Mick Hartley

From the National Secular Society:

The Irwin Prize for Secularist of the Year 2017 has been awarded to Yasmin Rehman, the secular campaigner for women's rights.

Yasmin has spent much of the past two years to get the Government to recognise the dangers faced by ex-Muslims and Ahmadi Muslims from Islamic extremists. She has used her own home as a shelter for women at risk of domestic abuse….

Secularism was not opposed to faith, she said, before describing how she had been shut down as 'Islamophobic' and "racist" despite being a Muslim herself. There is anti-Muslim sentiment in society, she said, but 'Islamophobia' was being used to silence and curtail speech.

Yasmin said she didn't know if she could ever go back to Pakistan because of her work in the UK, while in the UK it was "impossible" to get funding for secularist work. She asked where women could possibly turn if they faced religiously-justified abuse. Muslim women were left with nothing but religious, sharia arbitration, while faith healing was spreading, with ill women being controlled by male relatives and religious leaders and told to pray instead of seeking medical treatment.

FGM and honour-based violence were being dismissed as "cultural", while in fact polygamist and temporary marriages were Islamic practises, she said. There is a slippery road from this to child marriage, and there should be "no space" in the UK for these practises.

It is astonishing how little support such people get – in particular, as we've seen, from those on the left, who you'd think would be at the forefront of the struggle against the kind of subjugation that so many Muslim women endure. But western feminists don't seem interested, and the fabricated charge of "Islamophobia" serves well enough to silence the rest.