SaudiDebate.com & Mona Eltahawy

A very interesting website I’ve come across is SaudiDebate.com. Interesting in particular are the articles of award-winning journalist, commentator and lecturer Mona Eltahawy. You may or may not agree with her, but she certainly provides out with some food for thought in a very well written and accessible style. Read for example the following two articles:

SaudiDebate.com – Qaradawi damages Palestine’s cause by turning global issue into Islamist weapon

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a Muslim issue. It is a dispute over land, it is about an occupation that must end and it is about a people who deserve a state. But it is not a religious dispute. Clerics, rabbis, priests and any one else who claims religious authority for his opinion should stay out of it. As a Muslim, I’m particularly eager to keep our clerics away from Palestine.

For too long the easiest Friday sermon to give began and ended by cursing the “Zionists”, often interchanging Zionist with Jew, stopping along the way to enflame the worshippers with news of the latest humiliations or atrocities committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians.

The conflict has been one of the most jumped upon bandwagons in both the Arab and the Muslim world – but framing it in religious terms serves no one’s interest, least of all the Palestinians. With the Islamist Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian government the temptation is great to lose ourselves in the religious kaleidoscope they would love to wrap around the conflict. But just as Islamists are more about power than religion, so is the conflict less about religion than land.

Which is why it always rankles to hear the Egyptian-born cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi opine about the conflict as he did when asked if he had a message for Arab leaders who held a two-day summit in Saudi Arabia recently to revive an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

SaudiDebate.com – Wife beaters set the tone as backward Imams threaten to overwhelm 21st Century Muslims

To appreciate the absurdity of what it can mean to be a Muslim woman today you need a few fools

Enter stage right: German judge Christa Datz-Winter, whose claim to infamy was her refusal to grant a fast-track divorce to a German Muslim woman who had complained that her husband beat her. The judge said both partners came from a “Moroccan cultural environment in which it is not uncommon for a man to exert a right of corporal punishment over his wife,” and she cited passages in the Qu’ran that she said sanction physical abuse.

How cruelly ironic for the unfortunate wife who tried to make the most of western laws that are always waved in the face of Muslims as the pinnacle of civilized behaviour if only we would learn from them. Here was a Muslim woman who really did need to be saved from an abusive husband – not the ‘Evil Muslim Man’ imagined as lurking in all our closets, but the real thing – a brutal man who beat his wife. Right at the moment when she pushed to take advantage of those laws, the Muslim woman who really did need to be saved was kicked back – by a woman no less – into the arms of the very misogyny that the West is always trying to save us from.

So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
[…]
If God included us in the narrative, who has kept us out? Answer: The YouTube imams and scholars and their ilk around the world who have let the Muslim world down. Their apathy and disinclination to speak out against misogyny in the name of Islam long ago turned many of us off and encouraged us to move beyond them and towards setting our own agenda. The Muslim world is large and diverse. Issues that concern women in Saudi Arabia – where they cannot be admitted to a hospital without a male guardian’s signature – are very different from those in Malaysia, where women recite the Koran on national television.

Things are changing and it is largely thanks to the efforts of Muslim women who are reinterpreting our faith and standing up to the centuries of misogyny. And thanks are due also to the liberal Muslim men who are our allies. A few days before news broke of the fiasco in Germany over Judge Datz-Winter’s misstep, Iranian-American Laleh Bakhtiar was profiled in the New York Times for her translation of the Qu’ran that is being published this month. Her new translation does not include the word “beat” but substitutes for it “to go away”. As I said, I do not care for the semantics performed around that verse because I do not think it is a husband’s right to discipline his wife. But the New York Times article brought to light interesting challenges to our YouTube imams and scholars.