[lbo-talk] Honor Killing and Domestic Violence in Germany

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Dec 6 08:47:43 PST 2005


sharif islam sharif.islam at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 08:09:15 PST 2005:
> This is what I am grappling with.
> The incidents of violence towards women within the muslim immigrant
> community usually have a religious undertone or at least that is
> how it gets reported. I totally agree with you that the violence
> is based on gender discrimination. However, can you totally ignore
> the religious influence?

Criticism of the role of religion in gender oppression is surely necessary and appropriate if it is offered in a feminist context that doesn't claim any particular religion has monopoly of violence against women. Take a look at this feminist project called Sarah- Hagar in Germany: <http://www.sarah-hagar.de/projekt.html>. Its mission statement sounds like a promising way to approach the problem (though I don't know how that translates into its practice -- does anyone know?).

The dominant media -- as in the case of Peter Schneider's article -- tends to suggest that, when Muslim men commit violence against women, it is their religion or culture that's the problem, but ,when non- Muslim German men commit violence against women, it is just that the particular non-Muslim men are bad men, their badness having little or nothing to do with their religion or culture. That's the double standard that we ought to combat.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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