Women Under Islam

Website Facebook

Women Under Islam A feminist takes an unblinking look at gender repression in the Muslim world. By Daphne Patai at City Journal   12/1/17   Phyllis Chesler’s crucial early encounter with the reality of Muslim social norms began in 1961, when, at the age of 20, she married an Afghan student she met while attending Bard College. Totally unprepared for what was to follow, she accompanied him to his family home in Kabul. Nearly 50 years later, Chesler told this extraordinary story in detail, in her 2013 book An American Bride in Kabul. Using her old journals and letters, she describes her five months in her father-in-law’s patriarchal, polygamous Muslim household, from which, sick and undernourished, she finally escaped. Buttressing this account are details from the extensive reading Chesler did over many years in an effort to understand better her own experience, and that of women in the Muslim world generally. Turning her attention first to her own, American, society, Chesler became a feminist activist, reformer, and writer. Her 1972 bestseller Women and Madness sold 2.5 million copies and established her as a major feminist voice of the seventies. Over the course of writing a dozen books in the subsequent years, Chesler came to realize that the West had made remarkable progress in advancing the status of women, while across much of the Muslim world a surge of Islamic fundamentalism had reversed progress in women’s rights.   Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War against Women, Chesler’s new book, comprises a series of essays published between 2003 and 2016. She is particularly incensed that the same people who describe Israel, falsely, as an “apartheid state” routinely disregard the indisputable gender apartheid existing in much of the Arab and Muslim world. The result is that the seclusion of women, face and full-body veiling (Chesler describes the burqa as a “sensory deprivation chamber”), female genital mutilation, so-called honor killings, polygamy, rape, and other forms of violence against women (as well as against gays, apostates, dissenters, and religious minorities) are all excused—or simply denied—by Western liberal apologists for Islamism. Continue reading here.