Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Fleeing Islam" with Yasmine Mohammed

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"Fleeing Islam" with Yasmine Mohammed · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Can I humans welcome a safe space to dangerous ideas and what idea could be more dangerous
• 0:07
  than to say, I'm sorry, I do not want to participate in this arranged marriage with an
• 0:13
  Alcada terrorist.
• 0:16
  That's something that today's guest found herself having to do, well actually she had to
• 0:22
  go through with the marriage after all, but you will learn about that henceforth.
• 0:28
  Yes, me and Muhammad is a hero, a heroine, are we saying heroine, heroine, heroine?
• 0:32
  If we're not saying actor and actress, are we saying heroine, heroine?
• 0:35
  Anyway, I'll search for the memo on that, I'm sure it's here somewhere, gender, non-specificity
• 0:40
  on hero, heroine, yes, heroine is still okay, good not to be cancelled for that, excellent.
• 0:46
  Yes, me and is a heroine because she's a protector of women and girls, the world over
• 0:54
  from the tyrannies of fundamentalist Islam.
• 0:58
  That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not.
• 1:00
  She has a charity called Free Hearts, Free Minds and literally helps to smuggle ex-Muslims
• 1:06
  and LGBTQIA plus Muslims who live in Muslim majority countries that have death penalties
• 1:15
  for leaving Islam and so on.
• 1:16
  She smuggles them out, applies for refugee status in, I was going to say civilized countries
• 1:24
  and then I thought that's not very politically correct, but in contrast to the countries
• 1:27
  we're talking about, let's just call us bad as bad civilized countries and helps them
• 1:31
  with psychological counseling and provides them with services to get out of places which
• 1:37
  are deeply regressive.
• 1:39
  She also has a podcast called Forgotten Feminists, which interviews women about their experiences
• 1:44
  leaving Islam, her own personal story is extraordinary, I mean she was born and raised
• 1:48
  in Canada, but her story is instructive about how you don't have to be born in some
• 1:55
  benign part of the most fundamentalist and backward Islamist backwaters to nonetheless
• 2:05
  feel the pain and suffering and depression and brutality of Stone Age religions being
• 2:12
  inflicted upon you.
• 2:15
  It's not a fun story, but we don't dwell on her personal story too much, I'm really
• 2:18
  interested in checking back in with her because I spoke with Yasmin on my old podcast, it
• 2:23
  must be a good seven years ago now about her work.
• 2:28
  And I want to check back in about how we're all doing, especially in the West, in juggling
• 2:34
  our desire for having vibrant, tolerant, multicultural, multi-ethnic societies that are
• 2:41
  pluralistic and respectful of religious difference and supportive of our Muslim friends and neighbors.
• 2:48
  And at the same time, not being too full of shit about the excesses of Islam, about
• 2:56
  how pernicious and affect it can have on people's lives in most of the parts of the world
• 3:01
  where it is practiced with much less deafness and gentleness than it is in the West.
• 3:10
  And what we should make of the state of terrorism and jihadism and Islamism and Afghanistan
• 3:16
  and Iraq and what's gone on anyway, she has a lot of thoughts about a lot of things and
• 3:19
  it's wonderful, it's just so heartening to hear someone so articulate and so full of
• 3:25
  passion and life on a subject that so few people are interested in touching.
• 3:32
  Yes, I mean, really got going after that famous exchange between Ben Affleck, the actor
• 3:40
  and Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and now a podcaster on Bill Maas show, they were debating
• 3:49
  Islam and specifically whether or not it is racist or bigoted or Islamophobic to criticize
• 3:56
  the tenets of Islam, have a listen to some of that exchange.
• 4:02
  Yeah, well liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy, they'll criticize white
• 4:08
  theocracy, they'll criticize Christians, they'll still get agitated over the abortion
• 4:14
  clinic bombing that happened in 1984 but when you want to talk about the treatment of women
• 4:20
  and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would
• 4:25
  argue that liberals have failed us and the crucial point of confusion, yeah, thank you.
• 4:31
  Thank you guys, you're here, yeah. Well, I mean, the crucial point of confusion is that we have
• 4:36
  been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated
• 4:43
  with bigotry toward Muslims as people. Right. That is intellectually ridiculous, even it gets
• 4:51
  you the person who understands the officially codified doctrine of Islam, you're
• 4:55
  the interpreter of that, so you can say, well, I think any actually well educated on this topic.
• 4:59
  I'm asking you, if I criticize that Islamophobia is not a real thing, that if you're critical of
• 5:04
  something, well, it's not a real thing when we do it. Right. Well, it's really, I'm not
• 5:09
  denying that certain people are bigoted against Muslims as people, and that's a problem.
• 5:13
  Big of you, but the, why do we have to all about this? It's gross, it's racist, it's not,
• 5:19
  it's, but it's so, it's so, it's like saying, so not, you're, you're not listening to what we
• 5:25
  are saying. You guys are saying, if you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles,
• 5:28
  rights, freedom of speech, like, you know, where you're endowed by our four fathers of the
• 5:32
  neoliberalistic, all men are created. No, Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas,
• 5:36
  of course we do. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
• 6:06
  that was Sam Harris and Ben Affleck on Bill Mars Show in 2014.
• 6:11
  It's almost a decade ago now, and I play it because that was the climate of the time,
• 6:17
  where we were still in this kind of post-9-11 fervor of like, what can we honestly say and
• 6:23
  what can't we honestly say about the plight of people who are living under theocratic
• 6:28
  Islamist rule, and what can we encounter, we say about the danger that jihadists posed
• 6:33
  to all of the rest of us as well, that has now shifted somewhat.
• 6:37
  It's changed somewhat, and hearing Yasmin talk about that change is also instructive.
• 6:42
  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
• 6:45
  You're always wonderful, Yasmin Ma'amut.
• 6:57
  Well, it's lovely to talk to you again.
• 6:59
  How have you been in the, I don't know, probably seven or eight years since I last spoke with you.
• 7:06
  What's been going on?
• 7:07
  I've been that long, wow.
• 7:09
  Well, yeah, it must be.
• 7:10
  I mean, I left the states in 2017 when I had kids, and we must have spoke this probably
• 7:17
  when I had with the people live my last show in probably, I was probably in New York,
• 7:22
  so probably 2015 or something, which believe it or not is eight years now.
• 7:26
  Yeah, probably 2016, because that's when I first started my Twitter account and first started
• 7:31
  going public, so that you must have been one of the very first people that I spoke to.
• 7:35
  That would be at 2016, 2017 at the latest, yeah.
• 7:38
  Yeah.
• 7:39
  Yeah.
• 7:40
  What's the evolution been?
• 7:42
  I think it's better or worse now.
• 7:49
  You know, I have to say they're better, and it might be because I'm a hopeless optimist,
• 7:55
  but I think in some way, well, in some ways they're better, in some ways they're worse,
• 7:58
  so I think they're better because there's more conversation now, like there's more.
• 8:04
  In fact, we should say what criteria we're using to determine what is a better or what
• 8:09
  are we talking about here?
• 8:11
  Well, when you ask that question, I'll tell you what I was responding to.
• 8:15
  I was responding to the sort of the reason why I started to speak out was because I felt
• 8:22
  there was so much propaganda from the Islamists and misunderstanding from the West.
• 8:28
  And so there was this whole space in between of people like me who had denounced Islam or
• 8:35
  reform Muslims, whose voices just weren't being heard.
• 8:39
  All you're hearing was from the fundamentalists, essentially, from the Islamists, from Muslim
• 8:44
  Brotherhood mainly in the U.S., who were selling their propaganda of Islam as a religion
• 8:52
  of peace.
• 8:53
  ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.
