Oh, it’s the men, is it? It’s the men.
He picks up his favourite orange plastic stick. It replaced the wood ones that kept breaking. At first I was glad, as this wouldn’t give me splinters, but I didn’t realize it would hurt so much more. For the rest of my life, I will hate the colour orange. He whips the soles of my feet. The soles of the feet are a preferred spot, as the scars will remain hidden from teachers. I am six years old, and this is my punishment for not correctly memorizing surahs (chapters) from the Quran.
“So, you think you’ll memorize properly next time?”
I plead to my mother with my eyes.
Why aren’t you raising your voice or your hand to protect me? Why are you just standing there next to him?
What could possibly be holding her back? Was she afraid of him? She had asked him to come over. Was she partly to blame? In the moment, I cannot accept that the only parent I know would willingly give me up to be bound and beaten. He is the evil one, not my mother. That had to be the truth. So why, then, had she phoned him and asked him to come over? Why?
As I hung in the garage, I was aware that I was upside down. I knew I was being whipped, but I felt nothing anymore. I pass out at some point, and the next thing I know my mother is screaming.
“What are we going to do?”
She was scared that he had killed me. She wasn’t upset that I might be dead. She was only scared of what will become of them because they had killed me. As I came to, hearing her panicked screams, I wished I could just die. I didn’t want to wake up. Why would I want to wake up?
I was so sad, so heartbroken, but I was still so desperate for her to love me. I was trapped in a dichotomy of yearning to be loved and accepted and appreciated by my mom, and equally desperate to get as far away as possible from her.
But I was unable to go anywhere; I had no choice but to play the part of the dutiful daughter. I knew my mother hated me. I knew she didn’t care if I lived or died, and that was the most difficult part to deal with. I surmised that I was the reason she hated me. It was my own fault, because the devil, Shaytan, was so strong in me. I tried so hard to do everything she wanted.
What she wanted, it was clear, was to break me. She wanted me to stop fighting back and to just let the cement entomb me forever. Every single time I struggled I caused more cracks in the cement. Her goal was to make me stop struggling and just submit.
Finally, he unties the rope, throws it on the floor, and walks out. I lie there waiting for my mother to come and console me. She doesn’t come. I wait after every beating, but she never comes. She always follows him out the door, and I listen to their voices and laughter as they tell stories.”
“Yes, in the eyes of Allah she [Aisha] was grown up. You become a woman when you get your period, and all your sins start to get counted. Before that, you are a child, and nothing you do is recorded.”
“Nine? That’s not a woman!” By now I was shouting.
My mother answered my persistent questions with a slap on the face, with nasty, hate-filled words and reminders that my questioning was the devil getting in my brain, whispering these thoughts to me. Shaytan, the devil, was too strong for me to fight. I tried to swallow my questions, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself.
– “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam,” Yasmine Mohammed
Who do you think puts them in the hijab in the first place?
At the age of nine, I was fitted with my first hijab, which I was now required to wear. I hated it instantly. I hated it when my mom started wearing it, and I especially hated it now that I was expected to wear it. I begged for alternatives.
“Can I please just shave my head instead? What if I wear a wig?”
“Like the Jews! You want to be like the yahood?”
I tried to negotiate my way out.
“How come you didn’t have to wear it when you were my age?”
“Because my parents didn’t know better. They should have made me wear it.”
I wished she didn’t know better. I wished she would allow me the reprieve that she had been offered. I tried every tactic my nine-year-old brain could muster, but nothing worked. Gone were all my clothes; pants were no longer allowed. Now, I was to cover every inch of my body but my face and hands. This was the moment that the final nail was hammered into the coffin of my childhood.
I felt so awkward, so uncomfortable, so hot, in those stupid oversized clothes. My whole body was suffocating. My head throbbed, and my skin oozed sweat from every pore. And every day, they told me that dressing like the kuffar was evil and that I would go to hell if I dressed that way. Besides, when the Caliphate rises, if you’re not wearing hijab, how will you be distinguished from the nonbelievers? If you look like them, you’ll be killed like them.
– “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam,” Yasmine Mohammed
This is intellectual cowardice and astonishingly narcissistic. You’re so wrapped up in your own desire to paint yourself as some kind of eternal victim that you pretend the problem is men. You’re surrounded by men too, so you’re in the same boat, you share the same fate.
I’m so sick of this bullshit where western feminists pretend that they’re hurt by the mere existence of 49% of the population, like my brothers, my father and others who enrich my life. And we’re all just supposed to nod along and pretend that it makes sense. Feminist privilege is being able to call for the death of every man on the planet and get cheers from other sociopaths instead the consequences a man would get if the tables were reversed. (Everyone knows you couldn’t function without everything men do for you, so you’re all bullshit talk anyway.) When you can express your bigotry consequence-free, while destroying the lives of those who do to you what you do to them… that makes you the oppressor class, sweetie.
Have the fucking guts to name the problem.
You know who helped Yasmine?
