A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

From: Peter K. (peterk at enteract.com)
>>The destruction of the natural environment was not a conscious motive
>>of Islamic fundamentalists (at least they have yet to make it the
>>center of their grievances), but if you think of the environment in a
>>broader sense of the word, including social, political, economic, and
>>cultural, the analogy makes sense.
>--------
>I'm all for context, but that's a stretch.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/international/africa/27NIGE.html
>page A10
>Nigeria State Officials Urge Muslims to Kill Fashion Writer
>By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
>
>KANO, Nigeria, Nov. 26 (Agence France-Presse) - The government of a 
>mainly Muslim state in northern Nigeria urged believers today to 
>kill a woman who wrote an article about the Miss World pageant that 
>was seen as insulting to the Prophet Muhammad.

There is no doubt that Islamism tries to gain an ideological mileage 
out of such issues as commodification of women's sexuality, increases 
in women's wage labor, changes in family structures, and so on, all 
framed as threats to the actual or ideal social, political, economic, 
and cultural environments.  You can even find a number of female 
Islamist activists who make arguments on such issues quite similar to 
what male Islamist activists say.  Such ideological framing is not 
unique to Islamism either.  All religious fundamentalisms favor 
women's bodies, images, and social roles as ideological battlegrounds.

Yoshie