From Selma to Tunis: Marching against the segregation in our own time

Segregation, in short, is central to sharia — a fact that no amount of contortion by self-styled Muslim feminists can get around.

True, not all Muslim-majority countries apply sharia. In Tunisia, after a heated internal debate, the Islamist Ennahda Movement — which came to power following the Arab Spring — opted last year not to make sharia the basis for the country’s new constitution. But that is precisely the kind of moderate policy explicitly targeted by whichever jihadist gang carried out the Tunis museum massacre. And the troubling thing is that, worldwide, sharia is gaining ground. In Brunei, for example, the Sultan announced the introduction of sharia law last April. The advance of organizations like Islamic State and Boko Haram mean the most brutal application of sharia on a rising number of women and girls.

There seems to me only one possible way to react to this trend toward sharia and that is to resist it. Perhaps that is more obvious to me than to most; having lived under sharia when I was a young girl in Saudi Arabia I know just what it means to be a second-class citizen. Yet many Western liberals seem to struggle with the obvious point that if they were against segregation and discrimination in the 1960s they should be against gender segregation and discrimination now.