• 8:55
  The jab is a choice, Islam is the most feminist religion.
• 8:59
  All of their tropes that end up getting such traction in the media and people who are
• 9:09
  not familiar enough, as expected, as understood.
• 9:14
  This isn't a judgment, but just saying, like people aren't familiar enough with the religion
• 9:18
  or with the cultures where the religion reigns, they're believing all of that stuff.
• 9:25
  So they're saying things like, oh, so those Afghani women are wearing those burkas by choice.
• 9:30
  They like it.
• 9:31
  It's their culture.
• 9:32
  They want to.
• 9:33
  Oh no, child marriage is perfectly fine with it.
• 9:35
  It's their culture because that's the lies that they were sold.
• 9:41
  You're fair.
• 9:42
  I don't hear that so much, but what I do here is our, you know, we need to, as multi-ethnic
• 9:50
  multicultural societies like Australia and Canada, we need to be welcoming to everybody
• 9:56
  and we don't want to make people feel alienated for not fitting in.
• 10:03
  And therefore, if they want to wear the veil here, we don't want to dig too much into like
• 10:08
  why people are wearing the veil abroad or whether or not this is a perfectly free choice,
• 10:13
  like there are lots of ways in which our choices aren't free as well.
• 10:16
  And how much autonomy does a woman who's conforming to impossible beauty standards in the
• 10:21
  West really have for wearing a bikini at the beach in similarly in lots of other countries,
• 10:28
  women are not empowered to choose not to wear a veil or a headdress or a burka, but our
• 10:34
  overarching priority here in the West should be to make them feel completely entitled to do so
• 10:39
  and to not judge them for that choice. How does that map onto your work?
• 10:45
  Yeah, so that is a fair statement that I agree with.
• 10:49
  What I disagree with is this idea that because we want everybody to feel comfortable
• 10:57
  wearing whatever they want to wear, we're going to actually celebrate everything that everybody
• 11:02
  else wears. So let's go ahead and celebrate the hijab as if it's this empowering clothing instead
• 11:10
  of admitting the fact that it stems from purity culture, that it stems from modesty culture,
• 11:15
  that there are women imprisoned and killed all over the planet, including in my country and in
• 11:20
  your country while not imprisoned, but they do get killed over hijab in honor violence and in
• 11:26
  honor killings. So we have to sort of make a differentiation between saying you're free to wear
• 11:35
  whatever you want to wear and that doesn't need to seep into, I am going to celebrate whatever it
• 11:42
  is that you're wearing even if it's religiously ordained clothing that is seeped in misogyny.
• 11:49
  We don't do the same for fundamentalist Christian clothing, we don't do the same for fundamentalist,
• 11:55
  Jewish clothing, we don't do the same for any kind of clothing that is forced on a group of people.
• 12:06
  And again, always when this comparison comes up, I have to state that even those comparisons are
• 12:14
  not fair because no Jewish women or Christian women are being thrown in prison or are being killed
• 12:22
  over hijab. I mean, I think that what is happening in Iran right now is very, very clear to the whole
• 12:28
  world that this has never been a choice and women have been fighting against it for a very long
• 12:36
  time. But of course, as soon as they open their mouths, they are risking their lives. So quite often
• 12:43
  they choose to stay silent. How do you deal with the claim of kind of, I guess, false consciousness,
• 12:50
  where, you know, what you're saying sounds close to saying that people who, like a Muslim
• 12:56
  Australian woman who feels like it is an active liberation, defiance, feminism and ownership of
• 13:03
  herself to wear the veil in public or to wear a Burkini to the beach. For her, that is an expression
• 13:12
  of feminism and defiance. And yet you're saying that we shouldn't celebrate that expression of
• 13:18
  defiance because in other places, other people are being forced to wear that.
• 13:23
  Isn't that the sort of not having autonomy or something?
• 13:26
  There are millions of women that are wearing hijab. We cannot sit here and try and figure out
• 13:34
  the intentions or the forces around every individual woman that's wearing hijab and why she's
• 13:43
  wearing it, why she's not wearing it. So you're going to tell me that there's some woman in
• 13:47
  Australia that's wearing it because she feels empowered. I'm going to tell you that there are
• 13:51
  for every woman that you think is wearing it because she feels empowered, I could bring you
• 13:56
  thousands, hundreds of thousands other women who are wearing it because they're being forced into
• 14:01
  it, which one of those women's experiences is more valid or which one of these experiences or
• 14:07
  which one of these women matter to you more. So I think that's the wrong question to be asking.
• 14:13
  What you need to be asking yourself is this tool of misogyny, this tool of religious patriarchy,
• 14:24
  do I agree with it? Do I support it? This is something that is the epitome of rape culture.
• 14:33
  It teaches young girls and it teaches women that basically perpetuates victim blaming. It
• 14:42
  tells them you need to cover yourself in order to avoid tempting men who might end up harassing
• 14:50
  you or raping you. That is the purpose of the hijab. That's one of the purposes of hijab.
• 14:56
  So what you have to do is you have to look at that objectively and say, is that a message that I
• 15:01
  agree with? If it's not, don't put it on the cover of your magazine. And if it is, then sure, go ahead
• 15:06
  and do that. But that's the message that you're sending to the world. We can't pretend just because
• 15:12
  the women that are being imprisoned or the women that are not being allowed to go to school are in
• 15:18
  Afghanistan or any ran or the women that are being locked in their homes or in Saudi Arabia
• 15:24
  instead of in Australian soil. That doesn't make them any less valid as human beings. That doesn't
• 15:31
  mean that their lives matter any less and that doesn't mean that I'm going to you know, make this
• 15:36
  conversation specifically about women in Australia or women in Canada or women in America because
• 15:41
  that's unfair. Women are women regardless of where they stand geographically on this planet.
• 15:46
  And this is a global problem and we have to talk about it globally. You can't pretend that those
• 15:53
  women rotting in prison for decades over hijab don't exist because you don't want them to exist.
• 16:01
  And so you say, well, here in Australia that doesn't happen. So therefore we're going to put
• 16:05
  hijab on the cover of magazine and pretend that it's empowering. Well, that's a lie. You're lying
• 16:09
  to yourself and you're betraying feminism. You're betraying liberalism. You're betraying humanism
• 16:15
  because the truth is that this item of clothing is being forced on women under threat of imprisonment
• 16:22
  and under threat of death. And we can't pretend that that reality doesn't exist.
• 16:27
  The common resort to that, yes, mean as well, is in some places. I mean, some places are terrible
• 16:33
  dictatorships. And you know, there are a secular, secular dictatorships that we've supported in the
• 16:37
  past as well, like Pinochet's Chile or so Harto's in Indonesia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
• 16:44
  We have our fair share of blood on our hands. So of course there are there are theocratic regimes
• 16:49
  as well. And they're going to do their badness in the particular ways in which they do their
• 16:53
  badness. I don't know whether or not there's how do you what do you make of the difference I suppose
• 16:58
  between theocracies and the way that they harness the hijab and the veil and misogyny and sexism
• 17:06
  to oppress women versus I guess the more subtle forms of coercion that the hijab can also
• 17:13
  represent. Like I mean, where I struggle probably the most because I think it's an easy cut and
• 17:18
  dried case to say that, you know, the Iranian regime and the Saudi regime are doing bad stuff.
• 17:23
  I think the that more difficult case is in semi free majority Muslim countries where women
• 17:32
  ostensibly would not they wouldn't be jailed. They wouldn't be stoned. They wouldn't be tortured
• 17:39
  for asserting their rights. But they would have everything that they love stripped from them.
• 17:44
  And they would be excommunicated by their families. And it would take an enormous amount of
• 17:48
  courage to shed the head scarf and go out on your own. And that's trickier because then
• 17:57
  the Islamist sympathizer can always say, there's no coercion involved here.
