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May 7, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
27:17
TEDx： Muslamic Feminazis
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Sometimes I come across videos that I don't even watch before deciding that I'm gonna make a video response to them.
There are some titles so magnificent that I just think, right, well, just download and I'll just take it as it comes.
And the title, How Islam Made Me a Feminist, is one of those titles.
So let's go.
When I sat down to think what I wanted to write this talk about, I knew it had something to do with women.
Holy Mother of God, five seconds in and I'm already pissed off.
If you didn't know what you were going to write a speech about, why were you given the opportunity to present a TED X talk?
If you had to go looking for something to say, that kind of makes me think you don't have anything worthwhile to say.
But that still only narrowed it down to about 50% of the population, so it wasn't really a help.
Extra extra.
Read all about it.
Woman gives presentation about being a woman.
Then I thought it should be about something I've grappled with because the things you question are usually the things you know most and...
Okay, it sounds like you're going down a really rather strange line of reasoning.
The things you question are the things you know the most.
I think that's actually the other way around.
I think the things you know the most are the things that you have questioned.
By extension, care most about.
That doesn't necessarily follow.
I am sure that there are quite a few ex-Christian atheists who no longer care about Christianity and yet had to spend quite some time questioning and grappling with Christianity.
And those things are, first, Islam and second, feminism.
I am so glad for the opportunity to offend two religions in one video.
So what I'm offering you today is Salvation?
The story of how Islam has made me a feminist.
Islam?
Turning people into feminists?
Be excited to hear how this happened.
Now, if we played a round of word association in this room and I said to you, Islam, your first response would probably not be feminism.
What?
Sure it would be.
Islam's actually a feminist religion, according to feminists.
Everyone from daily mail reporters to radical feminists, QC to schoolchildren, would likely have an opinion on Islam's supposedly deplorable relationship with women's rights.
What?
No.
No, of course not.
But there is one thing that all human rights activists, politicians, and scholars overlook.
Wow, this had better be good.
And that's my mother.
And this is where you go flat out balls to the wall retarded, isn't it?
You see, my mother, the Muslim woman sitting in this room today, has taught me how to be a feminist.
Now that's interesting because the Quran does have some good things to say about women.
Comparatively good.
Comparatively, by the people who lived in, say, the 7th century AD compared to what came before.
Let's take, for example, this passage.
O you who believe, you are forbidden to inherit women against their will.
Very progressive.
Nor should you treat them with harshness, that you may take away part of the dowry that you have given them, except when they have become guilty of open lewdness.
Now, I'm guessing that your mum isn't the kind of feminist who's ever been on a slut walk.
I'm guessing that your mother fell into the extremely sex-negative camp of feminism, the one that is particularly compatible with Islam.
Now, it's impossible to easily define broad concepts such as feminism or Islam clearly as- Yeah, but when's that ever stopped a feminist or an Islamist?
If Islam was clear, then it would be united, right?
There would be no sectarian violence and pointless bloodshed happening everywhere from Fardeh to Timbuktu.
Broadly speaking, yes, but it's such a simplistic argument that you and I both know that in reality, you can never expect a religion to be so clear, transparent and understandable that it has no internal schisms.
You would think that a clear definition would make it easier to know right from wrong in Islam.
You're either on the right side of God's wishes or you're not, right?
I'm going to overlook that it sounds like you're talking to a room full of children and say yes, this is one of those reasons that we know the Quran was written by human hands.
It is, in part, self-contradictory and fallible.
But when you get a religion made up of over 1.5 billion believers...
A better word would be adherence.
That spans over almost 1,500 years of history, empires and economies, you're bound to get controversy.
Brilliant.
At least by bragging about Islam's accomplishments, you've completely undermined any arguments about Muslims being oppressed.
I mean, considering we can't get through one political election or, I don't know, a round of the Great British bake-off without some drama, it seems inevitable that black and white solutions stop existing, and I'd argue you're a fool to want them to, because life is better in colour.
Well done for screwing up that metaphor, but yes, everyone agrees that life is not simply black and white and is in fact many shades of grey.
So I've made my peace with the fact that Islam is difficult, but feminism is just as vague.
And yet you probably describe yourself as a feminist Muslim.
