Welcome to the Latest Edition

This week’s Unbelief Brief covers another victim of Iran’s draconian hijab law and the return of a conservative Islamic political party in Bangladesh.

In EXMNA Insights we reflect on the bravery of a female paralympic athlete from Afghanistan.

An EXMNA Update on the latest WikiIslam cyber attack.

The Unbelief Brief

Iran has, in the last two years, shown that they are more than willing to enforce and tighten their overwhelmingly harsh hijab restrictions against women on the street who refuse to comply with them—lethally in the case of Mahsa Amini. With one recent act, they seem to have demonstrated a willingness not to keep their efforts confined to “normal” private citizens, but even to extend them to honored and prestigious figures in public life. Just recently, the filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad and actress Baran Kosari, her daughter, were charged with crimes after “pictures of the two without the mandatory head scarf at a film event were posted online.” Both have received awards in the past at the country’s largest film festival, and Banietemad has the distinction of being one of the country’s “first female screenwriters and film directors,” being 70 years old herself. It seems in character for such women to refuse to abide by the oppressive restrictions of the Islamic Republic—and for the Islamic Republic to punish them for daring to act on their own free will while being women.

Moving over to Bangladesh, where student-led protests against authoritarianism deposed the government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina this summer: the interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has taken the eyebrow-raising step of unbanning the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami political party. The Shahbag protests of 2013, also spearheaded by students, were fueled in part by calls to ban the group amid aspirations for a more secular Bangladesh. The party had been banned from contesting elections in the last decade up until this point. In fact, former Prime Minister Hasina banned the party outright just days before she was forced to resign and leave the country—not just from contesting elections. The new government termed Hasina’s total ban a politically-motivated attempt to consolidate her own power based on unfounded claims of terrorist activities.

Jamaat-e-Islami now vows to attempt to re-register for the ability to contest elections once again. Although this decision from the new government simply restores the status quo that had existed until just a month ago, whether the party manages to gain a foothold back into Bangladeshi politics will be revealing. The students who led the protests against Sheikh Hasina’s government, an administration widely criticized as corrupt and authoritarian, premised their actions on a commitment to democratic values and to secularism, much like the Shahbag protestors of a decade prior. The unbanning of Jamaat-e-Islami is not necessarily intended as a betrayal of those values. Nevertheless, it may be worth asking whether an avowedly Islamist political party has any place in a secular democracy. While the members of Jamaat-e-Islami ought to be free to voice their desire for an Islamic state, that political project must never come to pass, a fact that should be more acutely felt in such a moment of optimism for Bangladeshi democracy.

EXMNA Insights

Zakia Khodadadi’s Bronze Medal win in the Paris 2024 Paralympics is not merely a personal achievement but a reflection of the double burden of being both a woman and Hazara. Her story, marked by a dramatic escape from a country rife with persecution, underscores a pressing issue: the systemic violence inflicted on minorities by the Taliban.

The Hazara people, a Shia minority, have been subjected to repeated atrocities, with the 1998 Mazar-i-Sharif massacre being a particularly stark example of an attempt by the Taliban at religiously inspired genocide of the Hazaras. The Taliban's statements during this massacre—declaring Hazaras as "kafir [infidels]"—reveal the extreme persecution that Shia and other Muslim minority groups suffer by being branded heretics and then murdered as apostates. This historical backdrop is crucial for understanding the current dangers faced by the Hazara community, including threats against women and athletes like Khudadadi.

Recent reports highlight the harsh reality of Khodadadi’s situation. After performing as the first  female Afghan athlete at the 2021 Paralympic games, she was forced to flee Afghanistan due to the Taliban's severe persecution of the Hazara. This escape was not a mere act of individual heroism but a necessary measure to protect her life against the oppressive regime of the Taliban.

Now living in exile in France and competing as part of the Refugee Paralympic Team, it is crucial to remain aware of the severe conditions that forced her to flee and the broader patterns of violence and discrimination faced by the Hazara people and Afghan women in general. Her story is a call to action for the global community to ensure support for persecuted groups, as not just a symbolic measure, but in hopes of making a tangible difference.

EXMNA Updates

🚨WikiIslam is under attack!🚨Following Meta’s ban of WikiIslam links across its platforms, WikiIslam is again under a denial of service (DoS) attack. While the initial cyber attack briefly took WikiIslam offline, we were quickly able to restore its operation. The attack, however, is still ongoing. Those who wish to silence the truth may experience transient successes but ultimately the truth will not be defeated.

Until next week,

The Team at Ex-Muslims of North America

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