Sarah Haider, a Pakistani-American writer, public speaker, and political activist, discusses religious dissent and her exit from Islam while elaborating how girls’ and women’s rights under Islam are negatively effected. Noting the patterns and political effects of religion in the Arabo-Islamic world, Haider critiques how the left has consistently moved to any eschew criticism of this religion by pretending that any critique is necessarily a generalisation or a result of colonialism. Haider maintains that with such rationale, nothing would be analysable since scrutiny depends upon noticing patterns and specific paradigms. Discussing the parallels between the repression of women’s freedom in the Muslim world and women in west who are today hounded for pushing back on gender identity, Haider examines how women’s rights around the topic of material reality are being restricted in the west through the “derangement” and enforcement of gender ideology that “has the potential to undo some of the gains of feminists in the west.”

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