How do so many women end up as ‘Feminists for Islam’?

FiLiA – though it sounds like a knock-off sports shoe – is a gender-critical-feminist charity. Like any other lively organisation, it has had its fair share of skirmishes.

In 2015, Jane Fae (a man) pulled out of a conference due to divergent views on prostitution (the man was in favour – quelle surprise!). Julie Bindel and Caroline Criado-Perez also backed out as a result. Just last year, the woefully trans-captured Plaid Cymru banned the FiLiA stall from its spring conference in Caernarfon, after being informed that these feminists’ views were ‘potentially contrary to the party’s values’. (Amusingly, PC had to admit just a few months later that canceling FiLiA’s booking amounted to ‘an act of discrimination under the Equality Act 2010’.)

I had replied reluctantly in the negative to a few offers to wheel me out to the nearby Brighton Centre last weekend, where the most recent conference took place. But looking back, I see it was much for the best that I swerved it, as I’ve never got into a fight in my current disabled state and I’m not altogether sure that I’d give a good report of myself.

It started out predictably, with the usual gang of violent cross-dressing men vandalising the venue before the conference began. The BBC website stated: ‘Masked figures were seen in online videos smashing windows and spray-painting the building, ahead of a three-day event billed as one of the largest grassroots feminist gatherings in Europe. Activists from Bash Back, which describes itself as a ‘trans-led direct action group’, posted a statement saying it carried out the vandalism because the conference would be hosting ‘some of the most vicious transphobia in… politics’, and warned of ‘further action’ to come. FilLiA CEO Lisa-Marie Taylor bracingly boasted that ‘the activities of a small, violent minority will not diminish the spirit of sisterhood and solidarity which FiLiA embodies’.

Around 2,500 people came to hear from 250 speakers from around the world, according to organisers. One can easily fight back against an enemy who makes himself known – even when the men involved cover their faces and/or attack under cover of darkness, we know what they are, if not precisely who they are. But identifying and combatting the enemy within is the real struggle. Civil wars are said to be the most poisonous and the hardest to recover from, turning brother against brother – or in this case, sister against sister.

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.

Those of you of a certain vintage, who as children saw the 1967 film Dr Dolittle starring Rex Harrison, might recall an unfortunate critter called the ‘pushmi-pullyu’, a creation of author Hugh Lofting, which had two heads on opposing ends of its body. As you can imagine, the creature looked miffed a lot of the time. Little wonder then that Wiktionary defines the colloquial use of the term as ‘a person who behaves in a conflicting or contradictory manner’. Feminists for Islam are such P-Ps that they make Queers for Palestine seem semi-sane.

They first raised their (covered) heads in 2017, at the ‘Women’s Marches’ against Trump (that worked!). Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American, was the hijab-wearing face of the movement. She portrayed herself as some sort of feminist with a tweet praising the Muslim world’s treatment of women:

‘Ten weeks of PAID maternity leave in Saudi Arabia. Yes PAID. And you’re worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame.’

She conveniently side-stepped the fact that, as women in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to drive, meet unrelated men or feel the sun on their bare heads, giving them permission to stay at home looking after children is about as empowering as giving a fish permission to swim.

The Women’s Marches also featured the grotesque spectacle of many non-Muslim women voluntarily hijabing-up. The formerly liberal Muslim-born feminist, Asra Nomani, said this prompted her to vote for Trump, because she felt that she could not stomach four more years of apologism for Islamism in the White House.

American internecine conflicts are generally more dramatic than ours, but during 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.

I remember a Woman’s Hour interview in 2021 wherein Zara Mohammed – then the new secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain – was simply asked about the number of female imams in the UK. Afterwards, the BBC received the usual pathetic yelps of ‘Islamophobic!’ when more than a hundred prize tossers signed an open letter about Mohammed’s ‘mistreatment’ on Radio 4. But – of course – none of the whining hordes could actually answer the question about why female rabbis and priests exist but female imams do not.

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. Those who wave the Palestinian flag are doing the same to the Israeli women raped until their pelvises broke by the Islamofascists of ‘the resistance’.

Just how do some females – some of them otherwise intelligent women – end up as Feminists for Islam? As the friend of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, I became familiar some time ago with the concept of ‘splitting’ – an extreme form of black-and-white thinking wherein individuals perceive themselves, others and situations as all good or all bad, with no nuance. I’m a Zionist, but had I been present at FiLiA, I would never have dreamt of whipping out an Israeli flag and waving it around – even I would have more sensitivity to what others might feel on seeing it. Palestine, having never existed (the flag didn’t exist until 1964 – it’s newer than the Polaroid camera), is an ideal land, perfect for those who have trouble with down-and-dirty reality.

Of course, this syndrome extends far beyond feminism into the left’s attitude to Palestine as a whole. On X this week, Owen Jones finally went fully gaga, intoning over a Hovis-tune-inspired soundtrack that Palestine will ‘free us all’. What does that mean? No gay rights? No women’s rights? No rights for atheists? One state religion, and death for apostates? This use of language is truly Orwellian – and not in a good way.

Is it masochism? The leftists must know it always ends with Islam turning on them, but they just can’t help themselves. It’s like a parody of a ghastly abusive romantic relationship, suicidal empathy turned ideology. Or is it exceptionalism, like those women who write love letters to serial killers on death row – ‘Oh, he’d never hurt ME!’. A blend of the two?

Whatever, it’s very odd. One of the weirdest psychoses of our times. The rise of Feminists for Islam – like that of Queers for Palestine – is yet another symptom of the increasingly crazy topsy-turvy, upside-down, pushmi-pullyu world we live in.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.