Salaam writes: Cycads, who is perhaps the only blogger - Malaysian or otherwise - doing feminist analysis of life in that country, has written a piece about why the feminism movement has been stillborn there.
Cycads writes, "Feminism was, and still is, the temporally-frozen, bra-burning, anti-men boogiewoman of the general Malaysian imagination." American political progressives will immediately recognize this as the legendary DFH (Dirty F***ing Hippy) stereotype that US rightwingers are always throwing around to freeze out progressive/leftist alternative ideas.
Anyway, herewith follows an excerpt of Cycad's attempt to address and respond to the criticisms and fears of feminism:
Conversations with Malaysian anti-feminists are almost always destined to doom. But I think it's only fair that we understand their grievances by teasing out their usual beef with gender equality.
Feminism is a Western, secular ideology. (This includes claims of feminism as elitist)
This is a good enough reason to forget about feminism altogether for many. Truth is, third-world, indigenous concepts of feminisms are growing in numbers around the world and are constantly in negotiations between non-racist, non-patronising feminist frameworks and local cultures in many societies.
Feminism has failed in its objective and fragmented into in-fighting groups. Many developed nations that are pro-women in law and socially have struggled to establish equal pay between the sexes and to achieve a greater female presence in the top ranks of politics. These issues are still being addressed and debated in the public sphere, and are not the failings of feminism. Feminism is a political movement, and is bound to break into different sub-ideologies based on values that are not represented by constituted powers-that-be. These values, of course, sometimes do not see eye to eye, like socialist feminism vs lipstick feminism for example.
The Superwoman is a myth. The woman who has it all: a family and a great career, is often blamed for family breakdown, neglected children, high rates of singlehood, and late motherhood, among other things. We still live in a culture that often turns a blind eye to neglectful fathers and castigates women for delaying marriage and motherhood in favour of high-flying careers. Men are congratulated for being a father at 80 - just don't expect the same for women. Yes, I know that women are normally not fertile at 80, but the risk of miscarriage and fathering a child with congenital defects such as autism and schizophrenia increases for men beyond the of 35. So everyone has a biological clock. Bummer for you and me.
Feminism supports the right to abortion. That means ending the life of an innocent human being for anti-choicers. Now, feminism sees that women should be given the right to her every aspect of her body, and that includes terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion is never an easy decision to make. It is traumatic, painful, and risky.
Feminism is to blame for all that gender role confusion and so-called social construct stuff. (This includes supporting the sexuality rights of LGBQT groups).
Girls are not hardwired to play with make-up and the mini washing machine, and boys are not born to shoot and kill. Children brought up with gender specific toys grow up internalising their respective roles. As a result, men don't expect to do the washing, sewing, or cooking, and women are not expected to work with power tools.
Feminism justifies morally-questionable acts of empowerment. Can pole dancing, shopping sprees, and binging on alcohol be empowering? This is something that might have little to do with what feminism stands for, that is against oppression and exploitation. If women choose to sexually exploit themselves and submit to oppressive standards of beauty for the enjoyment of men, let them.
Feminism encourages women to compete rather than working with men and then take over the world. Not like that is a bad thing, of course, but this is born out of an ancient male insecurity of female sexuality and its power to give birth, hence the need to contain it.
More passive and insidious forms of violence work in tandem (with the more high profile) - like sex selective abortions, sustained nutritional deprivation and delayed health care for female infants, or the unequal allocation of household resources detrimental to the health of the girl child.
Salaam writes: Earlier this year CAIR trumpeted its accomplishment of having had the FBI remove the label "honor killing" from the wanted poster for Yaser Abdel Said, who murdered his daughters Sarah and Amina last year on New Year's Day. CAIR's reasons for even paying attention to the case were reported as follows:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was involved in negotiations with the FBI to remove the term that it said was offensive to the United States' 7 million-strong Muslim community. Many Muslims had said the term 'honor killing' assigned a religious motive to a crime and instigated hate crimes against Muslims.
The term is not offensive to Muslims because honor killings are not sanctioned by Islam, and therefore not Islamic. Honor killings and honor-related violence however are a real problem. CAIR did a disservice to the larger community, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, by browbeating the term honor killing out of the lexicon of the FBI and therefore out of sight from where policies to address the specific issues that come in to play when a women is threatened with honor-related violence. Instead of letting the FBI do its job and protect women's lives, it let a public relations mission on behalf of Islam take precedent, which shows poor commitment to Islamic values, and is in itself a black mark on the reputation of Islam.
I was reminded of this when I read the article linked below, which identifies the most recent victims of honor killing in India (at least as reported in the media) to be two Hindu girls beaten nearly to death and then set on fire by their Hindu village.
One item of note: I had to dig around to identify the two girls as Hindu, whereas I've noticed that in cases of honor killing in the Muslim community media stories seem to always make prominent mention of Islam. Just because the media wants to fake up a false meme that Islam sanctions honor-related violence doesn't mean Muslims should buy into it too.