• 18:03
  You know, you know, we're not trying to allow for work for refusing to wear the veil.
• 18:07
  Yeah. And that's I think that I guess it's all on the spectrum. If you if those if people think
• 18:14
  that the only problem with coercing women into doing something is that they could be imprisoned or
• 18:20
  killed for it, then then that's the argument that they're going to make, which is one that I
• 18:25
  completely disagree with. Because as you said, not only in more progressive Muslim countries,
• 18:31
  but even here in the West, you know, in the UK, we have so many examples in Canada. We have
• 18:36
  so many examples in the US. We have so many examples. France, Sweden, the list goes on and on
• 18:41
  of women who are living in supposedly free countries or girls living in supposedly free countries
• 18:48
  who are not able to take off the hijab when they choose to take it off as adults. There's a very
• 18:56
  popular case of a young woman named Dina Tokyo, who's from the UK. She used to be a hijabi model,
• 19:03
  one of those modesty models. And when she decided to take off her hijab, she was inundated with death
• 19:12
  threats and rape threats. And you know, she has a video on YouTube called the the good, the bad,
• 19:19
  and the ugly or something like that, where she for 45 minutes just reads through all of the hate,
• 19:26
  all of the messages that she's been receiving. So that's just one example she became she was very
• 19:32
  public with the hate that she received. But that's what happens when a woman decides to assert
• 19:40
  control over her own body. We are not allowed to have bodily autonomy. This is why I said the reason
• 19:48
  for hijab, one of the reasons is victim blaming. Another reason is truly it's just a form of control.
• 19:55
  It's just a form of telling a woman, you are lesser than and you need to remember that. And this
• 20:01
  is going to be put on your head and put on your body as a constant reminder that you are different
• 20:07
  from men and that you have to wear this when men don't have to wear this. So you know, it's
• 20:15
  it's not just imprisonment, it's not just honor killings, it's not just, you know, those are the
• 20:22
  extreme cases. But those extreme cases happen all over the world, not just under theocracies.
• 20:32
  What was your family life like growing up? Yes, ma'am.
• 20:36
  Yeah, so well, if we're going to relate it to hijab, I was put into hijab at nine years old and
• 20:42
  that I was putting it in a car. It's coming for your bare head.
• 20:48
  Well, we have an Islamophobia officer here in Canada now. So
• 20:53
  Really? Yeah, we do. At the federal government level, she was given 85 million dollars in a
• 20:59
  whole cabinet whole office of people to to control some of the indigenous country. So
• 21:07
  against Islam. Well, this is the problem. If we talk about the term Islamophobia, you know,
• 21:15
  one of my biggest problems with the term is it hasn't been defined. There's a refusal
• 21:21
  this woman, Amira, has flat out refused on many occasions to differentiate between
• 21:28
  anti-Muslim bigotry and criticism of Islam. She insists that they are one and the same.
• 21:34
  She calls the Charlie Hebdo journalists racist. So she conflates those two things on purpose.
• 21:42
  And then unfortunately, this is the person that they chose to be the special representative for
• 21:48
  the office against Islamophobia at the federal government level. So it's something that
• 21:55
  obviously ex-Muslims and reform Muslims are very concerned about and very
• 22:00
  angry about because we were not
• 22:04
  nobody in Canada was
• 22:07
  consulted about this at all. Our Prime Minister just went ahead and appointed her
• 22:13
  and despite the hundreds and hundreds of people that have signed letters
• 22:20
  speaking up against her and giving very clear reasons why they're against not only her as an
• 22:25
  individual but also the appointment in general. We're just being ignored.
• 22:32
  Canada's special representative on combating Islamophobia serves as a champion advisor expert
• 22:38
  and representative to the Canadian government. So this is a this is just for about Islamophobia.
• 22:43
  I assume that this would be an umbrella position which is an anti-bigotry position that would
• 22:49
  include Islamophobia. So is there an anti-Semitism special representative?
• 22:54
  No there isn't. There isn't a special representative for any of the other religions. So this is
• 23:00
  obviously in a country like Canada where I don't even know how many religions we have
• 23:04
  represented in our country to just choose one religion to have literally she's called a special
• 23:10
  representative for any one religion to have this this special space is completely unfair and especially
• 23:18
  I mean a secular country too like it's just frightening towards the idea of freedom of speech
• 23:24
  and freedom of criticism to religion if you're potentially if you're implying that people who
• 23:31
  are going to criticize a set of theological claims could be because they are criticizing
• 23:40
  theological claims rather than throwing as you say throwing slurs at that people I mean let's
• 23:45
  let's just unpick that before I want to get to your backstory as well because I think it's
• 23:48
  really interesting but I mean if that is this is key because it's happening in all kinds of areas
• 23:54
  and Islam is just one piece of a larger jigsaw here where people's people's beliefs ideas,
• 24:02
  criticisms, personal opinions, political points of view are getting coded as hate speech or
• 24:09
  bigotry when those terms really should be limited to language that's directed at human beings
• 24:18
  at individuals it happens with LGBTQI plus stuff as well right you know transphobic hate can be
• 24:27
  saying that you believe that there's something unique to the experience of women in growing up as
• 24:33
  a girl and that opinion and be bigotry but I thought bigotry was like bigotry towards individual
• 24:43
  human beings or like you know someone could say that the state of Israel shouldn't exist and they
• 24:48
  can be called an anti-Semite well no hang on anti-Semitism is like hating Jews as human beings not
• 24:53
  an idea of an abstract idea of Zionism and similarly of course we should stamp out anti-Muslim
• 25:00
  hate meaning hatred towards Muslims as as human beings but to say that the Quran is a big load of
• 25:07
  hogwash like would that be something that Canada's special and what special representative on
• 25:14
  combating Islamophobia would be curious to investigate yes according to when she's been asked
• 25:22
  this question point blank numerous times yes she makes no differentiation between anti-Muslim
• 25:30
  bigotry bigotry against Muslims as people or criticism of the religion of Islam that she disagrees
• 25:38
  with in general she refuses to make a differentiation between those two things hmm so saying that Islam
• 25:48
  is a is a conservative and degrading and sexist force in society and should be
• 25:54
  really have a proper reformation the way that Christianity has had yeah could be considered
• 26:01
  hate speech that's right and because it's so nebulous and because it's so subjective people are
• 26:08
  just afraid to speak of course you know that's what's happened and so I just was in a conversation
• 26:17
  with this black woman from Toronto who was talking about slavery and how Christians enabled slavery
• 26:28
  in a lot of Africa and then she's like and another religion too but I can't name it and then we
• 26:34
  we were having like this code and conversation on Twitter because we're both Canadian and so you
• 26:42
  just don't know like even if we state historical facts about how Arab Muslims were not only in
• 26:48
  the past involved in slavery of Africans but currently are you know is that going to be something
• 26:53
  that's going to come back at us and be considered Islamophobia I mean you know me I don't care
• 27:00
  I would say whatever but she did and I was respecting that and so you know that's what happened
• 27:06
  so people can't even speak about topics that are important to them or important to their history
• 27:12
  or important to their people because they have to make sure that you know none of it is misconstrued
• 27:19
  as Islamophobia it's also just weird yes I mean that's the countries that are and the cultures
• 27:25
  and the societies that are the most keen to self-flagulate over issues like slavery that are the
• 27:32
  least willing to honestly discuss the human rights abuses of I don't know cultures and countries
• 27:40
  that they regard as being I mean what is that why is it so you know I'm just alluding to the fact
• 27:46
  that the Arab slave trade was like twice as aggressive and lasted for twice as long as the
• 27:52
  transatlantic slave trade and of course this Canadian the Canadian government is extremely keen
• 27:59
  to have a reckoning about the transatlantic slave trade and to discuss questions of compensation
