Now I'm 100% "feminist" in the sense that I believe that all women should have absolutely equal civil, moral and political rights. I roll my eyes sometimes at some things that some Western feminists write, but hey, equal rights include the right to be equally dumb from time to time (and we men have not always set the highest bar here). In any event, the push-back against Western feminism appears to come mostly from people intent on keeping women in a second-class status, if not actually barefoot[1] and pregnant.
But the whole idea of trying to somehow integrate Islam with feminism simply boggles my mind. Mohammed wasn't just some guy, he was the:
One perfect human [who] had such control, to enact such drastic change, [that] we must realize that if there was anything left for him to enact, it would have been... the Prophet and the Quranic message did not make moral compromises of any sort. What Islam allowed at that time must be considered, for those that love the Prophet (صلي الله عليه و سلم), to be allowed today. What Islam forbade at that time, must be considered to be forbidden today.Religion is very flexible, but there are some limits. If you don't somehow acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ, you just can't be a Christian. And I just don't see how you can, in good faith, call yourself a Muslim if you don't accept the moral authority of Mohammed's life. And you can't get any sort of equal rights for women from the personal morality of an ehebephilic slave-raping polygamist.
If someone wants to be slave, I'm not going to force them into freedom. But while I might pity them, I'll never have a shred of respect for them.
[1] This bum is barefoot by choice, not by any compulsion or oppression.
The Islam-isn't-really-so-terrible meme keeps popping up in many forms. I've seen a few contorted arguments about how the hijab is actually "liberating", but rationalization for forcing sex on slaves is a new one to me (notice that the same people would never use similar arguments to defend slave rape in the Old South).
ReplyDeleteI think the underlying motivation is that acknowledging the existence of a threat is scary, and the consequent necessity of doing something about it is even scarier. It's much more comforting to convince yourself that there isn't really a huge, misogynistic, imperialist ideological movement out there that wants to destroy Western civilization as we know it.
You can see the same psychological mechanism at work with the global-warming deniers. It's a universal trait, I think.
The password-protection thing is bizarre. If Achelois's original article can't be read, then the only way her words can be known to third parties is by how her critics paraphrase them. It can't be wise to put oneself in that position.
ReplyDeleteI think the underlying motivation is that acknowledging the existence of a threat is scary, and the consequent necessity of doing something about it is even scarier. It's much more comforting to convince yourself that there isn't really a huge, misogynistic, imperialist ideological movement out there that wants to destroy Western civilization as we know it.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for multi-culturalism, but really, sometimes you gotta just say, "Eh, screw it; that stuff sucks." That said, I remain wholly and completely unconvinced that Islam represents some monolithic threatening entity. It's not like Judaism was all that warm and fuzzy under that schizophrenic Abraham, either.