Deepali Gaur Singh writes: Five women were buried alive in the tribal region of Balochistan in Pakistan and only a national outcry led to the arrest of the persons involved -- months after the incident had actually happened. The killings had even been defended as "tribal tradition" by some senior members of the Senate, the Parliament's Upper House.
What "crimes" had these women committed? Three of the women were teenagers who wanted to marry men of their choice. The other two - the mother and an aunt of one of the girls - supported their decision. The women were abducted by men from their tribe, shot and thrown into a ditch while still alive; the older women were buried along with them for protesting, according to a report by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).
Across the eastern border in India, a region that was still some days celebrating the Olympic glory of its homegrown pugilist -- Vijender Kumar's bronze medal -- was recently shrouded by the hushed whispers of another honor killing. Two girls were killed on their return from a late evening outing, escorted by unidentified men. The entire village is believed to have watched as both were assaulted with sticks and axes, hauled to the cremation ground half-dead and set on fire by their family for the sake of "honor" -- quite ironically on Diwali, a day celebrated as the festival of lights in many parts of the country.
But what was even more shocking was the evidence of the system's casual acceptance of this family's act. Not even a "First Information Report" was registered until a fortnight later.
Numbers of women killed frequently go unreported, the perpetrators unpunished as the concept of family honor tacitly justifies the act in the eyes of the immediate community. And while such incidents elicit attention due to the intrigue and horror attached to them as some primordial custom practiced by certain sequestered communities, the fact is that this form of violence is just a part of a much larger problem of violence against women and an issue that transcends cultures and religions. Complicity by other women in the family and the community only helps strengthen the notion of women as property and the perception that violence against family members is a family matter and outside of the judicial and public domain. But at the center of the problem of violence against women is the imbalance of gender relations that assume men to be superior to women. And against the background of this subordinate status of women, much of gender violence is considered normal and enjoys social sanction.
When women are considered vessels of family, clan and tribal or community honor, they will almost always be the direct victims of crimes against a community or violence between groups. And one does not have to look too far for evidence of these manifestations of violence in the public sphere, tacitly supported by state and society either by directly perpetrating it or rarely taking proactive measures to curb it and punish the guilty.
....
In the hierarchical structure of gender violence, women from the lower castes of Indian society are even more vulnerable. By virtue of their position in the social structure they are the ones that find themselves the most vulnerable to exploitation of all kinds, while assaults are carried out with impunity with the knowledge that avenues for redress are even fewer and farther in between. Documented evidence and narratives by several human rights groups indicate that sexual abuse and other forms of violence against these women are used as tools for teaching political "lessons" for what is perceived as rebellion or attempts at dislodging the old, existent social order. Threatened by sexual exploitation of various kinds, these women have also been arrested and raped in custody as a means of punishing their male relatives both by the law enforcers themselves or powerful men within their communities.
Many women learn to accept violence very early in life. The family itself socializes them to accept predetermined social relations expressed in unequal division of labor between the sexes and control over the allocation of resources. And it is within the so-called secure walls of the home that women, very often, are most exposed to violence as they grow up watching the violence perpetrated against the other women in the household by the male members of the family. These violent actions are often closely linked to the concept of a woman as property and dependent on a male protector be it father, husband or son.
Despite the recognition of gender-based violence as a human rights violation, which also includes "violence perpetrated or condoned by the state," a large percentage of women continue to be unprotected against it -- whether it be in the context of the family, the community or the state. What is even more tragic is that at every point key social institutions not only fail to be critical of the violence but, in fact, play their role in legitimizing and maintaining the violence. And even as women find their own voice within these spaces, sometimes accepting the violence or negotiating space within it, adding another dimension to their condition are the more passive and insidious forms of violence that work in tandem -- like sex selective abortions, sustained nutritional deprivation and delayed health care for female infants, or the unequal allocation of household resources detrimental to the health of the girl child.
Taliban leaders in Pakistan's troubled northwest Swat valley have banned girls from attending school, threatening to kill any female student, officials said Thursday.
The threat was delivered this week by local Taliban commander Shah Durran in an address carried on an illegally-run radio station in the area, local officials told AFP.
"You have until Jan. 15 to stop sending your girls to schools. If you do not pay any heed to this warning, we will kill such girls," one official quoted the commander as saying.
"We also warn schools not to enroll any female students; otherwise, their buildings will be blown up."
MP Nabillah Sempala: 'Islam has five pillars and marrying many wives is not one of them.'
Kampala
Kampala Woman MP Nabillah Sempala, has cautioned Muslim women against opposing laws that are meant to protect their rights.
Ms Sempala, a Muslim, said opposing laws such as the Domestic Relations Bill (DRB) would lead to the continuation of the subjection of women to violence and inequalities in accessing, controlling, owning and inheriting land and other resources.
