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One highly experienced advocate from the last feminist surge has argued from a position much like Hirsi Ali’s. Phyllis Chesler said recently in a speech that feminists have failed to confront the rampant misogyny at the heart of Islam. She thinks feminists condemn Western imperialism but refuse to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism and religious and gender apartheid.

Perhaps the problem is feminism has been shaped by its potential audience

In the 1960s and 1970s, as Chesler campaigned with the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other organizations, she understood that they were talking about women everywhere. She also worked with Muslim dissidents and artists from Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, Iran and Lebanon. Now, she complains that, “What I describe as a ‘faux feminism’ has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and postcolonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason.” She thinks that women’s studies associations and national feminist organizations are not merely politically correct. They have become “Islamically correct.”

She recalls organizing rape-crisis counselling and new laws about rape. Today, feminists in the West are not rescuing rape victims in Islamic communities, she says, because they “are too nervous about being called Islamophobes, racists or colonialists.” She recommends that feminists help girls and women in the West “who are being beaten, stalked, and death-threatened by their own families because they refuse to veil or to marry their first cousin.” She wants feminists everywhere to create shelters where honour-based violence is forbidden.

Perhaps the central problem is that feminism has been shaped by its potential audience. In the West, it speaks to women and men who have learned that critical thinking is a natural part of civilization. Those reared in Islam, on the other hand, rarely have acquired that conviction. “They fear critical thinking,” Hirsi Ali has said. Feminists will never stop criticizing ignorant and powerful men in the West for their treatment of women, but they can’t imagine how to address the very different men produced by Islam.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca