on the environment that you're used to yeah beating is
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can be pretty bad and any obviously hitting another human being is a bad thing anyway and the creator
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of the universe really should not be sanctioning husbands to be beating their wives but there's a
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there's a famous critic of islam named hamed abd al-samad who is an egyptian german man who had a
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really great way of describing this and he says it's like allah's at the bar and he had a bit much
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to drink and he's like you guys should just like beat your wives man and his friends right the scholars
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are behind him going no no no he doesn't really mean that he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't actually
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mean that he means like like with a feather or something so those are just the scholars trying to
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soften it up but at the end of the day people read the quran and they you know they quote that
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verse right so and you're wearing the nikab at this point at what point did that happen hijab was at
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nine years old you know as far as i could remember and then once i was engaged to him started wearing
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the nikab he got it all delivered from saidi arabia and uh that really helps in dehumanizing you that
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really helps in turning me into a nothing that he can control very easily it just suppresses your
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humanity entirely it's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber and you are no longer connected
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to humanity you can't see properly you can't hear properly you can't speak properly people can't see
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you you can only see them i mean just little things like passing people in the street and just making
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eye contact and smiling like that's gone you're no longer part of this world and so you very very
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quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there yeah well we're going to get to this but it is amazing
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how sanguine western feminists are around this practice like this is just a another culture's ideal of
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how to honor feminine beauty and empower women who are we to criticize it we should differentiate
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the hijab from the niqab the hijab is just a straight-up symbol of female empowerment now
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in the west right i mean despite your best efforts on twitter it is just amazing to see what is being
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done with this and we have you know in the aftermath of the christ church massacre the prime minister of
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new zealand puts it on as the only possible show of respect for the community like there's just no
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other way to express solidarity but to don the symbol and we have got linda sarsour you know organizing the
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women's march and there's so many examples of this for some reason people one can't see that
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most of the women on earth right now who are wearing a hijab are not doing it based on some
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empowerment they felt at an ivy league institution where they just they're just going to take the male gaze
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off them at their own discretion so they're forced to do it the consequences of not doing it in many
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cases are if not absolutely coercive social pressure it's actually physical violence but it is also just a
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step toward the niqab and the burqa which are the actual crystallization of the ideal here that's being
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enshrined which is it's all the female modesty is the only thing that safeguards male sexuality from
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completely running amok it's like all men would be gropers and rapists but for the fact that women
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hide themselves maybe we should jump into that now i want to talk about your who your husband revealed
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himself to be but what have your encounters with western feminists been like well that makes me
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really sad that they consider muslim women to be of some other species and that are so completely
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different from them so for themselves they will recognize all of those things that you talked about
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are basically victim blaming you know slut shaming they recognize those elements of rape culture
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when we're in the western context which are you know they're much harder to see in the western
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context but under sharia it's very very easy to clearly see a perfect example of rape culture
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but they somehow when it's those women over there it it's empowering like would it be empowering for
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you if you were told you have to wear this clothing in order to protect yourself from men who might rape
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you or you have to wear this clothing in order to be good and pure and go to heaven because if you
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don't wear it then you're a filthy whore like you wouldn't no woman would want to hear that no seven
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year old child would like to be told you have to wear this in order to go to school and your brother
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doesn't have to he can wear whatever he wants but you must wear this or you're not allowed to get
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educated it it is an atrocity like that that's something that every human being should be upset