• 28:05
  and you know truth and reconciliation around the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade
• 28:12
  but if you say so let's also grapple with the fact that Arab countries are sitting on top of at
• 28:19
  least as bad an experience of slavery and an even more recent one then everyone starts
• 28:25
  feeding and feeling like that's not something that you're allowed to talk about is that like what
• 28:31
  is going on there that's exactly what's going on here yeah why it's you know that's that's the
• 28:40
  question that is the whole question that is the reason why I started to speak out to begin with
• 28:47
  was because I found that whenever anybody would would speak up about these things they would be
• 28:53
  attacked for their innate characteristics they would they would be told you're a white
• 29:00
  straight American male who were you to talk about the Arab slave trade you're only talking about
• 29:05
  it because you're racist or because you're a phthalmophobic or whatever and so whenever anybody would
• 29:11
  try to have this conversation they would be attacked and silenced and so that's why I felt
• 29:17
  as an Arab woman who grew up Muslim maybe I can say these things which are cold hard facts you people
• 29:27
  like this is history this is this is happening right now there's a slave trade currently
• 29:33
  in Libya right now buying and selling of African people um why why can't we talk about this so at
• 29:41
  least because of my identity it's it allows me to push the conversation a little bit further with
• 29:50
  people who are just unwilling to have these conversations but um yeah that doesn't deal with the
• 29:57
  crux of the problem of like this unwillingness to talk about it and and how can we break those
• 30:04
  barriers and allow people to see that we're all human beings and we have we all have to reconcile
• 30:12
  for many faults that we have in our histories and we cannot protect or ignore or refuse to acknowledge
• 30:22
  the faults of some groups of people because either a um this is the irony right here Josh I'm
• 30:34
  going to tell you because I really do believe that the main reason why a lot of people don't want to
• 30:40
  speak up is because they are afraid of Islamic terrorism because when the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists
• 30:46
  drew cartoons what happened to them when Salman Rushdie wrote a novel what happened to him you know
• 30:52
  when I on her CLE did made a video or sorry a short film with Theo Van Gogh what happened to him
• 31:02
  it goes on and on and on right well if you criticize Islam publicly there's going there there could be
• 31:10
  some sort of terrorism in your future so what's what's ironic here what's interesting is these people
• 31:16
  that are screaming aslamophobia they are the ones who are the most scared they are the ones who truly
• 31:23
  are afraid of speaking up against us them because they believe that there could be a response of
• 31:30
  terrorism and they're very that it is valid fear I understand it I mean obviously I live in that space
• 31:36
  I know that it's a valid fear but I also know that and I'm going to quote Salman Rushdie here I also
• 31:43
  know that the best way to fight back is to refuse to be afraid because terrorism works terrorism is
• 31:51
  successful terrorism keeps people in line and so all they have to like you know a few people dying
• 31:58
  in France or in England or in you know wherever is enough to keep everybody in line it's enough to
• 32:06
  get everybody to bite their tongue against criticism against Islam and that's where
• 32:15
  people have to this is where it becomes most dangerous you know because now you are capitulating
• 32:23
  to terrorism and is that who you want to be is that what you want are you willing to give up
• 32:29
  you are freedom of expression because bullies are forcing you to you know I think one of the
• 32:36
  greatest responses in in France when a teacher named Samuel Petit was beheaded because he was
• 32:42
  sharing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and they were having a conversation about free expression in his
• 32:48
  classroom so he was beheaded by you know people connected to the children in his classroom
• 33:00
  the response from a lot of France was to take those Charlie Hebdo cartoons and to just plaster them
• 33:08
  all over the city and in fact they they were projecting those cartoons up on buildings and I
• 33:15
  thought that was the most beautiful response that's the way it should be when people say you
• 33:21
  you are not allowed to have this free expression or we're going to terrorize you the response should
• 33:27
  be no we will not be terrorized we refuse to cower and we will continue to value free expression
• 33:37
  and we will continue to express ourselves freely but unfortunately that's not the response that
• 33:43
  you see normally that is a plausible explanation but also as an overly cynical one to explain
• 33:51
  everything that's going on I think because the the the fear of what I see amongst my journalistic
• 33:57
  colleagues is a reflexive desire to be on the right side of culture war battles and to not
• 34:04
  be part of quote unquote the problem of like western shauvinism and and bigotry and xenophobia
• 34:13
  and so in I'm sure that there I'm sure that part of it is that you don't want to be a target of
• 34:18
  Islamist violence but part of it is also that there's something unseemly well for a start
• 34:25
  you don't it you don't want it to seem like you're playing a game of what aboutism so that every time
• 34:29
  people criticize the you know the sins of the European invasion of Australia or Canada and
• 34:35
  the plight of First Nations people you just wave your arms about and go yeah but what about the
• 34:39
  Arabs with their slave trade you know you don't want to be that guy so there's an instinct
• 34:44
  to not be that to not do that but then even if you are being even handed and saying yes we have
• 34:49
  to all acknowledge the challenges of our past but let's not also gloss over the fact that this
• 34:55
  was this was a worldwide phenomenon and needs a global reckoning and we shouldn't be singled out
• 35:00
  for our own misdeeds you know and gloss over those of others if that's an impediment to to true
• 35:07
  reconciliation between cultures and and peoples but then there's also just this instinct that
• 35:14
  if you are in a if you are a brown skinned person in a religious minority in a multi-cultural
• 35:19
  society then we should really be spending our energy making you feel welcome and not nitpicking
• 35:26
  what's what might be wrong with your culture that's causing hardship overseas yeah that's right
• 35:33
  I think that's I do understand what you're saying but I actually find that position to be very
• 35:39
  patronizing to be very condescending and it's also very white centric so when you were making this
• 35:46
  argument for example you were saying okay we can speak up against you know Christianity and
• 35:52
  sort of their impact in the slave trade but let's not speak up against the SNAM because we don't
• 35:57
  want to be doing that what about is them because that's those people over there as opposed to us
• 36:01
  over here but the example that I was giving you was about a black Canadian woman so from her
• 36:07
  perspective she couldn't care less if it if you were Christian or fewer Muslim you're both others
• 36:12
  and you're both slave traders and so it really depends on the perspective of the person who
• 36:18
  is speaking for for there to be this idea that we can that is always sort of the white person who's
• 36:25
  in the dominant position of of having the conversation and therefore we need to be careful when
• 36:31
  we're talking about the others you know that's not my perspective you know when I'm speaking I'm
• 36:40
  not seeing myself as the other and I'm not seeing myself as white and so that's really just depends
• 36:48
  on the speaker and their perspective and I when I'm speaking against Christianity or when I'm
• 36:53
  speaking up against Islam or when I'm speaking against whatever religion or ideology that I see is
• 36:59
  hurting people I'm never seeing that from the perspective of an Arab Canadian woman I'm just seeing
• 37:08
  it from the perspective of a human being you know I mean that makes the ideology that is so has
• 37:16
  become widespread in the past five years in media and academia and broader culture is that
• 37:24
  the perpetrators of injustice are is a white well I was going to say are white people but is rather
• 37:30
  it usually gets framed as a white supremacist power structure that we're all complicit in right so
• 37:36
  it's all very nice to say I will hear is a woman of African descent in Canada who regards Arabs and
• 37:44
  white people as equal oppressors but actually the narrative of most first nations people in
• 37:52
  Australia and Canada and most African-American people in the United States would be that actually
