Letter From a Muslim Woman

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 2/16/07 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

One of the responses to Dinesh D’Souza’s recent works (see note below) is from an unknown Muslim woman who helps us understand some of the underlying causes of Muslim unhappiness with the spread of western culture. Since Muslim terrorism is a world-wide phenomenon, existing in places like Darfur and Indonesia, as an explanation, there is obviously much more to it than the elevation of women’s rights, but it raises an interesting question: where are the womens’ rights groups? Why do they and other left-wing organizations turn a deaf ear to human rights abuses by Islamists? Why do they support the cause of the Palestinian terrorists over an Israeli population that has turned itself inside out to find a peaceful solution that doesn’t involve their own extermination?

[isthisnickcool]

The letter is from an unknown moslem woman.

That fact kind of exemplifies the problem, moslem women are treated like cattle. None of them are "known".

[aliquis]

It's sort of self-explanatory: the problem is that the Muslim societies are fundamentally and inherently unfree.

Let's see what points she is making in her letter (I've only seen the excerpt).

She correctly identifies the problem as that of the Islamic societies rejecting individualism and meritocracy. She also admits that the excesses of the West are not the underlying reason for this rejection. It seems, that she does understand - on some level - that those excesses are nothing more but a side effect of the norms under which Western societies operate.

But the problem becomes evident as we get nearer the end of the excerpt. For example, she is seeking to find a balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community to avoid 'breakdown of family and society that has taken place in the West'. A good cause, it would seem but fuzzy thinking. Could it be that those who choose their lifestyle actually prefer it? And, on the other hand, if they would like to change but unable to do so, it is the price they pay for the inability to pull themselves together and work hard on achieving their goals.

This highlights the issue: Muslim societies are inherently autocratic and things such as a free choice are nonexistent there. They don't seem to understand that, while there are unstable families, hedonism, gross excesses, etc in the West, the majority of the people lead normal lives in very stable families (and manage to preserve the values the Muslim are trying to enforce by decree by nothing more than a free choice.)

Until they understand that you cannot have a truly free society while oppressing someone, forcefully imposing a set of values that everyone has to follow, there is no chance they will change. Their society has been twisted for so many centuries that it will take many generations before they realize that they are living a lie, and nobody knows how they will learn - it could be by being defeated and brought to the brink of total destruction, or by absorbing the ideas from the more free societies and gradually changing and thus finding their place in the world.

[PurpleMountains]

Very thoughtful comment. Unfortunately, now that nuclear weapons have entered the equation, we have to force this choice by bringing them to the brink of destruction.

[steve-b]

From the letter:

What threatens patriarchal Muslim communities are not the excesses of Western societies but its very norms. Individualism and the relatively equal position of women manifest themselves in the opportunities females have to pursue education and economic independence. And these principles of individual freedom and equality, even Mr. D'Souza will agree, are neither Right nor Left, but simply American. There is no way that Muslim women, in great numbers, can be granted similar opportunities without it eventually shaking their societies at their very foundations. Whatever else the Taliban is obtuse about, they understand perfectly the concept of the slippery slope - allow a girl child to be educated at all, and you never know where she will end up - perhaps like me, with only tangential ties to some of the core values of the conservative Islamic community I was raised in.

(emphasis added)

There you have it in a nutshell. The Islamic Fundamentalists do hate us for our freedom, because they know that it is more appealing than anything they have to offer.

D'Sousa's cringing call to appeasement is beneath contempt.