Tag: women

Fire that German judge

Completely ridiculous story — while Arab women fight to have such measures removed from their own legal system, a German judge refers to the Quran to justify domestic abuse:

German judge invokes Qur’an to deny abused wife a divorce

A German judge who refused a Moroccan woman a fast-track divorce on the grounds that domestic violence was acceptable according to the Qur’an has been removed from the case following a nationwide outcry.
The judge, Christa Datz-Winter, said the German woman of Moroccan descent would not be granted a divorce because she and her husband came from a “Moroccan cultural environment in which it is not uncommon for a man to exert a right of corporal punishment over his wife,” according to a statement she wrote that was issued by a Frankfurt court. “That’s what the claimant had to reckon with when she married the defendant.”

The 26-year-old mother of two had been repeatedly beaten and threatened with death by her husband.

When the woman protested against the judge’s decision, Ms Datz-Winter invoked the Qur’an to support her argument. In the court she read from verse 34 of Sura four of the Qur’an, An-Nisa (Women), in which men are told to hit their wives as a final stage in dealing with disobedience. The verse reads: “… as to those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them and leave them alone in the sleeping places and beat them”.

That judge should lose her job. And incidentally, there is (as always) a wide range of interpretations and thinking about this part of the Quran.

Update: NYT story on alternate interpretation, by which a rebellious woman should be spurned rather than beaten as usually interpreted.

The “burqini”

Img Products 20-977-1150420524

I’m not trying to make fun of this — people can wear what they want — but why call it burqini? A burqa is a rather extreme form of fundamentalist gear that is not found in much of the Muslim world outside of Afghanistan and, to a much less degree, India and Pakistan. Is the Taliban what they want their product to be associated with?

Incidentally, this “burqini” is now standard issue for Muslim female lifeguards in Australia.

Mufti not against women presidents after all?

I got hold of a press release from Dar al-Iftaa saying that the Mufti was not in fact against women being president. The fatwa in fact referred only to barring women from being caliphs — which is hardly relevant to modern politics. Or at least, if the Caliphate is ever restored, whether women can hold the position will be the least of our concerns. The fatwa obviously plays on the distinction between Sultans and Caliphs — on a related note, I highly recommend Fatima Mernissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam (in the original French Sultanes oubliées) on the history of Muslim sultanas.

Since we were fairly negative about the earlier reports of the Mufti’s fatwa, I’m reproducing the statement for Dar al-Iftaa below, after the jump.

[Thanks, Paul]
Update: Apparently the Mufti considers the Organization of the Islamic Conference to be the contemporary equivalent of the Caliphate, as opposed to the Salafi/MB “imperial” vision of a modern Caliphate. It’s an interesting argument, within the confines of Islamic (ist?) discourse.

Continue reading Mufti not against women presidents after all?

Review: Golia on Hirsi Ali and Afzal-Khan

My friend Maria Golia, author of the most excellent Cairo: City of Sand, has written a review essay on two recent books that deal, broadly speaking, with women and Islam. One is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s popular and controversial The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam and the other is Shattering The Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out, a compilation of writings by Muslim-American women edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan. The review recently appeared in the august Times Literary Supplement, but is not available online. As always, click on the covers or links above to buy them on Amazon.com and we get a little baksheesh.

In 1992, the Somali-born author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, arrived in Holland as a refugee. She was granted citizenship in 1997, and six years later elected to parliament, where she focused on immigration policy. Hirsi Ali collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, writing the screenplay for Submission 1, a film about women suffering from a repressive Islam. When Van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim in 2004, Hirsi Ali’s life was threatened and her celebrity enhanced. In 2005, TIME magazine named her one of the ‘world’s 100 most influential people’.

A photograph in the New York Review of Books (October 5, 2006) shows the attractive Hirsi Ali at a TIME-sponsored party chortling with fellow influential person, Condoleezza Rice. In the accompanying review, Timothy Garton Ash notes his ‘enormous respect for her courage, sincerity and clarity.’ The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think-tank close to the Bush Administration, apparently feels the same way. They made Hirsi Ali a fellow following her abrupt withdrawal from Dutch politics. Hirsi Ali’s resignation was owed in part to the controversy surrounding her falsification of personal data when requesting asylum, but also her opposition to Dutch tolerance and multiculturalism on the ground that it perpetuates ‘backwardness’, especially in Muslim immigrants.

‘[Muslim immigrants] only rarely take advantage of the opportunities offered in education and employment’ she writes in The Caged Virgin, and a restrictive Islam is what is holding them back. ‘By our Western standards, Mohammed is a perverse man. A tyrant. If you don’t do as he says, you will end up in hell. That reminds me of those megalomaniac rulers, Bin Laden, Khomeni, Saddam…..You are shocked to hear me say these things…you forget where I am from. I used to be a Muslim; I know what I’m talking about.”

This credential may have impressed the AEI, but it falls somewhat short when attempting to prosecute a religion and the multifarious peoples that profess it. It’s not that Hirsi Ali says outright that all Muslims are fundamentalists; she just attributes fundamentalist beliefs and practices to all Muslims.

Continue reading Review: Golia on Hirsi Ali and Afzal-Khan

It could happen to anyone we know

This al-Masri al-Youm report highlighted by Hossam is truly terrifying:

Two police corporals are currently under investigation for attempting to rape a woman in Tahrir Square’s underground metro (Sadat Station) on Wednesday, Al-Masry Al-Youm reports.

The woman approached a police corporal inside the underground station, asking him for directions to the nearest exit to KFC at 1:30pm. To her surprise, he pointed at the security office in the station, and told her that was her destination, before grabbing her to the office and attempting to rape her with the help of another police corporal. The woman managed to escape, in complete trauma with torn clothes.

This could happen to your sister or mother.

Egyptian feminist blogs

Joseph Mayton writes about them in the Middle East Times:

Leading the charge is a young Egyptian female – preferring to remain anonymous due to the nature of the campaign – who has started an Arab-language feminist blog called Atralnada (morning dew). In a country where Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise, and the status of women a subject of much debate, this young activist has made her struggle public, and her blog is empowering Egyptian women to speak out in turn.

“I wanted to post about my personal experiences of being harassed,” she says simply, adding that the events of the last Eid celebration had sparked something inside her, compelling her to begin expressing herself in such a fashion.

Particularly galling to her has been the apparent callousness by Egyptian men regarding the assaults. “I am asking women to speak up and tell their stories since most of the men have denied anything [of this nature ever] happens in this country,” she points out.

“[Males] write disgusting comments on blogs telling us that we are using the forum to become famous – even though [posters have to be] anonymous – and … to attract men,” she says incredulously.

Despite the odds, the forum’s popularity is catching on, having become the mouthpiece of a fledgling feminist movement, which, unlike the majority of other movements in Egypt, can lay claim to a truly grassroots base.

Does anyone have a link to the blog? Nevermind.

Arab Human Development Report 2005

UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report 2005 has been launched this week – this year it focuses on women in the Arab world. Next to a lot of valuable data and figures, it discusses progress and continuous discrimination of women. It makes some interesting points – for instance arguing that moderate Islamic groups with their increasing respect of human rights, minorities, internal democracy and good governance are balancing the noise that extremist Islamic groups are making in public. The report also criticizes some Arab states for claiming to have ratified international conventions, without adapting national legislation to an extent where women and men would be fully equal before the law.

Overall, the report seems to argue that it is much less Islam but rather deep-rooted traditionalism in Middle Eastern societies which is responsible for the situation of Arab women.