Its a touch and sensitive issue. I dont fully buy the civil rights analogy because there is no “right” to sit somewhere in a private building. The analogy to Rosa Parks is tempting, but do we want the government imposing rules on our practice of faith?

Still, its hard not to be impressed. I would have been even more impressed if the women had followed through with the civil rights analogy in full… but thats spoiling the narrative. Go read it.

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Muslim women staged a protest at a D.C. mosque Saturday to demand that mosque leaders remove a 7-foot partition behind which women pray separately from men.

Fatima Thompson and other women staged a “stand-in” at the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest. “Every woman should be able to stand with the congregation. That’s the correct way,” said Thompson, who converted to Islam 18 years ago.

snip–

but Fatima Goodwin, a mosque employee who also worships there, said Thompson is acting alone. “Not a single woman that prays here has expressed disagreement with the partition,”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/22/AR2010022204657.html

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The Al-Shabab movement in Somalia has issued directives in schools located in areas under its control, in an effort to instill Islamist ideology in the younger generation.

Islamist authorities in Merca, located some 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of the capital Mogadishu, have ordered that boys and girls learn in separate classrooms and that the Somali national flag be replaced with the movement’s flag in schools, according to the London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat.

Observers and human rights activists are concerned that the new directives will help the Islamists spread a radical ideology among impressionable schoolchildren.
….

Analysts suspect the directives are a sign the movement is trying to push girls out of the school system in moves reminiscent of the Taliban’s attacks against girls’ schools in Pakistan, since imposing separate schooling for boys and girls is logistically and financially impossible.

“Al-Shabab has already demonstrated its clear need to subjugate women, and the expulsion of girls from schools fits into this,” Roque said, “in the same way that the Taliban separated men and women, their roles, their rights, and their role in the public and private spheres.”

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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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The change in banking policy that now allows women to open accounts comes after an advocacy campaign led by the Institute of Progressive Women and other groups.

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In one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest cities, a bank has opened a branch only for women, hoping to tap a potentially large market and meet pent-up demand from Muslim women for financial services that meet their needs.

The manager of the Najaf branch of the private Babel bank is, however, a man. He must make an appointment before making a visit and enter the premises through a back door.

“Through this bank they (women customers) can unveil and exercise complete freedom in dealing with the employees,” said Mazen Abdul-Razzaq, Babel’s deputy director.

A study by The Boston Consulting Group, which included Iraq, found that women worldwide were particularly dissatisfied when it came to financial services.

Iraqi women interviewed at the women-only bank in Najaf say they felt uncomfortable dealing with male bank clerks in regular banks and felt much more relaxed in the new branch.

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Grand Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayghani said the appointment of women in such top jobs was against sharia (Islamic) law.

“They come to Qom, the centre of Shiite Islam, and announce that they will appoint women as governors of some provinces. Do you want to fight with the Quran and the Prophet with such talks that go against sharia?” he asked.

Is it any wonder that shariah gets a bad name wit interpretations like this…can somebody point me to what part of the Quran says women can’t be governors?

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The test was a two-and-a-half hour nonstop workout-slash-pummeling. I don’t remember ever being this tired.

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Tired of abuse and suppression a group of women in Kenya have joined forces to establish a female only village in Kenya, where the motto seems to be “to hell with men.”

The village, based 350 kilometers west of the capital of Nairobi, was started by a group of 14 women who decided to escape the dominance of men and live according to their own rules, Germany’s Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA) reported on Wednesday.

Called Umoja, or unity in Swahili, the village has become a safe-haven for women escaping arranged marriages, female genital mutilation (FGM) or rape and abuse.
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Despite the fact that women in the village live on their own, men from neighboring villages continue to harass them and throw stones at them.

“Get out of here. You are cursed,” they yell at them, prompting the women to build a barbed wire fence around the village to protect themselves.

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