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August 16, 2005

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: UnFree Under Islam

Topics: Understanding Islam

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a member of the Dutch parliament for the Liberal Party. Born in 1967 in Mogadishu (Somalia), she took refuge in the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, and has had armed bodyguards after receiving death threats from Muslim extremists. You may recall that in 2004, together with controversial Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, she made the film Submission(film available at her website) about the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. The title refers to Islam (which means submission to Allah) and was heavily criticized by Dutch Muslims, who found it to be disgraceful and blasphemous. According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the emotions incited by her statements, especially among radical Muslims, underscores the state of the Islam. She believes that radical Muslims are incapable of self-reflection. Consequently, any critical remark is perceived as an offense.

Ali writes in the OpinionJournal today that "Shariah" endangers women's rights, from Iraq to Canada, and goes on from there, with a blistering attack on what is often called Islamic law:

In every society where family affairs are regulated according to instructions derived from the Shariah or Islamic law, women are disadvantaged. The injustices these women are exposed to in the name of Islam vary from extreme cruelty (forced marriages; imprisonment or death after rape) to grossly unfair treatment in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance.

Muslim women across the world are caught in a terrible predicament. They aspire to live by their faith as best they can, but their faith robs them of their rights. Some women have found a way out of this dilemma in the principle of separation of organized religion and state affairs. They fight an uphill battle to achieve and hold on to their basic rights. Two cases demonstrate just how difficult that struggle can be, in the context of new as well as established democracies.

The first is the draft constitution of Iraq, now due next week. Iraqi women like Naghem Khadim, demonstrating on the streets of Najaf, are fighting to prevent an article from being put in the constitution that would establish that the legislature may make no laws that contradict Shariah edicts. The second case is the province of Ontario, in Canada. There, Muslim women led by Homa Arjomand, an activist of Iranian origin, are fighting--using the Canadian Charter of Rights--to keep Shariah from being applied as family law through a so-called Arbitration Act passed as law in Ontario in 1992.

(...) Hamam Hamoudi, the head of Iraq's constitution committee, refuses to discuss the article that worries the Muslim women. He also refused to put in the draft constitution that men and women have equal rights, creating a bizarre situation whereby the women had more rights under Saddam Hussein's regime than in post-Saddam Iraq. Mr. Hamoudi insists that women will have full economic and political rights, but the overwhelming evidence shows that when Shariah--which gives a husband complete control over his wife--is in place, women have little chance to exercise any political rights. Does Mr. Hamoudi realize that it took the removal of Saddam and the establishment of a multiparty democracy for men to vote, while if his draft constitution is ratified, women will need the permission of their husbands to step out of the house in order to mark their ballot? I thought that President Bush and all the allies who supported the Iraq war aspired to bring democracy and liberty to all Iraqis. Aren't Iraqi girls and women human enough to share in that dream?

Continue reading at OpinionJournal ...

Posted by Richard at August 16, 2005 8:14 PM

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• Ayaan Hirsi Ali: UnFree Under Islam - Aug 16, 2005