Studying feminism in my first year of university.
Please try to contain your surprise.
He taught me that there are liberal feminists, Marxist feminists, radical feminists, post-colonial feminists.
There's Mill, de Beauvoir, Payman, Moran, Wollstonecraft, etc., etc., each embodying different ideas of ways to emancipate their sisters.
A mission that could have just as easily been accomplished with Google.
And different ways of breaking through the seemingly bulletproof glass ceiling.
How would they know?
Doing gender studies is virtually a way of guaranteeing you will be trapped under the glass ceiling.
There are hundreds of definitions and hundreds of disagreements about what makes feminism the fight for women's rights.
So first, to anyone who says to me that Islam is diametrically opposed to feminism, I first challenge them to give me a definition of what they see as Islam.
Then give me a definition of what they see as feminism and tell me where on the Venn diagram they disagree.
You just told us that feminism was a collection of disparate ideologies.
This is what your first year of gender studies told you.
So to say, where does feminism and Islam disagree on a Venn diagram is stupid.
So let's choose, oh, I don't know, radical feminism.
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that focuses on the hypothesis of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into complex relationships based on the assertion that male supremacy oppresses women.
Radical feminism aims to challenge and overthrow patriarchy by opposing gender roles and oppression of women and calls for a radical reordering of society.
This is a picture of a 12-year-old Pakistani girl and her six-year-old husband.
Is this transgressive to radical feminism?
Because it's certainly not transgressive to Islam.
Because the way I see it, Islam is hard to follow because it's hard to find.
Is it though?
Because that sounds really stupid.
There are Muslims all over the world who have read the same book as you and are convinced that they too are Muslims.
So.
It's a book.
No, the Quran is a book.
Islam is the religion based off of the Quran.
That sheds light onto humanity and misinterpretations have led people astray.
These people don't look very Scottish to me, but then maybe they do put sugar in their porridge.
But what am I saying?
I mean, I thought that the prophet of Islam was Muhammad, and clearly, it's you.
The promise of 72 virgins has blindsighted many young men.
How can you blindsight something?
What you mean is blind-sided.
And likewise, feminism has alienated so many women from their own liberation.
The stigma of being termed a feminist has scared men and women away from a cause that really should be universal in our age where reason and equality supposedly dominate.
Reason and equality are the reasons why people are not feminists.
You fucking cultists.
Placing feminism as something opposed to Islam is as hard as saying that feminism is the champion of Islam.
Not really.
It's a lot easier to say that feminism and Islam are diametrically opposed because most feminists would not accept what Islam mandates for women.
Take this, for example, and say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty and that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except appear thereof.
That they must draw their veils over their bosoms and should not display their beauty save to their husbands or to their fathers or their husbands' fathers or their sons or their husbands' sons or their brothers and their brothers' sons or their sisters' sons or their women or the slaves whom their right hand possess or male servants free of physical desire,
that'd be those castrated slaves that I mentioned in a previous video, or small children who have no sense of sex and they should not stamp their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments.
In what sense could this be in any way considered for women in Islam to be in any way liberated from patriarchy?
I'm sure many will criticize me about not talking why we don't eat pork or the logic behind four wives, but.
Fuck it.
There are some far more fundamental ideological conflicts that feminism in Islam run into.
I'm not a scholar.
Oh, don't sell yourself short.
You did a year of gender studies.
It certainly makes you qualified enough to give a talk to a bunch of impressionable young university students.
I can only really talk about what I know and this brings me back to my mum.
So when I asked her in preparation for this whether she thought she was a feminist, she shrugged and said that she never really thought about it.
Just so we're clear, you can't define feminism and your mother, who is not a feminist, taught you how to be a feminist.
But my mother, who rereads the Quran every Ramadan and who prays more than five times a day, has shown me that feminism and Islam are compatible ideologies.
Oh yeah, they're like two peas in a fucking pod.
You see, she led by example.
She showed me that though women can be trodden on and abused for their presumed weakness, women's durability, that force which allows females to forget the agony of childbirth, is more real than the air I breathe.
Fine, fetch me a pound of women's durability.
She showed me that being a single mother, though not ideal, can be done with dignity.
Well, I can certainly see why you need religion.
