ISLAM OPPRESSES WOMEN
Rebel Muslim's book due out Tuesday
ARTHUR MAX
Associated Press
April 28, 2006
THE HAGUE, Netherlands - She breaks all Dutch molds. A former refugee from Somalia, she is a black face in the white crowd in parliament. She seeks blunt confrontation rather than the quiet consensus of traditional politics. In a country that used to pride itself on its free and easy ways, she lives under constant guard.
What makes Ayaan Hirsi Ali stand out is religion: She is a Muslim who rejects the Prophet Muhammad as a guide for today's morality. For this she is castigated as a "traitor" by the Muslim community she abandoned, and is accused of heightening tensions with "Islam bashing" and mindless provocation.
Elected to parliament four years ago, she became internationally famous when a film she wrote provoked the murder of its director, Theo van Gogh, by an Islamic radical on an Amsterdam street. It drove home to the Dutch how vulnerable they were to terrorism.
To meet her at the Dutch parliament, a reporter must be escorted by a security guard who stays by the door throughout the interview.
Hirsi Ali's unusual trajectory started when she was 22 and passing through Germany en route to Canada for an arranged marriage to a distant cousin she had never met. She instead got on a train to Amsterdam and got asylum.
She briefly worked as a chambermaid and part-time translator before enrolling in university for a political science degree and joining the leftist Labor Party.
In 2002, on the promise of a parliament seat, she jumped to the conservative Liberal Party, causing a political storm but guaranteeing her a high visibility platform and a regular spot on TV talk shows.
Today, at 36, she feels she is having an impact.
"Issues that I wanted to put on the agenda in 2002 and that were dismissed as incidental or unimportant are now issues that are discussed at all levels of government," she said. "I have a satisfaction that this wasn't for nothing."
Not all Dutchmen agree. Hirsi Ali was indirectly targeted in a report by a government advisory group which criticized the "climate of confrontation and stereotypical thinking" about Islam and its activists.
Its author, Jan Schoonenboom, was more direct in news interviews, accusing Hirsi Ali and other politicians of "Islam bashing" and of appealing to "gut feelings" rather than reason.
Immigration and integration, women's rights and the place of Islam in Western countries are subjects of "The Caged Virgin," a book Hirsi Ali will launch in New York on Tuesday.
The essays and reprinted articles explore "my relationship with Islam. We Muslims should learn to look at ourselves critically, at our moral values," she says. "The best agent for this reform is emancipating or liberating our women."
"We Muslims" may sound curious coming from Hirsi Ali, who was raised a strict Muslim but now calls herself an atheist. She would like to see a Muslim Reformation of the kind that remade European Christianity in the 16th century.
Muslims need "to develop a different relationship, a different concept of God, of what God means," she says - not just total submission to God's will but "a dialogue with God."
Such a reformation is more likely to emerge from the West, she said, because for reformers in Muslim societies "there is always the fear of being killed, of being shunned by your community, of being exiled, jailed, tortured."
But Holland hasn't proved much safer. She went into hiding after Van Gogh's murder, spending 2 1/2 months in the United States.
She faults the Dutch intelligence service for focusing too late on the Islamic fringe, and the government for then overreacting by allowing infringements on civil liberties.
"There is ethnic profiling. But unlike in the United States, we don't even debate it. That's bad," she says. "In the Netherlands and in the rest of Europe we pretend that we are morally superior to the United States, that we are not doing any form of ethnic profiling. But we are."
She was a critic of Dutch immigration policy at a time when it was unfashionable to talk about an immigrant underclass, high crime rates among second generation migrants, and crowded Muslim ghettos.
As a translator for the immigration service, she says, she saw evidence of the mistreatment of women in Muslim families and the difficulty of the Calvinist Dutch to deal with an alien culture.
Joining the conservative governing coalition in parliament hardly softened her criticism.
"Our migration policy is a failure," she said. "We used to pretend that we were a homogenous little country and that Holland is not a migration country. We have become a migration country like the United States."
She believes the housing projects that have become immigrant ghettos should be demolished and their inhabitants blended into mainstream society.
Hirsi Ali is the daughter of Hirsi Magan, a Somali politician who opposed the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre and took his family into exile in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and finally Kenya.
Her 11-minute film "Submission" got its director killed three months after it aired on Dutch television, but Hirsi Ali is undaunted. She says she's going ahead with "Submission Part II," a 90-minute sequel.
Veil a 'mark of separation' - Blair
Press Association
Tuesday October 17, 2006
The veil worn by hundreds of Muslim women in the UK is a "mark of separation" which makes people of other ethnic backgrounds feel uncomfortable, Prime Minister Tony Blair has said.
