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Fatemeh Fakhraie writes about the Chesler vs. Wolf ridiculousness:
What’s most interesting about this “debate” is that neither women have qualifications that make their opinions hold weight. Phyllis “Feminist Hawk” Chelser is a notorious Islamophobe, and Naomi’s experience with the veil came from putting on Pakistani clothing (“shalwar kameez”) in Morocco. Uh-huh.
Over at Muslimah Media Watch Egyptian blogger Eman Hashim writes about the Saudi guardianship campaign being led by two Saudi princesses: “My guardian knows what’s best for me.” It is a campaign in support of the strict male guardianship laws in that country.
Hashim is rebuked in the comments by other Muslimahs for her defense of women who choose or desire to live under male guardianship.
However, Hashim is far more critical and uncompromising when she writes about women who choose to live within the dominant paternalistic paradigm on her own blog. In a review of a movie about the fight in America to get the vote for women, she favorably quotes this line: “Women like you are worse than anti-suffragists; you perpetuate the lie everyday at breakfast.”
Then she lists her own complaints:
My god! How many times have you met a woman who voluntarily declares her stupidity and ignorance just to get a man’s attention and approval?
How many women have you talked to and they just faked inferiority to nourish a no-body guy just to get a proposal?
How many places have you gone to where women refuse to get business done with other women cause “we are not as smart as men”?
I know that a lot of my fellow doctors never went to a female doctor nor they ever intend to because “male doctors are cleverer”
I know that women don’t like to go to electronic stores and deal with saleswomen cause “we just don’t understand technology!”
I know my friends who resist any piece of information related to their laptops cause “guys just get these kinds of things not us.”
She concludes her post:
I am optimistic, I believe that someday we will be able to break those walls, that women will be that scared of being rejected by intimidated men, that women will not be ruled by what other want her to be, that women will not be scared to lead their lives, make their own choices, be ready for the consequences and live the beauty of a free life!
I don’t understand why Hashim writes with one face at Muslimah Media Watch, and another when she writes for her own blog.
Remember this clarion call for (especially Western) silence and indifference in the name of privacy and respect toward the martyr Neda, and against those who would appropriate her as a “sign,” a symbol?
Here’s Neda’s mother in a BBC interview thanking the world for its attention:
I don’t want people to forget her. People – Iranians – have all been very supportive. They come to me and congratulate me for having had such a brave daughter.
And now I want you to do something for me. I want you, on my behalf, to thank everyone around the world, Iranians and non Iranians, people from every country and culture, people who in their own way, their own tradition, have mourned my child… everyone who lit a candle for her – every musician, who wrote songs for her, who wrote poems about her… you know, Neda loved the arts and music. I want to thank all of them.
I want to thank politicians and leaders, from every country, at all levels, who remembered my child.
Her death has been so painful – words can never describe my true feelings. But knowing that the world cried for her… that has comforted me.
I am proud of her. The world sees her as a symbol, and that makes me happy.
Muslims ‘not of the West’ need as much protection from Western Muslims who will colonize them as they do from any other oppressor.
Who among us will rush in and do the patroniz…err…protecting? 
A pejorative comment about ‘what Western media manipulation has done’ to Neda:
Her image is no longer that of a woman in death but rather a sign of Iran’s oppressive regime.
Some facts about who has acted to make Neda a sign of Iran’s repressive regime, and some facts about who has acted vigorously in defense of Neda’s ‘privacy.’ From Wikipedia:
* After being pronounced dead at Shariati hospital, Agha-Soltan was buried at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran; she was denied a proper funeral by government authorities.
* On June 23, it was reported that government authorities directed Agha-Soltan’s family to remove the black mourning banners that were hanging outside their residence in the Tehran neighborhood of Tehranpars in order to prevent the home from becoming a place of pilgrimage.
* On June 24, The Guardian reported the results of interviews of neighbours who claimed that Agha-Soltan’s family was forced to vacate their apartment some days after her death.
* The Iranian government has issued a ban on collective prayers in mosques for Agha-Soltan in the aftermath of the incident.
* Soona Samsami, the executive director of the Women’s Freedom Forum, who has been relaying information about the protests inside Iran to the international media, told the foreign press that Agha-Soltan’s immediate family were threatened by authorities if they permitted a gathering to mourn her. Samsami stated, “They were threatened that if people wanted to gather there the family would be charged and punished.”
* On June 22, Iranian riot police dispersed a crowd of between 200 and 1,000 protesters with live ammunition and tear gas who had gathered in Tehran’s Haft-e Tir Square after online calls for protesters to pay tribute to Agha-Soltan and others killed during the demonstrations.
* On that same day, about 70 mourners gathered outside Niloufar mosque in Abbas Abad, where the Agha-Soltan family attended services. A leaflet posted on the mosque’s door read, “There is no commemoration here for Neda Agha Soltan.” Many in the crowd wore black. Some recited poems. After about ten minutes, 20 Basij paramilitary arrived on motorcycles and dispersed the attendees.