Ms Sempala said it is better to ask if one does not understand the components of the law other than opposing it out of ignorance.
"If you don't understand something, please ask. Ignorance sometimes forces people to fight against things that are meant to improve their welfare," Ms Sempala said.
"Islam has five pillars and marrying many wives is not one of them," she added. Ms Sempala was addressing participants at a conference for the Forum for Democratic Change Women's League in Kampala on December 18.
The conference sponsored by Action Aid International, Uganda, was co-hosted by the Uganda Women's Network, an NGO that brings together national women's organistations.
Ms Sempala's comment were triggered off by the statement made by one of Muslim women at the conference that Muslim women cannot stop their husbands from marrying more than one wife and that she had participated in a demonstration that was opposing provisions in the DRB that discourages polygamy yet the Quran allows it.
In 2005, more than 1,000 Muslim women and men stormed Kampala streets to demonstrate against some aspects of the DRB which they said were contravening the Islamic law.
Polygamy is one of the contentious issues in the bill.
It states that a husband should seek permission from his first wife before taking a second. Both men and women flashed four fingers in support of the Islamic law which allows a man to have up to four wives.
'The collective activities of the human rights activists in Iran have angered the Iranian authorities so much that they have illegally ordered the closing down of two NGOs.'
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi was briefly taken into custody Sunday as Iranian authorities raided and indefinitely shut down two of her offices in Tehran, she told CNN.
The Iranian authorities never gave her an explanation for the crackdown, and she was later released, she said, adding that there were no arrests in the raid, but the offices remain closed.
Speaking from her home, Ebadi said the closed offices belong to two non-governmental organizations funded by her Nobel Peace Prize earnings: the Center for Participation in Clearing Mine Areas, which helps victims of landmines in Iran; and Defenders of Human Rights Center, founded five years ago to report human rights violations in Iran, defend political prisoners, and support families of those prisoners.
Ebadi said Iranian authorities had no written justification for Sunday's raid, which she described as illegal.
"The collective activities of the human rights activists in Iran have angered the Iranian authorities so much that they have illegally ordered the closing down of two NGOs," she said.
Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her human rights work, making her the first Iranian to receive the honor. She is one of the most prominent Muslim women in the world and serves as the president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center.
In August 2006, Ebadi said the Iranian government informed her that the agency is "illegal" and vowed to arrest those who continued to work there.
"Of course, me and the other members of the center do not intend to shut down the center and we shall continue our activities," she said at the time.
She said the center -- which has operated for over five years in Tehran -- "is a member of the International Federation for Human Rights" and "has also been awarded a human rights prize by the Human Rights National Commission in France."
"This center is very well known and credible in Iran," she said in 2006.
The Nobel committee has described Ebadi as a champion of human rights who "sees no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights.
By doing what many of us achieve by simply turning on a stove, refugee women and girls regularly fall victim to rape, assault, theft, exploitation, and even murder.
Liv Ullmann writes at the Boston Globe: AS THE global financial and economic crisis continues to throw countless numbers of people out of work, millions of refugee women and girls in developing countries continue to toil at a task that is not only arduous but extremely dangerous: collecting firewood to cook meals for their families.
For thousands of these impoverished women and girls, gathering firewood is more than a vital chore - it is often a matter of life and death. By doing what many of us achieve by simply turning on a stove, refugee women and girls regularly fall victim to rape, assault, theft, exploitation, and even murder.
Although it is impossible to obtain hard figures on the overall number of sexual attacks, fact-finding missions to refugee camps in such places as Darfur and Nepal have documented their frequency and brutality. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a particularly egregious episode occurred in Kenya in 1993, when at least 101 women were raped outside of one camp in a single night, 87 of them as they gathered firewood.
....
The many dangers of firewood gathering have been recognized for years by the United Nations and nongovernmental, international, and humanitarian organizations. Yet little has been done to promote effective protection strategies. Development aid to help these and other vulnerable people - already at historic lows - could begin falling precipitously as the world's economic woes deepen.
It is time to get beyond firewood. The Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children - an organization that I helped found nearly 20 years ago - has begun a worldwide drive to explore alternative fuels and cutting-edge energy technologies, such as clean-burning fuels, fuel-efficient stoves, and solar cookers. Working with UNHCR and the World Food Program, its goal is to reduce the violence by promoting the development of safe alternatives to firewood.
This week, just two weeks after the horrific attacks in Mumbai, the Women's Commission is hosting an international conference in New Delhi, India, that has brought together developers, users, and financial backers of new cooking technologies that can be provided to the people that need them the most.
All of this is in line with the ongoing work of the Women's Commission: to rally the world to action while giving voice to the millions of women, children, and adolescents in almost every region who have been uprooted from their homes by armed conflict and sexual violence. It is this kind of little-known crisis that first drew me to humanitarian work.
