In 1799, the French artist Vivant Denon, accompanying a team of scientists traveling to Egypt with Napoleon (who excused his invasion with the logic that he was bringing democracy to the Arabs) was touring some ancient sites along the upper Nile when he came across an 8-year-old girl in severe pain. Writing in his journal, Denon noted that, "a cut, inflicted with equal brutality and cruelty, has deprived her of the means of satisfying the most pressing want, and occasioned the most horrible convulsions." Denon was referring of course, to female genital mutilation. The Frenchman quickly pulled out a knife and performed a counter-operation, by which he "was able to save the life of this unfortunate little creature."
On another occasion, Denon (who went on to become the first director of the Louvre) encountered a bleeding, recently blinded woman carrying an infant in the desert outside Alexandria. She was begging for food and water. As the French stopped to offer aid, a man galloped up, claiming to be her husband, and demanded that they leave her alone. "'She has lost her honor,'" the man shouted, according to Denon. "She has wounded mine, this child is my shame, it is the son of guilt!" The horrified French artist watched as the man then drew a dagger, stabbed the women and hurled the infant to the ground, killing it as well. Denon asked his Egyptian guides whether the man was not liable under the law for murder, and was informed that the man was within his rights, although the actual murder was frowned upon, and that after 40 days of wandering, the woman would have been eligible for charitable services.
The French in 1800 were among the first westerners to visit and write about the lives of modern Arabs in Egypt. Besides the great pyramids, what struck them most forcibly was the abominable treatment of women. And while the archaeological treasure has been studied and secured, two hundred years later, unfortunately, much remains the same with respect to women's rights.
Ninety percent of Egyptian women are genitally mutilated, according to aid worker estimates. Although the practice was officially outlawed in 2007, gynecologists can still legally perform it "for health reasons." Egyptian women can vote; they are significant part of the workforce and there were women in the recently disbanded Egyptian cabinet. But Egyptian women are not allowed to travel abroad without the permission of their husbands; they have difficulty initiating divorce; and they can't become judges.
As Egyptians rise up to demonstrate for their civil rights, the world watches with bated breath, wondering what man (for surely it will be a man) will succeed Mubarak, and whether he will be moderate -- that is "friendly to Israel and Western ideas and mores" or a fundamentalist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose strict interpretation of the Koran and anti-Western political and cultural bias would turn the delicate global balance upside down.
What no one is talking about, though, is how deeply dangerous this time is for Egyptian women. The influence of extreme Islam has been growing there in recent years, so that for a bare-headed female to walk the streets of Cairo, even the tourist areas near the Egyptian Museum where I worked on my book about the French in Egypt in 2004, is to invite menacing looks, and muttered obscenities from men on the street.
Whatever happens in Egypt, there's an elephant in the room, and it's pink. Despite the years of discussion around our "War on Terror," we have not focused on the fact that misogyny is a fundamental pillar on which radical Islam is based. Freedom of women is what the Al Qaeda jihadis, as much as the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, most revile about the West. Women living in these parts of the world are severely discriminated against in ways that would be considered human rights violations if the same abuses were applied specifically to racial or ethnic groups.
While women in the west, and many Asian nations, have begun to move toward gender equality in the past century, the Islamic fundamentalist regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran, some African nations, and especially the Taliban, have moved backwards, with great violence and repression that harms millions of women and feeds jihadi fervor against the West. The influence of the Islamist/fundamentalist attitude toward women has spread to neighboring countries, and into countries in Europe where migration is occurring.
To varying degrees, women in Islamist regimes are forced to wear blankets over their heads, marry in childhood, are denied education, denied freedom of movement, have little or no control over their finances, cannot divorce. Their most basic desires are thwarted at every turn: those who dare choose their own lovers are routinely murdered in so-called "honor killings." Rape victims may be forced to marry their attackers.
These horrific examples should make it ever more obvious to the world that subjugating females is the driving force behind Islamist rage. It was there in 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atta's will, in which he demanded that no pregnant woman be allowed to come near his grave; it's there in the acid attacks on pretty girls who dare say no to their men in Pakistan; it's there in the stoning sentences for "adulterers" in Iran and Somalia, it's there in the prohibition on women driving cars in Saudi Arabia, it's there in the black blankets millions of women think -- know -- they must throw over their heads whenever they dare step outside their homes.
