Manifesto of Freedoms
And then as soon as I posted that, I found this rather inspiring Manifesto at Jonathan Derbyshire’s blog. And the thing is…it seems to me that people in the US and the UK who side with the pro-hijab side against the ban don’t quite realize the extent to which they’re siding against people like those who wrote that Manifesto. Against people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie and Ibn Warraq. People who are not arrogant Westerners, not Eurocentric, not colonialists, not Orientalists, not hegemonists keen to trample on the Other, but people who want to get rid of the regressive, punitive, subordinating aspects of their own cultures, just as we all want to get rid of those aspects in our own. I wish Western liberals would pay less attention to pro-hijab protests and more to things like this Manifesto and the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend
Women’s Rights in the Middle East and Ibn Warraq’s Secular Islam site. They’re the ones who need and deserve support.
I had read the manifesto on Derbyshire’s site and it reminded me of the following:
I forget who the writer is — an educated Hindu woman — who decried the “epistemic charity” of Western multiculturalists, who “grant us [third world women] a mind to think but not to choose between the intelligence of aliens and the wisdom of ancestors” [a paraphrase from memory].
The “intelligence of aliens” is of course Western science, universal human rights, and rational thought; the “aliens” are us, the inhabitants of the western world (or at least some of us).
The “wisdom of ancestors” would be, I suppose, the rituals and customs of other cultures that subjugate women.
It’s our friend Meera Nanda, of course. You’ll find her work all over B&W. She’s educated all right – one PhD in microbiology and another in philosophy of science. If you don’t have her book – you should. Prophets Facing Backward.
Yup, the Manifesto is indeed reminiscent of that. ‘Epistemic charity’ is a terrific phrase; it makes what’s wrong with that way of thinking fall into place with a bang.
Thanks for the reference. I agree, Nanda is quite good.
A few days ago I watched a presentation before the national convention of the American Assoc. of Sociologists [on c-span; c-span will broadcast anything, and of course I will watch anything LOL], in which another Indian woman spoke [I should remember her name, but my mind is blank; she’s a hero of the left, and I think she wrote a book entitled “Dissent” or some such thing]. She takes an approach 180 degrees opposed to Nanda. Of course, the sociologists loved her.
She openly defended terrorists, and further claimed we can’t have lily-clean terrorists; sure, some terrorists are misogynists or religious fanatics, but, after all, they are terrorists “dissenting” from “neo-liberal capitalism,” so we have to accept them as we find them, because “dissent” [read: Terrorism] displaces all other values. Actually, I was stunned. (I still don’t know if I was stunned by what she said, or the fact that she was applauded for what she said).
Oh, I know, I saw that! I’ve been meaning to do a Comment on it for days. It was Arundhati Roy, and she made me crazy! As did the way the gathered sociologists all but slobbered on her. It was revolting!
She’s so smug. I’ve seldom seen anyone so smug. Preen preen preen smirk, while the sociologists applauded every word she said. It was indeed stunning.
She’s just a novelist, after all. Why are a pack of sociologists fawning on her as if she were an oracle? I would really like to know. I mean even if she were sensible I don’t think she would deserve the fawning, and since she’s not…
(I actually only saw a few minutes of it, unfortunately; I missed the part about flawed terrorists. Oy veh.)
I’m going to do a Comment comparing her performance with another I saw on S-Span more recently: Azar Nafisi. She was impassioned rather than smug, and she was saying very different things. Less comfortable things.
Bloody sociologists! I hate ’em all!
I know! Of course I immediately thought of what you would make of it all, and wondered if sociologists are quite as soppy in the UK. Do they invite people like Arundhati Roy to their conventions and then applaud every fatuous word she says? Surely not.
“Do they invite people like Arundhati Roy to their conventions and then applaud every fatuous word she says?”
Hmmmm. Don’t forget the audience was self-selecting. If you’re a hard-nosed empirical sociologist you probably wouldn’t have turned up.
Ah – right. I did forget that. Comes of happening on the thing while channel-surfing and then not watching it for long because it was so irritating. (I can read irritating stuff, but watching it is another matter. Watching Roy’s glow of quiet self-approval was not endurable for long.) I was forgetting it was just one session.
Hurrah for hard noses.