Renowned author, scholar, activist, and journalist, Dr. Phyllis Chesler has been an independent and politically incorrect truth teller for nearly half a century.
As a powerful advocate for global women's rights, one who witnessed firsthand the stunning injustices of gender apartheid in Afghanistan during the early 1960s, Phyllis Chesler understands the struggles that Muslim women face in their tribal, patriarchal societies. Her power is her voice, and how she clearly, boldly, and unapologetically uses it to denounce oppression no matter where she sees it--and no matter what the consequences of such truth telling are.
In Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women, Dr. Chesler writes with journalistic passion and ease. These pieces are meant for a popular audience and bear frontline moral witness to the normalization of misogynist atrocities in our time. This volume covers a variety of topics, including the burqa and face veil, child marriage, polygamy, honor-based violence, FGM, state-sponsored and vigilante acid disfiguring and stoning, forced female suicide killers, and other injustices that have been minimized or denied by Western media and governments.
Here you will find portraits of Muslim and ex-Muslim anti-Islamists who are well known in the West, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, and Asra Nomani, and less known, but extraordinary women heroes in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East, who have risked death as they defied the bans on trouser-wearing, forced face-veiling, remaining in a violent marriage, choosing their own religion, and facing harassment and death for the right to work outside the home. This volume is a tremendous service to history - a witness at the critical time when women s rights will either advance worldwide, or the hard-won gains of western women will begin to erode due to the thoughtless mass acceptance of multiculturalism.
Relevant, thoughtful, informative, Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women is a compelling journalistic account of our perilous times from an award-winning author and scholar.
"No human culture compromises the rights of women more than Islam. Today over 700 million women are directly or indirectly affected by the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed. Phyllis Chesler is by far the bravest and most outspoken American feminist to address the plight of Muslim women. In this book she shares with the reader her first encounter with Islam in Afghanistan. It is a moving account of the harrowing experience of one woman who almost meets her death in a culture that could not be more alien to her American upbringing. Yet every page is laden with compassion and love for the ex-husband and his family she unwittingly joined. I recommend (that her work) be put on the reading list of every American school."--Ayaan Hirsi Ali
"With great talent and in a vivid style, Phyllis Chesler observes every aspect of today's American culture, politics, and society with humor and through a feminist lens. This enlightening picture unveils the most dramatic domestic and international problems of our times, including that of Islamic gender apartheid, analyzed by a daring and politically incorrect lover of truth."--Bat Ye'or
"Phyllis Chesler brings an eloquent and righteous anger to bear against Western feminists for their dual habit of overlooking the plight of Muslim women and blaming Israel, by far the Middle East's most feminist country, for the woes of that region. Chesler's focus on this topic, it turns out, is informed by an intensely personal experience; in The Death of Feminism she reveals her nightmare as a young wife in Afghanistan in 1961. That event, it turns out, was a crucible vital both to her general intellectual development and to the making of this powerful book."--Daniel Pipes
"To read Phyllis Chesler is to encounter one of the most challenging and original minds in the world today. Every Chesler book takes on the conventional wisdoms and political correctness with verve and insight. The Death of Feminism is a tour de force, combining personal experience, brilliant analysis and heart-felt advocacy. Chesler demonstrates how anti-Israel bigotry, which has already damaged the credibility of many human rights organizations, is now endangering feminism. A must read." -—Alan Dershowitz
"Ms. Chesler's book is a welcome critique of the Feminist Left's willful and shameful neglect of their sisters' plight in the Islamic World. Rejecting cultural relativism or political correctness, Ms. Chesler paints a depressing but truthful picture of the world that women under Islam have to live in. One hopes Ms. Chesler's book will bring about not only a change in attitudes but some sort of political and social action on behalf of women suffering because of the totalitarian and misogynistic tenets of Islam."— Ibn Warraq
Selected Reviews for Islamic Gender Apartheid:
In a political environment where feminism is both ubiquitous and meaningless, whether feminism means a t-shirt or unthinking adherence to leftist doctrine, Phyllis Chesler bears the scars of her activism from her time in Afghanistan to her activism in America. And so it's unsurprising that Dr. Chesler also remains one of the rare few who are working to confront gender apartheid in Islam. - by Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage Magazine
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/islamic-gender-apartheid-is-real-and-its-here
Phyllis Chesler is a true liberal – and as such, she is a thorn in the side of the politically correct crowd who style themselves as liberals but are simply inconsistent socialists who think that loving the underdog is what liberalism means. - by Elder of Ziyon at Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/review-of-islamic-gender-apartheid-exposing-a-veiled-war-against-women
Phyllis Chesler's new collection of articles, Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War against Women, is shot through with a notes-from-the-front-lines urgency and a righteous rage. The earliest of these pieces date back to 2003; the most recent are a few months old. Together, they form a chronicle of the post-9/11 era as observed by the only top-tier second-wave American feminist who – as the pernicious patriarchy of the Muslim world was increasingly introduced into the West – remained true to her values, consistent in ideology and in principles. Other feminists, including the entire academic Women's Studies establishment, have linked arms with the sharia crowd. They've preached that it's wrong for Westerners, operating from positions of post-colonialist privilege and power, to profess to “save the brown woman from the brown man.” They've made a heroine out of the vile, hijab-clad Linda Sarsour, a booster of sharia and apologist for jihad whose star turn at the Women's March on Washington last January catapulted her to international fame. Even to suggest that such a person can be a feminist in any reasonable sense of the word is, of course, right out of 1984: war is peace, freedom is slavery, Sarsour is a feminist. - by Bruce Bawer at PJ Media
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/islam-women-and-phyllis-chesler
It takes courage – although Prof. Phyllis Chesler probably doesn't think twice about it – to decide to raise the level of public awareness on Muslim treatment of women in a period during which any criticism of Islam is immediately branded as "Islamophobia" and some of the people who utter criticism are either in hiding or protected by bodyguards. - by Rochel Sylvetsky at Israel National News
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/islamic-gender-apartheid-facts-not-islamophobia
Phyllis Chesler’s crucial early encounter with the reality of Muslim social norms began in 1961, when, at the age of 20, she married an Afghan student she met while attending Bard College. Totally unprepared for what was to follow, she accompanied him to his family home in Kabul. Nearly 50 years later, Chesler told this extraordinary story in detail, in her 2013 book An American Bride in Kabul. Using her old journals and letters, she describes her five months in her father-in-law’s patriarchal, polygamous Muslim household, from which, sick and undernourished, she finally escaped. - by Daphne Patai at City Journal
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/women-under-islam
America’s leading feminist is Linda Sarsour. The Islamist activist has praised Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women while touting Mohammed, whose sex slave habits ISIS had adopted, as a feminist. - by Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage Magazine
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/islamic-gender-apartheid-real-feminism-means-resisting-islam
Phyllis Chesler’s book, Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women, analyses some pervasive gender inequities in parts of the Muslim world that are enabled by culture and laws. The book comprises essays, columns and articles written over decades, from the time the author was a captive bride in Kabul in the 1960s to the present day. - by Farzana Hassan at Toronto Sun
Continue Reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/hassan-new-book-shines-light-on-muslim-gender-problems
Anything men can do women can do as well, maybe better, was the declaration of the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft whose Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. She denied the prevailing attitude that women are naturally inferior to men, and insisted that women and men should be equally educated, and that equality of men and women should exist in political, social, and economic life. It wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that the effort to establish the struggle for the emancipation of women emerged in the United States and Britain. - by Michael Curtis at New English Review
Continue reading: https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/courageous-american-feminist-phyllis-chesler