What Muslims Around the World Think About Women's Rights, in Charts

[LadyHawkAZ]

32. There's quite a bit of concern

but the thing about concern is, people tend to use it on the ones who need it most. I think the lack of activity on your posts may have something to do with who posted it.

This crossed my Facebook feed this morning:

Bestselling Turkish Writer is receiving death threats, after she took her veil off

http://www.muslimwomennews.com/faces/sn.php?nid=21964

Arguing that there is no verse for wearing headscarves in the Quran, Kazan has faced heavy criticism also in her country due to her thoughts. Her own father attacked her house with stones. Kazan who worked voluntarily at WFUNA, a human rights association of United Nations, claims that headscarves were used due to geographical conditions before Islam by both Arabic women and men as a custom. Conducting studies on Women Rights in Islam, Kazan explained why she uncovered her head and what has changed in her life since then.

(snip)

I suffered from vitamin D deficiency since my skin didn't get enough sunlight by then and this normally causes serious illnesses, weakness and mental fatigue. I sunbathed a lot. Then I tied my hair in a pony-tail and played tennis under the blue sky with my white tennis clothes on. I cannot tell you how good it felt. Then I fulfilled my dream of growing nails and putting on red nail polish, which was a personal remembrance to me. I had met a woman in my trip to Iran who was forced to put her hands into a bag full of insects just because she had put on red nail polish... Whenever I put on red nail polish, I still remember that woman with sadness...

Now I am free and believe that God has no problem with the hair on my head, He will not burn me in his Hell for this reason, He holds us with much more mercy and kindness than we think, and that being "a good person" is much more important than wearing a dark veil.

I have understood that destroying our lives like a criminal in pain and tears just because we express our feelings of thankfulness clearly cannot be something He desires. And I have chosen to accept everyone He created, without conditions, prejudices and with love like He does. This new movement which saves Muslim women from the primitive image of Arabic nomadic life should rather be encouraged than being criticized. Women should be the sole decision makers on what they wear.

Where's the support? People here dissed Amina Tyler and went to some pretty extreme lengths to try to discredit her. People here dissed Sila Sahin. Where was the support? Aliaa Elmahdy got rape and death threats for her epic (nude) protest on the treatment of women in Egypt: why is the concern directed only at women protesting sexual assault who dress "properly"?- think hard about that one for a minute. Where's the support? Were those women Westerners, looking down their noses from a Western perspective? Why the vehement insistence, contrary to all evidence, that veiling is the one and only free choice that women have anywhere, and that those who get free of it are mere patriarchal tools doing what teh menz tell them to? Where's the support?

Did we support Sarah Palin's goals when she claimed to be a "feminist" speaking for women and their needs? How about Batshit Annie? Why is this different? Why, if we scoff at fundies in our own country and fight their ideas tooth and nail, should we honor them in others?

How any of that adds up to anything other than support for social conservatism, in direct defiance of the cause of women's rights, is completely beyond me, even if I am "too Western and superior" to be allowed an opinion. In fact if you want to go that route, to say "You can't have an opinion on women's rights in Muslim countries because Western bombings, drones, wars blah blah" is also using the broad brush- I haven't bombed anyone, I don't run a drone, I protested the wars, and the treatment of women in Islamic societies still, in my imperialist superior Western opinion, sucks. Muslims aren't all the same, everywhere? Well duh, but neither are all Westerners speaking from an imperialist warmonger perspective. Some of us just don't think women's rights should take a back seat to "respect" for fundamentalist abusers of any stripe, that's all.