In National Review this morning I discuss how David Horowitz and I came to be the leaders of the feminist movement.
Feminist Katha Pollitt of The Nation blog boldly heralded last month “A Campaign to Stop Stoning” to protest the ongoing practice of stoning in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in particular the sentencing of two sisters, Zohreh and Azar Kabiri, who were recently sentenced to be stoned to death for “adultery.”Indeed, it is a remarkable initiative. And to whom should the credit go for this landmark shift in feminist gaze from the perceived ills of American society, to the oppression of women in the Islamic world? Perhaps, to an article published by frontpagemag.com just four days before Pollitt unveiled her protest of stoning: “Two Women Stoned: Feminists Mum,” by David Horowitz, Janet Levy, and me.
Of course, the Horowitz Freedom Center didn’t become the ideological vanguard of the American feminist movement overnight. The controversy began last October with the Center’s first Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, during which we protested the silence of feminists over the oppression of women in Islam on campuses all over the country,. The week included organized sit-ins at a dozen Women’s Studies Departments to protest the absence of courses and department-sponsored events confronting the issue, and brought national discussion and debate to the matter. Pollitt responded by attacking David Horowitz in The Nation, quoting Columbia University anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s assertion that “the Islamofascist Awareness people aren’t interested in what’s actually going on in the Muslim world. They just use the woman question as an easy way to target Muslims.”
Read it all, over at NRO.
The glacier thaws.
1) Adultery is not a crime. The state has no right to interfere in our personal decisions.
2) No women should be forced to undergo female circumcision.
3) A woman can wear whatever clothing she chooses to wear.
4) "Honor killing" is murder. Family members should be charged as accessories.
5) The segregation of members of the opposite sex in public spaces is illegal.
6) Men and women have equal rights under the law.
These are not just women's rights, they are universal human rights.
There is no right or left in this issue.
"Pollitt responded by attacking David Horowitz in The Nation, quoting Columbia University anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s assertion that...
-- from the article above
A little more on Lila Abu Lughod:
A Feminist for Gender Apartheid
By Hugh Fitzgerald
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, May 20, 2005
Judging by the press coverage of Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of sociology, her family background is of keen interest. Or possibly that background has proved to be quite useful. In the view of Antony T. Sullivan (reviewing her book, Veiled Sentiments, in The World and I, January 1991), her father Ibrahim was a “distinguished Palestinian-American political scientist” and his “Jewish wife, Janet” is “herself a world-class sociologist.” Their daughter, raised a Muslim, spent childhood summers in Jordan and she seldom fails to mention her “heritage.”
This background makes her serving on the committee searching for a scholar to occupy Columbia’s new chair of Israel studies especially inapt.
Lila Abu-Lughod specializes on “topics of gender, class, and modernity.” She lived for 2 years with the Baladi tribe of Egyptian Bedouins, and wrote two books about them: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, and Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Still, she has reservations in this kind of writing, for as she told an interviewer for the Cairo Times (March 4-17, 1999) she “worries about privileging her own voice over her subjects.”
Abu-Lughod is the editor of a book of essays, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity, which has been hailed as “an important contribution to comparative postcolonial and feminist studies.” The book, she explains, “seeks to tackle comfortable and accepted linear notions of progress, modernity, and emancipation in modern academic works on gender in the postcolonial world.”
Why, Abu-Lughod asks, should the West’s ideas about “progress” and “modernity” be unquestionably accepted? Perhaps Western “progress” is not progress, and “modernity” is not modernity. And Western feminists should not be so hasty in denouncing the veil and the burka, because they act as a “portable seclusion,” your very own zenana or haramlik, which you can bring with you anywhere.
Her essay “The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics,” in Remaking Women, offers a critique of what Abu-Lughod calls “companionate marriage” – i.e. monogamy, which the highly judgmental Western world apparently thinks is the only way to go about things, and fails to appreciate the many benefits to women from polygamy.
Abu-Lughod notes that “the concept of companionate marriage advocated by Qasim Amin and other nationalist-feminist writers around the turn of the 19trh century – brought with it the breaking of bonds among women. The result was dissolution of the lively, cross-class homosocial world of women; in its wake emerged a bourgeois household centered on a nuclear family.”
