Reddit mentions of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

> if it didn't go down well with your family and friends

The internet is funny. I respect your position in the above kerfuffle, and I was appalled enough at your opponent's intransigence, ignorance and intellectual dishonesty -- enough to comment at the end of your feud. I spend a fair bit of time thinking and researching these ideas. I am becoming increasingly disappointed by the hordes of vociferous people who think they are virtuous culture warriors, but who are so low on information about Islamic texts, sociology and anthropology, that they have no business talking about it.

Unquestionably, aside from reading both the Koran and the Life of the Prophet (preferably together, so you can read the Surah in chronological order, which are otherwise mixed up and unintelligible in the Koran as it is by itself), the most important thing any non-Muslim can do to learn is to read the sociology of Islam and most importantly, listen themselves to what Muslims and exMuslims actually say. Unquestionably, r/izlam and r/exmuslim, respectively, are the best places to do that. The religious supremacism and backwardness on display in r/izlam is just as astonishing as the endless horror stories in r/exmuslim. Lurking in these subs (along with r/islam and r/progressive_islam) has provided me with endless insights into Islamic religious culture -- frankly, most of them far more depressing and pessimistic than most Western people could even imagine.

The funny part is, I am a culturally Christian atheist, raised in a secular household in the US -- a household which celebrates Christmas by giving each other books by Dawkins. It is embarrassing the way people make assumptions about other's cultural and ideological background on Reddit. Don't worry about it in this case.

I do hope you continue your study. The intellectual rhetorical landscape has been badly confused by social science's erroneous notion's about cultural relativism, colonial guilt and the rejection of universalist epistemology (ideas about knowledge that apply to everyone in the world). As such, many extremely vocal people are incapable of understanding that the Arab cultural imperialism that is the world-wide Islamic Revival is a pernicious vehicle for some of the most harmful and retrograde elements of Arab culture. I highly recommend the book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution to illustrate this, although the author is annoying with her fashionable identity politics.

My point is that things have gotten so bad rhetorically, that the very real problem of huge, insular, communities of Muslims with retrograde values in Europe (I now live in Wales, in the UK, and I live a couple of blocks from a Mosque which since opening, has visibly spawned a culture of niqab wearing religious supremacists I see in my own neighborhood every day) -- is being bizarrely ignored. The very idea of concern over the proliferation of what is essentially an Arab version of the Ku-Klux-Klan, has been demonized as an irrational "conspiracy theory", currently marginalized as "The Great Replacement". Those of us -- even die-hard lefties like me -- wishing to mobilize civil society to oppose community groups that flagrantly reject human rights, beat their children if they don't pray, commit honor killing, FGM and form sex-grooming gangs literally everywhere they form -- are marginalized by this idiocy.

It is important that you keep fighting. But it is wildly more important that you keep learning -- as we all must.

EDIT: a word