• 37:59
  the great sin is white European colonialism and white supremacy and yeah I can see that
• 38:08
  perspective obviously if you're an indigenous Canadian or if you're an indigenous Australian
• 38:13
  then yes it would be the Europeans that are mostly to blame for your you know the current position
• 38:21
  that your people are having to to struggle it but again that's back to my previous point of it
• 38:29
  really depends on the perspective of the person who's talking and what what their experience is
• 38:37
  so I'm just I'm just trying to caution from saying that you know this is the way it is like I
• 38:47
  understand that's the way it is in your perspective like from where you're standing it is common
• 38:54
  for white people or white supremacists to be blamed for all the ills in the world I understand
• 39:00
  that's your context and that's your perspective that's not my context and that's not my perspective
• 39:05
  because in the work that I do there are like no white people involved in the work that I do it's
• 39:11
  mostly either fearcraft you know theocratic nations theocracies law enforcement government
• 39:19
  education or it is misogyny it is men in general and sometimes women actually
• 39:28
  patriarchy so it's dealing with FGM and child marriage and forced hijab and and honor killings
• 39:36
  and things like that so it really just depends on who you are and what's the fight that you're
• 39:42
  fighting and what is your perspective and who you're seeing as the bad guy I mean unfortunately
• 39:47
  we don't live in a Disney movie and the bad guys don't all wear black hats and the good guys all
• 39:51
  wear white hats I think we're all wearing gray hats to be honest and I think that yes to have
• 39:57
  the conversation for in the West from the Western perspective I can understand them saying we only
• 40:03
  want to criticize us because we are the dominant majority and then criticizing any other groups
• 40:12
  is punching down because they're the minority I find I understand your perspective but when
• 40:19
  that becomes toxic is when someone like me or someone like the millions of other people who are
• 40:26
  actually coming from Muslim majority communities because let's not forget as I'm just the second
• 40:31
  largest religion on the planet it's not a tiny little minority group like people in the West
• 40:38
  like to pretend that it is when people like us start to speak up against our oppressors
• 40:45
  they look at us from the same lens that they're looking at themselves they're judging us by
• 40:51
  the same you know whatever spectrum they're using to judge themselves and they think that for us
• 40:58
  to speak up also makes us punching down it's like uh no we are very much punching up
• 41:06
  yeah yeah it's like the problem of being a minority inside a minority in in a culture where
• 41:13
  everybody is trying to defer to the wishes of the quote unquote minority without seeing that
• 41:19
  there's another minority inside the minority that's being impressed by that minority and
• 41:25
  in actual fact sometimes to defer to the minority just means to defer to the loudest person
• 41:30
  in the majority yeah in the majority of the minority or the loudest or the loudest bully inside
• 41:36
  that majority you know the the amount of the loudest loudspeaker and the best connections uh who
• 41:41
  may be right and rough caught over the 15 year old girls in his uh in his community let's talk
• 41:47
  about your early life i don't want to i don't want to leave that i hadn't realized that that your
• 41:51
  great uncle was the president of Egypt is that right yeah it's uh my yes my great uncle my mom's
• 42:00
  uncle yeah yeah uh what was growing up in the Egypt i mean he was there for a short amount of time
• 42:07
  but yes where'd you grow up and what were your parents like so i grew up in a Vancouver BC
• 42:16
  by the time i was born my family and like my parents uh marriage had already dissolved
• 42:23
  it was the third there was my sister first who was born in San Francisco and then my brother and
• 42:28
  I that were both born in Canada um and when i was about five or six years old my mom who was
• 42:39
  feeling lonely and you know looking for a community and a support system in Canada
• 42:46
  went to the local mosque not because she's at the time not because she was religious or anything
• 42:52
  but just because she was looking for i don't know other Arab speakers or something and um that's
• 42:59
  where she met this Egyptian man who was a fundamentalist Muslim and he was already married and
• 43:08
  already had three kids but he took my mom on as his concurrent second wife and that's when my
• 43:16
  life changed that's when everything went from you know pre him joining our lives it was playing
• 43:26
  with my friends um you know down the hallway in the same apartment building Chelsea and Lindsay
• 43:32
  we'd have our barbies and we'd all play together we'd go swimming we'd go bike riding we'd
• 43:38
  go to birthday parties you know we'd listen to music we just have the life of regular kids
• 43:43
  and once he joined our family it was like all of that is Haram all of that is forbidden so suddenly he was
• 43:54
  breaking my mom's records my mom used to love listening to a lot of country music so she had
• 44:00
  like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers and he would broke all her records and he sat us down on the
• 44:06
  carpet in front of him and tried to encourage us to break her records too and she just stood there
• 44:12
  and let him take over our lives she at the same time was undergoing a kind of a born-again experience
• 44:20
  so I mean was she become that exactly that that is exactly what happened she became a
• 44:26
  and born again Muslim her family in Egypt were like surprised and horrified at what was going on
• 44:32
  with her suddenly she's putting a hijab on she's studying Sharia it allows her to university Sharia
• 44:39
  meaning Islamic law and when you say the family in Egypt were horrified this is because they were
• 44:44
  secular in Egypt and they thought oh she's out off there in Canada leading this classic Canadian
• 44:51
  you know modern lifestyle and all of a sudden she hooks up with someone who seems more retrograde
• 44:56
  than the people that they would be associating with even in Egypt exactly so at that time in Egypt
• 45:03
  religion was pretty much relegated to the villages to the to the
• 45:09
  uneducated you know like progress was all like Cairo all of those cities right Iran even Kabul
• 45:16
  in Afghanistan like all these cities were progressing but the the big shift happened when the
• 45:23
  Islamists took over in Iran so once the Islamic Republic of Iran was established and they started
• 45:31
  forcing hijab on the women and all that that was kind of the beginning of this Islamist
• 45:38
  explosion that spread all across the Middle East so my mom's life followed that same trajectory so
• 45:48
  she was secular before this all of her family were secular before this and then in the early 80s
• 45:57
  you see a very vast difference well maybe not in the early 80s but throughout the 80s you see this
• 46:05
  just insurgents of Islamists everywhere and suddenly hijab is a lot more prevalent suddenly
• 46:14
  people are going to the mosque a lot more so like I was saying earlier before that
• 46:23
  religion was more relegated to the villages not at what you weren't really seeing a lot of
• 46:31
  religious conversations or religious clothing in the big cities but after this Islamist
• 46:40
  growth you see it everywhere so hijab went from so there's this video in the 50s with
• 46:47
  Abdu Nassoud who was the president at the time the Muslim Brotherhood who were you know the first
• 46:53
  group of Islamists when they went to him and they asked him to force all the women in Egypt to
• 47:00
  wear hijab he started laughing at them and then every all the men in parliament started laughing as
• 47:06
  well they thought it was such a joke like oh my god can you imagine trying to tell Egyptian women
• 47:10
  what to wear like ha ha ha and then of course by the 80s and 90s now easily 90% of women in Egypt
• 47:21
  are in hijab and we do have a 10% Christian population so pretty much every Muslim woman is in hijab
• 47:32
  there and that is a physical like that's a visual indication for for how religious the society has
• 47:42
  become so my mom went through that exact same she followed the exact same timeline so she met
• 47:49
  this guy when I guess it must have been 81 and and then she started to become more religious she
• 48:01
  she was ahead of the curve she was ahead of the rest of her family and initially they were like what
• 48:05
  we can't believe that she's gonna start wearing hijab because my mom was all about mini skirts and
• 48:11
  she wanted to move to San Francisco and her and my dad were all about the peace love and hippie
• 48:16