Monogamy destroys that “lively cross-class homosocial world of women” in the windowless quarters where, guarded by eunuchs, they can trade stories, jokes, tales of Grand Cairo in the Scheherazade manner, and do one another’s hair, in a kind of dormitory pajama party without end.
Abu-Lughod insists that Westerners, especially those pesky feminists, should stop harping on “difference” and look at what unites us: “We should ask not how Muslim societies are distinguished from ‘our own’ but how intertwined they are, historically and in the present, economically, politically, and culturally.” It disturbs her that so many people want to know about “women and Islam” – the very topic is worrisome, she feels, because it gets away from the real issues, the “messier historical or cultural narratives” that focus on “colonial projects” and the “colonial enterprise.”
She cannot abide Western feminists who talk of “saving” Afghan women:
It is easy to see through the hypocritical ‘feminism’ of a Republican administration. More troubling for me are the attitudes of those who do genuinely care about women’s status. The problem, of course, with ideas of “saving” other women is that they depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners. [2]
And that, of course, is a Bad Thing. Better, then, to stop worrying overmuch about different ways that men and women relate to each other, in Afghanistan, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia. For any interest, or still worse, intervention that might possibly lead to a reinforcement of “a sense of superiority by Westerners” must, at all costs, be avoided.
Abu-Lughod has a solution, She thinks “we need to work hard to respect and recognize difference.” And, she adds, “We might do better to think how to make the world a more just place rather than trying to ‘save’ women in other cultures.”
When Western (or Muslim) feminists try to intervene to better the lot of Afghan, or other women in Muslim countries, Abu-Lughod finds this deplorable, for it could “reinforce a sense of Western superiority.” When Western (or Muslim) feminists object to hijab or burka, Abu-Lughod replies that the women welcome this kind of costume, which offers them a “portable seclusion” from the prying eyes of men. When Western (or Muslim) feminists attack polygamy, Abu-Lughod defends it, and complains that “companionate marriage” is overrated while in the privacy of the polygamous women’s quarters, so much fun is to be had that Western women cannot possibly understand.
Abu-Lughod is a determined Defender of the Faith. Where the rights of women, and the reputation of Islam, collide, she stands foursquare with Islam, and against those rights. It has been noted by the real Muslim (or more often, ex-Muslim) feminists – such intrepid fighters for women’s rights as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Azam Kamguian – that quite a few supposed Muslim “feminists” end up retreating into a defense of Islam, whenever they sense that the interest in the mistreatment of women might harm the Faith.
Sherin Ebadi, for example, the recent Iranian winner of the Nobel Prize – an award that infuriated many Iranian feminists in exile, who were not silent on the matter – has been keen to ascribe the difficulties of women under Islam to “cultural” factors, and to exculpate Islam on every occasion. Leila Ahmed, and Fatima Mernissi, two Muslim female academics who once were thought to be defenders of women’s rights, have, as Reza Afshari has shown in his keen examination of them, changed their tone considerably in order to deflect all criticism of Islam, and have apparently maintained, in the Ebadi manner, that not the tenets of Islam, not passages in Qur’an and hadith, but only “cultural” factors, are to blame for the mistreatment of women.
Abu-Lughod, it appears, feels the same tug of filial piety, and loyalty.
It is quite a revealing performance, for someone who claims to be so interested in the treatment of women, and ends up defending, in her own way, the burka, polygamy, and other abject conditions of Muslim women lest – horrors – there be any possibility of reinforcing that “sense of Western superiority.”
The same argument, of course, could be deployed to prevent Western intervention in Mali, Mauritania, and the Sudan, where Muslim Arabs continue to hold as chattel slaves tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of black Africans. Perhaps Abu-Lughod’s loyalty would not extend that far. But, on the other hand, perhaps it would."
Perhaps we can get the UN to pass a resolution condemning these actions?
From Hugh's quote of the pop anthropologist Abu-Lughod: "The problem, of course, with ideas of “saving” other women is that they depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners."
This objection to Western superiority is not merely the concern of Muslims like Abu-Lughod; it is the dogma of most Westerners! Most Westerners today, were they asked the question, "Is the West superior to the non-West?" would laugh in the face of the quesioner and upbraid him for his bigoted impertinence.