Embedded in these various bullets points are reports of lots and lots of non-Western Muslims – real people, with real feelings and real rights trying to take control of their own destinies and identities, but some Western Muslims clearly seek to diminish or ignore them. Therefore ‘Muslim sources’ and ‘feminist sources’ should be deconstructed of the license these labels give them to speak with authority about non-Western and female perspectives.
Silence and invisibility for the sake of Neda:
Her image is no longer that of a woman in death but rather a sign of Iran’s oppressive regime. Neda’s agency is denied, and in her passing we cannot afford her privacy but continually reproduce an image of her death which to me resembles a Warhol pop art print. Neva Mwiti writes a really strong analysis of Stolen and the controversy surrounding it. She asks whether or not “film producers, brand gurus and marketers from the West will realise and respect that the third world is not fodder for their notoriety, but actually made up real people, with real feelings and real rights over their own destinies and identities.” I think her comments can be applied to the majority (if not all) representations of women like Faitim and Neda. When will these women be given the respect they deserve?
Neda’s agency is denied by limiting the scope of her possible desires to one – “privacy,” a state of silence and invisibility.
Next we should examine what we know about Neda’s thoughts on the political behavior she was engaged in and was killed for. From Wikipedia:
* Her music teacher, Hamid Panahi, who was accompanying Agha-Soltan during the protest, told the media: “She couldn’t stand the injustice of it… All she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted. She wanted to show with her presence that, ‘I’m here, I also voted, and my vote wasn’t counted’. It was a very peaceful act of protest, without any violence.”
* Caspian Makan (Agha-Soltan’s fiancé) told BBC: “Neda had said that even if she lost her life and got a bullet in her heart, she would carry on”.
She was engaged in an act of expression when she died, in a public place for all to know and see. She stepped out of anything that was part of her normal regular life to be public and to be heard. To then say that the highest respect we can pay her is “privacy” is to steal the agency – the meaning that she ascribed to the last few minutes of her life.
Speaking of non-Western perspectives, this commenter at Racialicious was fairly bursting with respect for them:
If I am not mistaken…it is the Iranian dissidents who are pimping Neda Soltani’s blood-ridden face all over the Internet. It is a certain political group of Iranians who are dying for attention from the Western corporate media.
Paraphrased thusly: “I just hate non-Westerners who won’t get with my program and let me colonize them…”
A Saudi Arabian blogger has published an expose about women reporters in that country suffering sexual harassment and having to sleep with their bosses to keep jobs and get promotions. The blogger, Hedayah Darwish, also reports that Saudi journalists sometimes resort to using drugs and alcohol. As most any reporter will tell you, use and abuse of substances is sadly far more common than it should be among those in that profession due to the stress and the sometimes inhuman demands that come with the job, so this is not a wild report.
Now however, it seems the bosses and editors she exposed are utilizing the Saudi Journalists Association to destroy her, with 13 female journalists smearing Darwish and calling for a government crackdown and new round of censorship of bloggers and e-newspapers that publish “content that creates social harm and negative images.” (The gender of the accusers is important because they claim Darwish impugned female journalists only, but Darwish seems to deny that in the Arab News article linked above.) The attack on Darwish is a trojan horse that may allow the traditional print journalists of Saudi Arabia, who operate under more restrictive censorship rules than their online brothers, to cut out the competition by prompting a government over-reaction that squashes access to Internet information sources in that country.
Aside from that larger issue, the most important journalistic question that arises out of the story is this: Is the report accurate? If the story is accurate then there is no issue, since the truth should be the highest value as a standard of personal, professional, societal and even religious integrity. “Social harm” and “negative images” should be secondary considerations to the truth in a country that claims the Quran for its constitution.
If Darwish’s story contained inaccuracies, the Saudi journalists should have published reports that corrected the inaccuracies and set the record straight. Instead they acted like Stalinist toadies and called for a full-on government slam-down on Internet publishers. So I’m creating a new tag here at TalkIslam “Faux Journalist Watch” to go with the “Faux Feminist Watch”, both of which seem to apply to this story.
Polygamy: a relationship in which women’s rights are obtained and their needs met. Cycads examines efforts to appropriate feminist language to promote polygamy in Indonesia.
(UPDATE by Aziz: Note that Wayne Ross vehemently denies ever making such statements, and the evidence does seem tissue-paper thin)
“If a guy can’t rape his wife…who’s he gonna rape?” and “There wouldn’t be an issue with domestic violence if women would learn to keep their mouths shut.”
Patriot Boy consoles the president of Feminists for Life of America Serrin Foster over rising criticism of Sarah Palin’s choice for Alaska attorney general Wayne Anthony Ross, who made the comments above.
Patriot Boy writes to Ms. Foster:
Surely, there is nothing more feminist in its very nature than spousal rape. It empowers wives by providing them with the means of gratifying the head of household even when they are not in the mood. If you look at it that way, support for spousal rape is perhaps the greatest innovation in feminist thinking since crotchless pantaloons.