Replies to post #24841 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Rocking the Casbah

A few Muslim feminists are out there on the fringe, defying death threats to fight for change. They're also creating space for moderate reformers to be heard


Finding a voice: Muslim women in Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Alex Majoli / Magnum for Newsweek

By Christopher Dickey and Carla Power
Newsweek

Dec. 20 issue - 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.

Why are women taking these risks? A rising sense of desperation, especially in Muslim countries where women who speak out have virtually no protections. "There are so many women who are working quietly and diligently to better the lives of other disadvantaged women, but there is hardly a dent in law or custom," says Amal Ghandour, a Stanford-educated author in Beirut. "It is always case by case, day by day, one small victory at a time."

This is not a single revolution, but a collection of smaller ones with many clashing dogmas. While a few iconoclasts like Manji and Ali attack conventional Islam head-on, a wider group of women activists with more moderate views aim to reform their religion from within. They see their faith as one based on equality and fairness. But they've also seen the promise of both forsaken.

In the 1960s and '70s, when Western ideas of modernity were widely accepted, masses of Muslim women were educated—with almost no opportunities open to them. Pioneers like Morocco's Fatema Mernissi and Egypt's Nawal El Saadawi started fighting for women's rights in that more liberal era, and they're still at it. Saadawi told NEWSWEEK last week in Cairo she's going to nominate herself for president of Egypt in next year's elections. That's just a gesture, of course. "Most of my 42 books are banned [in Egypt]," she says, and she's not even allowed to lecture in state-run universities.

At the same time, however, the last 30 years have seen large Muslim immigrations to Europe and North America, creating a new arena for Muslim women to practice their freedom. More recently, satellite TV and the Web allowed people to contrast the wider world and its horizons with those dictated by their local imams.

The reaction to all this among some traditional Muslim men has been the embrace of fundamentalism, and fury. Within the family, women may be powerful figures, but not within the faith. In some Muslim societies women are systematically mutilated, in others merely humiliated. Last week Britain's Crown Prosecution Service announced it had identified 117 cases of female deaths and disappearances over the last 10 years that may have been honor killings: executions of girls and women by men in the family who feel they've brought shame on them.

The visible tokens of these attitudes—the veil, the higab, the burqa—have drawn a curtain between East and West that sometimes blinds both sides. A veil need not be any more a sign of fanaticism than a cross or a yarmulke. And Muslim scholars often say Westerners should see past the dress code to understand, for instance, that chador-wearing women in Iran rise to significant positions in business and government. But at the same time, the Islamic "scarf" has become a masochistic symbol of identity for many Muslim women and girls, even in Europe and the United States, as if a slave holding up his chain could point to it proudly and say, "This is who I am."

Or so it seems to the likes of Irshad Manji. Punk shocker that she is, she says she doesn't lead a movement, and doesn't intend to. "I am here to be a dissident," she says, "and to break silences." Yet that is the greatest challenge of all in Muslim society right now. Will women bring Islam back to the future? It's a slim chance. But they may be the last, best hope for this generation.

With William Underhill in London, Friso Endt in The Hague, Gameela Ismail in Cairo and Sarah Sennott in London

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6700425/site/newsweek/

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(COMTEX) B: Christians Aiming to Boost Religion ( AP Online )

Dec 14, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Emboldened by their Election Day successes, some Christian conservatives around the country are trying to put more Christ into Christmas this season.

In Terrebonne Parish, La., an organization is petitioning to add "Merry Christmas" to the red-lighted "Season's Greetings" sign on the main government building and is selling yard signs that read, "We believe in God. Merry Christmas." And a Raleigh, N.C., church recently paid $7,600 for a full-page newspaper ad urging Christians to spend their money only with merchants who include the greeting "Merry Christmas" in ads and displays.

"There is a revival taking place in our nation that is causing Christian and right-minded people to say, 'Wait a minute. We've gone too far,"' says the Rev. Patrick Wooden Sr., pastor of the Raleigh church. "We're not going to allow the country to continue this downward spiral to the left."

In California, a group called the Committee to Save Merry Christmas is boycotting Macy's and its corporate parent, Federated Department Stores, accusing them of replacing "Merry Christmas" signs with ones wishing shoppers "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays." The organization cites "the recent presidential election showing political correctness is offending millions of Americans."

(Federated, for its part, says that is has no ban on such greetings and that its store divisions can advertise as they see fit and store clerks are free to wish any customer "Merry Christmas." Macy's says its ads commonly use the phrase.)

The push from the religious right troubles Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"This mixing of secular and religious symbols ought to be seen as a bad thing, not a good thing, for Christian believers," he says. "Unfortunately, some of the Christian pressure groups seem to have it backwards." He adds: "I think it's fair to say it's a mistaken notion that they have a mandate to put more nativity scenes up because George Bush was elected."

The battle over the manger on the city hall lawn is nothing new. People expect the annual tussle over the separation of church and state.

But the "keep the Christ in Christmas" contingent is particularly agitated this year over what its members see as a troubling trend on Main Street: Target stores banning Salvation Army bell ringers; UPS drivers complaining to a free-speech group that they have been told not to wish people a "Merry Christmas" (an accusation UPS denies as "silly on its face and just not true"); and major corporations barring religious music from cubicles and renaming the office Christmas bash the "end of the year" party.

"I think it is part of a growing movement of people with more traditional values, which make up the majority of people in this country, saying enough is enough," says Greg Scott, a spokesman for the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund.

Amid stories of schools banning the singing of carols on buses, Scott's group has distributed to more than 5,000 schools a seven-point legal primer citing 40 years of case law that says it is OK to mention Christmas in public places. And the group has about 800 lawyers waiting in the wings in case that notion needs to be reinforced.

To that same end, the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute, which says it received the UPS driver complaints, has reissued its "12 Rules of Christmas" guide to celebrating the birth of Jesus.

"I think the businesses and the schools have just gone too far; this is the final straw," says Institute president John W. Whitehead. "It's supposed to be a time of, what, peace and freedom and fun. And they've kind of made it into a secular ... kind of gray day."

Conservative radio and TV talk show hosts have chortled over some recent incidents of what they consider political correctness run amok.

In Kansas, The Wichita Eagle ran a correction for a notice that mistakenly referred to the Community Tree at the Winterfest celebration as a "Christmas Tree." And the mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologized after a news release mistakenly referred to the Dec. 21 City Holiday Party as a "Christmas Party."

But to many, the threats and demands that stores put up "Merry Christmas" signs are no laughing matter.

"Why not simply require stores owned by Jews to put a gold star in their ads and on their storefronts?" the Rev. Jim Melnyk, associate rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Raleigh, wrote in a letter to the editor.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh, N.C. AP writer Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed to this report.

By ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press Writer

Copyright 2004 Associated Press, All rights reserved

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