Even if the question's focus were narrowed to "Is the West superior to Islam?", only a small segment from among that Western majority would show signs of grudging discomfort with the stress and strain which such a question -- along with the unavoidable data that is impinging more and more with its growing weight and noise from outside the Box they inhabit -- exerts upon their still reigning paradigm; but in the end they would stand their incoherent ground by doing evasive gymnastics in order to not answer the question.
"The same argument, of course, could be deployed to prevent Western intervention in Mali, Mauritania, and the Sudan, where Muslim Arabs continue to hold as chattel slaves tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of black Africans. Perhaps Abu-Lughod’s loyalty would not extend that far. But, on the other hand, perhaps it would."
That's because it's companionate slavery.
They will try anything, won't they?
Get this.....
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-03-05-obama-kin_N.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
Which is it?
David Horowitz and Robert Spencer...icons of the feminist movement!
It's a strange world.
Perhaps Lila would like these meddlesome western women not to link up with those self-hating Afghani women who would like to save themselves - who can't understand why western feminist women continue to ignore their plight....Oh, that's right. Some self-appointed Edwina Saida has said that muslim women LIKE the whole apartheid thang. And who are we to meddle in their bidness, anyways? Thank God, Patrick Stewart is bravely speaking out against the pretend violence against women in movies....perhaps Mrs. Jay Leno might be able to get Cap'n Picard to violate the prime directive and speak up on behalf of real women in Muslim cultures. Like the muslim women in his very own Londonistan. It seems that a large number of Asian girls have gone missing...not that anyone there actually cares enough to do anything about it.
interestingconundrum:
I don't know if you caught this, but in the new york times article it says:
"Sarah Hussein Obama of Kenya, Barack Obama’s stepgrandmother, is a lifelong Muslim. “I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” she says."
and in the usatoday piece:
"Obama's grandfather had converted to Islam from Roman Catholicism and taken the name Hussein, Sarah Obama said, but his children had inherited only the name, not the religion. Each person should be able to choose how they worshipped, she said. In the world of today, children have different religions from their parents," she said. She, too, is a Christian."
She's a lifelong Muslim and she's a Christian?!>?
Somebody is seriously trying to bullshit us.....
Wafa Sultan is a great woman.
God keep her,
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1704.htm
Self-described red-diaper baby, Radcliffe girl with cheek of tan (a little weak sun-taking, during that first job in Johnson, Vermont), a naif who -- in the middle of New York City -- was completely oblivious to, and shocked, shocked, shocked to dsicover, the "serial philandering" of her former husband (the man she thought was her eternal "soul-mate" earned his living as a joke-writer for someone, possibly Letterman, so she was being supported in quite a high style, presumably on the Upper West Side, by a husband who was very much a beneficiary, or part,of The System), Katha Pollitt is a girl -- oops, woman --whose "feminist politics" have not entirely erased her inner essential sweetness. Listen to her voice, that of a twenty-year-old, on a radio show. But she refuses to grow up. That's sometimes okay. Yet one wishes that in one area she would decide to really start to inform herself, and thereby grow up about an ideology that, if she really thought about it, she would surely come to dislike and that would fill her with a dismay far beyond what the cheekbones of Katrina van den Heuvel may cause. She could start reading, on her own -- "Why I Am Not A Muslim" by Ibn Warraq, or "While Europe Slept" by Bruce Bawer. Or "The Dhimmi" or "Islam and Dhimmitude" by Bat Ye'or. Or, if she can get over his presumed "right-wing-ness," even the guides to what is actually in the canonical texts of Islam -- Qur'an, Hadith, Sira -- by the notorious Robert Spencer. She might meet, over a period of a few weeks and sometimes tea, with Paul Berman. He's no right-winger, he's practically Village Voice People. She might read, and even try to think about enought to write about, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is no right-winger. [I use such terms as "right-winger" only because I must get down in the muck in order to help clear it away]. Katha Pollitt might read the books of Oriana Fallaci on the matter of Islam. But before she does, she should learn all about Oriana Fallaci's aid to her father, and other partisans who fought as best they could against the Germans in World War II, should familiarize herself with Fallaci's attacks on the Vietnam War, should find out about her Greek leftist lover, Panagoulis, killed by Greek rightists (those "colonels"), lover, about whom she, Oriana Fallaci, wrote "Un Uomo." Now if that doesn't get the attention of Katha Pollitt, what will? Rest assured that if Oriana Fallaci had been around in the 1930s, she would have fought in Spain, right alongside the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. That's right -- for Fallaci, fascism was fascism. And she knew Islam intimately, she had spent a lot of time interviewing the likes of Khomeini and Arafat (and even was subjected to Israeli fire, while accompanying a group of PLO fighters). And having learned all that, she can then read Fallaci's expressons of horror at the demographic invasion of Tuscany, of Italy, of Western Europe, by those who are adherents of a faith that discourages free and skeptical inquiry, without which science is imopssible, and discourages or rather prohibits, almost all forms of artistic expression save (Qur'anic) calligraphy and (mosque) architecture, that incuculcates in Believers the necessary (by our standards) mistreatment of women, and the mistreatment of non-Muslims, and does not permit, is bitterly opposed to, the individual rights that the Delcaration of the Rights of Man, the Bill of Rights, and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man all uphold, rights that are flatly contradicted by the Shari'a.