With so much evidence piled up that the status of women in the West is what radical Islamist fighters revile most about us, the only question left is why haven't the Western countries made support of women a fundamental element of the diplomatic, military and political response?
The issue gets very little discussion in the foreign policy community. Five years ago, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy (NCAFP) deemed it appropriate to convene a roundtable on "Arab Women and the Future of the Middle East." Afterward, a not-for-attribution summary report was produced for the foreign policy community containing the views and suggestions voiced at the April 14, 2005, roundtable. The first three recommendations were:
• American foreign policy should be consistent: The United States must apply human rights standards uniformly in its relations with all the countries of the region.
• When dealing with officials of Middle East countries, U.S. officials should always remind them of their obligations to respect human rights and women's rights enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• The State Department should expand the section concerning women's rights in its annual report.
The U.S. has had three female Secretaries of State in the last 15 years, yet the human rights of women remain unaddressed, and the above recommendations have never been implemented.
In March, 2010, Secretary of State Clinton was interviewed on MSNBC and asked what the Obama administration was doing for women's rights globally. She mentioned three fronts: health care, which affects the infant mortality rate; food security and climate change. While these certainly help all people, they do not remotely rise to the level of a real response to the abuses women specifically face simple because they are female.
For years, our governments have treated outrageous depredations against women as quaint cultural customs. Only the French have officially rejected the burka, and for that that faced international criticism about "racism."
Of course womanhood is not a "race," and that may be the problem. If blacks or Jews were consistently mistreated the way women are from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, and in many of the nations in between, the United Nations, the Europeans, and the people of the United States wouldn't stand for it, and our elected representatives would be holding hearings, issuing sanctions, putting the issue front and center every single day.
In Egypt in 1899, a male judge named Qassem Amin caused an uproar when he penned a book called The Liberation of Women, arguing that improving the status of women would help Egypt develop. Amin blamed Egypt's falling under European power, despite centuries of ancient learning and civilization, on the low social and educational standing of Egyptian women.
A century on, women remain severely discriminated against in Egypt and throughout the region, especially in extremist regimes in the Gulf States and under the Taliban. The reversals women face after revolutions in these areas are horrific. The case of Iran is well-known. In Iraq, so recently secular under the dictator, millions of women have now donned the black blanket out of sheer fear and have seen their mobility decrease.
The effort to keep women segregated is at the heart of the regional cultural bias against women, and it is true that it is an old tradition. When Napoleon invaded Cairo, the Egyptians barely resisted at first. They only revolted when Napoleon ordered his soldiers to break down the many doors in Cairo streets and alleys that kept neighborhoods walled off, and women safely incarcerated in their communities.
But Islamist efforts to keep women segregated in these modern times have reached ridiculous levels. Iraqis whisper that extremists have even shot storekeepers for stowing "male and female vegetables" (cucumbers and tomatoes apparently) together. An Egyptian cleric in 2009 decreed that men and women may only work together in offices if the women have breast-fed the men. That cleric was forced to retract the decree, and was fired, then reinstated. But the decree was reiterated by another cleric in Saudi Arabia.
Increased limitation on female mobility is a hallmark of Islamic resurgence, and this should be recognized as a backlash against the model of increasing women's rights elsewhere. "Women's liberation movements in the Muslim world were viewed as Western contaminations aimed at the destruction of Islam from within," wrote Lamia Rustum Shahedah, in Arab Studies Quarterly, in an article about the theoretical bases of Islamic fundamentalist attitudes toward women. "Accordingly, all resurgents allotted the female status a major part of their corpus, the most radical stipulating complete segregation of women to the home environment. Thus, men will direct the Islamic society while women sustain, nurture, and propagate the family, the nucleus of society."
We in the West should reconsider our own definition of the boundary between a cultural trait and a human rights violation, as it pertains to women. An extremist takeover of Egypt will be a disaster for Egyptian women, who must hope that the future will be better for their daughters than for them, and that whatever new society is being formed takes into account the universal - not just Western - human rights of women. The world and moderates among the Egyptian people must keep the human rights of women front and center in the discourse as they watch Cairo, and other Arab nations, transform themselves.
