This City Journal article titled Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam is important. One thing though that those of the West-PoMo-types and defenders of the tradition-might forget is that sometimes women want to be “oppressed.” Check out this article relating the far greater number of Islamists, many women, protesting equalization of the medieval Muslim divorce laws in Morocco (this is a moment where Robert Kaplan’s enlightened despot shines above the froth of anarchy).
Why would women oppose their own liberation? With rights come responsibilities (so goes the theory), and I suspect many of these women have been socialized to exist in an almost quasi-infantile state without a conception of self-determination and delude themselves that they are “protected” (at least to western eyes) [1]. Of course, there are different roles that men and women traditionally have. But the problem is that behavior between the genders overlaps, and absolute dictates do not take into account personal choice and autonomy.
[check out this related article in Beliefnet about Muslim-Christian custody disputes, I don’t know where I stand on this, but it raises confusing questions. They should raise them atheists and allow them to pick gods when their grow up I say!]
[1] All my liberal friends seem to have heard or encountered traditional Muslim women telling them that they feel “protected” and “respected” by Islam. There might be something to this, but children are also protected and respected. While to a westerner an educated Muslim woman wearing a head-scarf might say that “she is a pearl to be cherished,” in my personal experience as a child, the prime justification that Muslims of South Asian origins made for purdah was that a woman was for the eyes of her man only (perhaps Muslims of other nationalities are more noble in inclination, I have no knowledge of that…). A far less edifying reason, but logical insofar as I believe that most Muslim men view their women-folk as property owned by the extended family which they are head. This explains the story recounted in the article of a father beheading his seven year old daughter because she was raped by her uncle, she was damaged property that blemished the appraisal value (social standing) of the clan. There’s a reason I think the terms “civlization” and “barbarism” should make a comeback….
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