The kindness that kills: Wokeness, guilt, and Islamic radicalism - opinion

There is a comforting myth we like to tell ourselves in the civilized world: Once a society has universal suffrage, some civil rights, a gender-studies department, and a rainbow crosswalk, the job is done. History, we imagine, has finally set like Jell-O in a democracy-shaped mold.

It has not. It never does.

Societies rarely fall into fanaticism with a single crash. They slide there, inch by inch, while telling themselves moving stories about compassion, diversity, and open-mindedness. The villain does not stride in and declare he hates freedom. He arrives wrapped in the language of justice, authenticity, anti-imperialism, and, most seductive of all, victimhood.

Before 1979, Iran was no paradise. There was repression and corruption, as there is almost everywhere. But it was also a place of genuine cultural range. Women studied at universities and worked as doctors, lawyers, and artists. On the same street, you might see a woman in a headscarf and another in a skirt. Mosques and movie theaters coexisted. The air was full of arguments.

They surfed a wave of anger at the shah, at Western interference, and at inequality and rode it straight into a theocracy. The slogans were intoxicating – justice, dignity, independence, an end to humiliation – and many inside and outside Iran applauded. Down with the tyrant, up with the people. And then, almost immediately, came the bill.

Women, who had marched alongside men, woke up to find that the new guardians of virtue had very strong views on their hair, clothes, voices, jobs, and existence. The regime did not unveil its full horror in one swoop. It unfurled its program step-by-step, always with a pious explanation and often with Western sympathizers nodding along from a safe distance.

First came symbolic control: The headscarf turned from garment to loyalty test, with the unveiled woman recast as a walking act of treason wrapped in lipstick. Then came the laws: dress codes, segregated spaces, job restrictions, guardianship rules – a web spun around women in the name of “culture” and “faith.”

Above all came the policing of thought, which always precedes the policing of bodies. Women ceased to be individuals and became symbols – the “honor” of the community, the “virtue” of the nation. A woman who claimed ownership of her own mind threatened the entire architecture; she had to be corrected, silenced, or disappeared.

All this in a country that had, within living memory, known something radically freer. Iran did not tumble from medieval darkness into the arms of mullahs. It moved from an imperfect but open society into a closed one in a few short years, and since the door clicked shut, it has proved agonizingly hard to pry open again.

What does this have to do with us?

We are told that to be good, enlightened citizens, we must treat the most severe, patriarchal interpretations of Islam not just as one opinion among many but as the authoritative voice of entire communities. We are warned that questioning theocrats is “Islamophobic,” that defending secular space is “punching down,” and that objecting to compulsory veiling is “imposing Western values.”

This is how guilt becomes a leash. Because we are rightly conscious of our sins – colonialism, racism, arrogance – we grow reluctant to criticize anything that comes dressed as “non-Western.” So, to avoid hurting feelings, we accept what we should never accept: the erasure of women’s faces from public posters, demands for sex-segregated seating, “modesty” codes in schools, and the idea that women who refuse to cover themselves are aggressors, while those who threaten them are “defenders of faith.”

Listen carefully, and you will hear the same phrases that greased the rails in Iran. “It’s their culture.” “We mustn’t judge.” “Who are we to say?” As if culture were a prison cell rather than a human creation that can be argued with and changed. As if Muslim women who reject forced veiling are somehow less “authentically Muslim” than the men who threaten them.

Notice who disappears in this arrangement: dissident women. The Iranian girl who burns her hijab in the street, the Afghan student barred from school, the ex-Muslim who writes a book – all are treated as inconvenient anomalies. Suddenly, the “marginalized voices” our elites claim to cherish go strangely unheard because they interfere with the comforting story that every demand made in the name of identity must be indulged.

We are not Iran. Still, we are not magically immune to the dynamics that broke that country either. The heart of Islamic radicalism is not actually Islam; it is the radicalism, the absolutist hunger for control. Religion is the instrument. The project is total: to regulate what you wear, what you read, what you think, whom you love, and what you can say about it. Women are simply the most visible battlefield, the easiest to occupy because half the world still, at some level, expects them to be controlled.

The defense against this is not hatred of Islam, nor contempt for believers, nor some chest-thumping fantasy of Western superiority.

It is something quieter but more demanding: the insistence that every human being, including every woman, has the right to form and express an independent thought without fear of religious or political punishment; the insistence that culture and faith belong first to individuals, not to regimes; and the insistence that no ideology – however wounded it claims to be, however drenched in the language of victimhood – gets a free pass to crush the people in its care.

Iran is called a “revolution” by those who prefer romance to reality. The rest of us should have the honesty to call it what it was: a warning – and to heed it before our kindness kills our courage.