> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Wojtek Sokolowski
> Sent: Monday, January 03, 2000 10:45 AM
>
> Nathan, forget all that christian b.s. The fact remains that islam is a
> major political force that keeps its female population in virtual slavery,
> oftentimes without access to most basic health care and human services.
> While Russia is certainly not a paragon of democracy and civil rights, at
> least the Russian women are treated as human beings rather than sub-human
> species.
Uh...how prejudiced and unbalanced can a comment be? Islam is a quite complex system of thought that hardly equates with the Taliban. There is a large debate over Islamic feminism that does not always reflect well on non-Islamic countries on the comparison of the state of women between comparable Islamic and non-Islamic countries.
No question that there are forces within Islam that use scripture to subordinate women, but the same was done within Christianity using selective quotes from Paul. It is worth remembering that Muhammed married a rich independent woman who ran a large merchant business. That is not unnoted by many Islamic scholars of gender. Compared to Christian law up until quite recently in most of Europe and the United States that literally made women the property of their husbands with no real legal status on their own, Islamic law has traditionally given women far more independent legal status.
So while Islam has some extremely sexist social divisions, it is far too glib to make universal condemnations of its faults, even in areas like gender relations.
> Arguing that by fighting islamist terrorists costs Russia its influence
> with islamic states, is like arguing that Stalin's decision to fight the
> nazis cost the Soviet Union its influence with the Axis powers. That is
> simply crap. Islam is perhaps the greatest threat to democracy and civil
> rights since the rise of nazism. As it was in the past, Russian people
> carry the burden of fighting political monsters created in response to
> imperialist policies of western europe and the us.
Yowww... I didn't realize that all those nice people I met in the streets of Cairo chanting their Koran verses were equivalent to Hitler's blackshirts :)
More seriously, in the Middle East in places like Egypt, Algeria and (frankly) in the United States, the greatest danger to civil liberties is inflated fears and xenophobia against Islam. Fears of Islam have been used to deny civil liberties to a host of people. Frankly, the anti-Islam fears look more like McCarthyism than anti-fascism.
And much of the anti-Islamic ideology sweeping Russia is based in fascist sources like Zhironovsky and his cohorts who have been agitating for years for a war against Islam and a "drive to the South."
If we are to look at the dangers of respective religions, Islam stands out over its long history as far more tolerant than Christianity. Large pockets of non-Islamic groups prospered quite well over centuries of Islamic rule of Arab and Ottoman empire governance. The same cannot be said of non-Christian groups in Europe during the same period.
-- Nathan Newman