Mr Blair's comment was his strongest intervention yet in the debate sparked by Cabinet colleague Jack Straw's assertion that the wearing of full veils - or niqab - made community relations more difficult.
The Prime Minister also backed a local education authority which has suspended a teaching assistant who refused to remove her veil during lessons.
And he said it was "absurd" to suggest that Britain's foreign policy was to blame for the radicalisation of Muslim youth.
Speaking at his regular monthly press conference at 10 Downing Street, Mr Blair said that the veil was a visible symbol of a wider debate about the way the 1.8 million-strong Muslim community integrates into British society.
Questions were being asked, not only in Britain and across Europe, but also within the Muslim community and in the Middle East, about how Islam "comes to terms and is comfortable with" the modern world, he said.
Asked if a woman who wore the veil could make a full contribution to British society, Mr Blair paused before saying: "It is a mark of separation and that's why it makes other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable."
Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell this weekend described the veil as a "symbol of women's subjugation to men" and suggested that women wearing it "cannot take their full place in society".
But Mr Blair stressed that he was not suggesting women should be ordered to remove their veils: "No one wants to say that people don't have the right to do it, that's to take it too far, but I think we do need to confront this issue about how we integrate people properly with our society."
Mr Blair said he could "see the reason" why Kirklees Council chose to suspend 24-year-old Aishah Azmi for refusing to remove her veil in the classroom at Headfield Church of England Junior School in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. While stressing that such decisions were a matter for local authorities, he added: "I do support the authority in the way that they have handled this."
Afghan girls sold off to settle disputes
ALISA TANG
The Associated Press
July 10th, 2007
JALALABAD, Afghanistan – Unable to scrounge together the $165 he needed to repay a loan to buy sheep, Nazir Ahmad made good on his debt by selling his 16-year-old daughter to marry the lender’s son.
“He gave me nine sheep,” Ahmad said, describing his family’s woes since taking the loan. “Because of nine sheep, I gave away my daughter.”
Seated beside him in the cramped compound, his daughter Malia’s eyes filled with tears. She used a black scarf to wipe them away.
Despite advances in women’s rights and at least one tribe’s move to outlaw the practice, girls are traded like currency in Afghanistan and forced marriages are common. Antiquated tribal laws authorize the practice known as “bad” in the Afghan language Dari – and girls are used to settle disputes ranging from debts to murder.
Such exchanges bypass the hefty bride price of a traditional betrothal, which can cost upward of $1,000. Roughly two out of five Afghan marriages are forced, says the country’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs.
“It’s really sad to do this in this day and age, exchange women,” said Manizha Naderi, the director of the aid organization Women for Afghan Women. “They’re treated as commodities.”
Though violence against women remains widespread, Afghanistan has taken significant strides in women’s rights since the hard-line Taliban years, when women were virtual prisoners – banned from work, school or leaving home unaccompanied by a male relative. Millions of girls now attend school and women fill jobs in government and media.
There are also signs of change for the better inside the largest tribe in eastern Afghanistan – the deeply conservative Shinwaris.
Shinwari elders from several districts signed a resolution this year banning several practices that harm girls and women. These included a ban on using girls to settle blood feuds – when a man commits murder, he must hand over his daughter or sister as a bride for a man in the victim’s family. The marriage ostensibly “mixes blood to end the bloodshed.” Otherwise, revenge killings often continue between the families for generations.
Jan Shinwari, a businessman and provincial council member, said a BBC radio report by a female journalist from the Shinwari tribe, Malalai Shinwari, had exposed the trade of girls and shamed the elders into passing the resolution to end the practice.
The Women and Children Legal Research Foundation in Afghanistan investigated about 500 cases of girls given in marriage to settle blood feuds and found only four or five that ended happily. Much more often, the girl suffered for a crime committed by a male relative, said Hangama Anwari, an independent human rights commissioner and founder of the organization.
The story of Malia and the nine sheep illustrates the suffering of girls forced into such marriages.
Malia listened as her father described how he was held hostage by his lender, Khaliq Mohammad, because he could not come up with the money to pay for the sheep, which Ahmad had sold to free a relative seized because of another of Ahmad’s debts.
Ahmad was freed only when he agreed to give Malia’s hand in marriage to the lender’s 18-year-old son. Asked how she felt about it, Malia shook her head and remained silent. Her face then crumpled in anguish and she wiped away tears.
Asked if she was happy, she responded halfheartedly, “Well, my mother and father agreed … ” Her voice trailed off, and she cried again.
Does she want to meet her husband-to-be? She clicked her tongue – a firm, yet delicate “tsk” – with a barely perceptible shake of her head.