one thing is for sure, muslim women MUST be allowed to choose their destiny... the way men are. equality must be now!
please join me... in fighting for women's rights by becoming a member of "equality now" - http://www.equalitynow.org/
afdhere
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How to Reconcile Islam, Sexuality and Liberty?
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times
For Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, the central problem of
Islam is sexual. "We have to deal with Islam's attempt to control the
sexuality of women, its refusal to accept that women have their own
sexuality and want to make their own choices," she said.
Ates, who practices law in Berlin and visited New York this week,
speaks with conviction. Many of her clients are battered Muslim
women, mainly Turkish immigrants in Germany.
They come to her because the men in their lives insist on control of
their sexuality - that they remain virgins until married, that they
agree to arranged marriages, that they do as bidden once wed - and
react with violence when denied.
Six recent "honor killings" in Berlin, where about 10 percent of the
2.5 million Turks in Germany live, have focused attention on a
culture of violent male repression of women in some Muslim immigrant
communities in Europe. The most talked-about case is that of Hatan
Sürücü, a 23-year-old single mother, gunned down near her Berlin home
in February.
Sürücü, the daughter of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants, was married off
to her cousin at 16, before fleeing her husband with her infant son
and attempting a form of emancipation.
She stopped wearing a veil; she drank alcohol; she dated; she trained
as an electrician. Then, according to the prosecution, her three
brothers killed her because her lifestyle was "a slight to the honor
of the family." The trial is ongoing.
"Such killings reflect the widely held view in Islam that the honor
of a man lies between the legs of a woman," Ates, a secular Muslim,
said. "It is not understood that the honor of woman lies in deciding
what she does with that."
Strong words, but this is no time to shrink from confrontation with
difficult issues between the West and Islam. A form of political
correctness has long contributed to a European habit of tolerating,
or being blind to, what went on within Muslim communities living
parallel to, rather than as part of, their adopted European
societies. The dangers of this approach have now become apparent in
various forms of violence.
Of course, the picture is not uniform. Many young Muslims, whether
retaining or renouncing Islamic identity, integrate into European
societies. A survey last year in Germany, commissioned by the
ministry responsible for women's affairs, questioned the stereotype
of oppression among young women from Muslim households and found a
majority preparing to pursue careers.
Beyond Europe, the place and image of femininity in Arab society vary
enormously, from the veiled and largely invisible women of Saudi
Arabia who are barred from exposing their hair or ankles outdoors, to
the scantily clad beauties on 24-hour Arabic rock-music channels or
the punchy professional women presenting the news and weather in
cities from Beirut to Casablanca.
The disparity is enormous between the late-night clubbing of cities
like Dubai, where men and women mingle, to the sexual apartheid that
leaves the public sphere to men in broad swaths of the Arab world and
subjects women to indignities ranging from harassment for immodest
dress to a stifling domestic oppression.
These very differences raise the question of whether the problem lies
in Islam itself - the Koran and the Prophet's sayings as embodied in
Shariah law - or whether the issue is rather how those texts have
been interpreted or perverted within some societies and communities
to justify the humiliation of women.
The answer is no doubt some of both. But that the Koran, read
literally, and in male-dominated cultures inclined to perpetuate that
domination, offers men the latitude to humiliate women and claim
God's blessing in doing so seems clear enough.
After all, the Holy Book allows men to marry four wives, beat them if
they are disobedient, dismiss women's legal testimony as less weighty
than men's, and insist on modesty in women's dress.
"Islam is a religion obsessed with sex and sexuality and limiting and
regulating that of women," said Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born
member of the Dutch Parliament living in hiding because Islamic
fanatics have threatened to kill her. "The religion was founded by
and in a tribal Arab desert culture, marked by distrust between
clans, and the only way to survive was to be in the tribe with more
male members, and that required protecting your women from
impregnation by others."
Hirsi Ali, who has worked with battered Muslim women in a Dutch
society shaken by several "honor killings" in the past year, believes
that "challenging sexual morals is the key to a better integration of
Islam in the West, because once you get rid of this neurosis, women
are no longer kept in the house, they can choose their own partner,
and a partner not necessarily of the tribe."
A lot more than sex and sexuality is at stake here. The group culture
that says a Muslim woman is not free to choose her mate or lifestyle
is an _expression of a value system that places extended family and
clan and ultimately the whole Islamic community, or umma, above the
norms, and often the laws, of Western societies.
That, in turn, can only exacerbate division and distrust that, in the
post-9/11 world, have proved the prelude to explosive violence.
Some European Muslims respond that it is the prejudice of Western
society that forces them into their own cultural islands, and that
Islam is the only authentic alternative they have to the
homogenizing, all-trampling force of Western modernity. Hence, they
say, the revival of Islam and, on the fringes, the growth of
fanaticism.
But an authentic culture is one thing, trampling on fundamental human
rights like the equality of men and women quite another.
"My clients," Ates said, "say their men beat them and then claim this
is allowed by the Koran, this is a man's role in the Koran, you must
accept the authority of the male, which is higher than that of women."
The time is ripe, more than ripe, for a Muslim Freud.
count your blessings.
Homosexuals always hide behind women issues.