Early in his long career, he gave speech after speech about the “toxic” influence of the Pahlavi monarchy on the nation’s family values — the ayatollah’s euphemism for the growing freedoms of women under the shah. But Khomeini’s anti-feminist diatribe did not catch the public’s imagination. What catapulted him to national stature began with his fiery criticism of a 1964 decree, known as the “capitulation law,” that gave diplomatic immunity to nondiplomatic U.S. personnel working in Iran.

“They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog,” went one of the ayatollah’s most memorable lines from the first of a series of speeches in which his anti-imperialist tenor steadily grew. By 1978, when his journeys through exile landed him in France, he no longer sounded like his misogynist self of a decade earlier.

Now Khomeini cast himself as a nationalist in the image of Mahatma Gandhi, fighting the foreign powers that were plundering his motherland. His anti-Americanism lifted him to nationwide leadership, and he set to work on his earlier agenda. Days after his arrival in Tehran in February 1979, he issued an order to abolish women’s freedom in dress and to bring back the mandatory hijab. After protests broke out and were widely reported by the international media, he retreated.

Nine months later, the U.S. Embassy was seized in Tehran. As the news media became consumed by the fate of the 52 American hostages there, the ayatollah again ordered the dress code. This time, when all eyes were averted, he succeeded.

Two factors have since veiled the U.S. perspective on the region: The first is the expression of anti-Americanism, which sends the rejected American psyche into a downward spiral of introspection over feckless U.S. policies and leads to inaction. The second is the use of Islam as a wall of privacy, behind which oppressors act with impunity. Both factors function, in great part, as a disguise. Behind them, where women are concerned, all the seemingly unbridgeable divides merge seamlessly to connect Sunni Saudi Arabia to Shiite Iran.

Thus far, the Arab Spring has brought a severe frost to women’s rights. In Libya, women are grossly underrepresented in the new government. In Egypt, the image of a female protester, her blue bra exposed as she was dragged through the streets of Cairo in December 2011, has become a new symbol of brutality against women. The March 2012 acquittal of a military doctor accused of carrying out virginity tests on female detainees attests to the prevalence of state-sponsored violence toward women.

In Tunisia, the rise of the Islamist Ennahda party has come with alarming public displays of intolerance for freedom of speech. In the new draft constitution — unlike its 1959 predecessor, which held men and women as equals — a woman is defined as the “complement with the man in the family and an associate to the man in the development of the country.”

These pressures will inevitably lead to acts of rebellion. In the Semnan region of Iran a few weeks ago, a cleric was passing two women, and told one to cover her head better, according to an Iranian news agency report. The woman, punching him to the ground, told him to cover his eyes.

Western politicians can apologize for crooked policies and retreat into passivity for fear of committing new errors, which are bound to be deemed as new sins by future generations. Yet none will change the elemental facts. The notion of an Islamic democracy is merely another euphemism for turning women into lesser citizens, and it ought to be deemed as unjust and anti-democratic as America before the end of racial segregation. “Terrorism” is only one manifestation of the evil that the world hopes to root out from the region where part-time terrorists have always been full-time chauvinists.

The real enemy is misogyny. Malala Yousafzai is not just a teen-ager in Pakistan’s Swat Valley but a victim of the greatest apartheid of our time, and a wounded warrior in feminism’s newest front line.

Roya Hakakian is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in nonfiction. Her most recent book is “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace,” an account of a 1992 plot to kill Iranian dissidents in Berlin. She left Iran in 1984.