And she told me that humans only think of the sky as our limit because, well, we're too scared to explore the sun.
Well, I cringed.
I'm pretty sure Wonder Woman is based on her.
Your mum must be fucking old then.
She helped me revise for every spelling test from our cockroach and fetched council flat.
She taught me never to cry, even when she was grappling with depression.
And she told me three weeks ago on my 21st birthday that I should never let anyone take advantage of me.
But nor should I ever see myself as better than anyone else.
Yeah, your mum is not a feminist.
Pride, she said, well, it comes before a fall.
When I was five and she almost died 13 days before my sixth birthday, she wore a pink dress, looked like a queen and threw me in McDonald's birthday party, trying to stand tall.
When I was eleven and I wept after my Iraqi family sacrificed our lamb for our safe arrival into Baghdad in 2004's war zone.
I don't really want to mock her personal stories regarding her family, but Jesus, did they really sacrifice a lamb for your safe arrival in Baghdad?
She bought me a baby goat as a pet to compensate.
Unfortunately, they had return tickets.
You know, I'm cutting out these little cringe-worthy anecdotes.
You see, my mother embodies strength.
And she's not a feminist.
Her firm and unwavering belief in God, Islam, and justice have driven me to be a hard-working student, to be a loving friend, and to be a good woman.
And you don't sound like a feminist either.
She is a firm believer in you can take a horse to water, but you sure as hell can't make it drink.
So Islam is my decision.
She taught me, and she let me find my way in the world.
But seeing as I've only ever wanted to be her, Islam and its beliefs have shaped my life.
And I see her not as something that restricts me, that stops me eating, drinking, or doing X, Y, and Z, not as a set of rules, but rather as something that has opened doors for me.
Apologia at its finest.
These restrictive things that prevent me from doing things, well, they actually enable me to do things.
It's something that has given me a confidence and a self-assurance that holds me tighter than the arms of any lover ever could.
Well, yes, I'm sure being part of not just one, but two religions is giving you quite a lot of reassurance for salvation.
Because I love myself.
Calm down, Narcissus.
I am proud of who I am today, and my mother's example enabled that.
I suppose self-love is not as vile a sin as self-neglect.
I will probably be more successful than she is.
We'll hopefully be wealthier and dress better.
We'll likely age with more grace.
Yes, yes, go on, keep telling us how much better than your own mother you are.
But I would be nothing.
Nothing at all without her marriage of independence and Islam.
And frankly, whether God exists or not is, well, to me, it's almost irrelevant.
Oh, yeah, just like a typical Muslim.
Well, God might exist.
It's kind of irrelevant.
Because Islam has taught me to respect the mother, respect the mother, respect the mother, and then to respect the father.
It has taught me not to judge, not to hate, not to disrespect, but just to be.
Yeah, that's horseshit, though, isn't it?
What you're thinking of is Buddhism.
I mean, let's be honest with ourselves, there is plenty in the Quran that calls for quite graphic violence against infidels, and these are apparently not restrained by historical context, which means they can be used anywhere at any time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Muslims are all Quranic literalists or anything like that, but there is quite a lot in there that does specifically incite violence.
To be specific, I'm not saying this is better or worse than any other religion, but I am saying that it's there.
And it's something that I've been grappling with ever since I adopted it.
And if you're thinking that I've misinterpreted Islam, surely my perversion cannot be more warped than the terrorists who speak in my name.
It rather depends from which position you approach it.
If you're approaching it from a position where you think that violence against infidels is bad, then yes, your perversion of Islam is much better than theirs.
But if you approach it from a perspective that thinks that violence against infidels is good, then no.
Yours is the most unholy perversion of Islam.
But at least we can all agree that we are talking about an ideology that has been perverted.
And my mother also taught me how to be a feminist.
I was wondering when we'd get back to that.
Go on, do tell me how a non-feminist Muslim woman taught you how to be a feminist.
Because the way I see it, feminism isn't about how men have oppressed women, but it's about how we have oppressed ourselves.
Okay, Kate, that's that's that's marvellous.
That is fantastic.
It's not very feminist to see it that way, and I don't think you're going to find all that many feminists who agree with you.
But yes, we should definitely adopt that.
