Sinead O’Connor was once invited to speak at a Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia (MARIAS) event in London, or at least to put out a statement on the group’s behalf. She had the good grace to reply to say that she couldn’t speak out against Islam in England because she was too busy fighting for women’s rights in her own country.
To her credit, she did help expose the abuse that girls and boys were suffering in laundries, orphanages, and at the hands of pedophile priests. I wonder if she will now look to expose the abuses that occur, today, against girls and boys in madrassas and mosques and in their own homes during Quran lessons, by imams and clerics up and down the UK. The double standard is that when the Catholic Church was caught in a scandal, no one was afraid to blame the Pope for a cover-up and name the priests as being ‘priests’ and ‘Catholic’. No one danced around the issue, minced their words or pulled their punches. Nor did Sinead hesitate to rip up a picture of the Pope on live American TV. Would she dare rip up a picture of Muhammad? Would she dare call a cleric who raped boys and girls a ‘Muslim’? Let’s wait and see if her feminist activism continues within Islam. If it does, let’s wait and see how long before a fatwah gets put out against her.
Sinead has falsely claimed to be a theologian, and falsely claimed that when you study world religions, then all roads lead you to Islam. This simply isn’t true, and any theologian of note would laugh in your face if you said it to them. It all leaves me to wonder what empowerment for women Sinead is seeing within Islam that’s drawing her towards it. She’s a bit of an attention-seeker and hasn’t had a hit album in years, and she has gone from making YouTube videos of herself in a motel room in New Jersey, crying and begging for her family to come and save her, to now converting to Islam. She clearly has mental health issues and is in need of care. I would imagine that she sees Islam as today’s major talking point, and she’s jumping on the bandwagon and playing the fame game to keep herself in the news.
Is she playing mind games? She might be. When she said she no longer wanted to engage with white people, she later made a YouTube video saying that she only said it to see if it would get her a Twitter ban. Is her conversion to Islam a mind game? If so, it’s not very helpful for young women out there. She’s already covering her head with a hijab to preserve her modesty (something one could argue she lost in her younger years of drinking and drugging and having multiple children with multiple fathers). Islam, of course, will accept and endorse her, while the graves of their own women who have behaved in the same manner are piling up. For them, it’s free publicity. The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed her with open arms. She’s a mild celebrity, and together with Lindsey Lohan, makes Islam look like an attractive option for women.
Sinead grew up under a virtual theocracy and, as far as I’m aware, in a strict religious household. She has spent time as a teen in a Magdalene Asylum for shoplifting and truancy. She knows the restrictions that the more fundamental aspects of any religion can impose upon a person, particularly a female. She, of all people, should be avoiding Islam. She has done drugs and had multiple sex partners, and all of it gone unpunished under Western laws (I think her drug-taking was limited to smoking joints, nothing class A). Sinead O’Connor would not be alive today had she grown up under Islam, and yet now she is running to it.