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" I asked you to share with us some evidence to back up your unsubstantiated claim that most Muslim women are forced to wear the veil.Instead, you quoted the book of someone who is openly hostile to the Islamic faith, aka Islamophobe."
I said some women choose to wear the veil, some do not, but most Mus*lim women *I know* do not. You asked for proof. I obviously wasn't going to give you my friends' phone numbers, so I mentioned Parvin Darabi. You feel her point of view isn't valid since she left Isl*am (and wrote a statement filled with accounts of abuses suffered by Iranian women after the Islamic Revolution). I disagree. I think dissenting opinions are very valid. To every faith.
You repeatedly demand that I should just focus my attention on "celebrity" news (?) and assert that Americans don't sufficiently criticize our own government. Many Americans very critical of our government and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We tried to vote Bush out. We vehemently protested those wars. We lost.
(FYI: in general moderators will tolerate mild sarcasm, but not rants. )
Finally, I think we can agree to agree on absolutely nothing at all. *Sigh*
If Iranians took the wrong path in their revolution, well it is up to them to change it and people shouldn't have to engage in forms of bigotry to draw attention to their issues.
I've seen how Americans protest as of late: walk around the streets on the weekends (so not to inconvenience the people you are protesting against) and pose around for the media so they can headline the event first thing on Mondays (so they can sell more ads).
No wonder no recent US administration ever paid any attention to any of those protests.
You said you lost, I say you didn't "fight" to begin with.
Long are gone the real protests in American society that made an impact. (*Sigh* indeed)
"On the death penalty or more accurately, state sponsored poisoning, the difference is that you blame every issue we have on our faith but when it comes to your issues, it is never your faith."
I'm a Catholic, and I have NO problem seeing the homophobia and misogyny in the Church's teachings. And no problem talking about it without feeling my faith is being "attacked." And when people criticize my faith, I don't retreat to charges of "bigotry."
You wrote: "You people are so delusional if you think Muslims are going to accept that all their problems are rooted in their own very personal faith as the bigots often suggest."
Speaking for myself and not the "You people", most religious people I know -- including mus*lims -- are able to see the problems and contradictions in their own faith.
Her book in which she argues against the veil (something that we don't object to, what we object to is vilification of people) does not imply that most Muslim women are forced to wear the veil.
You explained that you had no problem seeing homophobia/etc in the Church's teachings but you didn't write Catholicism or Christianity in the general sense as a religion was homophobic. Christians in America who are fighting the teachings of homophobia by their churches often argue that Christianity as they understand it is not homophobic.
The issue with Islamophobia as I explained earlier is not the accusation of homophobia. It goes beyond that. Islamophobia like anti-semitism or racism intends to denigrate, to dehumanize and to vilify an entire ethnic group based on their religion (or skin color) of birth.
I said "Church teachings" because my main problem with Catholicism is the way it is currently applied and interpreted regarding social issues. I believe that there is a version of my faith that focuses more on G*od's love for all, than on condemnation of any group. Sadly, that's not the Pope's view. And of course I understand that the same is true of Mus*lims. My muslim friends, I realize, are progressive and perhaps as out of step with mainstream/"known" Islam as I am with mainstream "known" Catholicism.
Of course. Who isn't? You should realize that when you use that word as freely as you do, it loses its meaning.
And given her experience of Islamic law in Iran, it might be more accurate to call her an "abuse-ophobe."
1. Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change (this means whatever happens in say Afghanistan is projected on say Egypt for the simplistic reason that they are both born in the same faith)
2. It is seen as separate and "other." It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
3. It is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive, and sexist.
4. It is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism, and engaged in a clash of civilizations.
5. It is seen as a political ideology, used for political or military advantage.
6. Criticisms made of "the West" by Muslims are rejected out of hand.
7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
8. Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural and normal.
All across Europe western values are being eroded by a relentless assault by Islamists. The greatest treasure of western civilization has been it's steady rise out of misogyny and that rise must never be reversed under any circumstances and at any cost.
American's need to wake up.