Then she might start to see Islam in a more intelligent and truthful light. And then she herself might become a light unto, not the nations, but to The Nation, or at least to its more intelligent and mentally open-to-new-knowledge contributors, among whom I suspect there are at least three: the gourmand and fugitive versifier and very touching memoirist Calvin Trillin, and the unforgettable cheekbones -Right and Left -- of the editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel. But because we are all feminists now, we won't dare to mention them, or their conceivable aid in making what Katrina Heuvel says (on, say, Charlie Rose) more convincing to her rapt male listeners.
Lt. Presley O'Bannon ,
Yes, I caught it.
Funny isn't it?
How many people {and press} are going to shrug this off?
interestinconundrum,
I imagine it will be ignored, but I've emailed the links you provided to folks I know, so maybe the information won't end up totally lost (hopefully).
And thanks for the memri link. Wafa Sultan is awsome! I thought those islamists were going to choke! Too funny. She ripped them apart. ( I noticed they didn't deny drinking camel urine ;)
@cantor
Your POV only holds water if both ideologies are balanced devoid of any moral considerations. In other words in a relativistic world both are equal. That is what I hear you saying.
That is the card Islam plays in the west to gain advantage politically and culturally. The dogma of "superiority by Westerners" is a socialist and leftist POV. Is that you view?
I would like to see Karen Armstrong write a book, and title it thusly: "Why I am not a Muslim".
Well, I think "credit" should go to me, too, as I e-mailed Katha Pollitt a month or two ago saying "She should never call herself a feminist again if she didn't write an article protesting the honor killings in Texas of the Said sisters." I also said that the only TRUE feminist in America these days is Phyllis Chesler.
Pollitt replied to me with a lot of excuses, but apparently she took what I said to heart. At least, I hope I have contributed to her turn-around.
"Feminist Katha Pollitt of The Nation blog boldly heralded last month “A Campaign to Stop Stoning” to protest the ongoing practice of stoning in the Islamic Republic of Iran"
It has always annoyed me the way Western, governments, cultural and religious leaders allow Muslims to occupy the moral high ground with their charges of defaming Islam and Mohammad, in addition to the general immorality of Western socities in a whole host of different ways.
It never has, or or ever should be, that way. Only a total lack of confidence in Western moral superiority could allow Western leaders to concede the moral high ground to the Islamic world.
The brutal treatment of Women in Muslin countries is only the tip of the iceberg, but a very important and obvious manisfestation of Islamic immorality. Western leaders, including feminist leaders, should have benn in the streets in mass demonstrations long ago proteting Muslim barbarity.
If we in the West have failed morally, the failue is in standing by and allowing these crimes to be committed daily without so much as a peep of protest. And the greatest failures of all are the feminists, who tout themselves as the moral leaders in fighting against the mistreatment of Women.
I just hope that this isn't just a lot of window dressing by Ms. Katha Pollitt and her feminist sisters in response to being shamed by a National Review article.
This should be an on-going and massive effort by everyone, including feminists organizations, to redeem ourselves for past moral failures to bring some moral accountability to the Islamic world.
"...their charges of defaming Islam and Mohammad,"
Here's the reply to those charges: "Islam and Mohammed DESERVE to be defamed, just like Naziism and Hitler." Yep, there's the reply. And then see the look on their faces like they just sucked a lemon! LOL
we won't dare to mention them [her cheekbones], or their conceivable aid in making what Katrina Heuvel says (on, say, Charlie Rose) more convincing to her rapt male listeners.
