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One of the most famous cases of deadly coercion in Canada took place in Toronto in 2007 when Aqsa Parvez, a 16-years old student at Applewood Heights Secondary School was strangled to death by her father and her brother, because she did not want to wear the hijab.

This makes the line in the essay about “fashion meets bigotry” deeply offensive. As long as women all over the world are killed or hurt because they want to be free to choose what’s best for them, non-Muslim women and men will continue to care and fight alongside them. This is not about fashion. It’s about humanity.

But those Muslim women who face unique challenges are not alone. More and more Muslim-born feminists fight Islamic tradition with amazing courage and disregard for personal risk.

Among them: our own Irshad Manj’ Bangladeshi doctor, author and human rights activist Taslima Nasreen, who has been living in exile since 1993, when religious fundamentalists issued a fatwa against her; and Ayaan Irsi Ali, also in exile, who wrote the script for Theo Van Gogh’s documentary Submission about the treatment of women in the Islamic world that cost him his life.

These people not only write about radical Islam, they live it. They fight it even when radical Islam wants them dead.

In the wake of the Quebec City attack, local politicians fell all over themselves to extend the hand of friendship to the Muslim community. Quebec City mayor Régis Labeaume promised to expedite the procedures for the establishment of a long-denied Muslim cemetery. That is all good. But when Premier Phillipe Couillard, who practiced brain surgery in Saudi Arabia for six years, prayed “Allahu Akhbar” at the funerals of the slain men, explaining that it is wrongly associated with violence, many an eyebrow was raised.