What About The Martial Rights of British Muslim Women? Shelina Janmohamed

http://timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2009/08/what-about-the-marital-rights-of-british-muslim-women.html

One of the reasons Britain gives for its military intervention in Afghanistan is the liberation of Muslim woman from oppression.But what if anything has really changed for them in the 8 years in which the UK and US have been present in the country? In fact, with laws like the recent legislation dubbed the “marital rape law” where a husband can supposedly starve his wife if she does not have sex with him, it’s hard to see that Muslim women are indeed being ‘saved’.

Let’s look at the example of veiling where women are forced to wear the Afghan-style burqa. This is utterly wrong as it is a woman’s choice as to how she should dress. Some in Afghanistan, however, who would argue that it is a more traditional society, where women being uncovered is ‘alien’ to the ‘culture’. This really is about culture not religion because this is absent in the majority of Muslim countries bar a few exceptions.

Back in Britain, some Muslim women do face pressure to veil, but on the whole veiled Muslim women are exercising their own freedom of choice. This can be seen from the fact they tend to be younger, well-educated, British-born women, often decked out in the latest fashions. These women are exercising the same freedom of choice that Britain says it is fighting to give Afghan women.

Muslim women avoid reporting racism

Half the calls Samina Ansari takes relate to claims of hate crime

Shouts of ‘Terrorist’ and ‘Osama Bin Laden’ on the way into an Eid party. Being chased out of a park crying because a man thinks the way you dress is a danger to children. Both racism. Both to Muslim women. Neither reported to the police.

Catrin Nye of BBC Asian Network has been investigating after a charity set up to offer the women support claimed hundreds of racist crimes against Muslim women in Scotland are going unreported.

Amina is a Scottish helpline for the country’s Muslim females.

Workers take around five to six calls a day, sometimes for hours at a time, and they say approximately half the women who call will have suffered hate crime of some sort. Of those, only one in four will go to the police.

One reason given is that the women feel an incident is too trivial, or don’t feel the police could actually do anything about it.

The helpline says it is recording a worrying number of callers who are accustomed to the racism and pass it off as part of life.

“Generally speaking the women will be like ‘Oh it’s ok, I don’t want to report it because it’s not a big deal, everyone faces that, my Asian neighbour’s also had that,” Samina Ansari, Amina’s helpline development officer, said.

“It’s become the norm that ‘Oh it’s not a huge crime, I’ll just put up with it.’

“But really you can get quite severe incidents where it affects people’s mental health.

“Just in terms in socialising or going out, people stop doing all these things.”

“Muslims Talking Sex” Series: Much Ado About Nothing- the Hymen

GOATMILK introduces its original and exclusive month long series entitled “Muslims Talking Sex” featuring diverse Muslim  writers from around the world discussing a gamut of topics in their own unique, honest and eclectic voices.

Much Ado About Nothing: the Hymen

Fatemeh Fakhraie

Riddle: If you’ve got this, you can’t share it. If you share it, you haven’t got it.

The actual answer to this riddle is “a secret.” But the case could be made for an alternative answer: the hymen.

Women are taught that our hymens are a secret: a gift representing our virginities that we should never share with anyone but our husbands. Instead of being a gift, however, it really functions more as a curse. Our early lives are often shaped around the hymen and its protection: we may be kept from playing sports, using tampons, having male friends, and riding horses for fear that our hymens may break (or be broken) and our virginities rendered void.

The Saudi Bitch Slap by Asra Q. Nomani

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-12/the-saudi-bitch-slap/

May 12, 2009 | 6:35am

Hassan Ammar / AP Photo A Saudi Arabian judge declared this weekend that husbands can slap their wives if they spend too much money. The Daily Beast’s Asra Q. Nomani on why his outrageous remarks are a helpful wakeup call for the Muslim world.

The blogs are lighting up with ridicule after a Saudi judge declared this past weekend that husbands can slap their wives on the face if they blow their husband’s money. One headline declared: “Saudi judge says it’s OK to bitch slap your wife.” Said a blogger: “Just more of those Muslim family values in action, folks!” Another headline laid out the news: “Saudi Sharia Judge: Slap the Bitch…”

For my part, I’m thrilled the judge said what he did—and got busted for it.

Razine’s statement is emblematic of a disturbing interpretation of Islam exported from Saudi Arabia to the far corners of the world, and we’re better served as a global society every time the absurdity of this ideology is exposed.

But first, let’s start with the facts. The incident occurred at, of all places, a conference on domestic violence, sanctioned by the Saudi royal family. During the conference, Sheik Hamad bin Mohammed Al-Razine, a judge in the Saudi city of Jeddah, tried to explain an increase in spousal abuse by suggesting spendthrift women were partly to blame, a Saudi newspaper reports.

“If a person gives SR1,200 [$320] to his wife and she spends SR900 [$240] to purchase an abaya [a full black gown worn mostly with a face veil or head covering] from a brand shop and if her husband slaps her on the face as a reaction to her action, she deserves that punishment,” he said, according to an Arab News account. Women in the audience jeered loudly—but because Saudi judges are also Islamic clerics, their comments are influential.

A male response to Zeba Iqbal’s Article on Women

Matrimony – ALTMUSLIMAH.COM [Originally published APRIL 9/2009]

A male response to Zeba

Recently, Zeba Iqbal wrote a series of articles concerning the state of gender relations in the Muslim-American community. Although she focused on matrimony for over-30 women, I think she highlights a much larger issue of what expectations are for and from men and women.

It is difficult to remove male-female interaction from the context of (hetero)sexuality. When we have pubescent boys and girls discovering each other, and themselves, there is a concern that inappropriate relations may emerge. Unfortunately, it seems that the response has generally been to freeze gender relations at the adolescent level and not move beyond that age. This response has the perverse effect of hyper-sexualizing our relations, rather than creating safe environments for men and women to interact.