“The man whips the soles of my feet, his favorite spot. I am 6 years old, and this is my punishment for not memorizing the surahs (chapters) of the Koran properly, ”Yasmine narrates on the first page of her book, Unveiled. How progressivism legitimizes radical Islam (Libros del Zorzal). From a very young age she already felt pain, threats and terror on her skin. “Only the filthiest whores want to walk around naked exposing their bodies for all men to desire!” her mother yelled when Yasmine wondered why she had to wear a hijab. She had been a girl born and raised in Canada, in a western city, even though her family roots were from Egypt.
Yasmine lived between violence, sexual abuse, humiliation, prohibitions (haram) of all kinds... and the sad thing was that her own mother consented to it, the figure she considered the great example to follow and her trusted person. Being a woman is not easy. It never has been, and less so for those women who have been born within a patriarchy that keeps them submissive to a regime, a culture or a religion. But Yasmine Mohammed has managed to summon up the courage and courage to collect her moving story in Unveiled, which reflects the excessive abuse she suffered from her family, friends and acquaintances of hers within the Muslim community.
For a Muslim mother it is quite an offense and even an insult, that a daughter does not comply with "the will of Allah": "The mother is responsible before Allah for the daughter to comply with all religious impositions, and if she does not do so, the one who she will pay for it”, explains Yasmine in her book.
“It is women who take their own daughters and subject them to rape and forge marriages when their daughters are still children. It is a very sad thing to accept. Many women support the patriarchy and my mother was one of them”, confesses the writer in statements to La Vanguardia.
At barely 20 years old, she was forced to marry a man she did not love, an Al Qaeda operative (Essam Marzouk), with whom she had a daughter. In order to protect her from Essam's mistreatment and Islamic ideology, Yasmine escaped from her with her 6-year-old daughter just at the moment when her child was at risk of female genital mutilation.
“We change many times our name, identity, places, we have moved numerous times. My first husband was a member of Al Qaeda. Wherever we went I didn't feel safe, I didn't know how far his contacts, his connections reached... he was a constant threat. Until they sent me a photo of him behind bars, I did not feel calm, ”she recalls. Essam is currently in prison for life in Egypt: “I want him to spend the rest of his days in prison,” adds Yasmine.
Sometime after his flight, he took out student loans and enrolled at the University of British Columbia, where he enrolled in a class in the history of religion and began to examine Islam more critically for the first time in his life. Currently, Yasmine has managed to get rid of all the threads that linked her to Islam, also her bond with her mother and her brother. However, she maintains a relationship with her maternal uncle: "He is the only one who has always been good to me."
In addition, she is now the president and founder of the NGO Free Hearts Free Minds, which offers emotional support and professional assistance to people who have denounced Islam and fear for their lives. “We offer them support and tools as if we were a community because we know what it means to leave fundamentalism. The first session, of the eight total, we dealt with the great theme of identity. We try to replace the question of who am I? because of who do I want to be?” says Yasmine. The idea is to give these people confidence so that they can achieve their freedom.
Undoubtedly, Yasmine Mohammed is a clear example of feminism and freedom for having rebelled against the guidelines of the Koran and the radical interpreters of Muslim doctrine: "Each of the laws of Islam is clearly designed to cage women in a marriage forced with a man who beats and rapes her. All this, with the approval of Allah ”-she writes in her book-. And she concludes with an emotional message dedicated to her daughters: "None of them will fear being burned by an invisible man from heaven."