There will be no quick solutions to the perils of collecting firewood. Humanitarian aid helps, but is usually limited - and there are many competing priorities for funds already allocated. Moreover, cultural traditions are difficult to change, especially in countries where the status of women is low and gathering firewood is considered "women's work." Most men refuse to collect it, even if doing so would protect their wives, mothers, or daughters from potential assault. They say they will be killed if they venture too far afield, so the task is left to women, who will "only" be raped.
Menstrual suppression -- the use of oral contraceptives, Depo-Provera or other hormonal methods either to prevent menstruation from occurring with its normal frequency or to stop it altogether -- is all the rage these days.
Salaam writes: This is an excerpt of a larger article where I find that the author's writing style to be frankly weird. She tries to equate attitudes toward menstruation with mean things people say about other people, and then personifies menstruation as a persecuted person. The net effect is just weird and off-putting.
I'm posting this here anyway though because I think the topic and question is important. I of course have no idea how prevalent menstrual suppression is among Muslimahs, but it's clearly a high-risk behavior.
Heather Corinna writes:
Quotes about menstration When I first got it, I went to my mom, handed her my bloody underwear and said "I think I have my period." She said "Yep, you do. Congratulations!" I thought, why are you congratulating me? This is a bad thing! My friend had just gotten it about a week before I did, and was telling me how much she hated it and that I would probably hate it too.
When I need to buy pads I have to write code word "rabbit chow" on the board because I'm so embarrassed and ashamed.
I hate it because when I get it, it is horrible. There's something wrong with my body -- I have to go to the gyn and get birth control to fix it.
I was having sex this weekend, and my partner asked what something was...it ended up being blood. It really grossed me out, and he thought he had done it, but this wasn't my first time. I didn't tell him it was my period. I told him I didn't want to [have sex] anymore until this situation cleared up.
In my high school gym class during our swimming time, I had my period, so decided to use a tampon. 20 minutes later, blood everywhere! The lifeguard pulled me out in front of everyone! 3 classes in all, my friends and everyone were watching me...I just wanted to die! The male lifeguard gave me a real hard time about using a tampon in the future (though I had used one...) and told me to stop swimming since I was gross.
It grosses me out because I just hate going to the bathroom to change pads and seeing these gobs and puddles of blood. I think it's horrible. I don't feel comfortable even at my own home changing pads, so I can't imagine staying over at a friends house, or at a partners house while having my period.
It's inconvenient and time consuming and I feel very dirty. I don't like having secrets and this is one huge one that I cant ever tell anyone. When I do have it, I'm in the bathroom, I wipe and wipe and wipe until it's as close to spotless that I can get it.
I don't usually masturbate when I'm on it. And even when I do, it feels really scandalous.
Every month when I would get it, I would cry and beg my mom to put me on the pill or to get me a hysterectomy.
Not limited to the mouths of babes, negative attitudes about periods are writ on the proverbial bathroom wall: "Lifting the Curse," (Chicago Sun-Times), "Off the Rag" (salon.com), "Move Over Mother Nature," (ABC's 20/20), "No Flow" (The Stranger), "A Pill to Uncramp Women's Style" (Washington Post), "Continuous Contraception May Banish Periods" (NPR, Morning Edition), are all titles of recent pieces championing menstrual suppression. Take Control of Your Period is the title of one of the most popular books on the subject, clearly implying that, by god, if you don't take control of her, then she's going to take control of you.
Menstrual suppression -- the use of oral contraceptives, Depo-Provera or other hormonal methods either to prevent menstruation from occurring with its normal frequency or to stop it altogether -- is all the rage these days. It's being given the hard sell, too. Having figured out that the concept of "choice" plays well with women generally, and knowing how desperate we are to have actual choices where our reproductive and bodily lives are concerned, menstrual suppression is increasingly being sold as a matter of being empowered. At long, desperate last there's a way for us to choose to send our terrible sister packing for good, to put her in the corner and make her write "I will not bleed all over your whitewashed world" 300 times while we snicker behind her back. If plugging her up with bleached, rose-scented wads of cotton is sending her to her room without supper, and trying to wash every unsightly trace of her away with vaginally-disruptive and unhealthy douching is a stint in juvenile hall, then seeking to suppress her completely is sending her to prison without the possibility of parole.
By all means, menstrual suppression gives women a choice, and for some women with certain health conditions, inexplicably painful periods, or who are spending extended times in areas without the means to tend to a period, suppression is a godsend, even though not all women's bodies react ideally to such hormonal interventions and many will instead end up trading a monthly flow for irregular spotting at any time.
But there is real reason to also question this, particularly given the marketing of suppression. Do pervasive cultural attitudes about menstruation, and about the female body as being a great annoyance and a burden -- attitudes so ingrained and accepted that even some doctors perpetuate them -- allow women a real choice as to whether or not, and why, they WANT to suppress menstruation?
....
