Things are humming in the Maghreb. Excellent.

Human rights activists from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania attending a Tunisian seminar last week stressed the need to separate religion from state as “an essential approach to realizing gender equality.” The “Maghreb Women’s March towards Realizing Equality” seminar on November 24th and 25th addressed the marginalisation of the Maghreb woman and the gender gap in each country…Activist Malika Remaoun from Algeria complained about the concessions given to Islamists at the expense of women…Tunisian Balkis Mechri agreed, saying “the battle to realize equality is not only legal, but social as well.” Ourida Chouaki of Algeria, however, warned that secularism in Maghreb societies is mistakenly being perceived as a call to apostasy.

And … Read the rest

Ho hum – a woman says women are equal, male clerics pitch fits.

Zeinab Radwan…announced during a conference on “Citizenship” that “the testimony of a woman is legally equal in weight with a man’s testimony.”…Clerics were swift to condemn Radwan’s statement, as expected. Gamal Qutb, former head of the Fatwa council in Al-Azhar, impugned Radwan’s credibility on Islamic Jurisprudence and warned against tampering with the Shari’a. In his view, it would be insane to continuously alter interpretations of the Quran every time conditions in society human behavior changed.

Oh well quite. Exactly so. It would be stark staring insane to keep on and on and on forever changing interpretations of the Koran simply because conditions changed – what could … Read the rest

A comment or attempted explanation on BBC jokes got my curiosity awake.

This still seems to need spelling out for some. In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam. Gibbons was convicted of this crime. Should it be a crime? No. Given that it is a crime, was Gibbons guilty? Again, no: she didn’t insult Islam. Nevertheless, she was convicted of insulting Islam. In saying so I quote no-one, but simply state a fact. Tim Evans was wrongly convicted of murder, not “murder”.

Which is to say that the BBC wasn’t doing anything risible or marked or noteworthy by reporting that

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned

The Beeb really is hilarious sometimes. In its report on Gillian Gibbons’s story it puts ‘ordeal’ in quotation marks but leaves ‘insulting Islam’ free of them. So we get

A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her “ordeal”, after returning to the UK. Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

You have to admit – that really is funny.… Read the rest

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.… Read the rest