  era so like they just couldn't believe this shocking difference in this woman but soon after
• 48:23
  they all followed suit now all of my answer in hijab and all my cousins in Naqab too which covered
• 48:29
  which means the covering of their face so yeah it spread very effectively all over the country
• 48:37
  and all over the entire region and you meanwhile in Canada start going to an Islamic school
• 48:44
  at a mosque and stop being abused well the abuse started before I started going to the Islamic
• 48:53
  school but yes so I started going to an Islamic school and so that's it was like this really
• 49:02
  clear separation between us and them at that point so you can't be friends with the non-believers
• 49:08
  anymore so you're going to an Islamic school and it was more effective in separating us from
• 49:15
  the rest of the Canadian society because we were in a completely you were just in a bubble they
• 49:22
  call it a separatist society in in France and in the UK these days because that's a very common
• 49:28
  thing that happens because people in the west or western government seem to think that it's
• 49:34
  it's on them when the integration of Muslims doesn't happen into their countries but what they
• 49:40
  feel to realize is that it's a two-way street and a lot of fundamentalist Muslims do not want to
• 49:47
  integrate into your countries they want to take advantage of the what's available you know the
• 49:53
  safety the freedom the education the you know whatever but they don't want to
• 50:04
  tarnish their children with the ideas of liberalism inequality and you know women's rights
• 50:10
  and LGBTQ rights and things like that so they want to keep a separation between the
• 50:17
  and long story short you experienced this first hand because the police were all about your
• 50:23
  dad abusing you and that went to court but you're my stepdad you step my my my own father never
• 50:31
  never laid a hand on me him and my mom but the point was this this I guess a hypocrisy in the in
• 50:43
  the way that you saw the Canadian justice system deal with you versus what you imagined would have
• 50:47
  happened if you were a nice white girl because you were from a community where this sort of thing
• 50:52
  happens and the community has the right exactly yeah so it was the moral and cultural relativism that
• 50:57
  I was you know introduced to at the age of 13 so what had happened was when I one of my teachers
• 51:05
  alerted the authorities about the abuse that was happening to me at home um you know it went
• 51:12
  through a whole bunch of steps went through the police child services this and that and then
• 51:16
  eventually in in in family court the judge ruled that um because my family is from Egypt and
• 51:27
  because my family is Muslim or because my family is from a different culture that this is just the
• 51:32
  way that they express disciplining their children it might be different than the way the average
• 51:37
  Canadian might discipline their children but this is their culture and this is their business
• 51:41
  and so um he didn't take me out of that home and and so as I was expressing in my book
• 51:50
  what he was essentially telling me was you know had your parents been from Denmark or Germany or
• 51:55
  China or France then yeah I would have protected you but because you happened to be coming from
• 52:04
  this culture and this is how they insist is normal um for how they discipline kids
• 52:13
  then that's their business because that's your culture so you're just you know
• 52:19
  shit out of luck so yeah it was a very dark time and continued to be dark as you I mean you
• 52:26
  were wearing the handicap when when you were a young woman you got married to an extremist
• 52:34
  yeah so I was I was forced into a marriage with an extremist because as my mother said
• 52:41
  quote we had to find a man who was strong enough to control you um and so they chose
• 52:48
  more than an extremist they chose a terrorist he was an al-Qaeda terrorist um
• 52:54
  he's in prison in Egypt now but you know at the time this was pre 9-11 and uh I knew he had been
• 53:05
  in Afghanistan before he came to Canada but they convinced me that he was a paramedic driving a
• 53:12
  red crescent bus and that he was helping people and that he wasn't involved in any terrorism but
• 53:17
  of course eventually the truth came out when I was contacted by the Canadian intelligence
• 53:25
  when they told me who I was actually married to well have what I've been going to university
• 53:34
  and and learning I mean where it was a slow and gradual experience at what point did you
• 53:40
  realize this was uncomfortable um I think that it was it was in stages so first of all I had a
• 53:47
  daughter with him and he was talking about taking my daughter to Egypt to get FGM
• 53:53
  performed on her you mean genital mutilation yes great female gentleman go of FGM yeah yeah sorry
• 54:02
  so they were talking about well when she's you know five or six years old we'll take her to Egypt
• 54:09
  and we'll get it done and that was my first moment of realization that okay I need to get out of
• 54:20
  this I mean I had nothing but a high school education and I had I was cut off completely isolated
• 54:26
  from my friends or anybody who I could go to for support but I knew that I had to somehow
• 54:32
  get myself and my daughter out of that situation I just didn't have a plan um
• 54:37
  eventually through a long series of sorted events I was able to get myself and my daughter
• 54:45
  out of that house um away from him first level and then away from my family is the second level
• 54:53
  and then when her and I were finally alone that's when I was able to start going university
• 54:58
  and I do although I just finished trashing the Canadian government a moment ago
• 55:04
  I will say that I am very very grateful to have been in Canada because if it wasn't for them
• 55:10
  uh I wouldn't have been able to get student loans and to go to university like and I wouldn't
• 55:14
  have been able to better myself and so I did do that and I went to university and one of the courses
• 55:22
  that I took in university was called the history of religions and it basically focused on the
• 55:28
  three monotheistic religions and the reason why I took that course really was because I thought
• 55:33
  oh this will be an easy A my mom was the head of the Islamic studies department at the Islamic
• 55:38
  school and she made sure that we understood the religion inside and out and so I knew that at
• 55:45
  least a third of the curriculum I would ace and so I thought okay I'll just take this course
• 55:50
  not knowing that that course was going to change my life now while I'm in university taking this
• 55:57
  course 9-11 happened so it was a simultaneous you know both intellectual and emotional disruption
• 56:08
  that by the end of that year um I didn't want to call myself a Muslim anymore but I honestly
• 56:16
  didn't know that that was an option I thought that the what you could be was just a non-practicing
• 56:23
  Muslim so because they they really do it's crazy for me to think about this now but you really get
• 56:31
  raised with the belief that being a Muslim is an innate part of who you are
• 56:39
  and the option of not being a Muslim was like saying I don't want to be I mean I don't want to be
• 56:48
  five foot six anymore it seems like there's no consensus about which ethnicities are also religions
• 56:57
  and which religions are also ethnicities because Jews do that I mean right there there is definitely
• 57:03
  a sense of you know I'm a secular Jew but I don't think I can I'm not sure it's possible for me to
• 57:09
  disown my Jewishness in any more of a way possible for me to disown my I guess being a member of
• 57:17
  the LGBTQIA plus community which is like a term that I don't like in a community that I don't feel
• 57:22
  affinity with but it's just a biological reality of my life that I'm married to a male and so therefore
• 57:28
  you know like yeah but then you would never say that of a Catholic I mean of course a Catholic
• 57:33
  is being a Catholic yeah you know a piscopalian or something um and yeah maybe Islam sits
• 57:40
  somewhere in between depending on the eye of the beholder well they they don't but they like to
• 57:46
  act like they do so this is why so the thing is with with obviously being part being gay is
• 57:54
  who you are that is an innate part of who you are it's like saying I'm a man or I'm a woman or I have
• 58:02
  whatever big lips or I'm big feet but being Jewish also fits because it really is a tribe I know
• 58:14
  obviously there's it's it's it's a tribe of that has grown and there's lots of different
• 58:20
  groups within that tribe but it's still one tribe whereas with Muslims there is no tribe it's it is
• 58:27
  more parallel to Christianity or in that people from all over the world so like you could be Somali
• 58:38
  and Tunisian Saudi Arabian Afghani and you're all Muslim but you all speak different languages you
• 58:46
