Author: Ophelia Benson

This is an irritating piece of crap.

By Allah, we’re an arrogant lot. By “we”, I mean modern western feminists, a group among which I am generally proud to be included. Except when we’re full of ourselves. Western feminism is not the only ideology exquisitely sensible of gender injustice.

It’s not clear what that is supposed to mean – feminism is universalist, not ‘Western,’ and there are of course feminists all over the globe. But if Geraldine Brooks means that feminism itself is not the only (or best) way of talking and thinking about and demanding gender justice – well I just have no idea what she means, because talk of gender justice is feminism, and vice versa, so what other ‘ideology’ would there be?

Nor are western feminists the only ones willing or able to speak up about it. Muslim women have been doing this themselves for decades, loudly and often effectively.

That’s interesting, but ‘western feminists’ don’t claim to be the only ones willing or able to speak up about it, and we’re thrilled when non-‘Western’ (which here apparently means Muslim, which is a tad simplistic) women speak up. (And when they do speak up – they’re doing a feminist thing. That’s the ‘ideology’ that’s in play. There’s no point in looking around for a different one, because that’s the only one there is.)

In Iran, on the other hand, a young generation of Koranically-literate Islamic revolutionary women sparked a national conversation on personal status issues, using Islamic jurisprudence rather than legislative measures. By educating women in the use of Islamically sanctioned pre-nuptial agreements, for example, an Iranian woman can secure for herself the right to divorce in set circumstances, to continue study or work after marriage and to establish her share of property if the marriage is dissolved.

Oh wow – so if she uses an Islamic pre-nup she can get some very limited rights, and as for just being entitled to such rights and more simply because she’s an adult human – well that’s just some pesky Western ideology, so she doesn’t need it – according to Geraldine Brooks, who is all right Jack.

What I am recommending is a little humility. Western feminists with a genuine desire to raise the status of oppressed women in Afghanistan or elsewhere should call their nearest mosque and make an appointment to talk to the sisterhood there…[I]n the majority of mosques they will learn of efforts long afoot to reclaim the positive messages about women’s rights in the Koran, messages obscured for too long by patriarchy and oppressive social customs. It is those efforts that we western feminists should support if we care about the women, and not the sweet sound of our own politically correct bleatings.

Our own politically correct bleatings – politically correct where, exactly? In many circles what Brooks says is far more politically correct than what universalist feminists say, so bleatings yourself, comrade.

You may remember that Julian Baggini wrote a piece about the destructiveness of the ‘new’ atheists a few months ago and then another urging them (or us) to turn down the volume at Comment is Free. I disagreed with him at the time in more than one post. He sounds like a new atheist himself in a new piece for C is F.

It’s another C is F ‘belief’ question: how did you find or lose your faith? Julian starts off by saying that people who lose their faith ‘do come to see as absurd beliefs which once seemed clearly true, or deeply mysterious.’

That was certainly true for me. As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers. For example, I was baffled by the role of intercessory prayer in church services. Surely, if God were good, and it was good to help someone recover from illness, he wouldn’t wait until someone asked him to do so. Yet no one gave me a decent answer to even this simple question…Questions like these tend to be dismissed as simplistic, but that kind of response is no answer at all. It’s like when people roll their eyes when you raise the problem of evil: how can a good God allow so much suffering in the world? Yes, the problem is old, but it’s not the challenge that’s tired: it’s the person who has given up trying to give it a decent answer.

Yes, quite. But isn’t this Basic ‘New’ Atheism? Isn’t this just the kind of thing we keep being chastised for?

Julian went to some kind of Methodist youth jamboree at the Albert Hall and it started making him feel sick as soon as he got off the bus, so he was feeling ill and out of it while he watched the Sunday worship.

Instead of being caught up in the emotion, I was observing at a distance. That confirmed the perceptual shift from believer to non-believer was now complete. For what from the inside had looked like the holy spirit at work, looked from where I now stood like a humanly-constructed exercise in mass hysteria…To simplify a little, the convert adopts a religious faith because he or she comes to inhabit it from the inside. The infidel rejects it because she or he comes to see it from the outside. And the further you zoom back from religion and see the big picture, the more absurd it seems.

Again – yes, quite, and isn’t that just the kind of thing that ‘New’ atheists are scolded for saying? So…welcome aboard, or welcome back, Julian, but do admit – either the ‘New’ atheists aren’t all that naughty after all, or you are yourself a ‘New’ atheist.

The beauty and compassion of religion:

A new family law in Mali is causing a furore, partly because it no longer stipulates that wives have to obey their husbands…[Article 312] says that, once married, husbands and wives owe each other “loyalty, protection, help and assistance”. Mali’s current law specifically states that a wife must obey her husband, and that is the way things should stay says Mahmud Dicko, president of Mali’s High Islamic Council.

You bet – because that has to be a matter of national law so that if a wife is disobedient she can be arrested, charged, and imprisoned (or do they whip them?).

“We’re not trying to make women slaves. Not at all,” he says. “It’s just the way our society is organised. The head of the family is the man, and everyone in the family has to obey him. It’s like that to create harmony.”

No – it’s like that to create a situation in which everyone in a family has to obey ‘the man’ – which in other contexts is recognized as inequality and tyranny rather than harmony.

Hadja Safiatou Dembele, president of the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations (NUMWA), says the Koran is clear that a wife has the obligation to listen to her husband. “A man must protect his wife. A wife must obey her husband,” she says. “It’s a tiny minority of woman here who want this new law; the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country, the real Muslims, are against it.”

And of course laws that illiterate people prefer are obviously much better than laws that intellectuals think are a good idea. God damn intellectuals – they should all be smothered.

But it’s no good complaining, there were giant protests and Mali’s imams made a big fuss and that’s that. No women’s rights for Mali! No pesky secular government for Mali! No sirree. That would be too modern and intellectual and unIslamic.