In a study by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals about patient and doctor attitudes regarding menstrual suppression, 71% women disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that they enjoyed their periods in some way; 48% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that the only good thing about menstruating is to let them know they are not pregnant; and 75% thought that men have a real advantage in not having the monthly interruption of a menstrual period. 45% did not disagree that they hide when they are menstruating. 55% did not disagree that they avoid touching themselves when menstruating. 37% agreed/strongly agreed that they think menstrual blood is disgusting. And when it comes to menstrual suppression, 53% of women who knew about it had been told about it by a health care provider (some of whom hold and state outright these attitudes themselves). Another recent study has also noted the profound bias in the way menstrual suppression and menstruation are often being presented, as well as how much more frequently those who are proponents are quoted compared to those who are questioners or critics of suppression.
You know menstruation is in the big trouble she clearly deserves when we hear even female doctors recommending this for nothing more than convenience. These women have often worked harder than their male counterparts, fought for equality and credibility in their field, and usually know from gender bias. They are women whom other women often count on to help keep us safe from misogynist bias in the medical system. It seems that some, though, are either so unaware of their own internalized misogyny or so convinced of its essential validity that when cited as experts in newspaper and magazine articles on menstrual suppression, they do not talk, as healthcare pros should, about health concerns, biochemistry, or the results of double-blind studies. Rather we hear doctors telling us about the wonder that is avoiding pesky stains in our expensive, pretty panties.
One of the common arguments such doctors make in favor of suppression is that women of yesteryear had fewer menstrual periods because they had more children and less time between pregnancies. The doctors then apply an incredibly strange logic to reach the conclusion that thus, we would be healthier if we menstruated less, completely ignoring the facts that the women of yesteryear weren't actually known to be any healthier than we are, and lack of menses due to pregnancy and lactation are an entirely different biological phenomenon than lack of menstruation due to synthetic hormones.
When I think of period bleeding I mostly think of the smell and mess. Invariably my underwear and bedding would end up stained after years of use. It seems shameful to admit that even with a tampon and a pad there would still be bloody accidents.
Tampons are hard to insert, go in crooked, and it hurts to pull them out (almost like my uterus is acting like a suction cup). My vagina gets abnormally dry, and the tampon doesn't stay up all the way; creeps down in a short amount of time.
(From adult women at no period.com)
When you've got a medical professional such as Dr. Leslie Miller, who runs the noperiod.com website (and seems to have a disturbing conflict of interest: her research was paid for by Wyeth, a pharmaceutical company who makes big bucks from Lybrel, a pill developed for menstrual suppression), posting testimonials like these as reasons to suppress menstruation coming from a place of medical authority, we've got to start asking questions about why a doctor would advise any of us to engage in a known gamble with our long-term health rather than just suggesting we first try something as simple, inexpensive, and utterly without risk, as putting a towel or two under one's self when in bed to avoid damage to linens and mattresses, or using a menstrual pad or cup instead of a tampon as tampons create vaginal dryness during a period.
Miller states that "Taking the pill every day should be no different than taking them for only 3 weeks with one week off" - although this rather fails to address the history of known links between contraceptive pill use and problems like cardiovascular disease and stroke. Extra hormones each month may well mean extra risks, particularly for younger women. Dr. Miller and other ardent supporters of suppression rarely, if ever, even bother to address such risks and side effects. But as other doctors, like Dr. Winnifred Cutler of The Athena Institute, Dr. Susan Rako, and Jerilynn C. Prior and Christine L. Hitchcock of The Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research have mentioned, there are numerous potential problems from continuous contraceptive pill use: the dampening of female sexual response, reduced production of oxytocin and testosterone (both vital for the sexual response cycle), increased risks of breast and cervical cancers, and troubles with iron imbalances and anemia. Many of these are known side effects of contraceptive pills used normally, let alone continuously, as with menstrual suppression. Dr. Rako, the author of "No More Periods? The Risks of Menstrual Suppression and Other Cutting-Edge Issues About Hormones and Women's Health," calls menstrual suppression "the largest uncontrolled experiment in medical history." It should be no surprise that women are the guinea pigs for such an experiment: historically, we often have been. When a gynecologist enthusiastically endorses menstrual suppression without any reservation, or without suggesting other options first or additional options at all, it doesn't take a genius to guess that a bias may be coloring her judgment.
Dec 14th, 2008 | BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Every year, Salha Solh spends half her small income of $3,600 just to keep her three sons and three daughters from being deported from their homeland.
Solh is Lebanese but her husband is Pakistani, and under Lebanese law she cannot pass her citizenship on to her children. They are Pakistanis in the law's eyes and need expensive annual residency visas, even though they were born and raised here and have never been to their father's country.
A few months ago, Solh's eldest son was picked up by police for not renewing his residence permit on time and imprisoned for three months until he got a new one.