"In the USA prisoners are tied to a table and have a chemical induced heart attack. How is that not cruel? Stoning isn't your value, but killing is. How are you not barbaric as well? By Europiean values you are." I agree. It is cruel. It is barbaric. I am completely opposed to the death penalty here. But judging from your comments, as long as a practice is culturally based, no matter how barbaric or discrininatory, it's fine?
"Almost all women choose to wear the burka or other clothing that their culture guides them to wear. They are Islamic by choice and chose to wear traditiona l clothes." Definitely some do, but others do not. I've read books by women who choose to wear a veil, and others who vehemently didn't want to. (And most of the Mus*lim women I know fall into the second camp.) Perhaps if the possibility of arrest, torture or death as punishment for "improper veiling" were removed, it would seem more like a real choice.
Now from your comment, I take it that for example women were allowed to enroll in US universities centuries ago???
Did you know that two "provinces" in Switzerland only extended voting rights to women in the 1990s?
Look up "women voting in Switzerland".
It is a shame indeed that you have surrendered to prejudice and ignorance.
this article is full of patronizinÂÂg and dangerous islamophobÂÂic rhetoric. it's a perfect example of mainstream western feminism towing the line of US imperialisÂÂm. regarding female genital mutilationÂÂ: why are you so quick to condemn islam? the practice of genital mutilation isn't limited to islam; male genital mutilation (otherwise known as circumcisiÂÂon!) is a common occurrence in the US and other western nations. why not get up in arms about that and start dealing with human rights violations in your own country before attacking another?
don't you realize that this type of rhetoric is used as justification for war and occupation, which legally sanctions human rights violations under the so-called legitimacy of the state!
ditch your double standards. they only serve to weaken your argument and are not at all helpful to the women of egypt.
Anything is allowed to demonize Muslims as a people and yet Muslims themselves are not given the same opportunities to respond to these dangerous islamophobic rhetoric.
As of 2007 there were 22 nations that were part of the Convention on the Elimination of all form of Discrimination against Women. Egypt is a member of this convention. The United States is not. Member of this convention guarantee women the right to education, child care, fair and equatable employment, to not be sold into sexual slavery, the right to suffrage, etc. They guarantee these rights in theory anyway. Egypt is obviously failing at this. However, as the United States clearly does not value women how can we expect the government to step in and help all the citizens to be equal? We can't help people acomplish something unless we've already done it ourselves.
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How so?
You tell us who dominate US politics (from congress to mayors), US economy (from the Nasdaq floor to the CEO of major companies), media including newspapers, universities (how many women presidents are there), to even sports where women's role consists of cheerleading (for Men's pleasure of course)
The US is run on a number of illusions, slogans and well organized sophisticated propaganda.
French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, summed well when he said:
"Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society".
What is sad about the Islam/cultural imperative that brings men into the street and keeps women in the house or covered is that women have little opportunity to then organize.
As an older woman, I find it very distressing when traveling in these countries to be almost totally surrounded by men when outdoors and discover that many of the disorders that older women experience come from having stayed indoors since puberty.
The Secular West sees no substantial difference between Islam, Judaism and/or Christianity. But it is the 9% of Coptic Christians or 13% combined of Egyptians that are not Islamic that do not approve of mutilated women. There is no coincidence that 10% of Egyptian women are not mutilated; There is nothing more obvious in all of Egypt. The Pink Elephant in the room is a Coptic Christian, Female Elephant.
Over cooked western sensibilities can create separation from Inalienable-Human-Rights and Women; or, more to the point, women from their privates. Further, it can disarm human rights activists of one of the last true friends the East has left to give them, Coptic Female, Pink Elephants.
http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/first/hosken.html
"The followers of the Ethiopian Christian Church and the Copts in Egypt (more than seven million adherents) have always mutilated the genitals of their female children. Indeed, all religions (with the exception of the Scottish Protestant Church in Kenya in the 1920s) have actively supported or tolerated the mutilation of girls to make the pliable subjects of the dominant patriarchal community that vests all rights in the males. "
Helping to provide decent economic and educational opportunities to girls and women is the only successful way to stop this practice. Since when has war or Western interference managed to "save" another country's women? Don't blame Islam, blame repressive dictators who for thirty years did nothing to help develop their country but lined their pockets with American money.