Julie Burchell asks: How do so many women end up as ‘Feminists for Islam’?

The first sign that something might have been amiss at FiLiA was a hijab’d woman selling similar head-coverings in the foyer. ‘What next, binders?’, Sonya Douglas asked on X. The number of keffiyehs and Palestinian flags on show could have persuaded a person that they had wandered into the Oxford Union debating chamber by mistake. Veteran feminist Bev Jackson posted that: ‘An organisation called Total Woman Victory had a stand at FiLiA disseminating a pamphlet with some of the most virulent anti-Jewish tropes I’ve ever seen.’

Jewish women have had to put up with enough monstrous bullying and belittling from the world generally over the past two years (BELIEVE ALL WOMEN – UNLESS THEY’RE JEWISH, as the saying has it). And now the poison of anti-Semitism seems to have trickled into the very heart of a conference where women of all races and belief systems should feel safe. But sadly, we’ve seen before that Islam and diversity, though often used in tandem by politicians and other clueless scolds, are often strangers to each other. Here at the FiLiA conference was evidence of a strange beast – here was Feminists for Islam.

A strange beast but not a totally unfamiliar one. Much of the left has been trying to mash together feminism and Islam for years despite the obvious fact that Islam treats women like shit. That clash was the main spark for writing Does God Hate Women?

[D]uring the FiLiA conference a rather un-British spat broke out when the aforementioned group of Feminists for Islam ended up waving a Palestinian flag at a disco, only to be challenged by the beautiful and brilliant Aja the Empress, a long-time beacon of glamour and guts in the women’s rights movement (which has surpassed the rather weedy ‘feminism’ so beloved of academics). Unpleasantness ensued and the losers, as ever, were Jewish women, even if their Gentile allies did their best to speak up for them. One, Freya Papworth, said that she was ‘deeply concerned about the dissemination of disgustingly anti-Semitic material at the FiLiA conference… [the organisers] made an egregious error in platforming a speaker who has openly shared anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas material.’

Let’s make this clear. You cannot be both an Islamist and a feminist. It’s as illogical as saying you can be a woman and be a penis-haver. Yet it seems increasingly difficult for a group of otherwise enlightened women to grasp.

The trouble is that the Islam issue gets mixed up with the immigration issue (see also the anti-immigrant issue and the racism issue and the xenophobia issue) such that people on the left feel compelled to defend Islam itself. Lots of people are racists therefore Islam is benign. Sadly, not true.

Women who voluntarily don the hijab are trampling on the broken bodies of all the brave women – the young women of Iran come most heartbreakingly to mind – who are raped, tortured and murdered for daring to take theirs off. 

Let’s not forget what the point of the hijab is. It’s to make women just ugly enough so that men can refrain from raping them for the few seconds it takes to walk past them in the street. That’s all it’s about. There’s nothing inherently pious or goddy about it; it’s just a cold shower in portable form.