Nearly every Arab country has similar laws, rooted in Islamic precepts that emphasize paternity as the source of identity. Women's groups have succeeded in changing such laws in Egypt, Morocco and Algeria and are leading campaigns elsewhere, usually against religious conservatives.
In Lebanon, reformers are finally gaining attention for the issue -- through a series of small public protests like one that Solh recently attended, of 100 people, on Beirut Martyrs' Square.
"It is my children's right to have Lebanese citizenship," said Solh, who works as a cook and whose husband is unemployed after falling sick recently.
But in Lebanon, the opposition is not only religious but also sectarian and nationalist. Many Lebanese fear that allowing women to pass their citizenship to their children will upset the country's delicate sectarian balance, or open a backdoor for the large Palestinian refugee population to gain citizenship.
"Definitely there is sexism" in such worries, said Information Minister Tarek Mitri, who supports changing the law. "I fear that this might take a bit of time (to change)."
He pointed out that many more Lebanese men are married to Palestinians or other foreigners than the reverse, and no one sees their children as anything but Lebanese.
But in the eyes of many -- not just the law -- a Lebanese woman with children by a foreign father is seen as bringing foreigners into the country.
Lebanon's population of 4 million is divided between 18 sects, including Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Christians and Druse, and every community is highly sensitive to anything that tips the demographics.
Moreover, Lebanese of all stripes are deeply suspicious of the 400,000 Palestinian refugees who live on the country's soil. The Palestinians, who live in a number of impoverished camps, have not sought mass citizenship, fearing that it would mean permanent settlement in Lebanon.
Nevertheless, many Lebanese remain wary of giving them any foothold.
"The Lebanese constitution prevents all forms of settling Palestinians in Lebanon," said Christian lawmaker Naamatallah Abi-Nasr, who opposes changing the current law.
He said he would only support a change if Lebanese are given the same treatment by other Arab countries -- a condition not likely to be met. "If a Saudi woman gets married to a Lebanese, he should be given Saudi citizenship," Abi-Nasr said.
Reformers face a similar situation in Jordan, home to nearly 2 million Palestinian refugees. Queen Rania has pressed for new laws to allow women to pass on their nationality, but lawmakers have resisted, fearing the move could open the way for Palestinian refugees to gain citizenship.
In Lebanon, activists and women married to foreigners have in recent months held conferences and sit-ins, including protests outside the prime minister's office and near parliament in October.
A draft bill to allow women to pass on their citizenship has been submitted to parliament, though it is not known when lawmakers will take it up.
"Lebanon is the least-advanced country in the region when it comes to this matter," says Lina Abou-Habib, executive director of the Collective for Research and Training on Development Action, a campaign leader.
It is not known how many Lebanese women are married to foreigners, but they are believed to number in the thousands. Many live abroad and are not registered.
Women are the bearers of family honor and any perceived erosion of that honor can be considered dangerous and punishable by families.
KABUL, Afghanistan (WOMENSENEWS)--Each year the festival of Eid that ends the month-long Ramadan holiday season is commemorated in Afghanistan with presidential pardons for prisoners.
It's a show of cultural benevolence since Ramadan is traditionally celebrated with families coming together.
But as Eid approaches on Oct. 13, women's groups and international organizations are warning that many women, if released, will become homeless, ostracized and vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Others may wind up back in custody for being "unaccompanied" women.
Some may become victims to relatives who carry out punishments as severe as execution.
"Women die after leaving prison," said Dr. Anou Borrey, a gender justice consultant for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in Afghanistan.
"Afghan women in jail are lucky, at least they are alive," said Carla Ciavarella, the justice program coordinator of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan, who has worked with Afghanistan's penitentiary system for four years. "We do not know how many women are killed or abused at home every day."
The warnings follow an early September report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime that found at least half the women in Afghanistan's largest jail are there for so-called moral crimes such as adultery, "running away," being in the company of a man who is not a relative or even giving shelter to a runaway woman.
The agency's Afghanistan representative, Christina Orguz, said many of the women would be considered victims, not perpetrators, in most other countries.
Findings echoed The findings echo a January 2007 assessment of the status of women in Afghanistan by Medica Mondiale, an advocacy group for traumatized women and girls in war and crisis zones that has worked extensively with female prisoners in Afghanistan.
"The judiciary overwhelmingly tends to hold women responsible for crimes even when they themselves are the victims and cases are judged employing tribal laws of traditions instead of codified law," the Cologne, Germany-based group found. "In particular accusations of 'zina,' or sexual intercourse outside of marriage--irrespective of the truth--are often prosecuted and the woman sentenced to prison even when she was the victim of rape."
For the U.N. report, investigators interviewed 56 of the 69 women imprisoned in Pul-e-Charkhi, the country's largest prison located on the outskirts of Kabul.
