The Left and Gender Apartheid

A female's chances of surviving are higher in countries with a Judeo-Christian heritage
than in countries with an Islamic, Confucian, or Hindu heritage. Source. 

Some leftists were talking about Islam and women. One of them said that Islamic hijab is comparable to Orthodox Jewish women wearing wigs. Another said that Christians practice clitoredectomy, just like Muslims, and Christians and Jews stone adulterers.

I disagreed.

My post is below.

I used to be a leftist because I cared about people and the left seemed more "caring about people" than the right, to my young eyes.

Me and my fellow leftists protested apartheid in South Africa and racism in America.

There were some cracks in my understanding, and one was that no one I knew on the left wanted to talk about gender apartheid in Islam.

On those rare occasions when it was brought to their attention, my comrades would invoke cultural relativism. "Islam is just like Christianity and Judaism which also oppress women." Or "All these oppressive features of Islam are cultural, not rooted in the Koran."

I found this odd. Why did my leftist friends, who were quick to condemn Christianity and Judaism without equivocation, suddenly sound like defensive attorneys, or public relations men, when it came to gender apartheid?

I gave this a lot of thought, for decades, and I now agree with other thinkers on the alliance of the left with Islam. Islam represents an existential threat to the West. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so gender apartheid gets a pass, just as Stalin used to get a pass from leftists in the West.

The facts are simple. Gender apartheid in Islam is all too real. It has nothing to do with Christianity or Judaism. It is rooted in the Koran, hadith, and sunna. For example, the Koran explicitly states that women are fields that men should plow whenever they want, that God created women as less than men, that men *should* beat women, that women should cover, that men can take sex slaves.

Traditions include Mohammed, at fifty plus, taking a six year old bride, and four adult males as witnesses to rape before it can be prosecuted, thus any woman raped without four adult Muslim male witnesses is a whore and must be punished.

One could go on and on. Stoning, clitoredectomy, taking children away from their mother, depriving girls of inheritances ...

Gender apartheid, as Leila Ahmed showed in Signs some years back, is not a reflection of seventh century Arab culture. Khadijah, Mohammed's first wife, who lived before he invented Islam, was an independent businesswoman who selected her own husband and ran her own business and was able to compel him not to marry other women. Ahmed shows that remaking Arab society to the Muslim ideal of oppressing women was a great project for early Muslim jurists.

Gender apartheid is real, it is rooted in Islam from the first, and it has nothing to do with Christianity or Judaism. It is reflected in the high sex ratios of Muslim countries. Women and girls have a much lower chance of long term survival in Muslim countries than in Christian or Jewish ones.

It will be a good day when all leftists join the rest of the civilized world and condemn gender apartheid unequivocally and effectively, just as we condemned race apartheid in South Africa.

For now -- I read a couple of good books by and about ex Muslims this year. In both books, ex Muslims speak very harshly of leftists in the West who turn a blind eye to ingrained injustice in the Muslim world.