For instance, Saudi law proscribes females from operating motor vehicles, or going about in public without a close family-member male attendant (all of which some might say is rather to take the enlightened view of such matters); not to mention concealing the female form in the omnipresent, voluminous burka, the deprivation of educational opportunities, the extraordinarily restricted scope for female civil participation, etc....Speaking as a Western female type, I am particularly appalled by the fundamentalist Muslim view of female chastity, on which all of family honor and social respectability depends in that part of our world-in-common. Whatever gross misdeed of sexuality in that culture, it is always the woman's fault for breaches of the chastity law.
Even in the [recently documented] case of a young Palestinian girl who was raped by her two older brothers, and impregnated as a result, it is the innocent victim who is held personally culpable; and it is she, not the rapists, who can be "justly murdered" in the name of family honor and social position. Which is exactly what happened in this recent case: This poor girl was the victim of a grisly murder committed by her own mother -- "for the sake of family honor."
<shudder>
IMO, Theoretically the best way for a person to discover for themselves, with true objectivity, what the best moral system is, would be to split up and live a whole life simultaneously in several different cultures. Then at the end of each of these lives, merge back together into one person and compare how their life turned out. Then I guess each sub-person would vote on the best culture & moral system.
In the real world, what do we have? Well, anything that lets us understand other cultures - both how people turn out in them, and what their rationales/rationalizations are for why they're structured in the ways they are.
I keep thinking about all those Arabs who come to America to study. You'd think they'd come to appreciate our freedom & prosperity and want to import it back to their countries. And some of them do.
But I get the impression that most Arab students only see the surface of a free society: "I can read porn! I can go to a strip club! All the women dress like hookers (just look at those exposed ankles)! <sigh> So, um, this is freedom, huh?"
They don't understand the rationale for Western-style freedom, especially the freedom of women. Both the West & the Arab world needed to come up with a way to protect the women from the men.
In the muslim world, they force the women to stay away from men and to cover up as much of their bodies as they can to remove the possibility of the men being tempted. But this means it's inevitable that the women (who are of course equal in potential to men) won't be able to flourish as the human beings they are, no matter how many platitudes of "we respect our women" they spout. And though the men have it much better, they are put into an impossible position WRT controlling their sexual impulses. How can a muslim man ever learn to treat real women as equals if he can never interact with them? How can he learn to behave himself with a woman?
In the West we teach the men to respect women as equals, and we women in turn can live & work out in the open & do virtually everything the men can do. This means we show a lot more skin as we bump up against men all the time, but that's a necessary side-effect if we're to be truly equal in the world. It also means the men become relatively jaded to our voluptuous bodies - which is why we're able to be protected to a high degree even though we're in what should be such a vulnerable position.
The West's system for protecting women in a sea of men is objectively superior to the Muslim approach because it allows us to flourish as equals in virtually all aspects of life. The Muslim approach locks women into a role as second class, dangerous citizens.
jennyp, after the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan, for some strange reason I thought that women throughout that country would throw off their burkahs, like liberated slaves would throw off their chains. This, of course, did not happen. Afghan women kept their burkahs. After hearing about what happened to that little Palestinian girl, I now understand why. The more beautiful the woman, the greater the incentive to keep covered up.
Great post, jennyp.