One of the female prisoners at Pul-e-Charkhi told interviewers that her husband killed a man in a land dispute and later claimed it was her adultery that led to the killing. Since she had no witnesses to prove she had not committed adultery she was imprisoned. The woman, who is illiterate and poor, is serving a six-year sentence along with her child. Her initial sentence of one year was increased she says, after her request for a divorce, a plea she feels may have prejudiced the judge against her.
Among the 11,200 people imprisoned in Afghanistan there are 300 women, a number that has roughly doubled from 2004 to 2006.
Some of the women's "crimes" are not listed in Afghanistan's formal modern criminal code, which is based on Sharia, or Islamic religious law.
Women as property The formal justice system based on Sharia as well as the traditional or customary councils of elders--which are often harsher--view women as the property of their husbands' extended family, a view that warps the interpretation of the criminal code.
As property, for instance, women do not have the right to run away because they do not have the right to leave the house without permission of a husband or male relative, a custom that prevents depriving men of their possessions.
Women are also the bearers of family honor and any perceived erosion of that honor can be considered dangerous and punishable by families.
A UNIFEM study from May 2006 estimates that 82 percent of the violence against women in Afghanistan is committed by family members.
Domestic violence is more common in forced marriages, including those involving brides younger than 16. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission's last assessment estimated that the majority of marriages in Afghanistan--between 60 percent and 80 percent--are forced and many include a child of either sex.
Afghanistan's laws allow a girl to be married at the age of 15 with paternal consent, but in practice many fathers are considered entitled to grant consent to children of any age.
Marriages and divorces are often not documented in Afghanistan. This means a woman who marries after a divorce risks being accused of adultery if her former husband claims he never divorced her. Social customs and tradition here make it much more difficult for a woman to initiate divorce proceedings and the lack of formal documentation of births, marriages and divorces makes it difficult to provide proof. In a dispute where it is a man's word against a woman's, the man is usually believed. Some ex-husbands exploit the lack of proof of divorces to gain monetary compensation from a second husband for taking his "property."
Women are given away in exchange for debts, to settle scores, to redress complaints.
Pakistani Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar lost her job last year over this photo. Clerics became outraged as the man she is hugging is her male parachute instructor, not her husband.
Salaam writes: It's about time!
Iran has launched the "world's first unisex Muslim skydiving center," Iran's semi-official Fars news agency reported here Wednesday.
Iran's Aviation and Pilot Training Company, Paravaran Asseman, has recently opened the "world's first unisex Muslim sky diving center" in Tehran "with female instructors," Fars said.
The center, named "Shahab Skydiving Center," plans to operate all through winter and is preparing for an expansion of its operations in spring 2009.
According to the report, Muslim women have had no chance of skydiving with male instructors, "due to the fact that their bodies would be intimately positioned whilst harnessed together."
Therefore, "as a totally new way of allowing Muslim women to participate, Shahab Skydiving Center has specifically employed female sky diving instructors which have uniquely allowed Muslim women to experience the thrill and exhilaration of sky diving for the first time," it said.
In a bitter experience, Pakistani Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar resigned in May last year after the "hardline Islamic clerics accused her of obscenity for hugging her sky diving instructor after a charity parachute jump," according to the report.
Bakhtiar was photographed in the jumpsuit while "hugging her instructor after a tandem jump to raise money for child victims of the earthquake that struck Pakistan in October 2005."
Former husband: 'I had an arranged marriage. My wife just wanted to get rid of the title 'unmarried.' Once we got married, our life turned into hell and our marriage came to an end. My wife acquired a new title then and the victim was a little child.'
"Old Maids for Change" is a Facebook group attracting wide media attention for bringing into the limelight the stigma of being an unmarried woman in a patriarchal society.
The group was created by Yomna Mokhtar, a 27-year-old journalist who was inspired by the suffering of her unwed friends and colleagues.
"The girls I know suffer all the time from social pressures," said Mokhtar. "No matter how successful they are at work and how well educated they are, they are not appreciated. They are always perceived as incomplete beings simply because they are not married. I found this unfair."
The group identifies itself as "a social movement that seeks to reverse the negative attitude towards every unmarried girl who eventually found herself forced to either to get married to any man so she could get rid of the title 'old maid,' or hold onto her position, insisting to wait until she finds the right guy.... We are not calling on girls to boycott marriage but we refuse the idea that girls get married under pressures from their families or the society or just to get rid of the title 'old maid,' " read the group's mission statement.
The term "old maid" is particularly troubling to Mokhtar: "It sometimes implies mockery; people mock girls who fail to attract a man. On other occasions, it can imply compassion as some people pity unmarried girls. However, other people perceive the old maid as a person who envies all married couples."
"Girls should have the full right to decide not to get married, the society has no right to blame them for that," added Mokhtar, whose Facebook group has grown to 550 members since May.
"I really hope we can change unfair and obsolete beliefs in our society," Radwa Haroun wrote on the group's Web page. "How long will we keep treating girls just as bodies without brains that have no right to decide on their fates?"
