A rift has opened up between left-leaning alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) chapter of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and conservative Islamists in the group. At least two dozen alumni addressed an open letter to the club on Facebook asking them to disinvite an anti-liberal Muslim writer, Daniel Haqiqatjou.
MSA's Tufts University chapter disinvited Haqiqatjou last month.
The alumni say that Haqiqatjou's socially conservative views are "regressive" and that they should not be heard because he is not a researched academic. Haqiqatjou's writings attack feminism as the enemy of all religion, and claim that Muslim feminism puts self-described Muslim feminists a path to apostasy.
"From its very inception, feminism has been anti-religion. In fact, the most prominent figures of each wave of feminism have been viciously anti-religious," he wrote on his blog. Late Boston College radical feminist scholar Mary Daly received his ire because she encouraged women to have "courage to sin."
Haqiqatjou likewise questions gay rights and same-sex marriage.
The split is unusual given the MSA's roots within the global Muslim Brotherhood network. It was founded by Brotherhood members who came to the United States in the 1960 and some members push extreme rhetoric.
Opponents of Haqiqatjou's talk criticized the MSA for not holding a forum on Muslim feminism, describing Haqiqatjou's views as "deeply problematic and ... half-baked ideas that have no real intellectual basis. Haqiqatjou spreads vile ideas about women in general as well as critical social movements such as Islamic feminism, slanders Muslim feminists very frequently and undermines the struggles of an entire gender."
Oddly, no one took issue with Haqiqatjou's seeming embrace of another Islamist speaker who says he had a campus lecture canceled for failing "to show sympathy w/Charlie Hebdo and its satanic Shuhada." ISIS-inspired terrorists killed 12 people the magazine's Paris offices in 2015 as revenge for its caricatures of Islam's prophet Mohammed.
Haqiqatjou found Hamza wald Maqbul's canceled talk last year at St. Louis University, "Shocking, that's even more egregious."