Lene Espersen is the first woman foreign minister in Danish history. This comes ninety-five years after Danish women's suffrage and eighteen years earlier for 46-year-old Espersen than for Hillary Clinton who holds the same office. If the Social Democrats win the next election, Helle Thorning-Schmidt will be Denmark's first woman Prime Minister.
Gender equality of this caliber underscores the so-called "problem" between Europeans and Muslim immigrants. We believe that western feminism has roots in the French Enlightenment while sharia law is irredeemably misogynistic. We're forgetting history, however. Consider Christianity's burning of women. Between 1480 and 1750, an estimated 75,000-100,000 executions occurred. We forget that the 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen categorically excluded women -- a decision that sent feminist Olympe de Gouges to the guillotine -- and that this women-hating attitude continued in France for another 151 years until women were officially given the vote in 1944, by which time many of us who supported Hillary Clinton for President were toddlers.
Many of us believe it is Islam that prevents women from gender equality while forgetting that Christianity was essentially anti-woman and remained so until the late twentieth century. Early theologians such as Tertullian blamed women for human mortality, a dark idea inherited by St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and eventually Martin Luther and John Calvin. "You are the devil's gateway," Tertullian wrote in the second century, "you were the first deserter of the divine law. You destroyed God's image, man." Just as this idea justified the mistreatment of women for two thousand years in Christendom, tribal interpretations of sharia law are used today to justify the mistreatment of many Muslim women.
Muslim feminism is alive and well, however. Many prefer to call themselves gender jihadists: thousands of Muslim women who love Islam but hate tribal misogyny. They find inspiration in women such as Amina Wadud who broke with tradition and led Friday prayer and Laleh Bakhtiar whose scholarship challenges sexist interpretations of certain verses in the Qur'an that are used to justify the systematic abuse of women.
British journalist Shelina Zahra Janmohamed loves her religion but questioned the rules when they violated her personal integrity. In Love in a Headscarf, she describes how she came to understand that faith and culture are completely separate. She and her friends wanted to be friends with their husbands; more than that, equal partners. Shelina is now a role model and gives workshops in Doha and interviews in Abu Dhabi. She calls Muslims to task for returning to the era of Jahiliyyah -- the Period of Great Ignorance -- that preceded Islam. Power and economics, she says, were the driving forces behind the un-Islamic practices of the Jahiliyyah. "Muslims must learn from their history to understand that these practices are once again with us, and if we are proud that the advent of Islam eradicated them, then we must honour the promise of Islam and eradicate them again today."
Indian-born, Shahnaz Chinoy of the Muslim Women's Fund reminds us that Mohammad ended female infanticide. Launched at the WISE conference in Kuala Lumpur in July 2009, the MWF is a special project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a financial initiative to empower women educationally and economically.* One focus is the eradication of female genital mutilation in Cairo. WISE is Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality.
As part of WISE's mission statement they declare gender equality to be an intrinsic part of the Islamic faith: "As Muslims, we affirm our conviction that the Muslim woman is worthy of respect and dignity, that as a legal individual, spiritual being, social person, responsible agent, free citizen, and servant of God, she holds fundamentally equal rights to exercise her abilities and talents in all areas of human activity. Furthermore, we insist that these rights are embedded within the Qur'an."
Christian women were victims of misogyny for centuries and have been liberated for less than a hundred years. History matters and now it is Islam's turn. Perhaps there is no better evidence of this than the recent cooperation of women and girls who protested alongside men and boys for an end to Hosni Mubarak's regime. Instead of sexually harassing them, men supported women as they stood side by side for justice and equality. Most observers believe women's rights will be strengthened as a result of the protests and the possible political and social reforms in Egypt and across the Middle East.
Reform is coming. It's time for smug, condescending Western Christians to recognize
this and be there with support.
*This is a correction
Yusra Tekbali: My Life as a Libyan-American Muslim Woman
Women in Islam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Welcome to the Website of Muslim Women's League
Looking at Muslim women in the media and pop culture » Muslimah ...
Muslim women who wear the hijab and niqab explain their choice ...
No where is the violence of that evidenced more profoundly and metaphorically in the practice of female circumcision, which is more often then not practiced and imposed by women, and worse on little girls.
What I admire about the women of Islam is their determination to both understand and reinterpret their scriptures.
In the Christian faith, we have elevated women to the pulpit, opened the doors to the homosexual community, but there remains little reinterpretation if any. Same old, same old, only women are now doing it. The vibrancy of the Christian faith, it's message of hope and promise of liberation, freedom, is in jeopardy of being subsumed, as is the whole Western heritage, in an ever encroaching world, because liberals and fundamentals alike refuse to take the plunge and redefine their faith by knowing it's text to it's fullest.
don't you really mean "mysandry?"