Between Charlie's craggy cliffs of a face and her marmoreal promontories, we are in the presence of Mt. Rushmore giants of PC.
Im.mad.as.HELL!
"Your POV only holds water if both ideologies are balanced devoid of any moral considerations. In other words in a relativistic world both are equal. That is what I hear you saying."
How could my view, that the West is superior, be a relativistic worldview in which all sides are equal? That's a contradiction.
"The dogma of "superiority by Westerners" is a socialist and leftist POV. Is that you view?"
I've never heard one Socialist or Leftist ever say that the West is superior. I think I know the source of your confusion: Your quote above is misquoting me, so you got the exact opposite of what I was arguing: I wrote that --
"This objection to Western superiority is ...the dogma of most Westerners!"
Not Western superiority itself is the dogma I was referring to -- but the objection to the idea of Western superiority: that's the reigning dogma of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism which dominates Western hearts and minds in our time.
Again, this is not just a Leftist problem. The vast majority of Western conservatives today would balk at the suggestion that the West is superior to the non-West. They might not laugh in your face when you assert it -- so they are less egregiously arrogant about the whole thing --, but they would still be mighty uncomfortable handling it, for they too have succumbed to the dominant sea change in consciousness that most everybody else has.
Only a total lack of confidence in Western moral superiority could allow Western leaders to concede the moral high ground to the Islamic world.
by rational
That's all it is. The West allowed itself to be blamed for the Crusades (disregarding the three centuries of Islamic violence and colonialism that preceded them) and the "colonial period" (disregarding the Islamic colonial period that existed five times longer).
From Hugh's quote of the pop anthropologist Abu-Lughod: "The problem, of course, with ideas of “saving” other women is that they depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners."
We(us Westerners) have a sense of superiority because Western culture is superior. That's why we have the higher standards of living, we produce the most goods, the greatest technology, the best/most powerful weapons and the longest life spans. And that is why so many people from non-western societies want to move to western countries.
If non-western societies (I'm including Japan as "western") are so great, why do they all want out?
Let's just admit it, we act superior because we are superior. And we are superior because we aren't stuck in tribalism/clanism type societies wherein everyday people can't make choices regarding careers, religion, marriage etc without imposition of some ruling class, be it clerics, royalty or party leaders.
If a woman in the west wants to wear a burka for her own personal privacy tent, she can. . .and conversly if she chooses not to walk around in a sack, she can do that also. If she chooses to marry outside of her parents faith, she is allowed (or at least used to be) to do so without the worry of being murdered by her father and/or brother.
And there-in lies the crux of the matter.
I guess my dyslexias is kicking in. Missed objection in the phrase.
I will repeat what I think you were saying to correct confusion on my part. Basically, we in the west do not think that we are superior even though the accusations appear to stick. Mostly by our unwillingness to admit or deny the point.
If that is what you said. I think you are correct as far as conservatives think, but the left thinks we are inferior and that is the reason for all of the problems. I would even venture to guess that they (the left) project that the right think they are superior and that being the biggest problem.
This is a little OT but it does fit into the bigger picture of how we perceive ourselves (male/female, left/right) and cultures (west/Islam, US/allies, allies/enemy). On the flip side I was watching the video posted with Wafa Sultan. Her opponents were projecting their cultural values into how the west would react.
Kind of comes down to the story about removing the beam from your eye before the splinter from the others eye.
@walterc
Did you happen to view that LINK with Wafa Sultan? It was posted earlier on this tread.
Toward the end her opponents stated that Islam was far superior in all things and went down the same list you posted, giving themselves all the credit. LOL
That in deed is 'the crux of the matter'!
Thank you to Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, et al.
Posted by: Im.mad.as.HELL!
Yes, Leftists are far worse than conservatives in terms of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism, but they are rather beyond hope in their sociopolitical deformity; conservatives on the other hand should know better and try to recover the higher degree of rationality they and their sociopolitical culture possessed over 50 years ago.
Yes ----- with hat in hand, thank you Robert and Dave; some of us wish we could do more, but for now we appreciate your lighting the fire under us.