Who'd be female under Islam?

“Who'd be female under Islamic law?” asks Muslim writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in today’s (UK) Independent.

Who indeed?

Alibhai-Brown presents us with sickening examples of abuses of women in Islamic countries, including the murder of Ayman Udas, a singer, killed for singing – many of them sanctioned by law.

She says she is a Muslim, yet cites a number of things she does that Muslims just don’t allow, such as drinking alcohol and appearing in public with unrelated men. I’m not sure how she can claim to be a Muslim. Perhaps there’s some semantic sleight of hand going on here.

However, she goes on to talk of Pakistan, “the country that once elected a woman head of state”. She continues:

The divinely beautiful Swat Valley has, for reasons of political expediency, been handed over to the Taliban, and there they have blown up over a hundred schools for girls and regularly flog young females on the streets. The girls are shrouded and forbidden to scream because the female voice has the potential to arouse desire. Or pity perhaps.

Quite! What a sick bunch of scum the Taliban and their followers are! And this, don’t forget, is done in the name of their religion – a religion we in the West continue (not in all its manifestations, true) to kowtow to. In the case of politicians (most of them, most of the time, shabby, dodgy and second-rate), it amounts to votes; in the case of others, it’s usually a case of woolly-liberal, touchy-feely political correctness.

Alihbai-Brown is aware that these things lead to comments such as those in the paragraph above:

I am aware that my words will help confirm the pernicious prejudices that fester in the minds of those who despise Islam. Yet to conceal or excuse the violations would be to condone and encourage them.

But why “pernicious”? Why “prejudices”? We can see what’s going on in these benighted countries, assuming all the news media are not conducting one huge, elaborate conspiracy.

However, she continues to criticise, and, towards the end of the article, presents an infuriating scene that sums up how women are treated (and often allow themselves to be treated) by men who follow this poisonous belief system – and her example comes from here in dear old Blightly:

I look out of my study at the common and see a wife fully burkaed on a sunny day. She sits still. Her children and husband run around, laughing, playing cricket. She sits still, dead, buried, a ghost. She is complicit in her own degradation, as are countless others. Their acquiescence in a free democracy is a crime against their sisters who have no such choices in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

What is the British government doing to try to discourage this behaviour, and to encourage Muslim women – who, along with gays, are usually the first victims of toxic Islam – to rebel against this treatment and to end their own complicity in it?

Probably nothing at all.
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Related links:
The singer is dead, but the song remains
The day the music died
Cover-up