“Many Muslim women have been reluctant to discuss this Tariq Ramadan case because in part they don’t want to feed into elements of the media’s Islamophobic and racist framing of these allegations,” Shaista Aziz, an Oxford-based freelance journalist, told me. “This does nothing to encourage women to report sexual violence.”

The hard place is a community within our own faith that is all too eager to defend Muslim men against all accusations. Mr. Ramadan’s defenders have dismissed the complaints against him as a “Zionist conspiracy” and an Islamophobic attempt to destroy a Muslim scholar. Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our “community” accuse us of “making our men look bad” and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes.

But they get it wrong. It is the harassers and assaulters who make us “look bad,” not the women who have every right to expose crimes against them. Mr. Ramadan’s case is also a reminder of the veneration of Muslim male scholars that gives them incredible and often unchecked power.

Indeed, Mr. Ramadan himself accused me in 2011 of “betraying the community” (code for disagreeing with him) when we argued about the French ban on the face veil on a BBC television program. Mr. Ramadan, while insisting that any conversation about veiling must be among Muslims only, incessantly interrupted me as I tried to contribute my views as a Muslim woman who had worn hijab for nine years. He accused me of being a neoconservative. I told him that his attempt to silence me was a reminder that for some Muslim men, a conversation among the “community” was another way of saying that it was a conversation led and conducted by — and for — men only.

As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life’s work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women. I can write about my culture and religion because I am a product of both. Even when I’m accused of giving ammunition to the Islamophobic right, in the struggle between “community” and “women” I always choose the women. It is exhausting that Muslim women’s voices and our bodies are reduced to proxy battlefields by the demonizers and defenders of Muslim men. Neither side cares about women. They are concerned only with one another.

Earlier this year, a Muslim man — a stranger — emailed to chastise me for my views on sex, which he labeled un-Islamic. He hid behind the phrase, “Dear Sister, I say these things with greatest certitude of your Islam.” So I asked fellow Muslim women on Twitter to use the hashtag #DearSister to share their experience of being lectured to and reprimanded by Muslim men.