Subhuman animals. I lost my cool last ni …
Subhuman animals. I lost my cool last night… If only my vocabulary of maledictions was a bit less mundane, I could have really let loose. I certainly didn’t go far enough.
I’m hoping Obama is far more interventionalist-minded than his comments on Pakistan indicate.
razib, and 1 other are discussing.
Fatemeh 2:33 pm on November 3, 2008 Permalink
This broke my heart just as much as this. May Allah give these women peace and justice.
aziz 2:35 pm on November 3, 2008 Permalink
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
razib 10:41 pm on November 3, 2008 Permalink
yeah, my rxn too….
fathima 7:22 pm on November 4, 2008 Permalink
i subscribe to sasialist, a mailing list devoted to South Asian lit (anyone else?). some weeks ago someone sent out the link to Mohja Kahf’s article, “The Upside of Being a Muslim Woman,” and basically said the article was bullshit, because there could be no upside to wearing the hijab, since it is an expression of and justification for patriarchy.
and while i found Kahf’s article superficial, i felt compelled to respond because a couple of points in that poster’s email irritated me(eg, all hijabis look the same).
anyway, that was a while back, but today, under that same thread, that same poster linked to this story and wrote,
“i don’t care what kind of rationalizations muslim women make about such oppression, be it wearing a burkha or chiffon hijab or confessing to adultery laws under sharia, if they claim that that if women can voluntarily practice these laws made to keep women down and quiet then somehow they become free women, then i call them not only delusional but collaborators.”
and i got so tired, that where ordinarily i might have responded i just deleted the thread.
this young girl’s murder is an instance of the innate capacity in humans for great evil. i don’t think we as people turn to religion or other sociocultural frameworks to excuse our evil, only to vindicate it after the fact.
but to be accused in one fell swoop of being a collaborator in something i cannot even begin to conceive … this triggered a different, perhaps more selfish, kind of tiredness, on top of the first more existential kind.
aziz 9:17 pm on November 4, 2008 Permalink
fathima, there’s actually a term for this – Bateson’s Double-Bind. I should write about this…
fathima 12:15 am on November 6, 2008 Permalink
oh wow, thanks for linking that up, aziz. please do write about it. having it articulated it would go some ways to helping surmount the circularity of this il/logic.