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Islam and Women
From Policy Review, an article by Lauren Weiner.... Islamism didn't come to full fruition until the 1970s, starting to win large numbers of adherents at the precise moment that feminism was at the height of its political power in America and Europe and gaining a foothold in the urban centers of the less developed countries. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi draws the connection very directly in Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Indiana University Press, revised edition 1987). Mernissi's book, first published in 1975, addresses the vast changes in Muslim societies as the European powers were relinquishing their colonies. Not only were rural populations migrating to the cities, but the universities in those cities — for centuries the exclusive preserve of local male aristocracies — were being democratized. Those whom Mernissi calls "traditionally marginalized and deprived male rural migrants" were for the first time permitted to seek higher education in Rabat, Lahore, Beirut, Amman, and other centers. So, too, were women. The introduction of ideas of liberty and equality into these societies had effects that were complicated and in many cases subtle. Clearly discernible to Mernissi, however, was an antagonism that arose between nonveiling college women and the males who arrived in the universities along with them. The male parvenus, in the millions, glommed onto violently anti-Western strains of Islam out of a sense of pique. "What dismays the fundamentalists," Mernissi writes, "is that the era of [postcolonial] independence did not create an all-male new class. Women are taking part in the public feast." Newly urbanized and newly educated young men singled out modern women with diplomas and careers as the worst traitors to Islam. These zealots saw offenses against "real" Islam everywhere, but the uncovered women in their own midst were the ultimate heretics. That generation now constitutes the senior echelon of radical clerics issuing interpretations of Islamic law, or sharia, and the top level of terror networks such as al Qaeda and Jemaa Islamiya. Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-10-09 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=45467 |