In late 2010, a wave of social unrest known as the ‘Arab Spring’ swept across North Africa and into the Middle East. Early the next year, this movement metamorphosed into political revolutions, rattling some governments, and overturning others.
Sadly, the revolutionaries were disappointed when the governments they’d overthrown were replaced by even harsher ones. The brief glimpse of an impulse toward a free society and toward individual political liberty was crushed by Islamic dictatorships.
Not only did the Arab Spring turn into an Islamic Winter, but it did so in the realm of civilization in addition to the realm of politics. As Kamel Daoud writes,
The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms.
The reader should remember that not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. Arabic hopes were suppressed by Islamic absolutism.
In Egypt, a location known as Tahrir Square became the scene of repeated sexual assaults and rapes. This was a glimpse of how women would be treated after the ‘Arab Spring’ was extinguished.
This attitude followed Muslim immigrants as they made their way into Europe. On New Year’s Eve 2015, a coordinated and planned series of gang-rapes occurred in major cities across Central Europe, as groups of men randomly attacked women who happened to be walking by.
Kamel Daoud shows the underlying cultural connections between the ill-treatment of women in the Islamic nations and the assaults in Central Europe:
The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society.
As the data revealed the scope of the attack, and number of victims, a pattern clearly emerged. By mid-2016, police were increasing the official number of victim as more women came forth, and as more evidence was gathered from video cameras which caught attacks in public places.
Women in Muslim nations are largely depersonalized. They lack equality under the law, and are perceived as a source of immoral temptations.
They are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.
Writing in the New York Times in February 2016, in the wake of New Year's Eve attacks, Kamel Daoud described a global encounter: how the rest of the world was learned about Islamic nations as waves of emigrants left those countries.
Daoud goes on to note that recent massive immigrations into Europe, and into North America, have brought this plight of Muslim women to the attention of the world:
Today, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.
For centuries, the degradation of women in Muslim countries was an unseen phenomenon and a rarely-studied topic. For the rest of the world, it was far away.
The transportation and communication of the postmodern era, however, have brought two different cultures in contact. The world is shocked to learn specific details of the way women are treated in Islamic nations, and horrified to learn that Muslim immigrants intend to continue this behavior even after they’ve immigrated into other countries.