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about and the fact that they think that it's okay for those humans over there but not for us is the
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part that really upsets me yeah but when what do you do with the fact that you could go into any one of
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these cultures and find women who will say i want to wear the niqab i want to wear the burqa
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just take your colonial bullshit elsewhere yeah oh of course there will be and you can also go to
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fundamentalist christian you know cults and they will tell you i want to be a servant for my husband
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you see people like that on twitter all the time right they're like you know i quit my job and i cook
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and clean for my husband and i'm proud of it whatever it is like women make all sorts of choices
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and decisions and decisions and that's completely up to them and they're free to do that and but i'm
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also free to make a judgment on the decisions that they're making so when i'm talking about the the
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hijab as a symbol of patriarchy and a symbol of misogyny i'm saying that because as you mentioned
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not only are girls coerced into it because of you know family or government or religion but girls can
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be killed because of this and not just in the muslim world but in canada in america in france
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in sweden there's honor violence and honor killing going on a girl a 16 year old girl in canada was
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strangled to death by her father and her brother with the hijab that she refused to wear and then
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her parents refused to bury her because they didn't want anything to do with her there's so many stories
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around this the one that sounds stranger than fiction is the case in saudi arabia school where
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the school was on fire and the religious police wouldn't let the fire department put it out because
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the girls weren't appropriately veiled yeah and they're literally parents standing at the gates of
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the school watching their daughters burn alive it's just uh and there are women that are in iran today
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that are being imprisoned for 15 years and more for refusing to wear this cloth on their head so it's
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not just you know it's not just a benign choice when the prime minister of new zealand or when megan
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markle put a hijab on their head it's not just a benign support of some benign cultural thing it is
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a not just a symbol but an actual tool of oppression there are women being imprisoned and women being
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killed there is a fight over this hijab going on right now women in sudan egypt iran saudi arabia
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they're burning their hijabs in the streets they're fighting against this thing and then to see free
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western women free western women leaders take this thing that they are fighting against
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and voluntarily donning it and supporting it what those women are doing is they are supporting
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the oppressors they are supporting the oppressors that these women are fighting against
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yeah the double standard is so clear and it really is sanity straining that it's so hard for people to
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see so like the clearest case for me in the media was when i don't remember this but warren jeff's
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the the leader of the flds the fundamentalist mormon cult his compound was raided and all these
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little girls and young women were led out in these little house on the prairie dresses right they were
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made to wear these awful 18th century dresses and they had been married to men who were you know their
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grandfather's ages and these forced marriages were described as rapes and the men were totally
00:26:40.220
unrepentant and you know jeff's got i think he's at least 15 years in prison i forget he got a real
00:26:46.900
prison sentence and this was all talked about on the news as just an unambiguous example of patriarchal
00:26:56.820
exploitation of girls the fact that it was associated with it with religious belief was not even slightly
00:27:03.300
exculpatory and everyone celebrated the fact that there was a swat team raid on the compound
00:27:09.800
we kicked in the door of this place to free those girls and it didn't matter at all that the girls
00:27:17.020
didn't want to be freed but we knew they had been brainwashed so when they're talking about how they
00:27:21.160
loved their husband for to a man or whatever it was no one had any qualm discounting that for their
00:27:29.440
obvious ignorance and brainwashing right and when you compare that to what is happening routinely in
00:27:35.840
the muslim world the mainstream media has the opposite response and this is the most benign case
00:27:44.100
of real extremism in the muslim world i mean it's it's you know in truth it's not even extreme but
00:27:49.940
the extremism in the muslim world you have to add to that the clitorectomies that would have been
00:27:55.060
performed on these girls the fact that they were raising their sons to be suicide bombers right and
00:28:01.860
there was an explicit indoctrination of you know martyrdom and they were exporting terrorism to the
00:28:08.080
capitals of europe and america that's how the the fundamentalist mormon cult would have to behave to make
00:28:14.280
it an analogous situation and no one can see it on the left i guess the other example i should mention
00:28:22.740
i believe i mentioned this on a previous podcast but it really belongs here because we were talking
00:28:27.900
about this last night i just saw ayan hersey ali give a talk at a university for the first time in
00:28:33.420
three years since she was deplatformed at brandeis and it's a fairly conservative college pepperdine
00:28:41.340
you know an explicitly christian college and she ran through her whole life story on stage i mean
