askchapo

Aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of sexual violence is committed against Muslim people in Europe (primarily by policing and border control agents) and that in general most sexual violence is a result of intimate partner violence regardless of a person's cultural or religious background, there's something so weirdly insidious about being angry about Muslim men "bringing sexual violence" to Europe when you look at the overwhelming centuries of European soldiers bringing sexual violence to the Muslim world.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but I think your request for Muslim feminist perspectives is absolutely the right move. So here's some recommendations, and I've added a bit of a focus on Palestine since you mentioned they were sympathetic to Palestinian liberation (including queer perspectives, which is intrinsically tied to feminism):

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one specifically addresses interventionist Western "feminism")

Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine - Nada Elia (look at feminist movements in Palestine, and the women's intifada)

Palestinian Women's Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism - Islah Jad

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality - Sara Ahmed (this is about the way that culture creates the stranger, and touches on exactly the issue you're dealing with: a repetition of myth-building about the dangers of a specific out-group. I also recommend a lot of Sara Ahmed's other books, like Living a Feminist Life, Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Post-modernism).

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique - Saed Atshan

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times - Jasbir Puar (examination of the leveraging of "progressive" Western values in creating the terrorist body subject to Western violence and dehumanization, and how "feminism" was used as a primary tool in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan)

Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon - Nicola Pratt

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures - Gul Ozyegin

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature - Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (kind of an old ethnography, but interesting nonetheless)

Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation - Geraldine Moane

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror - Mahmood Mamdani (this one isn't about feminism, but rather about the way that Islamaphobia has been inserted throughout western society and the shaping of western discourse on Islam. Mamdani has a lot of great books)

Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism, and the Politics of Dress - Stephanie Cronin

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society - Lila Abu-Lughod (this one is more about getting to know the cultural feelings of womanhood in bedouin society)

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories - Lila Abu-Lughod

Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study - Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (This one is about the weaponization of sexual violence, which is an important piece of understanding how the West are the largest perpetrators of sexual violence against Muslim women, not Muslim men)

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International - Sarah Schulman

Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel-Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude - Saffo Papantonopoulou (quick essay on how Israeli "progressiveness" is leveraged to oppress queer Palestinians and pinkwash Israeli violence)

Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism - Harsha Walia (not specifically what you were asking for, but has a lot of great information about how militarized borders are one of the largest vectors for sexual violence against women; anyone arguing about keeping certain people from immigrating is, de facto, arguing for supporting the funding of militarized borders to keep those people out, and thus adding to the amount of sexual violence)

"Honor Killing" is such a ridiculous bugbear i'd actually forgotten islamophobes liked to use that. it has literally no relationship to islam, it's a special colonial descriptive applied to colonized people in Europe. when a white Belgian murders their wife & someone she's cheating with, that's not an "honor killing" but and magically it becomes so

They’re very strong on feminism, advanced. More than me by far and I value their pov on feminism. A lot.

Prepare to be disappointed by liberal feminism when you come to develop your own understanding of feminism.

Anyways I would strongly recommend you look into Lady Izdihar and her appearances on Tedx and The Deprogram and so forth, she's a woman communist and convert to Islam living in Seattle, and she sometimes talks about the islamophobia of these sorts of faux-progressive liberals.

My own stance is basically that if someone doesn't know shit about Islam, then that person has basically no right to speak on Islam.

"What do Muslims say before reciting the Qur'an?" — "Uhmm... Allahu akbar?"

"What is the name of the last surah of the Qur'an?" — "Muhammad...?"

Now people like myself will occasionally forget or be ignorant about Islamic things, but you should still hopefully be able to distinguish between someone who genuinely tries to understand this major world religion but doesn't have the ingrained knowledge of it that an actual adherent would have, and someone who has consistently refused to actually engage with Islam in any meaningful way ever. The latter type will in my experience at best get through like a fourth of al-Baqarah, act like they've "seen enough" or that they don't have the time or energy to finish the Qur'an, and then basically make fun of anyone who's read the Qur'an in full or say that they "don't get what other people get out of it"; these islamophobes will then get the rest of their "understanding" of Islam through half-remembered secondary school classes, Internet memes, and fearmongering by liberal news.

So I would say you should force your friend to acknowledge their own ignorance. They may talk big about "cultural values" but they do not know what those cultural values actually are nor anything about their history or background. Now if you can make them acknowledge their own ignorance and they then try to become knowledgeable and make amends for their own Western chauvinism, then that's great; if they double down on their islamophobic drivel, which is frankly more likely, then you should really just cut this person out of your life. They would have demonstrated that they deliberately put their own prejudices in front of truth, and it is not your responsibility to fix this, nor can you derive any value from this person's knowledge that is not tainted by their bigotry.

“X% of rapes are by muslims when they are only Y% of the population.”

They are 25% of the population

It's to be expected that ~1.75 billion people commit lots of bad acts

Edit: there are more Muslims (1.75 billion) than there are black people (1.2 billion)

their honor killings our intimate partner violence

These arguments from your friend, even though they are using statistics, are appeals to emotion more than anything else. Probably don't need to worry about trying to found counter statistics to their claims.

I'd probably be using more pointedly shitty counter questions.

X% of rapes are by muslims when they are only Y% of the population

Yeah, rape is bad though. Does it matter if the assailant is an immigrant, Arab, Muslim or your non-immigrant neighbor? Does being an immigrant/Arab/Muslim make the sexual assault ... worse somehow?

Why are all the immigrants men? We should ban the male refugees from these places, but as a good pro-refugee progressive we should allow the women and children in because they aren’t a problem.

So, because some members of a group did a SA, all members of that group should be mass punished? Men (who haven't SA's anybody) forcibly separated from wives, children pulled from one of their parents, leaving a single parent to try to raise their kids as well as get a full time job to pay bills? What even would the cutoff be? What age would a boy be deemed "a threat of doing SA" and be deported or denied travel with their families to a new home... nine? ... ten? ... twelve years old? This doesn't make any sense to me.

The comic series Palestine by Joe Sacco includes a short section of him talking to Palestinian feminists. It was interesting; they spoke of "the lesson of Algeria", where women took great risks to assist in its liberation (you can see some depictions of this in The Battle of Algiers) and yet were not rewarded with rights after the French were kicked out and the country was organized according to Islamic principles. So there is that internal struggle between feminism and hardline Islamism, it does exist. Some feminists in the scene believed Islamic law actually provides a solid theoretical basis for women's rights, others disagree.

I would say this is one of those "let Muslim feminists lead the way" but that has difficulty because they'll always be able to find some western ex-Muslim liberal feminist validating all of their most racist beliefs. It has all the same pitfalls that, like, "listen to black people" has with the black faces in high places phenomenon.

I never recommend books without reading them but one book I am planning to read in the near future which probably covers this is Orientalism by Edward Said.

My first question whenever someone saying "X group commits Y% of crimes eventhough they're only Z% of the population"is asking why are we splitting crimes into race/religion? What are we gaining if we're only focusing on a subset of the aggressors? Sometimes people can recognize it's just racism after they're asked.

Regarding feminist critique of Islamophobia, I don't have any. I don't think Muslim women are any more or less oppress than other women of the world, like in the Congo or India. I think it's oppression that can be directly tied to something else and is not necessarily the religion or race. (Though, I could argue women in the Congo or Palestine are "more" oppressed at the moment due to the active genocides but that's another conversation.)