Unveiled
By Yasmine Mohammed
Author: Yasmine Mohammed
Rating: ★★★
Excerpt: He took pity on me. He knew that my mother had done this. He understood that she had fucked me over. [He] was involved in bombings that killed hundreds of people…[and] had more of a heart than my own mother.
“Serve the fucking soup!”
I had no choice to dip the ladle in again as he watched me. It emerged as it had twice before.
“What is this?” he whispered menacingly.
“I … er … had so much to do. This pregnancy makes me tired. I asked Mom to help with the chicken.”
“What? You’re going to try to blame this on me?”
Blame what? How would she know what I was going to say? She was still sitting at the table. How could she see what was in that ladle? Up until that moment, I had thought it was an honest mistake. I wasn’t sure how she could possibly have dumped all that in by accident, but I just couldn’t fathom the alternative. Now, I had no choice but to see the truth.
All those years of making excuses for her. Thinking I misunderstood. Accepting her rationales. Continuing to give her my trust. Continuing to vie for her love. Blaming myself. Hating myself. Accepting that I was a failure. Struggling to appease her. Putting her wants and needs before my own. It all came crashing down in this one clear incident that I had absolutely no way of denying. I looked up at him, expecting him to finish me off. But no physical blow to the head could compare to the inner pain I was feeling.
And then, the weirdest thing happened. He said, “It’s okay. Let’s just skip the soup. What else is for dinner?”
He took pity on me. He knew that my mother had done this. He understood that she had fucked me over. He saw in my eyes that I knew, too. He knew her hope was to witness yet another beating. And as I would scream for her, as he pulled my hair and punched my face, she would say, as she always did: “Shut up! The neighbours will hear you! Do you want him to go to prison?”
This evil man, who I would later learn was involved in bombings that killed hundreds of people, a man who had been involved in the biggest terrorist court case in Egyptian history — second only to the court case around the assassination of President Anwar Sadat — had more of a heart than my own mother.
I became familiar with Yasmine Mohammed through Sam Harris’ podcast where her story, trapped in an abusive, religiously-oriented household; left to child abuse by Canadian child services out of “respect for cultural differences;” married off to an al-Qaeda cash mule / jihadi; raised by a narcissist; battered and beaten by every man in her household; etc., was told in excruciating detail. I put a hold on the book at the library a while back and it came up last week.
Mohammed’s tale has two principal antagonists: the fundamentalist style of Islam practiced by her mother and her mother’s personality disorder (narcissism). Her tale of woe at the hands of the latter fits in with many abuse-survival stories. Towards their relationship’s horrible climax she comes to understand that the reason her mother never acted to save her from humiliations or beatings or to comfort her was because she didn’t like her and was quite possibly in competition with her. Her mother’s unconscionably cruelty (if not outright psychopathy) lead to her giving advice that could have lead to Yasmine’s infant’s death and advice to Yasmine’s sister that, after an episiotomy, the sister sit in salt water — literally salting one of the most painful wounds imaginable. Her outright menace and malevolence is so vast that I immediately leapt to: “What mental illness does she have.”
If Yasmine’s mother’s sadism was an art, their shared religion was the medium and motifs through which she prosecuted it. This leads to Yasmine’s criticism of Islamic practice and the abuse it harbored in her home and community. She, over the sounds of millions of pluralist liberals (like me) blanching, explains why it should be possible to criticize a religion. She notes that there’s little to no “cultural overlap” between someone in sub-Saharan Africa and an Uighur in China. What does unite them is their religious practice.
Mohammed realizes how difficult it will be to win readers to her argument in the post-#woke world of 2020. Do Westerners still feel like they have standing to make the moral arguments that some religious practices are less harmful than others?
“Seriously, are you kidding me? We’re [Muslim literalists] calling for your death, and you’re concerned that our feelings might be hurt?”"
Her appeal works on human rights grounds: she chronicles in painful transparency being locked in rooms, being beaten into miscarriage, and the surreal day when she wakes up and sees her ex-husband’s company’s memo letterhead fluttering in the rubble of a destroyed al-Qaeda safe-house.
After nakedly covering the pain of her home life and religion, the final third of the book covers her attempts at recovery and moving on. Ultimately Yasmine breaks off contact with her family and becomes an atheist. She says, “It was easy to see the irrationality in the trinity or in revering cows, but when that irrationality is your own, it’s harder to recognize.”
Mohammed’s story reminds me that for adherents who tout their creed’s broad-mindedness or inclusivity, those features are not in the literal letters of the documents (she has in mind the Abrahamaic faiths) or in a thoughtful decision or revelation to moderate; those victories are the victories of reason suggesting that Bronze- and Iron-Age models for morality are ridiculous and should only live within an orbit circumscribed by reason (preferably a very small circle).
Notes
{
"title": "Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam",
"author": "Yasmine Mohammed",
"highlightCount": 38,
"noteCount": 1,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "My life is not politically correct. I do not fit the preferred narrative. My life story is an uncomfortable truth, and people much prefer their comfortable lies.",
"location": 199,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Repeating the rhythmic patterns and hypnotically moaning the foreign words during the five daily prayers keep us forever in line.",
"location": 354,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I was angry that my mother had gotten to live such a glamorous life while I was forced to study surahs from the Quran,",
"location": 493,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Why didn’t she want me to have the same freedoms she had?",
"location": 495,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Because she was only Islamically, not legally, married to him, she could collect social assistance as a single mother and the government ignored the fact that she was married to this man because to question it would be racist or something.",
"location": 515,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I must have been mistaken.",
"location": 532,
"annotation": "Gaslit as control"
},
{
"highlight": "In her depressed and confused state, the simplicity and order of Islam must have been so enticing.",
"location": 559,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "She didn’t want to be responsible for making decisions. She wanted Allah to make all the decisions",
"location": 564,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And we were left to be raised by a narcissist who allowed a monster into our lives because it served her ends.",
"location": 581,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "she would never stand up for me. She would never defend me from his beatings.",
"location": 595,
"annotation": "Heartbreak."
