Discrimination does not discriminate

Last week, I met Turkish sociologist Pinar Selek at a conference in Paris. She is exiled in France because Erdogan is persecuting her for her defense of women's and Kurdish rights. A committed feminist, she explained that outside her country, she had established relationships with other women who had fled misogynistic regimes like Iran and Afghanistan. Since the situation of Islam in France is a topic that always generates heated debate, I dared to ask her what relationship they had with women of North African origin and their defense of a feminism rooted in religion, so-called Islamic feminism. She considered her answer and told me that, while they stand in solidarity with women who suffer from racism, there is no way to make their fight for equality compatible with what is disseminated by an Islamic order. And I realized how well Islamists of all stripes have performed in Europe, where in theory the democratic and liberal framework and the long history of feminism should have allowed for the emergence of a women's liberation movement that would fully challenge theocratic power and its discriminatory morality. Of course, this feminism of women born Muslim, which promotes equality through secularism, also exists in Europe, but unfortunately it is disparaged, considered "unrepresentative" or an eccentricity, a rarity. Selek herself told us about the complaints of Tunisian women who led the fight to achieve equality in inheritance (which is still half that of men in Muslim countries) and had received no support from feminists on the Old Continent. "They only see us if we wear a headscarf," said one of them, with the anguish of knowing they had been abandoned by those who boast about intersectionality and diversity but show no solidarity with the oppressed on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.

I say that the Islamists were clever. They got ahead of the curve in rearmament of an outdated machismo (already shaken by the wave of the seventies), turning it into an identity. And they went on to distribute their propaganda among those who felt incomplete, those who are suspended in the air between a country of origin they no longer belong to and a country of arrival to which they do not yet belong. From the beginning, they knew how to take advantage of the anguish of being in the middle, the anxiety of uprooting, by presenting religion as the only safe refuge, a solid and immovable identity that, moreover, is organized under the umbrella of an all-powerful and omniscient God. In order not to lose them, the girls and women who were awakening to the truth of the injustice of an order created for the benefit of men, they rushed to present two antagonistic and irreconcilable frameworks as compatible: the democratic one based on individual rights and freedoms and the theocratic one founded on religious texts. In Muslim countries, they proclaimed that equality would do away with the family and morality, which was an alien value belonging to Westerners. In Europe, among the daughters of immigrants, they dedicated themselves to spreading the poison of Islamic identitarianism with public figures who, while carrying the flag of gender apartheid (the headscarf and its variants), spoke of Islamophobia and respect for the equality of Muslim women. Muslim women who took to the streets, already discriminated against at home, demanded that their subjugation be tolerated and accepted as a cultural and religious trait. In short: what Islam demands in the West is that discrimination, sexism, and misogyny not be discriminated against. And those of us who believe that all women, regardless of their origin and religion, deserve a dignified and free life (excuse the redundancy), want to confuse us by presenting us as enemies of Muslim women, when what we are is the enemies of the system that wants them to be on their knees.