Islamic Feminists

[Said1]

Rocking the Casbah

By Christopher Dickey and Carla Power
Newsweek

For more than 30 years, much of the Muslim world has been sliding backward, away from modernity. Maybe the West and Israel, defeat and humiliation, dictators, emirs or mullahs are to blame. Or maybe it's one of those cycles of fanatic religiosity that afflicts every society from time to time. Some voices of reason, however, have to stand up and say "Enough! There is a modern world and Muslims should be part of it." Some apostles of progress have to do more than bemoan their fate, bow to the diktats of intolerance, make excuses for willful ignorance or turn their backs on the faith altogether.

Well, at long last that chorus is growing among Muslims, and if you listen to the most strident voices, damned if they don't sound like an all-woman band. They're way out there on the edge of the faith; their message and their lifestyles are so far from the torpid Muslim mainstream they're almost in the desert. Yet precisely because they're taking such radical stands, they're doing what dissidents and radicals often do: drawing fire from zealots, angering the complacent—and creating space for more moderate voices to be heard and accepted.


Right now it's a 36-year-old Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji, who's singing loudest. Her in-your-face book, "The Trouble With Islam," is a diatribe filled with aphorisms so bitter and sharp, she makes death-defying heresies sound like dirty jokes. Heaping scorn on Al Qaeda and Hamas preachers for promising suicide bombers they'll wake up to 70 virgins in Paradise, she writes: "it's like a perpetual license to ejaculate in exchange for a willingness to detonate."

Manji takes on all the mantras of Muslim victimization, all the tenets of intolerance: "Why are we [Muslims] being held hostage by what's happening between the Palestinians and the Israelis? What's with the stubborn streak of anti-Semitism in Islam? Who is the real colonizer of Muslims—America or Arabia? Why are we squandering the talents of women, fully half of God's creation? How can we be so sure that homosexuals deserve ostracism—or death—when the Koran states that everything God made is 'excellent'?" (Manji is "openly but not arrogantly" gay, she says.) "What makes us righteous and everybody else racist?"

Manji's critics call this opportunism, and say she's just an egotist pandering to the West. But it's risky business. Death threats come often, and sometimes with enough specifics to be taken very seriously by the police. Manji, with her spiky hair and cantankerous mien, isn't exactly in hiding. But others are. When Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered last month after releasing a movie critical of Islam called "Submission," a knife was plunged into his body with a message to a Muslim-born woman who is a member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She had written the script. Shortly before the murder she told NEWSWEEK, "My main aim is to reform Islam, to make people think and to decide on a more humane Islam." She is now under 24-hour guard at an undisclosed location.

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[Doc Holiday]

It's about time that the women of Islam (sounds ike something out of Playboy) stand up and start to make some noise. I don't know about most guys, but the wife threatening to withold the goods works wonders on changing my opinion on subjects.