  all have completely different cultures you all have completely different histories like you're
• 58:51
  there's nothing that connects you except for the fact that of this religion so that's more like
• 58:58
  Christians or more like Catholics and then you're you know you're not going to look at a Catholic
• 59:02
  from Mexico and a Catholic person from Italy and think that they have anything more in common that
• 59:07
  they are that they're part of the same tribe I mean maybe our Arabs and Persians are our
• 59:12
  groupings that are closer to Jews in that respect than Muslim yes absolutely correct yeah yeah
• 59:19
  definitely yeah there's tons of different kinds of Arabs but that's the one umbrella term is
• 59:24
  Arab now that we've established your your biography and people understand we are from what
• 59:29
  we've left let's let's look back to the the sort of first question which is like where we kind
• 59:35
  of are now thinking about about Islam one thing one interesting thing that has happened since
• 59:41
  we last spoke is that since I'm on the subject of gay marriage of gayness gay marriage has been
• 59:47
  legalized across most of the rich world and one interesting thing in Australia was Australia was one
• 59:56
  of the few countries that put it to a vote instead of just passing it as an active parliament or
• 1:00:00
  having it uh fed decided in ports um so there was a national plebiscite an election are on yes or
• 1:00:07
  no and it passed with more than 70 percent but there was a lot of head scratching and supposed
• 1:00:14
  bafflement that the big cities were not as in favor of gay marriage as people had anticipated that
• 1:00:22
  they would be because the media elite thinks that they are everybody and the the latte sipping
• 1:00:29
  a shardonnay swilling uh progressive lefties who live in the center of uh Sydney and Melbourne
• 1:00:35
  are everywhere but of course the vast brawling suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne are full of lots of
• 1:00:41
  families who come from cultures where homosexuality is not cool at all and i'm not just talking about
• 1:00:48
  Muslim cultures there are also large swathes of uh southwest Sydney where there were uh
• 1:00:53
  Chinese Australians who were not crazy about gay marriage but you know significant i mean it
• 1:01:00
  was a very statistically significant factor the fact that you had Muslim suburbs in Sydney and
• 1:01:07
  Melbourne voting no and for some reason this took people by surprise as if like everybody who is
• 1:01:14
  an oppressed minority has to be on the same page as the university educated white elite progressive
• 1:01:21
  vanguard of of woke uh thought and i just wonder what you make of that and how you wrestle with that
• 1:01:28
  moving forward yeah so that that is a really frustrating thing that that tends to happen
• 1:01:34
  quite a bit and that's because they're confusing the person's identity with their ideas
• 1:01:41
  and so yes Muslim people will vote left or vote Democrat quite often because they're coming from
• 1:01:48
  minority groups and that's where they're going to feel the most protected or the most safe for
• 1:01:53
  the most looked after are from the left but the truth is that their ideas align much more with the
• 1:02:05
  conservative Christians on the right that's where they're going to that's where the alignment happens
• 1:02:10
  yes the obviously the anti lgbtq stuff the um the anti women stuff you know the the whole traditional
• 1:02:21
  trap wife i don't know if that's a big thing and in australia but that's a big thing over here
• 1:02:27
  is that a is that a Christian thing or is that yes it's a Christian thing about how a traditional
• 1:02:32
  wife needs to you know her her role in this world is to serve her husband and to make babies and
• 1:02:39
  it just sounds like a slam it's just all right now i haven't seen it here but i think it's similar
• 1:02:43
  media from in in the u.s it seems yeah it's pretty quite interesting yeah and also the
• 1:02:49
  they're shared love of anti-semitism like there's a lot of things that they have in common in their
• 1:02:55
  ideas hiding with Jews united i find it's historic yeah yeah unfortunately true yes
• 1:03:03
  uh yeah because that's being seen on the left as well so but but what i mean to say is that they
• 1:03:08
  really do because they are religious conservatives what i mean it just makes sense that they would be
• 1:03:15
  aligned their ideas would be aligned together but people start to get confused um because they like
• 1:03:22
  you said they assume that all minority groups just because they vote left or just because they vote
• 1:03:28
  democrat that that means that they agree with those ideas on the left but they most certainly
• 1:03:33
  do not and you know that can be illustrated by the fact that 15 Muslim majority countries will
• 1:03:39
  kill people just for being gay you get executed for that crime i also saw you joking on twitter
• 1:03:47
  about a video of a couple of guys trying to eat a kebab which was hilarious the the relationship
• 1:03:58
  between masculinity and the more eroticism and homophobia in highly
• 1:04:07
  masculineized sexist cultures like conservative Islam can you explain it to me like you walk around
• 1:04:15
  I remember being in Egypt i was in Egypt just before the revolution i mean you know the last
• 1:04:21
  revolution uh and was quite struck by how kind of gay the guys seemed to bangate with each other in
• 1:04:28
  the most conservative mosques what's that all about yeah yeah um i'm gonna be honest with you because
• 1:04:37
  of the gender segregation most people's first sexual experience is with somebody of the same sex
• 1:04:46
  just because that's who they have access to what like an English private school environment or
• 1:04:57
  something yeah yeah yeah so i i mean i don't know but i mean i i i i don't actually it's it's
• 1:05:09
  any kind of society that suppresses sexuality to the extent that it is suppressed in
• 1:05:17
  Muslim majority countries is just a hot spot it's it's just a hotbed of of of i mean it's not
• 1:05:29
  i don't even know how to say this like it's in in Muslim majority countries there is the outside
• 1:05:37
  voice and there is the inside voice so if you look at countries like Saudi Arabia for example
• 1:05:42
  men and women are completely separated men are dressed completely in white women are dressed
• 1:05:46
  completely in black they like to create this um vision that like just visually you look at it
• 1:05:54
  and you think wow these people are so pious they're they're so uh whatever but the truth is
• 1:06:03
  that the the kinds of stuff that's happening in the underworld in these countries is
• 1:06:12
  i mean it's just beyond like i'm not they they're not even necessarily gay or not gay it's it's not
• 1:06:19
  even a sexuality it's just insanity so one of the examples i'll give is the culture of bachabazi
• 1:06:30
  in Afghanistan where they take young boys and they dress them up as girls and they put makeup on
• 1:06:37
  them and then they rape them it is it is an actual part of their culture so i don't know if these
• 1:06:44
  men would necessarily be pedophiles rapists or gay or whatever they would identify as i think that
• 1:06:54
  it's just created like this this this sexual repression where um yeah it just ends up
• 1:07:06
  becoming really unhealthy and and very toxic right right and i mean even quite apart from any
• 1:07:14
  any actual behavior i mean i was just sort of pointing to the the cultural i guess anytime there's
• 1:07:21
  a highly macho sexist bro kind of culture and this could be in like a a rugby club as well
• 1:07:34
  you know they're they just does become this kind of romantic sort of expression of masculinity
• 1:07:41
  at borders on the uh yeah the borders on the homo erotic um so that's that let me let me also
• 1:07:48
  pick your brain about Afghanistan and Pakistan and and uh iraq i mean i saw that you're being
• 1:07:57
  literally the Pakistani government is trying to take your tweet and your tweets are being banned in
• 1:08:03
  Pakistan for causing offent uh islam this is not an encouraging no i'm just so used to it by now
• 1:08:15
  it's hilarious like i'm not Pakistani you have absolutely no control over me i'm not a
• 1:08:20
  Pakistani citizen i've never been to Pakistan i do not plan on ever going to Pakistan but it's just
• 1:08:26
  funny how they have a temper tantrum trying to control women across the planet um because i was
• 1:08:31
  tweeting with another woman about the misogyny under islam and so they felt that that was so offensive
• 1:08:38
  and needed to be hidden off of twitter from from Pakistani eyes this is the uh this is the
• 1:08:45
  scandalous uh cartoon that you tweeted so this is the the the cartoon has a woman who seems to be
• 1:08:54
  ripping the Quran in half maybe that's the offensive thing i'm not sure but the caption says
• 1:08:59
  since i left islam i discovered that i'm more powerful and this religion had me believe
• 1:09:03
  i'm not worth half of a man nor less intelligent than a man no man has the right to beat me or rape me
• 1:09:10
  i was lied to and you write the caption what are some of your favorite parts of being ex muslim share
• 1:09:15
  the biggest to the smallest joys one of my biggest is learning to trust myself recognizing my value
• 1:09:21
  loving myself knowing that no man has a right to beat me or rape me no matter what some dusty old
• 1:09:26
  book says and that was so offensive that twitter sent you a warning saying in the interest of
• 1:09:33
  transparency we're writing to inform you that twitter has received a request from pta regarding
• 1:09:37
  your twitter account that claims the following content violates the laws of pakistan and then
• 1:09:43
  links to that that violates the laws of pakistan and that and twitter
• 1:09:49
  lights to that and takes it down in pakistan yeah yeah this is why i pack standing people writing to
• 1:09:55
  me privately all the time they cannot publicly retweet or like my tweets they can't publicly support
• 1:10:05
  the women in iran who are who are you know protesting against their government there they cannot
• 1:10:12
  publicly speak their mind because the actual telecom company of pakistan that control like that
• 1:10:21
  they are getting access to the internet from is what is controlling their their speech or controlling
• 1:10:29
  their clicks so if they were to click like on one of these things they would lose access on their
• 1:10:35
  phones to the internet from this telecom company so it's really very controlling and and they
• 1:10:44
  are just drunk on that control and so they're trying to extend it even beyond pakistan
• 1:10:51
  what's the biggest challenge for you and your work at the moment staying positive i think is the
• 1:10:58
  biggest challenge continuing to do this work and feeling like i'm not screaming into a dark
• 1:11:08
  empty chasm and things are moving forward and things are progressing i think that's why i have my
• 1:11:16
  podcast called forgotten feminists where i speak to different women who have overcome that really
• 1:11:22
  helps to to feed my optimism and obviously my work with free hearts free minds is
• 1:11:33
  incredibly rewarding because then we're actually changing lives one life at a time but
• 1:11:40
  you know you you feel like you're actually contributing something positive to the world
• 1:11:46
  um yeah so it's it's hard to stay positive with all the darkness out there but sometimes there's
• 1:11:52
  good news i don't know if you noticed today i tweeted about a woman uh yesamon in iran who was
• 1:12:00
  imprisoned by the iranian government in 2018 because she was not wearing hijab in public
• 1:12:07
  and then her mother this is the just the heartbreaking story her mother said
• 1:12:13
  well if you're going to arrest my daughter i'm also going to walk around without hijab and then
• 1:12:17
  you can arrest me too so that i can be with her and so the two of them have spent since 2018 they've
• 1:12:23
  been imprisoned together and they were just released so that was a you know some happy news for today
• 1:12:30
  extraordinary then uh on coming back to the very first question that i asked like
• 1:12:35
  things better or worse in the west than they were seven years ago why were you optimistic initially
• 1:12:41
  your initial response was yeah why yeah well i think it is getting better because we are getting
• 1:12:49
  our voices out there a lot more than we were able to before i think prior to social media
• 1:12:55
  people were limited to the powerful voices the ones that had the microphones the ones who had
• 1:13:02
  access to getting on cnn or bbc like they they're their voices mattered their perspectives mattered
• 1:13:11
  but the rest of us were just hidden and shut up um but with a lot of social media campaigns that we've
• 1:13:20
  had over the past seven years the main one starting with masi alina jade from iran she started
• 1:13:28
  a hashtag called my stealthy freedom and it was about these women that were secretly pulsating
• 1:13:33
  them pictures of themselves without hijab and quite often it would just be the back of their heads
• 1:13:38
  because they didn't want their faces on social media but they wanted to like feel a tiny sense of
• 1:13:43
  freedom and when that happened like that was like 2017-2018 that was like mind blowing for me like
• 1:13:51
  it just it was it was i could not believe that these women were doing this like their bravery was
• 1:13:57
  just beyond and then there were women in saadi arabia that were posting videos of them burning their
• 1:14:02
  necobbs stepping on the hood on like all sorts of these pictures and videos were coming on social
• 1:14:10
  media shared with our hashtag free from hijab um we have no hijab day on february first so we have all
• 1:14:18
  of these campaigns where we're like encouraging people to speak up against the the tyranny that
• 1:14:25
  they're living under and because you no longer feel alone like i know if you read my book you
• 1:14:31
  probably got the sense that i felt very isolated i felt very scared because i felt very alone
• 1:14:37
  and so one little tiny voice you know it's too scary to speak up so you just bite your tongue
• 1:14:43
  but because we're all out here on social media supporting each other and sharing each other's
• 1:14:47
  videos and pictures and stories um it motivates others to also share and then you notice the swell
• 1:14:56
  of people in all of these countries that are so unhappy and they've been silenced for so long so
• 1:15:06
  i think when their voices started to get louder obviously with what's happened in iran that
• 1:15:12
  and like nothing could have been more clear to the world um that has really helped to change the
• 1:15:22
  the dominating perspective before that that people were quiet in these countries because they
• 1:15:28
  were happy or because they were fine with it um yeah so in my organization the two groups that we
• 1:15:34
  help the most are ex-small some so people free thinkers people who have denounced a slam
• 1:15:41
  and people from the LGBT community because they're that's another group of people who
• 1:15:46
  will be executed for their crime of being gay and you never used to hear from them before because
• 1:15:52
  of course the last thing the world they want to do is to be public um but we had some examples
• 1:15:59
  like this young woman in Egypt who had a concert held up a rainbow flag and of course she was
• 1:16:07
  arrested for it and luckily she was able to seek asylum in canada but she after that committed
• 1:16:15
  suicide because she was so she wrote a letter describing about how sad she was to leave her country
• 1:16:23
  she wanted to stay in can in sorry she wanted to stay in Egypt and fight and help her country to
• 1:16:29
  progress but instead she was forced to go to this cold country in the north where she didn't know
• 1:16:34
  the culture or the language or the people and um and and so you know it was it was an incredibly
• 1:16:40
  sad story but it brought attention and every year we remember her and we talk about her again
• 1:16:49
  and it brings attention to the fact that there are so many people suffering quietly because if they
• 1:16:54
  open their mouth then they're risking their lives or you know if they're not going to be executed
• 1:17:03
  then there's like you were saying before there's all sorts of other risks that they're taking like
• 1:17:08
  what happened to Sarah yeah so I think social media has really helped to bring our voices out there
• 1:17:15
  I think that's why I think it's I feel it's getting better it's it's it's so good to talk to you
• 1:17:21
  again I want to ask you some first date questions which we always end with which is just a collection
• 1:17:26
  of completely random questions for like a Rorschach test to get to know you better uh like
• 1:17:32
  it was the state of your life what's the what's the best meal that you've had?
• 1:17:38
  okay the best this is going to be like the most lame answer but the very first time
• 1:17:44
  the very first time so I had an asparagus soup in a French restaurant and it was my very first time
• 1:17:54
  having French food and I remember that clearly I was like in grade six or something my dad was
• 1:18:02
  living in Montreal and we went to a French restaurant and it was like the most divine food I had
• 1:18:08
  ever tasted so that to me is my memory yeah fantastic did you go and visit from Vancouver did you
• 1:18:15
  go to Montreal much? I have been to Montreal and I've also been to France and I've had food in
• 1:18:23
  actual France so yes it lives up to all the high real friends not just Canadian friends real friends
• 1:18:29
  not the fake Canadian friends so that's very charming of Montreal what what appliance in your house is
• 1:18:37
  the most active that is where we will leave the wonderful yes ma'amma on the free subscription if
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