Muslims Are Misogynists
This is neither an attempt to defend Muslims and their conduct, nor is it an exercise in blindly defending Islam or the distortions that have been inflicted upon it. My writings—and especially my book The Crisis in Islam—render such an undertaking unnecessary.
Rather, this is an attempt to illuminate the contours of a great cultural revolution in the history of humanity, one that European thought has sought to deny, while confronting deliberate falsehoods and a campaign of calculated ignorance that has endured for centuries.
Among Europeans in general, and among the Anglo-Saxons in particular, there persists—whether consciously or unconsciously—the conviction that every Muslim man is inherently a misogynist. This is regarded as only natural, since he is presumed to have been raised in a thoroughly patriarchal household. At times Europeans express this conviction explicitly; at other times it is merely implied. Saddest of all, this misconception is widespread even among the educated.
Yet once we recognize that the Europeans’ absolute sense of intellectual superiority—a sense entirely without justification—is shared by the educated as well, we can begin to understand something of the European mind’s inability to examine its assumptions critically and perceive the facts. It is precisely this deficiency that enabled the Zionist political movement, born and consolidated since the First Crusade, to gain mastery over the European intellect as a whole and to write the history of Islam as it pleased.
I do not know where this essay will lead me. What prompted me to write it was a brief anecdote that reached me in a text message concerning Fatima bint Muhammad al-Fihri. In summary, the story is this: Fatima, a Muslim woman, was born around 800 CE to a prosperous father who left both her and her sister a considerable inheritance.
Fatima—the very woman who, according to the patriarchal society supposedly contemptuous of women into which she was born, should never have been permitted even to receive an education—used her inheritance to establish a university in the Moroccan city of Fez. It was the first institution in the world to provide systematic instruction across multiple branches of knowledge and to confer academic qualifications upon graduation. That institution, known as the University of al-Qarawiyyin, has continued to function uninterrupted since 859 CE.
Oxford University, one of Europe’s earliest universities, emerged roughly two centuries later and developed within the broader university tradition that trace to al-Qarawiyyin.
I have no intention here of engaging with the objections raised by certain Europeans—or those that may be raised after the publication of this essay.
What concerns me is a question of the utmost simplicity:
If Muslim society, as Anglo-Saxon Zionist thought claims, has always been ruled by a class of misogynistic men, how did the unlettered Fatima al-Fihri come to appreciate the value of education in the ninth century—not merely elementary education, but university education itself? How did the men who supposedly exercised absolute control permit her to accomplish what she did? And how did men, allegedly tyrannical toward women, agree to study at an institution founded by a woman whom Muslims are said—according to Zionists, who have mastered the art of falsifying history—to regard as intellectually deficient?
The fact that the Muslim woman Fatima al-Fihri founded the world’s oldest continually operating university, which has remained in existence since 859 CE, is not itself in dispute.
What is disputed, however, is the assertion that the Muslim man is by nature misogynistic, contemptuous of women and disdainful of them. Had that assertion been true, Fatima al-Fihri could never have founded al-Qarawiyyin, where men themselves pursued their education.
And if this historical fact wounds the pride of the Anglo-Saxon academic, who cannot accept that a Muslim woman founded a university two centuries before the establishment of Oxford, then I invite him to remember this: while al-Qarawiyyin—founded by a Muslim woman—opened its doors to all in 859 CE, Oxford University did not admit women until 1920.
Who, then, are the misogynists?
Abdul-Haq al-Ani
26 July 2026