The West's infatuation with Muslim women and their rights!

Like secularism, capitalism and democracy, women’s rights also flows from the West to the rest. The various tentacles of the UN are dedicated to propagating women’s rights as universal values. It seems odd that universal values would require external effort to cajole nations into compliance! The issue (women’s rights) is predominantly raised to attack Islam and Muslims, even though it may be more applicable to other religions and cultures that indicate the ulterior motive behind the issue is one of making political gains against adversaries not the welfare of womankind.

The Islamic Veil (Hijab) or the Bikini?

Polygamy or Sexual Freedom (Promiscuity)?

Freedom of Choice and Enforcement?

Gender Equality or Gender Harmony?

I found this an interesting read...hope you find it so..different point of view..

http://www.islamcalling.com/media/view.asp?d_id=11&n_id=158

that in some countries you can only wear a hijab. In many countries, you are given the option of wearing a hijab, wearing jeans or wearing a bikini. In other words, many Islamic countries do not give women the choice to wear what they want, to be treated like human beings, etc.

not what anyone may choose to do with that freedom to choose. It is the foreclosing of options that is so repellent to concepts of dignity and human rights.

cultural relativism which opposes the supposed freedom of western women with the supposed repression of muslim women is, in reality, as the poster said,, a stick to beat the present 'enemy' with.

It is better to look at it from another perspective - is there any reason to believe that the people who go on about women's liberation in muslim countries actually care about women's liberation anywhere? I would suggest not.

Women' liberation is just an issue which is being Exploited for their own Agenda.

It seems every day some poor woman is being killed in an Islamic country for some violation of male supremacy.

who wear the scarf and are college educated people who CHOSE a certain conservative approach to their lifestyles.
these women also believe that a good case for womens equality can found in the koran.
i have no opinion --

except in those countries when oppression is practiced.

having rocks thrown at you for dress that offends is unacceptable.

or a job that offends

or whatever it is.

it's about choice of lifestyles and beliefs and then not being tormented for those beliefs that's important.

and surprisingly, they are respectful of MY life in return. They could teach our American Taliban a few things.

the documented history of abuse of women in service of social power structures which remove their power and then place them on a pedestal where they are expected to remain silent, pure, deferential and first virginal and then fertile says all that's needed about how Islam is too frequently lived, implemented. Conservatives are the defenders of a way of life where we make nice little models about how things "should" be, and then try to force reality to coincide. The problem is that consistently, the "should" is self-serving, and defies reality in the service of unrighteous personal advancement. It is wonderfully convenient to have well-defined roles and differentiation for the genders, where everyone knows their place, has their sphere of overt control (women inside the home in these models) and leaves each other's turf well-enough alone. It allows us to be lazy, refer to a set of rules, and say "you're not following the recipe". It is also restrictive, and de facto has wasted the talent of 50% of the species in too many instances for too many millenia. My own suspicion is that the human mind, being relatively simple, has taken the literally receptive physical role of the female in heterosexual coitus and transferred its structure to social roles, etc. - I cause you to receive my prong during sex, so why shouldn't you receive my other initiatives in other realms. Duh, but then we're stupid, provably.

The plain fact is that Islam as lived is too often used as an excuse for perpetuation of the worst of human society and development, the slaver culture where the notion of ownership pervades everything, in this instance including gender relations. All pieties about intent aside, I propose that this may be a structural effect of the very differentiation asserted by Islam that the linked article refers to - if you predefine that there are clear differences (which are what is wished for but largely fail to coincide with physical reality - the seeds of both genders are biologically present in each, and all flows from there whether we like it or not, i.e. difference is largely social artifice) then you allow yourself to have them whether they are justified or not. But regardless of whether discrimination is institutionalized by Islam's very structure, its results are clear - beatings, abuse, coercion, theft of free choice in relationships or sexual activity, waste of talent, repressed psyches, undue advancement for incompetent and immature men, involuntary servitude to abusive spousal family members of both genders, killings, honor rapes, etc.

There simply are universal, and inherent, civil rights, and respecting them is more important than respecting cultural diversity. Cultures can be defective even as we understand that difference is not necessarily deficiency, and Muslim culture, as lived, too frequently provably is. (And as usual, it's the universal problem of changing the people, not necessarily the structure.)

If you want to do something useful, read here http://4anaa.org and donate.

look here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5667562

or already occupy. Afghanistan? Oh, we are SO VERY CONCERNED for women there! Iraq? We can't leave Iraq now (or indeed, ever) or else women would be oppressed by Fundamenterrahists, never mind that they were not previously subject to Islamic Law's special rules for women under the regime we just destroyed.