Yet, one should not assume that the group's appeal is limited to women. Men have also taken a peek at Old Maids for Change: "This group is a great idea and I hope we can convince girls not to get married just for the sake of marriage," wrote Ahmed Anwar Kamel on the group's Web page. "I have been through that. I had an arranged marriage. My wife just wanted to get rid of the title 'unmarried.' Once we got married, our life turned into hell and our marriage came to an end. My wife acquired a new title then and the victim was a little child."
The streets of Tripoli remain a male preserve where women are often subjected to verbal abuse and harassment.
Clothing in a Tripoli store last year. Said the photographer Sebastià Giralt: "I was shocked by the gay colors (and the daring) of the women's clothing sold everywhere, a great contrast with the dark cloths that almost all women wear in the street...so that is like "underwear" clothing, just visible in private life."
More Libyan women are venturing from home in search of work but they complain of antiquated male attitudes that decades of gender equality reforms have failed to dislodge.
Muammar Qhaddafi's 1969 Islamic Socialist revolution began a gradual improvement in the legal rights of women, who once could not walk the streets without a headscarf and the presence of a male relative.
Female illiteracy has fallen over the years and today's women can seek careers where their mothers could only hope to be housewives. Polygamy is restricted and child marriage banned.
But the streets of Tripoli remain a male preserve where women are often subjected to verbal abuse and harassment.
Single women in western dress say they are taken for prostitutes and avoid taxis after dark for fear of being molested.
Yolanda Zaptia, a foreigner married to a Libyan, said Libyan men must get used to seeing more women in public and behave better or risk damaging the country's development.
"The authorities need to confirm that this male behavior is unacceptable," she wrote in the Tripoli Post newspaper. "If Libya wants to increase the number of women making an active contribution to the economy they must be better protected."
A Muslim woman on Thursday became the first ever female allowed to conduct marriages in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and throughout the conservative Gulf, the official WAM news agency reported.
It said Fatima Saeed Obeid al-Awani, 33, a married mother of two boys, was named to the post in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi by the justice ministry.
Awani's appointment as "maazoun" -- a job traditionally held by men -- is aimed at "bolstering the role of women in society... in line with Emirati laws and without violating sharia" Muslim law, the agency said.
Awani holds a degree in theology from the faculty of law of the University of the Emirates.
She now becomes the first woman to be allowed to write up marriage contracts throughout the conservative Gulf, but she is not the first woman "maazoun" in an Arab state -- Egypt has already broken ground in that area.
Awani has now joined a growing list of audacious female registrars in Muslim countries.
Salaam writes: The Mary Rogan article that is the object of the complaints is here. Yes, the protesters are correct in asserting that Islam does not sanction murder and violence. But the protesters favor an abstract feminist intellectual construct of domestic violence (systematic power and control by men), thereby obscuring and ignoring the fact that these killings are ignited at the cultural nexus of religion and male control of women's bodies, ie, religious men's fanatical concern with female modesty, imparted to them from the strident conservative modality of Islam.
In fact, I see the non-Muslim feminists position here as particularly unsavory: They come with an agenda, essentially using the case as a platform to promote their generic complaint about gender-based violence in the larger society, thereby leaving the motivations of Parvez's killers unaddressed, thereby pulling the blanket over social dynamics in the Muslim community that will lead to other honor killings. Their attitude toward the specific problem of honor killings is glib, unserious - a position in which they are quickly supported by Muslim apologists who may be more concerned with the reputation of the religion than with the death of the teenager, or preventing the death of other teenagers like Parvez.
I also disagree with the assertion that one person quoted here makes which says the article equates Islam with domestic violence.
A coalition of Muslim, immigrant and feminist groups gathered in Toronto Tuesday to express their unhappiness over a magazine article about the killing of Aqsa Parvez.
The story by Mary Rogan in Toronto Life's December issue gives an account of Parvez's final months, suggesting that she was killed because she wasn't adhering strictly enough to her family's view of how a Muslim woman should dress.
Her father and brother have been charged in connection with the death of the 16-year-old.
The group protesting the article particularly objects to the headline on the article, which describes Parvez's death as Toronto's first "honour killing."
The Toronto Life article "serves to fuel myths and stereotypes that harm Muslim women and their communities and that distract from the real issues of gender-based violence against women," said Cindy McCowan, executive director of Interim Place, one of the organizations protesting the story.
"Violence against women is about the systematic power and control by men, and the assertion that Miss Parvez's murder was because she was Muslim or due to Islam is based in both racism and Islamophobia. Violence against women is not a value in any culture or faith community," she said.
Summaya Kassamali said the way the article is written equates Islam with domestic violence.
"It sort of implies that anyone who grows up Muslim - and they are taught there are certain things God wants, or there are certain requirements - is automatically subject to violence," she told CBC News. Story here.
