Mick Hartley

A couple of essays on women, Islam, and western feminists feature in the latest issue of Standpoint. As well as the excellent piece from Clive James (already linked to by Norm), there's this from Nick Cohen:

 [T]he stubborn fact remains that mainstream opinion does not consider the oppression of women a pressing concern when it is done in the name of culture or religion, particularly in the name of once-subordinate cultures and religions. The misogyny they generate does not move hearts or stir passions. Governments that stifle half their populations do not face boycotts or demonstrations outside their embassies, motions of condemnation at international conferences or opprobrium in everyday political discourse.

The comparison with the international anger directed at Apartheid is instructive. The oppression of blacks was once an affront to the conscience of the world. When we turn to the oppression of women, however, we find that the United Nations loses its conscience and encourages the ideologies of their oppressors. In 1990, Muslim foreign ministers challenged the first line of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights by replacing the ringing statement that "all human beings are born free in dignity and in rights" with the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights which announces that "all human beings are God's subjects". The UN's declaration says that everyone is entitled to its stipulated rights and freedoms "without distinction of any kind". The Cairo declaration says that rights can be restricted for a "Sharia prescribed reason". Nothing in it prevents forced marriages of pre-pubescent girls, or the death punishments for apostasy, homosexuality and the betrayal of a family's "honour".  […]

The emancipation of women is necessary and essential for white-skinned women in London but not for brown-skinned women in Lahore. Or, to move from the global to the local, the emancipation of women is necessary and essential for white-skinned women in Hampstead and Highgate but not for brown-skinned women in Bethnal Green and Bow.

On a similar theme, here (via A&L Daily) is Judy Bachrach, on being a woman in a Muslim country.