But elsewhere in the world:
Saudi Arabia--go ahead, set the bitch on fire! Behead her! We don't care.
India--arrange her marriage and then kill her when the husband dies, WE DON'T CARE!
(This list could fill the page.)

The United States has done some good in advancing the cause of human rights around the world, however this has been more in spite of our government's official positions and actions than because of them. The one "human right" that our government has been a consistent advocate of and has tried invariably to impose on other countries and cultures is the "right" of a person to engage in the limitless accumulation of property, and by a person I mean usually a corporation.

The rest has been, 99.9% of the time, a selective application of principles (aka double-standards) and transparently mendacious cant.

and the social structures of artificial differentiation which they support serve the same socioeconomic organization as union busting, domestic surveillance and the global free market. The notion is that everyone's pursuit of self-interest may not be impeded - cause if you do it to them, they might do it to you. Once we get a bunch of people together who all speak the same language, and after they've identified a dominance hierarchy among themselves, then when they're all pursuing their self-interest, we're ready to form a tribe. This tribe will now have collective self-interests which all members must contribute towards. Enter environmental obstacles, and other competing tribes, and our little group must suddenly fear for its survival. So life is conducted in a constrained climate, where the progenitive entities, namely the women, are tightly controlled for optimized breeding. This leaves the men free to go out and make money, and fight other tribes. Since human children need adult supervision for about two decades, the tribal society establishes mores revolving around a long-term or lifetime pair bond. So, with women who are constrained to enter into monogamous sexual relationships with males the tribe (often in the form of her family) chooses for them, and obliged to breed at the male's demand, and to engage in division of labor involving management of the home and daily activities, we have arrived at a social organization which optimizes the socioeconomic effectiveness of the procreative unit.

Quite effective really, except that we left caves a few tens of thousands of years ago, and in the developed world, we stopped needing to live in survival-optimized tribes a few centuries ago. I don't do uggah buggah, but that's what traditional social mores regarding women's roles perpetuate. It might be dressed up as "she rules from behind the scenes" or "the little woman who runs everything", but those models just encourage women to be ignorant manipulators, which is a waste of the potential of 50% of the population where it occurs, and an enabler for defectives to set social tone. We don't need to run around anymore fearing being clubbed, and if we do, then our society is broken and we need to set about fixing it so we don't. When it does work, we don't need to live like subsistence survivalists as today's conservatives, or precisely the brutalist neocons, would like to foist on us.

We "help" muslim women by killing their beloved husbands, fathers and sons-- somehow I don't think they will thank us.

i do tire of excuses being made for anti-women behavior under the guise of being broad-minded

'gender equality or gender harmony' indeed, catch a clue, dude, there is no separate but equal

progressives who would never tell a black man to sit down & shut up abt his rights, will tell the woman to sit down & shut up abt her rights

it is not worth being at peace if your peace means MY slavery

equality is simply a non-negotiable

...it is not just tiresome, it is disgusting to see people defend sexual apartheid! Women's rights and choices are just as important as men's. I read the "article," and I don't think there was one redeeming point. However, it is not just Islam, there are plenty of other religions with their faults. This article was the best red herring article I have seen in some time.

rights except those that the men in their families allow them to have, have you?

When you don't have any rights, you do what you have to for survival and to raise your children. I know many women even get brainwashed into believing that this is what is best for them. Let the men run things and she will look after the home.

They find out otherwise, when a woman's husband divorces her because he's tired of her. Then if she doesn't have a father or brothers to take her in, she's out in the street, where no one will give her anything but the most menial of jobs, and often she is thrown out with any children he doesn't want to keep.

Also, this could happen if she is widowed. This doesn't happen only in Muslim countries but many nations that still have a strict patriarchal structure.
This is why global organizations are reaching out to help save those women who have been cast out by the system, or who are victims of domestic abuse because there is no one to stand up for them.

Kind of a touche against Western culture. He hits on issues that feminists are struggling with as we speak. He seems to be saying there would be no need for feminism if we just let things be in Muslim culture. That such things he refers to in Western culture do not occur in Muslim culture.

But he leaves out much, as has been pointed out by posters above far more eloquent than I am on the subject.

I've met devout Muslim women from Ethiopia who do not wear head coverings, who work, who marry, or not- as they please. I've also met American Muslim women who have converted to Islam and live a much more conservative lifestyle--by choice.

As always choice is the litmus test. We struggle in Western culture with the results of uninformed choice, choices from damaged psyches, and the illusion in some cases that choice is available when it is not, it's actually a type psychological herding into a way of thinking and acting. Feminist fight against this uphill battle everyday.