Posted on 07/07/2008 2:25:52 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Advocates of even mild feminism were thin on the ground in 19th-century Egypt. But in 1899, the Cairo newspapers announced the appearance of at least one citizen who held outlandishly modern opinions on the subject. His much-reviled book, The Liberation of Women, created a controversy that remains alive today in certain corners of Islam.
The heretic in question, Qasim Amin (1863-1908), a young judge from a prominent family, was hard to ignore. He was well connected among Egyptian intellectuals and a founder of Cairo University. He based his argument on patriotism. As a nationalist, he insisted that the independent Egypt of his generation's dreams would need a new kind of woman, educated and (relatively) free.
Today, no one would call him a feminist. He emphasized that improving women's position would make them better mothers and wives. Boys were growing up in an a tmos p h e r e of ignorance because their mothers were ignorant , he argued. Amin believed that Egypt's future would depend on mothers giving their sons the beginning of an education.
The author also claimed that freedom for adult women would make them hap-pier spouses. He wanted fair divorce laws; he felt women should be less burdened by the demand to veil themselves; and he even suggested they should be able to go out of their houses unescorted.
Having created this scandal in 1899, Amin returned to the subject in a second book a year later, this time going farther. He suggested that women could become teachers and doctors, and he seemed on the brink of advocating something like full citizenship.
One gets a sense of his increased boldness from reading The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, published in 2000 as a single book by the American University in Cairo Press. It seems that after his gently diffident proposals were criticized in 1899, he decided he might as well set forth even more radical views.
Since Amin's death at age 45, Arab scholars, many of them marginal within their own societies, have continued to make him the focus of women's-rights discussions. He's never become a national hero in Egypt, but his ideas have continued to reappear through more than a century of changing intellectual fashions and regimes.
Too often, unfortunately, Amin's ideas get revived only so that another defender of orthodoxy can try to bury them. In 1999, when the government of Egypt recognized the author's place in history by organizing a six-day international conference about him in Cairo, one of the 150 scholars taking part reflected on how little had changed since Amin's time: It was as if "time has not passed in the Arab world" for a full century.
There are those who like it that way. Consider Azzam Tamimi, a prominent London-based Palestinian activist who supports Hamas and expresses admiration for jihadist suicide bombers. Tamimi believes that Amin, a Muslim who made all the required references to Allah and the Prophet in his writing, was eager to abandon Islam. Tamimi claims he was influenced by Christian Arab scholars who advocated secular principles. Their goal, as Tamimi sees it, was to weaken local religious institutions, make secularism "a tool of domination" and render Muslims "colonizable and controllable."
Secularists were wrong, Tamimi says, to think that Arabs needed freedom from spiritual authority, the way people in the West did. Actually, he points out, Islam has always been free. Its aims are "establishing justice and equality, encouraging research and innovation, and guaranteeing freedom of thought, expression, and worship." Can't argue with that.
Meanwhile, back in Cairo last month, after five weeks of debate, parliament finally passed a law making female ci rcumci sion punishable by two years in jail. The Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamists that essentially constitutes the country's political opposition, bitterly fought that measure, and so did at least one non-Brotherhood opposition member, said to be secular. He brought his three young daughters to parliament, all of them holding banners that denounced the law. Two of the three, he said, were already circumcised.
But Cairo's mild commitment to equality doesn't get reflected in foreign policy. In June, Egypt voted at the United Nations Human Rights Council against allowing discussion of the warped effects of shariah law (stoning of women, for instance, and "honour killing"). Egypt's delegate stressed that "Islam will not be crucified in this Council." A century after his death, Amin remains a man ahead of his time.
Were he alive and aware of the current state of feminism, I am quite sure he would object to the use of the term “feminist”. I would’ve been a feminist in 1930. Women should be equal — equal vote, equal right to work, equal right to compete for jobs, equal freedoms of speech, arms, enterprise, etc.
Western feminism has run off the rails. What was once a noble cause of women’s suffrage, has now morphed into a caricature of itself. While true feminists sought the right to vote, work and go to school — current feminists obsess about a “patriarchy”, bitch about women in fabric-softener commercials, castigate all men as potential rapists, and advocate the right to abort. What was once a noble cause, is now full-time anti male, anti-masculinity, anti-family advocacy.
If you get a chance, take a read of “feministing.com” or “iblamethepatriarchy.com” sometime. Very educational, quite amusing, and sometimes simply pitiful. You’ll never encounter a more miserable bunch of women in your lives ... those that are heterosexual hate themselves for it, they live in constant fear of being raped, and their rage can be set off by anything from a TV commercial to a girl playing with a doll.
It must be difficult to be that lost, that afraid, and that angry ALL the time. They often have my pity. Many of this bunch were simply mentally scarred by an individual male sometime — and have transposed their anger at one man onto an entire gender. They are the textbook definition of “bigots”.
H
Not having opened a Playboy magazine in more than 30 years, I was wondering if they’d done a “Girls of the Jihad” photo shoot yet? I might buy that one.
US Congress praises Södertälje mayor
Published: 11 Apr 08 07:00 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/11040/
Södertälje mayor Anders Lago received praise while in Washington this week from US presidential candidate Barak Obama and other members of congress for how well his city has handled its influx of Iraqi refugees.
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Lago had a chance to speak with Obama on Tuesday ahead of the Swedish mayor’s scheduled appearance on Capitol Hill Thursday to discuss the Iraqi refugee crisis.
“He said word for word that he was ashamed that the United States didn’t take greater responsibility for Iraqi refugees. Then he praised Sweden and Södertälje for how we’ve dealt with the issue,” Lago told the TT news agency.
Södertälje, a town of 80,000 residents, has taken in more Iraqi refugees than the United States and Canada combined, a fact which has come to light in several US media recently, and the motivation behind Lago’s invitation to testify before the Congressional panel.
“The senators posed questions about how we in Södertälje can take in so many Iraqi refugees,” he told the news agency TT.
Joining Lago at the hearing organized by the US Helskinki Commission were representatives from the US government responsible for refugee issues, as well as the Washington director of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
“I explained that Sweden will continue to have a generous asylum policy and that we need immigration, but I also discussed the difficulties with arranging housing, employment, and schooling when so many refugees come at the same time,” said Lago.
The Helsinki Commission is US government agency that monitors human rights and security issues of concern to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and includes members from the US Senate, and the House of Representatives, and US government agencies.
According to Lago, the senators were impressed that Sweden had taken in more refugees than the United States.
“They promised during the hearing to try to increase the number of refugees received to 12,000 this year,” he said.
Sweden received around 19,000 asylum seekers from Iraq last year.
Although Obama was not a member of the US Helsinki Commission, Lagos’s thoughts returned to his meeting earlier in the week with the senator from Illinois, whom Lagos calls his “favourite candidate”.
“He even tried to pronounce ‘Södertälje’,” said Lago.
TT/David Landes (news@thelocal.se)
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