Thread by @memarsadeghi

While Iranian women are braving arrest & violent repression to defy draconian religious dress codes, gender apartheid,& day-to-day humiliations, college campuses have either looked the other way...
#InternationalWomensDay
quillette.com/2019/01/20/the…

or asked us to admire those women who adhere to Islamist norms in defiance of “Westernization.” These ostentatious displays of cross-cultural intersectional tolerance are effectively silencing and denigrating the courageous uprising of women...

denied the most basic freedoms and opportunities, and at a time when American women have never been more free and more able to help less fortunate women in other parts of the world.

Though it is barely recognized by Western feminists, the Iranian women’s movement is at the forefront of a valiant struggle for human dignity against a fascist ideology determined to deny Muslim girls &women the fundamental human rights and freedoms rightly cherished in the West.

The defeat of Islamist politics and the global advancement of women’s rights are in no measure guaranteed but are, rather, wholly reliant on those heroic souls—above all free thinking women—with the courage to denounce medieval gender doctrines.

In the halls of academe, the struggles of Iranian women are more likely to elicit embarrassment about the Global South’s naive embrace of Enlightenment norms than solidarity with the universality of their cause.

In the name of a pious commitment to self-criticism, Western elites prefer to embrace the headscarf rather than risk the arrogance of imperial judgement.

But their selectively applied moral relativism only helps to confer a perverse legitimacy on practises like child marriage, domestic violence and marital rape, stoning, and unequal treatment before the law...

which are, it is implied, culturally authentic and therefore superior to the hypocrisies of the West’s imperfect egalitarianism. In this way, not only are the socio-economic achievements of Western women diminished, but the struggles of women in places like Iran are scorned.