So you really think the problem with the "vibrancy" of the xian faith is women?
I would add:
The libral left has done more to incite, and sustain the radicals, and extremist Muslims then the the republican right could ever accomplish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women's_rights_in_the_Middle_East
In the past 12 months, the force has dealt with 49 cases of forced marriage, up from a typical 30-35, with new cases almost every week.
The four Welsh forces have been involved in about 60 cases, with four in north Wales in six months.
The figures are released to coincide with International Women's Day.
A forced marriage, as opposed to an arranged marriage, is where either bride or groom, or both, do not consent to a wedding and are coerced into accepting it......"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-12669909
Before that gender roles actually made a decent amount of sense, men were the only people to be soldiers (and before that hunters) because from a survival standpoint; women are more valuable. Women tended to be primary caregivers for children; because at the time, for the period of pregnancy and lactation they pretty much had no choice etc. etc.
We should all strive in our modern society where most survival duties can be replaced and brains is finally far superior to brawn for equality; but (and hopefully not sounding too callous) it's too much to expect this change to happen overnight, especially in places where the benefits of the modern era were introduced 100 years ago as opposed to evolving over almost 400.
The reason it is so glaringly obvious in Islam is because only Islam shows us the confluence of religion and statism. There are no other religions where the religion is the law of the land.
So the real solution here is not to try to convince the fundamentalists that their fundamentalism is wrong, that their holy texts are outdated, or misinterpreted, by the priests, imams, rabbis or whatever.
Rather, the solution is to convince great masses of people that religion should not be a state matter at all - that the only reasonable form of governance is one that is not aligned with any religion.
In other words, the separation of church and state is one of the most powerful ideas for the advancement of civilization - whether we're talking about civilization here in the US, or in Egypt, or anywhere else.
The cure for misogyny - on a societal level - is secular, pluralistic, democracy.
Conversely, religions statism is a cancer, regardless of what the religion is.
Naive at best, cunning at worst, especially when one understands that misogyny comes in all shapes and forms and from all circles of society including secularism and atheism.
What more drastic form of misogyny can be evidenced then a public educational system that would propose teaching 10 year old children various sexual positions in sex ed classes.
What more drastic form of misogyny can be evidenced then a univerisity professor who gives live sexual intercourse classes as happened recently in California?
Diane Swayer reported last night on ABC news that 200,000 per year children are corporally punished in American public schools. 20,000 + must go to the hospital as a result of that corporal punishment. That's misogyny of the young and influencial minds, and is misogyny practiced by males and females. That's misogyny practiced by both the faith and secular communtiy.
Pedophila is a profound problem throughout the USA, and isn't resigned to just the faith community but is alive and well in our public schools, as reported to congress in 2004, and as evidenced on the TV news consistently.
But it is curable in the former, even though the cure takes time. It is incurable in the latter.
Your comments about pedophilia are heart-felt, but irrelevant to the issue I am discussing, which is the human rights problems that inevitably arise when religion and statism are joined together.
> Consider Christianity's burning of women. Between 1480 and 1750, an estimated 75,000-100,000 executions occurred.
Allegations such as that should at least come with a source attached.
As a counterpoint I would suggest a light reading of Proverbs and insert the word, “woman”, in place of the word, “wisdom”. Then compare the “woman” of “wisdom” to its diametric opposite, the “woman” of “adultery”. The culmination of the former is the woman of Proverbs 31; the latter the goddesses of Charlie Sheen. Now attempt to extrapolate how a man—in any culture—would honor and cherish the Woman of Proverbs…indeed, a “Christian” woman.
Lastly, to offer up Hillary Clinton as somehow representative of Christian values in general and a Christian woman in particular is not only an insult to a Christian in general and a Christian woman in particular, but probably to Hillary herself. In either the case of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Augustine (et al), a bit more objective research—and maybe a soul search, or two—is not out of order.
In keeping with the framework of your response, not to mention its spirit, you may want to look up Proverbs 5, and / or Ezekiel 23 and note the connection between them and my fist comment. Once those dots are securely connected I believe the differences between the lesson of Proverbs and that of John 7 will manifest themselves to you.
Until then, you may find me confused at your disconnected response but wholly amused at your judgment and subsequent condemnation.
PS. God did not see fit to give conservative men a womb to be in control of life. So be it.
Her gentle nature allows her to raise a child.The mother of Christ knew this.