You can present such blindness as a polite averting of the eyes. But it is the mirror image of anti-Muslim racism. The French National Front, say, or the British National Party or Serb and Hindu nationalists, portray "the Muslims" as a bloc of terrorists or barbarians. Leftists denounce the stereotypes but then reinforce them. Their motives are different but the effect is the same. "No one should have to argue any longer that terrorism can be a rational and reasonable strategy," says Norton as she justifies violence. As for worrying about women's rights, that is to fall into an imperialist trap. "Attention to the plight of women in the Muslim world turns the gaze of potential critics away from the continuing inequality of women in the West."

Forget that you should oppose misogyny wherever you find it, and notice that by implying that violence and sexism are excusable Norton does not refute stereotypes but excuses them. With an ignorance remarkable in a professor of political science, she makes my point for me by saying that Marx's On the Jewish Question inspired her. This founding document of left-wing anti-Semitism was hardly friendly to the Jewish people. Marx repeated every prejudice. The religion of the Jews was "huckstering" and their god was money. He concluded that only when "society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — [will] the Jew have become impossible". For left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims Norton's writing is just as insulting. Yet I suspect that she thinks of herself as being left-wing in some sense.

In her essential pamphlet Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left and Universal Human Rights (The Centre for Secular Space), Meredith Tax asks why leftists and liberals — who once said they believed in the separation of church and state, social equality and the emancipation of women — are siding with or condoning a religious Right that has made it violently clear that it agrees with none of the above. 

Tax is well-placed to dissect the duplicities of our time. She is a distinguished member of a dissenting movement in modern feminism that is hugely unfashionable, and all the more necessary for that. It refuses to accept "the double bind" that says the emancipation of women must always wait. Far-leftists placed women in it when they said, "You must put up with sexism until the revolution comes." You could not be against sexism and for socialism simultaneously. Now hopes of revolution have vanished, its proponents say, "Women must put up with sexism until American imperialism has gone."

Tax quotes the example of Leila Ahmed, the Harvard scholar of women and Islam. At one point in her writings, Ahmed lets out a cry of pain. She says that she believes that the rights of women "in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other societies. But the question now is how we address such issues while not allowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of saving them."