Topless Jihad: Why Femen Is Right.

Topless Jihad: Why Femen Is Right.HT: The Atlantic.Since launching its "topless jihad" protests across Europe and elsewhere on April 4, Femen has stirred up a media maelstrom, with commentators, mostly Muslim men and women living in the West, taking to the airwaves or the Internet on CNN, the New York Times, Al Jazeera English, and the Huffington Post (and elsewhere) to call the group racist, classist, imperialist, colonialist, Eurocentric, Islamophobic, orientalist, neo-orientalist, cowardly, or, at best, naïve, and foolish.

At least one of those opining veered into infelicitous nonsense: According to Ilana Alazzah, a Muslim activist, Femen's protest recalled "blackface," with its version of feminism "excluding women of all formats," even those women who "don't have vaginas." Another detractor, the Arab-American blogger Laila Alawa, contended (falsely) that the group told "Muslim women to sit down and shut up." The Canadian writer Murtaza Hussain, after noting, with apparent portent, that Femen activists are "mostly white Europeans," considered that their approach "reeks of arrogance."

Even the usually balanced blogger Hind Makki availed herself of hyperbole, in announcing, on Al Jazeera English, that Femen "really criminalizes every single Muslim man out there." A "Muslim Women Against Femen" page appeared on Facebook, and a "Muslimah Pride Day" was proclaimed. The overall message to Femen has been, in fact, nothing less than "Sit down and shut up." Your skin color and European provenance disqualify you from expressing views on Islam and how Muslim women are treated in the Islamic world.

Yet abuse perpetrated against women in Islam's name lies at the heart of the problem. Only occasionally did the critics note that.

The media has long fostered the view that religion should be de facto exempt from the logical scrutiny applied to other subjects. I am not disputing the right to practice the religion of one's choice, but rather the prevailing cultural rectitude that puts faith beyond the pale of commonsense review, and (in Amina's case), characterizes as "Islamophobic" criticism of the criminal mistreatment of a young woman for daring to buck her society's norms, or of Femen for attacking the forced wearing of the hijab.

Femen, and in particular, Inna Shevchenko, are defying this retrograde rectitude. With protests designed to puncture auras of sanctity, Femen has repeatedly targeted religious leaders -- the Pope, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, and Belgium's archbishop André-Jozef Léonard, among others. (Shevchenko herself is wanted by authorities in her native Ukraine on charges of "offending religious sentiment" by sawing down a cross in support of the jailed Russian punk band Pussy Riot.) So it should come as no surprise that she took part in one of the most heated debates on women, Islam, and the hijab in recent years, butting heads with the Arab-American Muslim blogger, Laila Alawa, who was coiffed in a headscarf.

Shevchenko began by declaring how pleased she was to hear so many Muslim women speak out, even if it was against Femen. The moderator then cited acid verbiage about Islam from her blog post.

"We are not calling to stone anyone," Shevchenko replied. "They are calling to stone our activist." Femen's problem with Muslim headscarves, she said, centered on whether wearing them was voluntary, adding that the only reason Femen was discussing Islam at all is the "blood, fear, and dead women's bodies" to which it has led, a graphic factual assertion not even Alawa dared contest (though she began to tear up). Despite attempts by the moderator to defuse tensions, Shevchenko demanded of Alawa, who had called herself a feminist, "How can you wear your scarf with so much proudness . . . like it's the hat of Che Guevara? It symbolizes blood and all the crimes that are based on your religion, even if you don't support them . . . . If you're a feminist, if you're for liberation, then be brave [enough] to say that we are against that and take off your scarf until the moment that your scarf will not be a symbol of crime."

The moderator called these words "insensitive," and Alawa, still visibly shaken, tried to explain what wearing a scarf meant to her. Yet Shevchenko doubled down.

"I really don't care how many scarves you wear . . . until the moment when that scarf is symbolizing something, something like blood, something like death." She again urged Alawa to "take [the headscarf] off until the moment when it will not be a symbol of the death of your sisters."

"What you're saying is quite loaded here!" responded the shocked moderator. Alawa, even more shaken up, offered a rambling response, and the show drew to a close.

By now it should be clear that with Femen, we are dealing with something new. Femen originated in Ukraine, born of young women who grew up without exposure to the West's culture of political correctness and who have scant respect for it; from their country's Soviet past, they know how deleterious the stifling of free speech can be.

Now that they have moved to the West, Femen has courageously broken rules and enlivened the debate over religion's role in our world. Its activists are charting a new route for public discourse about women and religion, and making it an unabashedly universal discourse, venturing into realms where they may be hated, and they may yet pay a high price for this. But that they have gotten people talking, even shouting and crying, is undeniable, and it is good; only through debate and discussion, sometimes painful, often unsettling, will we progress.

Far from discouraging the discourse they have initiated, we should welcome it.Read the full story here.