No, it is not Islamophobic to criticise the Islamic Republic

A couple of years ago, in my book, A Heretic’s Manifesto, I envisioned a situation where Iran’s female warriors against theocracy might one day come to the West only to find themselves branded ‘Islamophobic’. In my dystopic foretelling, these valiant hijab-burners would be accused by the pious pricks of the woke of such blasphemous sins as ‘hijabophobia’ – a real word, meaning ‘hostility to the hijab’. They might look to the West for refuge and wind up not being celebrated but being shouted down, charged with the thoughtcrime of Islamophobia.

Well, now it’s happened. Iranian icon Masih Alinejad has been damned as an Islamophobe. One of the theocratic regime’s most dreaded heretics, for her fearless defence of secular values and women’s rights, Alinejad has been living in exile in the United States since 2014. And last week she was marked with that shaming slur of ‘phobe’. Her crime? Daring to diss the hijab. Her accuser? None other than Mehdi Hasan – motormouth hack, darling of America’s coastal bourgeoisie, and someone who will never suffer the indignity of being told what to wear by preening, arrogant men who think they can talk to God.

I don’t think I have ever been as much ‘team’ someone as I was Team Masih in her digital clash with Hasan. It kicked off on Thursday when Alinejad had the temerity to criticise New York’s sainted faux-Marxian mayor, Zohran Mamdani. His office put out a tweet celebrating World Hijab Day. This garment is a ‘powerful symbol of devotion and celebration of Muslim heritage’, it gushed. It’s also a powerful symbol of sexist suppression under the boot of theocracy, as anyone who can be arsed to watch the news from Iran will know. Alinejad wasn’t happy. She let rip.

‘Really? Right now?’, she tweeted in reply to City Hall’s clueless hijab-cheering. You fawn over this hair-shaming cloak while women in ‘my wounded country’ are being jailed, shot and killed for refusing [it]’, she thundered. She then mused on Mamdani’s yellow-bellied silence on the massacres in Iran. ‘Not a single word of sympathy from you’, she wrote. ‘No expression of solidarity.’ She wondered – searingly – what kind of supposed progressive is less interested in ‘standing with women’ than ‘standing with our jailers’.

It was a blistering pushback. And she’s dead right: there is something seriously off about the fact that as women in Iran risk their lives by casting off the hijab, we in the West bow down to that regressive covering. There are even World Hijab Day events in British schools, where non-Muslim girls are encouraged to put one on to see what life is like for a Muslim. As one observer quipped, how about encouraging Muslim girls to take theirs off so that they might taste that hair-flowing freedom their non-Muslim peers enjoy?

Not everyone was pleased with Alinejad’s Mamdani-slamming. Step forward, Mehdi. ‘I have a feeling’, he said, ‘that a lot more Muslims around the world would support the Iranian protests for freedom and democracy if so many members of the pro-regime-change Iranian diaspora weren’t such raging Islamophobes’. Got that? Alinejhad isn’t just an ‘Islamophobe’ for having the audacity to reject a religious garment – she’s a raging Islamophobe. Ready the stocks. Prepare the fruit. A woman has spoken ill of religion.

The more I think about it, the more astonishingly awful Hasan’s comment becomes. What would possess a man to so publicly rebuke a woman for supposedly speaking out of turn? Even if that’s what you think privately – that these religion-mocking broads should pipe down – you really should control yourself in public. More to the point, what did Alinejad say that was ‘Islamophobic’? She made not one bigoted remark about Muslims. She only said the mayor of NYC should not celebrate the hijab and instead should show solidarity with the men and women fighting for freedom in Iran.

That Hasan felt cocky enough to call such sane, normal commentary ‘Islamophobic’ reveals what that word really means. The woke warriors against ‘Islamophobia’ are not fighting bigotry. They’re punishing blasphemy. They’re policing speech. They’re ringfencing religion – well, one religion – from the scurrilous wrongthink of the masses. That a public figure like Alinejad can be shamed for rejecting the hijab and raging against Tehran’s cruel rulers leaves no doubt – ‘Islamophobia’ means nothing more and nothing less than showing an impious disregard for the diktats of Islam.

We end up in a situation where a bloke can scold a woman for being irreligious. Not only is that morally out of order – the optics of it are absolutely dire, too. The Islamophobia-hunters of the credentialled classes are so drunk on misplaced moral arrogance that they can’t even see what the rest of us can – that their hectoring of Islam’s critics is an act of rank authoritarianism that makes them look like total wankers. Alinejad’s friends back in Iran are being arrested, flogged, jailed, and Hasan has a go at her? I don’t particularly like the term ‘male privilege’ but it’s hard to see what else made him think he could behave in such a shrill, illiberal and ungentlemanly fashion.

There’s a larger problem here. Across the West we have instituted rules against the dissing of Islam. You face shaming, or the sack, and sometimes even violence, if you mock Muhammad. And here’s the thing: that’s also why Iran’s dissenters are being so violently pummelled by their theocratic overlords. Because they, too, have been found guilty of anti-Islam sentiment. Alinejad was branded ‘anti-Islam’ by her former dictators in Iran – now she is ridiculed as ‘Islamophobic’ by some progressives in her adopted home of the United States. What a disgusting betrayal of a woman’s right to say whatever she wants, however many God-botherers she pisses off.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.