Unveiled: Yasmine Mohammed on Extreme FundamentalismYasmine Mohammed attended Islamic schools and wore a hijab starting at the age of nine, all while living in Vancouver, BC. In this episode, she invites us into her childhood to get a taste of what it was like to live in two different worlds – the West and extreme fundamentalist Islam – while fitting into neither. She pulls back the curtain on the culty dynamics, indoctrination, and dehumanization characteristic of both worlds. We learn a little about her forced marriage to a member of Al-Qaeda at the age of 19. And she illuminates a Bill Maher moment with Ben Affleck that she believes exemplifies the West’s deeply problematic approach to radical Islam.
Check it out.
NOTES:
Yasmine Mohammed is founder and President of Free Hearts Free Minds – an organization devoted to those free thinkers in Muslim-majority countries whose lives are at risk for who they love or the words they utter. She’s a courageous and eloquent writer, podcaster, and human rights advocate as unafraid to criticize conversation police as she is to speak up against radical Islam. Yasmine is the author of Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, a memoir/polemic that explores her own history and how Western liberalism gets in the way of actualizing liberation. She’s host of the podcast Forgotten Feminists that features inspirational women from restrictive religious backgrounds. And she speaks on Islamophobia and the Canadian motion against it to universities, organizations and major news agencies.