She had assumed that I would be a recluse, I suppose. She figured that the students would want nothing to do with the weird kid with the thing on her head. She thought she was safe sending me to a school full of kuffar because they would ostracize me anyway. Then I would be cured. They would hate me and reject me, and then I would have no other choice but to hate and reject them in return.
My mom’s initial reaction was to try and take me out of school immediately. She threatened it, but she didn’t do it. Instead, she told me to enjoy my final year in school, because I wouldn’t return the following year. This terrified me. If I were taken out of this school—my only connection with the real world—I would never know happiness again. I was desperate. I was overcome with a sadness and fear that didn’t even lift when I was in school. Usually, my personality shifted between home and school, between black and white; now I was just grey all the time.
My drama teacher, Mr. Fabbro, asked me if I was okay. His question reached me like a beacon of light in a deep, dark well. I was more than happy to tell him everything. I didn’t hold back. I met with him and showed him the welts and bruises on my arms. In an Orwellian twist, a few days later, the asshole my mother had married stormed into my principal’s office, angry that Mr. Fabbro had seen my arm. The audacity of him. How dare this male teacher see the welts and bruises that he had inflicted on this child! The greater problem here, he surmised, was that a man I was not married to saw my arm, not that he himself had beaten me.
As a teacher in a public school, it was Mr. Fabbro’s legal duty to notify the authorities when a minor was in physical danger. Both police and social workers questioned me, and I told them all how my “uncle” would beat us mercilessly. I told them how he would walk in the door and—without provocation—grab me to release all his pent-up tensions of the day. He would pull off his belt and cover my body in welts. Even though I didn’t feel them as they were being created, the bruises and scars remained as evidence of the beatings.
Mr. Fabbro warned me that if I went along with this, there was a possibility that I might end up in a foster home, that I might never see my family again. He asked if I was prepared for that. I was giddy with excitement. I was as light as air with the possibility that I would never have to see those people again. I was just hoping that sounding this alarm would prevent me from being taken out of school! Am I okay with being taken out of that home? I thought. Are you kidding me? Nothing could possibly be more okay! He also warned me that I had to stay strong, that I had to be willing to stand up in court and say everything to the judge that I had said to him. I always remembered my promise to him that I would stay strong. I envisioned myself courageously pointing him out in the courtroom as if I were in an episode of Matlock. I was prepared.
– “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam,” Yasmine Mohammed
The men in this video are doing exactly what Islam says to do.
If these women had “pranked’ their mothers, there would be no difference in the outcome.
The Internet is full of YouTube videos of children being viciously attacked in madrasas. Girls getting grabbed by the hair and being pulled to the ground for not wearing hijab (head covers), boys being whipped and kicked as they fall to the ground. The abuse I endured, as barbaric as it was, is light in comparison to stories I’ve heard. A girl in Somalia told me of how her mother poured hot oil down her brother’s throat (as he was tied to a bed), and the siblings were forced to watch.
According to recent reports, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 70 percent of children aged two to fourteen years are disciplined in a violent manner. In some countries—like Yemen, Tunisia, Palestine, Egypt—over 90 percent of children report being violently abused. What is the reason for this? Why do those countries have such incidences of violence against children? The common thread is that they all follow the same religion. A religion that instructs them to beat their children. According to Hadith, the record of sayings and actions by Muhammad, he said, “Teach your children to pray when they are seven years old, and smack them if they do not do so when they are ten.” (classed as saheeh by Shaykh al-Albaani in Saheeh al-Jaami, 5868) He also said, “Hang your whip where members of your household (your children, wife, and slaves) can see it, for that will discipline them.” (said by al-Albaani in Saheeh al-Jaami, 4022)”
– “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam,” Yasmine Mohammed
Shove your shitty, fucking, sexist bullshit attitude. This fucked up aesthetic you cloak yourself in and wear plastered all over your face when you don’t fucking know, and you’ll never fucking know.
You are the kind of person named in the subtitle of Yasmine’s book. You are a contributor to empowering radical Islam, because you’re so caught up in your bullshit aesthetic that you refuse to recognize and name the real problem. Because to do so, you might have to actually admit that you’re not really quite so much the victim you’re constantly cosplaying as.
You are the kind of person who distracts from the cause of the problems in Islam. You are the kind of narcissist who shoves their way into the spotlight to absorb the attention paid to someone else’s problem, because you can never not be in the spotlight. You can never say “wow, I have it better.” You can never ask “how can I help?”
Because you’re a sociopathic narcissist who doesn’t give a shit about anyone else.
Nobody can talk about Islam and what it does, what its doctrines say, how it operates, what it does, how it hurts people including both men and women, because you’re so busy doing the mental gymnastics to contrive it into your favorite hobbyhorse. And so Islam goes un-critiqued, once again gets immunity. And people like Yasmine who are trying to raise awareness, trying to make a difference to practicing Muslims and ex-Muslims alike, are drowned out by your pathological need to deflect and distract from the actual point so that you can demonstrate to the world what a damaged, sexist bushpig you are.
