Boko Haram and the Kidnapped Schoolgirls: When will the West wake up?

Yesterday, as many celebrated Mother’s Day, 250 anguished Nigerian mothers continued to search for their young daughters, kidnapped by the Muslim jihadist group Boko Haram.

Unfortunately, this horrific incident is but only one example of the oppressive treatment of women in Sharia-adherent Islamic societies across the globe. Until now, the world has remained largely silent and disinterested.

For years ACT! for America has worked to educate about Sharia law – the Islamic law that oppresses women through brutal acts including stoning, honor killing and female genital mutilation (FGM). The ongoing passage of anti-FGM bills across state legislatures is one result of our ongoing efforts thanks to activists like you.

We pray that the Nigerian schoolgirls will soon be found, so they can return to the loving arms of their mothers. And we hope that the worldwide outrage over this incident will lead to a true understanding of the oppressive ideology behind Sharia and won’t begin and end with the hashtag “Bring back our girls.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Boko Haram and the Kidnapped Schoolgirls

The Nigerian terror group reflects the general Islamist hatred of women’s rights. When will the West wake up?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Since the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last month, the meaning of Boko Haram—the name used by the terrorist group that seized the girls—has become more widely known. The translation from the Hausa language is usually given in English-language media as “Western Education Is Forbidden,” though “Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden” might be more accurate.

But little attention has been paid to the group’s formal Arabic name: Jam’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad. That roughly translates as “The Fellowship of the People of the Tradition for Preaching and Holy War.” That’s a lot less catchy than Boko Haram but significantly more revealing about the group and its mission. Far from being an aberration among Islamist terror groups, as some observers suggest, Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too representative.

The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists’ mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai—as she rode a school bus home in 2012—because she advocated girls’ education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.

How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as “Islamophobes” than to stand up for women’s most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers? These girls’ lives deserve more than a Twitterhashtag protest.