Muslim Women's Rights, Continued
By Katha Pollitt
This article appeared in the July 13, 2009 edition of The Nation.
I thought President Obama's Cairo speech was basically fine: begin anew,
extend the hand, reject "crude stereotypes" all around, turn the page on the
Christian triumphalism of the Bush years. But there's no denying that the
section on women's rights was rather minimal, just three paragraphs,
compared with his long discourse on Israel and Palestine; and to my American
ears its priorities were a bit odd. You would think the biggest issue for
Muslim women is that someone is preventing them from wearing a headscarf:
"The US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls
to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it," he said. "I reject
the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is
somehow less equal."
Fair enough, but that woman is choosing. What about Saudi or Iranian women,
who are forced by law to cover? Obama noted that countries where women are
well educated tend to be more prosperous and promised American aid for
women's literacy and microloans. These are both good things, especially in
desperately poor and underdeveloped countries like Afghanistan; but face it,
to become full participants in modern societies women need more than a grade
school education and a sewing machine. They need their rights. In fact, some
Muslim countries, like Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, already have
large numbers of highly educated women--in Iran, as in America, more young
women go to college than men. But those women are prevented from working to
their capacity, or even at all, by religiously motivated sex discrimination.
In Saudi Arabia, women can't even work in lingerie stores. By a quirk of the
gender-apartheid regulations, only men can sell ladies' underwear. So much
for "modesty": when there's money to be made from women, you can be sure the
theocrats will figure out a reason that God wants it to go into men's
pockets.
I can see why Obama didn't issue a ringing call for full civil rights for
Muslim women: an end to stoning and lashings and female genital mutilation,
to forced marriage and child marriage, to family law that enshrines male
privilege, the valuing of women's testimony in court as half that of a man's
and the scandalous laws that punish as unchaste those rape victims who lack
four witnesses--male witnesses, of course--to the crime. Such a statement
would have backfired; it would have allowed traditionalists and theocrats to
pose as anti-imperialists, defenders of culture and religion against the
impious West. Moreover, as he properly noted, women struggle for their
rights all over the world, not just under Islam. But I can also see why some
feminists were disappointed not to get more of a shout-out. "It seems that
Mr. Obama is attempting to build political bridges by taking a more socially
conservative stance, a common--but mistaken--tack in the struggle against
fundamentalism and terrorism," writes Algerian-American human rights lawyer
Karima Bennoune on the blog Europe: Solidaire Sans Frontières. "This may
also be the reason that the President felt compelled to stress his respect
for 'women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles,' rather
than, say, referencing the critical struggles of the Egyptian women's
movement. Welcome to the new cultural relativism. We're not going to deal
with human rights problems in your part of the world, because we want your
extremists to stop blowing us up."
The title of Bennoune's article, "The Religionizing of Politics," points to
another problem: the tendency in the West to treat majority-Muslim countries
as a single cohesive entity--"the Muslim world"--rather than as Asian,
African and Middle Eastern nations that are as different from one another as
the majority-Christian lands of Britain and Mexico. The term itself promotes
the view that Islam tout court is what these countries are all about, thus
marginalizing other ways of understanding them and rendering invisible the
non-Muslims and seculars who live there.
The current election struggle in Iran came as a big surprise to those who
take the simplistic view of Muslim nations as our antagonists in a clash of
civilizations. Who knew that our arch-enemy, member in good standing of the
Axis of Evil, had all these hip young people, these tech-savvy Tweeters,
these ordinary citizens eager to go into the streets day after day and risk
beatings, arrests and death at the hands of the feared Basij? Who knew it
had so many women who, however devout they may or may not be, don't want to
be denied ordinary human freedoms in the name of religion, thank you very
much? The energetic and massive participation of women in the street
demonstrations has received much comment in the Western media, but it's only
surprising if you think Muslim women really are as weak and passive as the
mullahs imagine.
That impression of Muslim women appears to be shared by Nicolas Sarkozy, who
has thrown his support behind a proposal to ban in France the all-enveloping
burqa and the niqab, calling it a "question of women's liberty and dignity."
The most vocal French feminists support the ban, as does the French Muslim
women's group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Doormats), for whom
it's a necessary counterweight to family and community pressures on women.
While it may well be true that some of the small number of French women who
wear burqas and niqabs are forced into them, it's hard to see how a ban will
help liberate them. Instead, it will permit the French to publicly humiliate
them and feel good about it, ratify the Islamists' claim that the West is
out to get Islam and give more proof that Muslims are unwelcome in France.
* * *
Just so you know, The Mind-Body Problem, my new collection of poems, is now
out from Random House.
About Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt's writing has appeared in many publications, including The New
Yorker, The London Review of Books, the Washington Post and the New York
Times. Her new book of poems, The Mind-Body Problem, has just been published
by Random House. Her previous books include Learning to Drive: and Other
Life Stories (Random House), a collection of personal essays. more...
***
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23148.htm
Obama Ignores Torture
By Helen Thomas
July 28, 2009 "Times Union" -- - Secrecy is endemic in all governments. It
goes with the turf, especially if their leaders hope to hide illegal or
immoral behavior, such as torture of foreign prisoners.
Many Americans heaved a sigh of relief last January when President Barack
Obama banned the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
It made the administration look more humane than the Bush-Cheney team. But
that is not the whole story.
Obama left unaddressed the possibility of torture in secret foreign prisons
under our control as in Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan, not to
mention the 'black sites" sponsored by our foreign clients in Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Thailand and other countries.
"The United States will not torture," Obama said in his directive. But he
has been silent on the question of whether the U.S. would help others do the
torturing.
Members of Congress knew a lot about U.S. torture practices. But Republicans
loyal to the Bush administration and Democrats, too, played along and kept
silent at the horror of it all.
Why did no bells ring for the U.S. lawmakers -- particularly those privy to
the brutality -- when briefed on the abusive treatment of the captives. Did
they owe more allegiance to the CIA than to the honor of our country?
There are hair-raising reports of methods that Americans -- including
private contractors -- have used to coerce information from our prisoners.
They include slamming a prisoner against a wall; denying him sleep and food;
waterboarding him under so-called enhanced interrogation; and keeping him in
a crate filled with insects.
I remember when President Ronald Reagan, marveling at the courage of
American soldiers, used to say: "Where do we get such men?" And I have to
ask: "Where did we get such people who would inflict so much pain and
ruthlessness on others?"
William Rivers Pitt, a best-selling author who wrote "The Greatest Sedition
is Silence," recently raised the emotional question of whether U.S. adoption
of torture has debased the international standards for treatment of
prisoners and that our enemies may now feel that they can torture Americans.
Pitt specifically expressed concern about Army Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was
captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan last month.
American military leaders had warned President Bush over and over that U.S.
torture of prisoners could boomerang against our troops. But he would not
listen.
Obama has blocked publication of pictures of the harsh treatment of
prisoners from our two ongoing wars -- in Iraq and Afghanistan -- but the
word still gets around.
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail:
helent@hearstdc.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment