The possible cause of ‘hyper-masculinised’ Muslim societies in the troubled lands. A very well written personal account, you might appreciate it more if you have an Asian subcontinent context.
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arif
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johnpi
The ulema of Maulvi Mumtaz’s time ignored it, but its revolutionary thoughts are now warming the hearts of reformists in the community. “Quoting the Quran and Hadith, both Prophet Muhammad’s traditions, the maulvi convincingly explodes the myth of male supremacy and argues that the Quran is just to both sexes,” says Islamic reformist Asgar Ali Engineer who published Huququn Niswan (Rights of Women) a few months ago after he got a photocopy from a US library with an American scholar’s help.
There are plans to publish the book in English, Hindi and Urdu.
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johnpi
A McClatchy feature article on the eight US states that allow insurance companies to designate domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition” for grounds to deny health care coverage.
“This is insane,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who’s been trying to convince Congress to address the issue for roughly a decade.
Murray said she couldn’t remember exactly when she first learned of it, but sometime in the 1990s she recalls a private conversation she had with a woman who broke down as she explained that she couldn’t flee an abusive relationship because her children were covered under her husband’s health care plan and she couldn’t get her own. Another woman told Murray that she didn’t report that she’d been battered because she feared losing her coverage.
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johnpi
ISNA has banned the first-ever translation of the Quran by a woman from its bookstore, according to Tarek Fatah. Fatah seems to be pretty fast and loose with the word “Islamist,” which prompts suspicion for me as ISNA has been the target of extremist smears for awhile.
Until 2007, only men had translated the Koran and interpreted it. That’s because the very idea of a woman translating the holy book offends Islamists. Consider, for example, the reaction to the first-ever translation by a woman — Laleh Bakhtiar’s The Sublime Quran — two years ago.
Mohammad Ashraf of the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) — the same gentleman who this week told the CBC that there was no provision for honour killings in Islam — told The Toronto Star that he would not permit The Sublime Quran to be sold in the ISNA bookstore. “Our bookstore would not allow this kind of translation,” he said. “I will consider banning it … This woman-friendly translation will be out of line and will not fly too far.”
What had Laleh Bakhtiar done to deserve the punishment of having her translation of the Koran banned from ISNA’s Islamic bookstores? Her fault, in the eyes of Islamists, is that she believes the Koran does not condone spousal abuse, as claimed by Islamists.
I checked the Toronto Star article, and Ashraf did indeed say what he is quoted as saying. Ashraf also said his objection was not that she was a female scholar, but that “she was not trained at an academic institution accredited in the Muslim world.” This is a catch-22 though as Bakhtiar would likely never have been admitted into programs that would allow her to be recognized as a scholar in the first place, so I conclude that Fatah’s criticism above is justified. I would still not use the word “Islamist” to describe the organization in America – but perhaps the Canadian branch is a little more “out there.”
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johnpi
Related to my previous post, a teen Muslimah ventures into the realm of media criticism and expresses a complaint about the lack of certain images of hijabis on the web:
Why doesn’t there seem to be action hijabis on google?! Why do all hijabis have to be posing? I’ve been googling hijabi w/hijab flying in the wind since forever. But there’s nothing! Or a hijabi running or jumping or cleaning or playing or eating…
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johnpi
Women’s sports clubs have become widely popular in Saudi Arabia as a culture of women’s fitness has taken hold. But the Saudi government now says it will close all of the unlicensed private operations down, leaving only expensive clubs in medical facilities.
Blogger Saudiwoman, who was misquoted and misidentified by the Arab News hacks in the article linked above, writes about this new development (I’ve edited one sentence in this quote for grammar and clarity.)
Women only sports clubs have been popping up everywhere and their fees are now within reach of the average woman. They offer aerobic classes, self-defense and even salsa dancing. However they have no legal licensing umbrella because according to the government all forms of exercise are for men only. So the owners of these clubs get a license for a salon or a child activity center and then expand from there. Ultra conservatives are dead against these establishments because they believe that they lead Saudi women to sin through the influence of and interaction with unsavory feminists, and sometimes they even go so far as to claim lesbians work there and frequent the clubs (according to the muttawa sexually repressed wild imagination). Moreover they believe that exercise goes against femininity and that it is an exclusively manly domain.
“Exercise goes against femininity” – yeah, sure. Exercise is important to overall mental health and helps stave off or improve control over mental illness. Such ‘ultra-conservatives’ must consider madness and poor mental health to be expressions of “normal” feminity, since they are more likely to be present among the women in their families who, no doubt, are prohibited from exercise.
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johnpi
Male officers in the Kuwaiti army have expressed embarrassment at having to salute female superiors as the interior ministry denied rumors it was considering offering monetary compensation to female officers in return for not demanding to be saluted by male officers.
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thabet