It's not about how men have oppressed women.
It's definitely about how women have oppressed themselves.
How we've oppressed our children and our children's children.
Just to be clear, you're saying that women oppress children and their grandchildren.
By lacking the confidence to fight for what's rightfully ours.
Well, you've certainly got the feminist entitlement complex.
To fight for our reason and to champion our emotions.
To what end exactly?
I mean, what good is championing your emotions?
Feminism isn't about how many days of maternity leave we get or whether the burqa is an obvious statement of oppression.
It's about proving that we are strong.
I think you've completely missed what feminists are doing.
It's about proving that they're fucking victims.
It's about complaining about how much space on the train men take up.
And it's about complaining that they went into the wrong jobs and aren't being paid quite as well as those particle physicists or engineers.
Women were mothers to Einstein, Shakespeare and Gandhi.
Women raised them and loved them.
Yeah, but by that rationale, women also loved and raised Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.
And though women should not be idealised, we are, after all, filled with as much hubris as the next man.
Rare is the man who is filled with as much hubris as a feminist.
Women should not be overlooked.
We are the principal agents in our own oppression.
Now, you know what?
I would agree with you.
This is actually something I would completely agree with.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my grandmother a while ago.
I asked her if her mother had been oppressed by her father, or if she had been oppressed by her husband.
She's over 80 years old now, so we're going back quite a way.
And she said, no, of course not.
She just, the very look on her face was just, this is a ridiculous conversation.
Why are you asking me this?
And I asked her why not.
And she just looked at me and said, we wouldn't have stood for it.
We have stopped other women.
We have not inspired them.
Because the best way to unknit patriarchy once and for all is to inspire other women so that they walk with their backs straight and their shoulders squared.
Well, the problem you're having here is that you don't know what patriarchy is.
You are actually actively advocating for patriarchy.
You are advocating for a system that requires hard work and also demands a set of standards for people to adhere by.
And our words, well, they mean nothing.
Nothing at all if our actions cannot back them up.
Women should not have to live in fear of being raped.
Oh, wonderful.
We're breaking out the shoulds.
Well, you are right.
We don't think that women should live in fear of being raped.
And to that end, we have made rape illegal.
Women should not have to live in fear of not being educated.
Yes, that's true.
And that is why in the UK, we have made education mandatory for both genders.
Women should not have to tell strangers on nights out that they are spoken for before being left alone.
Good luck with this one.
And women should not hate on their sisters when we're all dreaming of the same thing.
Well, in my experience, there is no sisterhood.
So good luck with that one too.
Women should not have to be bombarded daily with photos of Eva Longora's toned stomach, Gwyneth Peltrow's longest legs on the planet, or endless, endless photos of early 20, late teen page 3 breasts.
No, no, no, no.
Page 3 has got absolutely nothing to do with what you were just talking about.
What you are talking about are women's magazines.
Women's magazines that have in them beauty standards.
Well, frankly, if you want that to go away, then women have to stop buying them.
These are magazines made by women for women for the express purpose of selling women products that are used almost expressly by women.
Men, your average man simply is not involved in this equation.
Though we have access to more information than ever before, we are in many ways more ignorant than ever.
Don't look at me.
You did the gender studies course.
And global agendas, miscommunication, and a real lack of integration have victimized ideologies and soiled them.
Victimized and soiled ideologies.
How tragic.
Painting them out to be something fearful, radical, or just downright ridiculous.
They do that to themselves.
And the way I see it, it's tragic that even the brightest and the best in our communities lack the tolerance to see ideologies such as Islam or feminism as conducive to progress.
Listen, genius, it's not that there's some fucking grand conspiracy.
It's that everyone independently looks at your primitive, inflexible and prejudiced ideologies and says no.
As far as social trends go, I shouldn't really be a success story.
I'm a second generation immigrant from the lower socioeconomic bracket, but I was lucky enough to be well educated with strong role models and a firm, and I'm a firm believer that the human spirit can overcome anything.
Yes, your success was so remarkable, given the white male supremacist society you found yourself in.
Truly, you are a hero of Homeric proportions.
It's amazing what you have achieved.
I don't know whether my interpretation of Islam or justice is correct.
