This has been making rounds in e-mail lists recently and I want to hear people’s thoughts on it. I didn’t write this, it was written by a woman named Fatima in response to an article about women in the middle east and it was forwarded to me by a friend. To me if this is the state of womyn in the middle east, then it is just plain said. But it shows the bad influence that religionism/patriarchy can take when it has been carried out by people in power.

I am a ex-muslim womyn who was formerly married to a muslim man and I want to share my story. This article is INCREDIBLY biased & I found it offensive that such a whitewashed version of islam could be put on a public site. It tells nothing of the MILLIONS of muslim women raped or even murdered in the name of Islam.

I was married at gunpoint when I was 11 years old because a rich 60-year old man from my country decided that I was to become property and not a humyn being. My family was poor then, and my mother needed an operation so my family agreed to it because they were promised money. Of course it is normal in Arab culture to lie and cheat, so we never received the money. We went to court, but before the trial could convene, my husband had my whole family murdered in front of me as I was forced to watch. My baby brother was tied to a Mercedes Benz and dragged through the desert, while my 90-year old grandmother was stabbed. The rest of my family was locked in a barn as a dozen trucks pulled up, and were suffocated to death using diesel exhaust.

After this my “husband” who had kidnapped me and murdered my family for the crime of being poor left the country and we lived for a while in Switzerland as he had some money stashed away in a Swiss bank account. I was raped, drugged and beaten almost every night, and forced to cook dinner. If I didn’t do as my kidnapper and tormenter demanded, he would resort to violence and force me to watch videos of my family being murdered. While we were in Switzerland my husband had a friend a white Swiss man who converted to islam and sometimes he would come and join in the torture. He was an ex-SS man who worked in Auschwitz and had a number of torture implements from the war, and would take joy in torturing me and laugh maniacally as I cried out in pain.

Around this time I realized that I was lesbian as well so I attempted to ask my “husband” for a divorce. Of course since Islamic law does not permit divorce or same-sex relationships this only made the abuse even worse. I managed to escape and lived in the woods for about a month, eating mud and grass, and sometimes even drinking my own blood to stay alive. During that time I was hiding and had to sleep in an outhouse. Eventually my husband found me and he gouged out one of my eyes and amputated one of my feet with a sword for this (afterwards locking me in a dark closet with nails in the door for a week) and said “women are not humans, the Koran says they have to serve men”. My husband’s Nazi friend helped him set up an electrified barbed wire fence around our house so that I could not leave without permission.

I went to the police but after my husband made a donation of a new fleet of squad cars and promised to renovate their headquarters the charges were dropped. The torture continued for about a whole year. Around the same time, my husband started associating with more far-right thugs, and they would regularly go out at night and “look for a Jew or two to beat up”. When I tried to say that it was wrong, somehow my husband became paranoid that I might have had some Jewish blood as his friend the Nazi told him. So just to show me who was “boss” he locked me in the closet again for two weeks. Daily he would insult me as a “filthy Jew” and hurl racial slurs at me. So I tried to run away again. I dug underneath the electrified fence in our yard using a spoon and eventually made it to the Dutch border. As I did not have any money, I was forced to sneak across the border.

I hitchhiked to Paris and went into the American embassy. An Israeli Jew who was doing business in Paris at the time generously sponsored me to get a visa, paid for my living expenses in Paris, and also gave me first-class airline ticket to the United States, along with $5000 in cash. He said that he felt moved and compelled to help another person in need. Today I live in California and have a fufilling relationship with my fiancee (we would have gotten married if it had not been for the draconian Prop 8 which reminds me of shariah) and a job. In 2008, I voted for the first time for Obama, who like me, comes from an oppressed minority background. I am here to tell everyone we MUST fight Islam because Islam is the worst form of patriarchy, a barbaric death cult that encourages subjugation of womyn and indeed all humyn beings.

It will not be an easy fight but fight it we must.