00:28:47.840
starting with female general mutilation abuse in school physical abuse sexual abuse she described
00:28:54.980
it as routine among her friends at the school she was in she described all this and how she escaped a
00:29:01.700
forced marriage became a member of parliament i mean she's just a true feminist success story right
00:29:07.800
and as she starts to get into a discussion of contemporary politics i mean honestly the edgiest thing she said
00:29:16.580
was if i were teaching at a university and someone and one of my students said that they didn't want
00:29:22.740
to read a certain novel because it triggered them i would insist that they read that novel because
00:29:27.860
that's what a university is for and then i think the other thing she said was when me too came up
00:29:33.180
she expressed blanket support for it but she said we have to keep a sense of proportion there are the
00:29:38.940
the harvey weinsteins of the world and then there are people who just put a hand where it's not wanted
00:29:44.260
and you slap it away she was trying to give some articulating this spectrum of misbehavior that we
00:29:51.320
need to differentiate and as she's talking about this again she had just spent a half hour
00:29:57.580
describing in a background so replete with abuse patriarchal abuse that you would think it would it would
00:30:07.060
have earned her intersectionality points of a sort that you know you few people have and i've got these
00:30:14.720
white women students behind me who are beginning to almost heckle her right it was just you know
00:30:22.760
hissing and laughter among themselves and then they walked out it was like i mean again it was another
00:30:30.720
kind of brainwashing there's a kind of moral panic happening around variables of gender and race on
00:30:37.620
the left that is making it impossible to even parse the statements of a somali woman right who just
00:30:45.840
recapitulated the entire enlightenment success story of reclaiming secularism and modernity and
00:30:52.600
humanistic values in her own case in a few short years it's just amazing so anyway yeah i mean if iyan
00:31:00.040
had white skin and had overcome all of those things in the west she would be celebrated she'd be hailed
00:31:06.640
as a feminist hero so i mean when you were talking before about the difference between that mormon cult
00:31:13.680
and girls in the muslim world i started to tear up because it reminded me of your ted talk
00:31:19.600
which i'm going to tear up again that ted talk to me hit me so hard because it was the first time
00:31:28.900
anybody in like media i'd ever heard somebody care about those girls the same way you would care
00:31:42.680
about any other girls like the argument you were making in that ted talk like these girls in afghanistan
00:31:49.580
why are they different than the girls from the mormon cult
00:31:53.120
sorry sam no that's great that ted talk was late yeah yeah thank you so much
00:32:04.540
that's uh you don't have to apologize this is good radio
00:32:09.760
yeah well a few people notice it but i actually teared up in that ted talk i can't remember if we
00:32:19.700
spoke about this or not but there was a point where i talk about honor killing and i said imagine your
00:32:25.360
daughter gets raped and what you want to do is is kill her out of shame and you know obviously i had
00:32:32.180
rehearsed that talk a ton i mean unlike any other talk you ever give a ted talk is it's like this
00:32:37.500
memorization feat right where you have to remember every line because you're you've got a hard time
00:32:42.840
limit and no notes and so it's a very odd talk to give because you're basically it's a performance
00:32:50.420
as yourself i mean you're not thinking out loud because you really have a script that you've
00:32:53.780
memorized at least that's the way most people do it and the way i've done both of my ted talks
00:32:58.360
and so i obviously i knew exactly what i was going to say and i had done this you know a dozen times
00:33:05.460
at least but i had just been told a couple of hours before going out on stage that my first daughter
00:33:11.960
had taken her first steps so when i got to that point in the talk totally punctured me and i actually
00:33:18.640
almost burst into tears and you can sort of say people who are just watching it as a ted talk
00:33:22.260
don't tend to notice but you can see that that i have i have like i'm almost totally derailed in the
00:33:28.920
talk at that moment and uh yeah it's you could see that you actually care that was very evident and
00:33:37.800
that's why it hit me so hard is because i'm so used to there being this two-tier system of like all
00:33:46.220
you know girls that matter and then the girls that don't matter and that was the first time i had
00:33:52.700
seen in the western world somebody standing up like in a ted talk speaking up for us as if we were
00:34:01.520
human beings like every other girl on the planet and that was very evident in your talk and then of
00:34:07.880
course you know immediately after your talk you get questioned about it and you know the the all the
00:34:13.700
predictable things happen and so you know that's a that's a very quick the wokeness comes to swallow
00:34:19.380
you after yeah exactly here i am feeling all excited and happy and there it is you know but
00:34:25.840
you know i just wish that this is why the the subtitle of the book how western liberals empower
00:34:34.220
radicalism like that's what it's all about i want my liberal friends and supporters and you know
00:34:43.440
my this is where i see myself i am in this realm too so when i talk about liberals i'm not saying
00:34:50.220
those people over there i'm saying us over here we need to look at what we are doing and we need to
00:34:57.760
stay consistent and if we believe that all humans are equal then why are we having a different set of
00:35:09.520
you know why do we use a different yardstick for these people versus these people so i feel like if
00:35:16.100
they could see that if they could understand that then they would get it like i feel like if they could
00:35:23.160
get the lunacy of would you celebrate a mormon underwear on the cover of sports illustrated no you
00:35:33.920
wouldn't you would automatically see that that's ridiculous for many different reasons but then
00:35:39.620
having a burkini on the cover of sports illustrated that's something to be celebrated like i just want
00:35:45.960
them to stay with the thought for four more seconds and just continue on with that and think okay why is
00:35:51.600
this celebrated and this is not yeah again it's it's very hard to understand how the point doesn't run
00:36:00.120
through and change people's outlook just in real time whenever you have the conversation so like
00:36:07.760
an example i occasionally use when i'm getting criticized for judging another culture like and
00:36:14.380
again i always go to the most extreme and still it's not extreme enough so i talk about the taliban
00:36:18.660
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