Well, I can see why they made you give a TED talk.
Sorry, a TEDx talk.
But I don't even know how much that even matters, because if the two coexist and even enforce each other in me to make me a happy and self-sufficient individual, then surely that's all that matters.
Jesus fucking Christ, are you serious?
You come up on stage and tell us that you don't understand the two ideologies, the two contradictory ideologies that you profess to espouse and tell everyone, isn't it just better that I'm fucking happy?
Why should I understand the world around me?
Why should I understand any of this if I can just be happy?
It's like you have stepped out of 1984.
You're going to be telling me to listen and believe next.
And I would encourage critics to stop questioning.
I fucking called it.
But I'm sure you would.
I'm sure you would ask critics, you know, stop questioning.
It's making me have to come up with some inconvenient answers.
And start finding something that brings them half as much happiness because only then can we bring can we start spreading some sort of unity in the world.
You are a very weird person with very weird priorities and you sound like you're part of a cult.
And no, I'm not going to give up my critical faculties for some abstract and nebulous goal of creating unity in the world.
Fucking no.
When I look at my mother, I want to be a strong woman because she is.
And I want to be a good Muslim because she is.
I don't know what I want to do with my future yet.
I have no idea at all.
But I know that being a good mother lies at the heart of all of my plans, and that does not make me any less of a feminist for it.
I rather think that depends on which feminist you ask.
I write a lot of poetry.
Oh, good.
I do like feminist poetry.
To move ideas from the head to the heart.
Isn't that the wrong way around?
But whatever.
I found it's a fantastic medium of getting my voice heard and to make even your enemies understand the inside of your head.
And I didn't realise just how powerful it was until I set up my own poetry collective here at Warwick University called Shoot from the Lip.
And I've been privileged enough to perform to a range of different people about loads of different topics, everything from the Woolwich Killing to really creepy boys in nightclubs.
And I'd encourage anyone who's actually looking for some ideas or some direction, just turn to poetry because it really galvanises things.
So I thought I'd finish with a performance.
I do always love hearing the work of someone who is part of a feminist poetry collective.
And this poem is called Outer Place, about how when I was growing up, I wasn't a feminist, or I was, but I didn't think of myself as a feminist, but I am now.
When people used to ask me if I was a feminist, I never knew what to say.
When I was young and saw feminists getting beaten down here, there and everywhere, you're jealous and ugly and your pussy so old it's haunted, I'd answer no.
I was not a feminist because they were bitter, ugly, cantankerous old women.
That will get me a smile.
Sugar-coated condescension that I swallowed up, then I came to university and started reading.
I started knowing, started seeing man, I started thinking.
Suddenly, Taylor Swift's airbrushed face, Rihanna's topless album cover interlaced with Nas and Biggie's lyrics all seemed a disgrace.
Women on sale in the marketplace, it all seemed out of place in a country where a woman can be queen.
But for a woman to be queen in her own home, she must be a mother, a mistress, a cleaner, a seductress, the Madonna in the public and the whore in the private.
I started realizing that I still thought life was beautiful because my mother taught it to me that way.
She told me to be the best that I could be and I stand here today and I am a feminist.
Not because I think women are mistreated and not because I think women are subjugated, but because I stand here today.
You see, I am talking.
You are listening.
So I hope you see the irony in my ideology because I am preaching to you who go home and finger through pages where those vaping girls' breasts are ballooned by the same stuff that your younger selves made sandcastles out of.
You who hold your sisters close but will pay to see another's exploited.
You who question consent and keep a pen handy for the tally on your masculinity.
You who aspire for a wife and kids but will still never call a girl back after sex.
So I'm not a man-hater.
I'm not a bra-burner, a dungarees wearer or a chick who digs chicks, but I am a woman.
A woman who once was created not of Adam's rib but of God's imagination.
He created a beautiful creature, something not meant to be trapped in a gilt cage without education, to be violated and exploited, the source of men's masturbation.
This creature can deliver life through a cleft between legs, mythical, the stuff of legends, yet demeaned and degraded.
They say no man is an island, but every woman is the water that surrounds it.
She gives life and power, surging humanities forwards.
She is the one that raises you, takes blame for you, makes love to you.
So yes.
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