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Contemporary Jahilliyah : Worse than ever before?
“Wa idhal-maw’udatu su’ilat
Bi-ayyi dhambin qutilat”
Economist Cover Story This Week: Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls
Killed, aborted, or neglected at least 100 million girls have disappeared and the number is rising.
I can’t stand Sarah Palin and am basically happy that she’s treated as a joke as a political figure. Still, I think she’s probably right that the Newsweek cover is sexist.
On India’s Railways, Women Find New Peace in Commute:
As the morning commuter train rattled down the track, Chinu Sharma, an office worker, enjoyed the absence of men. Some of them pinch and grope women on trains, or shout insults and catcalls, she said. Her friend Vandana Rohile agreed and widened her eyes in mock imitation.
…
Many men are not thrilled. Several female passengers said eve teasing was worse here in northern India than elsewhere in the country. As the Ladies Special idled on Track 7 at the station in Palwal, a few men glared from the platform. The Ladies Special was far less crowded, with clean, padded benches and electric fans, compared with the dirty, darkened train on Track 6 filled with sullen men. Vandals sometimes write profanities on the Ladies Special, or worse.
this sort of problem is not limited to india. you read about, or hear about, the same issues in japan or the middle east (with variances, e.g., japanese men seem to be partial to groping as opposed to eye contact). reading this sort of stuff is bracing, and does make me think that a modest dose of feminist “brainwashing” of men does some good. it obviously occurs everywhere there are men, but cultural norms and even legal penalties can dampen it. note that it is more prevalent in northern india, not only generally more backwards in vital indices than south india (punjab excepted, though not in the area of gender relations), but also more conservative, religious and traditionalist in its patriarchy.
GENERAL SLOCUM DISASTER, 1905. most of the 1,000 people who drown are women because most women did not know how to swim. issues of modesty discouraged them from learning.
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.”
Unique among immigrant-bashing nativist movements, writes Sara at Orcinus, the Minutemen militias seem to let women take leadership roles. Since movement members racism is often only exceeded by their sexism, “There’s a good argument to be made that authoritarianism is, at its core, a fetishization of all things “masculine,” which means it generally can’t exist without the reflexive subjugation of all things feminine.”
So it’s unusual that you can find three women in right-wing leadership roles: Laine Lawless, Shawna Forde, and Brandi Baron.
The Seattle Weekly has a new article on Ford, who has apparently had a difficult life: foster care, shoplifting, prostitution arrests, repeated marriages and name changes. Ford, who told her followers that she saw brown-skinned immigrants as filthy, lowly lawbreakers, was recently charged for the double murder of a Mexican man and his 9-year-old daughter.
Sara writes:
It would not surprise any of us, I think, to find out that Brandi Baron and Laine Lawless had similarly troubled biographies — as do almost all of the men who commit acts of far-right extremist violence.
When feminism promised to give us all the same opportunities men had, I’m pretty sure this is not what the movement’s foremothers had in mind.
I guess this means we’ve finally arrived. It doesn’t feel much like victory, though.
Laine Lawless is the former high priestess of Sisterhood of the Moon, a lesbian pagan organization, and got into trouble in 2006 for sending a letter to a neo-Nazi leader asking if some of his “warriors” would be willing to engage in a terror campaign that would include beatings, stealing non-white peoples’ paychecks and “Discouraging Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative.”
And here’s video of Brandi Baron demanding to ‘Kill any man, woman or child who comes across the border illegally.’
This week on MMW, we laud Shahina Siddiqui’s idea of “true Muslim society”, look at South Africa’s Muslim Personal Law bill and its media characterization, harp on the Guardian’s coverage of Dr. Zahra Rahnavard, and like up all the news that’s fit to print…about Muslim women.
Salam, everybuddy! Sorry I’ve been absent these last few weeks; no good reason, just laziness.
This week, we take a look at how a South African Muslim magazine has been revitalized by its new female editor, how a Canadian immigrant uses women’s bodies to prove the “I’m not like them!” spiel, how the Financial Times gets sidetracked in its story about Dubai horse-racing, how a Canadian documentary looks at Indian Muslims, and at the misplaced concern generated by the video of the girl being whipped in Pakistan. Plus: LINKS!
It’s hard for me to imagine who needed a scientific study to tell them this, but some of the underlying implications are interesting…
“Men see bikini-clad women as objects, psychologists say”
supplementary study on both male and female undergraduates found that men tend to associate bikini-clad women with first-person action verbs such as I “push,” “handle” and “grab” instead of the third-person forms such as she “pushes,” “handles” and “grabs.” They associated fully clothed women, on the other hand, with the third-person forms, indicating these women were perceived as in control of their own actions. The females who took the test did not show this effect, Fiske said.
That goes along with the idea that the man looking at a woman in a bikini sees her as the object of action, Fiske said.
while i’m on the theme…Man sold teen daughter into marriage for cash, beer, meat:
A California man sold his 14-year-old daughter to an 18-year-old man for cash, beer and meat — then called police when the prospective bridegroom didn’t live up to his end of the deal, authorities said Tuesday.
This week on MMW, we discuss the polarizing politics of Muslims who speak against Islamism, provide a kick-ass review of The Jewel of Medina (it’s especially kick-ass because we have an audio clip of Ethar’s interview with Sherry Jones that you won’t find anywhere else), give point and counterpoint on Mohja Kahf’s Washington Post piece, discuss the racism and sexism that keep African American Muslim women out of Muslim representation, satirize the publishing industry’s interest in Muslim women, and keep you up-to-date on news about Muslim women.
susan rotolo, onetime a gf of bob dylan in the 60s, is on the radio a lot right now doing interviews. i was struck on *to the best of our knowledge* how she mentions that as a single woman she couldn’t really experience the coffee-shop scene of greenwich village back then because she’d always be hit on by strange men. in contrast, her male counterparts were given a particular freedom to lounge and just “hang out” which she wasn’t. i think it’s an interesting point because in many “traditional” societies today single women are viewed like this; if they aren’t with a man, they’re fair game to the same extent. this seems a classic case of normalization of deviance (without any pejorative or praiseworthy implications).
of course, to some extent this is moderately operative today as well in the USA. but since so many women live single lives they aren’t as out of the norm and so one can’t assume or presume that they’re “fair game” in some way.
‘Wrap your meat’:
Related: ‘veil your lollipop’, ‘wrap your sweets’.
Following ‘veil your lollipop’, it’s time to ‘wrap your sweets’:
(Via Hatshepsut.)
The following image appeared on a Muslim website recently:
(Via Tabsir.)
Intra-Arab cultural perspectives: A female Iraqi colleague says she was surprised that she had struggled to find work in the UAE; this is despite over 20 years experience in the industry (almost all of that in Iraq).
I found her ’surprise’ surprising.