},
{
"highlight": "she grew up in an environment where she learned that men were the masters and women their property; therefore, her transition to becoming a Muslim woman was just a short jaunt.",
"location": 681,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Eib! Eib!” It was the only word I heard more often than haram.",
"location": 735,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Girls are all hearing this because the family’s honour lies with the girls in the family—specifically between the legs of the girls in the family.",
"location": 742,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I knew about the verses of the Quran that forbid Muslims to be friends with Jews and Christians or any nonbelievers. Quran 5:51 says “O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them. God guides not the people of the evildoers.”",
"location": 813,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Child marriage is therefore rampant in Muslim-majority countries.",
"location": 908,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The Quran and Hadith are chock-full—chock-full—of violence.",
"location": 981,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The reason why all those young and women so quickly joined ISIS was because, just like me, they were raised hearing about how it was their duty to join the ummah against the nonbelievers.",
"location": 1105,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Hijab is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the physical representation of the subjugation and dehumanization and absolute gender apartheid that is commonplace in many parts of the Muslim-majority world.",
"location": 1171,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The judge ruled that corporal punishment wasn’t against the law in Canada, and due to our “culture,” sometimes those punishments can be more severe than in the average Canadian household.",
"location": 1291,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "There is no greater stupidity or double standard today. We need to look at the action, the incident, not the skin colour or ethnicity or religion of the person performing the action. That is irrelevant. An immoral act is immoral regardless of who is doing it!",
"location": 1310,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "My mom is a strange paradox. I used to call her the persecuted princess. She would manage to somehow be superior yet simultaneously the victim. It took me a long time to identify this dichotomy.",
"location": 2067,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Christopher Hitchens called it the “horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and self-pity.”",
"location": 2086,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Wearing a niqab you feel like you’re in a portable sensory deprivation chamber.",
"location": 2318,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I wasn’t sure how she could possibly have dumped all that in by accident, but I just couldn’t fathom the alternative. Now, I had no choice but to see the truth.",
"location": 2414,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "That is the power of brainwashing. It overrides your natural, instinctual, human reactions of love and empathy. It demands that you suppress these instincts.",
"location": 2544,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the story of Abraham and his willingness to slaughter his son for God. That is not virtue. That is madness.",
"location": 2546,
"annotation": "Why do so many religions make a virtue out of this tale of violating biology's most essential demand: protect the defenseless? What sort of monstrous credos are these?"
},
{
"highlight": "What kind of bloodthirsty, maniacal god would make such a demand of its creation? It’s like a scene out of the most horrific of horror movies, too terrifying to even imagine. Yet this was the pinnacle of virtue: to be willing to sacrifice your child for God.",
"location": 2547,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Would I never escape this life? I grew up in a home where I was abused, I married a man who abused me, and I escaped that to a home where my brother abused me.",
"location": 2933,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This had to stop. I had to end this cycle. I would not allow her to be on the receiving end of this one day because of my inability to protect her from that life.",
"location": 2937,
"annotation": "Shockingly a _mother_ is rebelling against the Abraham story. Instead of sacrificing her child to God's hands-on-Earth, she's flouting that and taking the child into a series of rational paths that will help her never have to bear the pain that Yasmine is bearing."
},
{
"highlight": "That was the first time I realized that I was the only one standing in my own way. I had to get past the fear that had been burned into my brain. They all wanted me to believe that I couldn’t make it on my own, and I had believed them. But, oh, the sudden delicious knowledge that I could! And they didn’t know that I knew!",
"location": 3163,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It was easy to see the irrationality in the trinity or in revering cows, but when that irrationality is your own, it’s harder to recognize.",
"location": 3324,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I felt like asking the Dean, “Seriously, are you kidding me? We’re calling for your death, and you’re concerned that our feelings might be hurt?”",
"location": 3388,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "had phoned her a couple of times since then from a safe, undisclosed distance. But not long after that dreadful day, I finally had to accept that there was no point in trying to keep the relationship.",
"location": 3594,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "These days, ex-Muslims have social media to support and guide them—the path is still dark and winding, but at least it’s not as lonely.",
"location": 3678,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I didn’t want people to get wind of the fact that I was, or rather had been, a Muslim. I was living in a country governed by Sharia. The punishment for apostasy was death. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. This is the most dangerous part about Islam today: Sharia.",
"location": 3704,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I was a strong woman. I was the only woman strong enough to be a single mom in such a misogynistic society. I became the woman that I wanted to be. I became her so well that at one point I realized I wasn’t faking it anymore. I was her. I’d conjured up exactly who I wanted to be, and I was her.",
"location": 3822,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "was left with this indignant need for her to apologize and accept and take responsibility for all the pain she caused me. I am so thankful to say that I am finally over all of that. I do not want or need anything from her.",
"location": 3944,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I am sad that I wasn’t born into a loving family, but I am certainly not alone in that. A lot of people grow up with rotten parents, but they still turn out to be very successful human beings.",
"location": 3962,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}