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docpiplup · 6 months

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9th part of the bookscans of Al Andalus. Historical Figures, here's the previous part

Eulogio and Álvaro de Córdoba: pursuing martyrdom

Under the reign of Abd al-Rahman II the Mozarabs of Córdoba, that is, the Christians who lived in Muslim lands, specifically those who lived in the emiral city, enjoyed prosperity and the tolerance typical of this emir. Anywhere in al-Andalus, from Córdoba to Mérida, from Seville to Zaragoza, the Christian churches were open for worship. The clergy could exercise his ministry, quietly, as long as he did not proselytize among the Muslims. There were convents of monks and nuns who lived without being bothered The Christian religion in Moorish lands had certain limitations such as the external manifestations, carrying out processions or ringing the bells. The Christian and Muslim communities lived together, without further ado, without problems... The clerics of both religions ignored each other, sure as were, in each faction, to be the possessors of the absolute truth. Now well, belittling religion in public, blaspheming, questioning dogmas of faith or apostatizing, carried within the Muslim religion the penalty of death, which was applied equally, depending on what crime it was, whether if the person was Moor or Christian.

Having made this exposition, it is worth highlighting that the Mozarabs of Cordoba had adopted many ways and fashions of the Muslims. Young Christians learned Arabic, studied and wrote poetry, just like the Islamic youth. Mixed marriages were not uncommon, after one of the spouses, usually the woman, converts to the other religion and it was also common for Christians, and very Christians, to maintain their own harem... It could not be denied that the brilliant Muslim civilization was conquering the Mozarabs, to the great displeasure of the priesthood class and some Christian religious fanatics.

This "Islamization", even if it was superficial, of the Christians aroused the suspicions of the abundant Christian clerics and Orthodox laymen, of way that a, let's say, Mozarabic opposition party emerged in Córdoba, led by the priest Eulogio and his faithful friend and biographer, Álvaro. Eulogio belonged to a rich Mozarabic family and one of his brothers was official in the Umayyad administration; two others were merchants prosperous, and his sister Anulona had become a nun. Eulogius himself had been ordained a priest in Córdoba, without much problem, and had his charge of the parish of San Zoilo. He had met his soul friend, Alvaro in the courses taught by Abbot Spera-in-Deo. As we can see, It can be not said that Christians suffered type of coercion to practice their religion, but in all faiths there is always the seed of fanaticism. Furthermore, an unfortunate incident was going to cause a crisis of great proportions.

The clergyman Perfecto, from the Cordoban church of San Acisclo, one day began to argue with some Muslims about

of the goodness of Jesus Christ and Muhammad, about which of the two had more merits. At first the discussion was on friendly terms, but later tempers were heating up and it seems that the Christian ended up insulting Muhammad. Momentarily nothing happened but someone ended up reporting Perfecto to the the cadi who ordered him to be arrested and sentenced to death. On April 18, 850, day of great holiday in Islam because that year was the date of the Breaking of the Fast, it was beheaded before the plebs who always enjoyed these barbaric spectacles.

Eulogio and Álvaro already had a martyr for the faith and began their propaganda among the Mozarabs of Cordoba, telling them about the torture suffered by the clergyman executed, opposing the Umayyad regime, raising spirits in such a way that every day the number of discontented Christians inclined to the ideas of Álvaro and Eulogio. On the other hand, the Córdoba police were more active than never against the Mozarabs. And suddenly a wave of mysticism, unknown until moment, took over the Christians of Cordoba, eager to suffer the martyrdom and achieving sainthood in the quickest way possible, which was achieved easily insulting Allah, cursing Muhammad and reviling Islam. That madness seemed unstoppable...six monks from the Tábanos monastery, a priest named Sisnando, a certain Isaac, also from the Tábanos monastery, a guard palatine named Sancho, the monk Teodomiro, the deacon Pablo... they all went to insulting Muhammad before the qadi and even inside the main mosque. The madness of martyrdom had taken hold of them like a malignant fever that spread before the

amazed eyes of the Muslims. In less than two months they had been eleven Mozarabs executed. Even two nuns, Flora and María, were executed on November 24, 851, after the Muslim authorities tried to convince them to recant to avoid the death sentence, but there was no way to achieve it. In prison Eulogio found Flora and was fascinated. It seemed like a angel and, perhaps without reaching him, he fell in love with that woman. When knew that she had been beheaded, he celebrated her death with a greater passion typical of a lover than of a clergyman who was insistently seeking, the martyrdom.

Abd al-Rahman II could have drowned this revolt in Mozarabic blood, but, so different from his father, he preferred to tackle it by another sensiblebway. Not all the Mozarabs, both clerics and laymen of Córdoba and from other places in al-Andalus, agreed with the extremists led by Eulogio and Álvaro. They feared that, in the end, the emir's reaction or the town, ended up attacking all of them and, as in so many sometimes, the righteous paid for sinners. So they approached Abd al-Rahman and proposed holding a council, presided over by Recafredo, metropolitan of Seville. The emir accepted this council to which, in addition, the bishops of all the Andalusian dioceses attended, the Umayyad government itself being represented by a Christian official, Gómez.

The Council opened in the year 852. Gómez, the official representative of the Government, exposed the futility of that sacrifice of lives that occurred by the exalted, asking the ecclesiastical authorities to disavow that non-

sense. Saúl, bishop of Córdoba, was the only one who defended martyrdom and the martyrs that had already occurred. The rest closed ranks with Recafredo who ruled that, from now on, the Christians of al-Andalus were prohibited from voluntarily seek martyrdom. This was considered suicide and as such he would be condemned by the Church. The leaders of the Mozarabic opposition party were arrested, among them Eulogio and the bishop of Córdoba, and imprisoned. It seemed that the waters were returning to their channel, but there was still some irreducibles who continued uttering blasphemies against Islam in the mosques in order to ensure martyrdom, and there were new convicts who were executed in the month of September 852. Six days later the emir died, unexpectedly, and the Christian extremists considered that the death was due to divine punishment.

When Abd al-Rahman II's son, Muhammad, acceded to the throne, Eulogius was released and left Córdoba. He visited Pamplona and lived for some time in Toledo, always recounting the "sufferings" of his life and his fanatical theses. When he returned to Córdoba he was met with the bitter disappointment that, even his most fervent supporters had opted for the peaceful route or, for the most part, were willing to abandon that intransigence that had only caused inconvenience and death. That's not why Eulogio let himself be discouraged. Him and his friend Álvaro, they returned to their preachings and the Mozarabic spirits stirred again... but Muhammad was not like his father. Faced with this situation, he ordered the demolition of the Tábanos monastery, which he considered the center of all unrest and possibly it was like that. Furthermore, the matter was becoming complicated because the Toledoan

Mozarabs who had listened to the sermons of the fanatic Eulogio, were also beginning to appear agitated and restless, choosing Eulogio as metropolitan of the city. The emir, of course, did not ratified this election.

Between the years 853 and 858 there were at least fourteen other martyrs volunteers, but Eulogio couldn't get them to finish him off. For more abundance, in those days, two French monks arrived in Córdoba, Usuard and Odilard, from the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, to request the remains of the martyrs from the emir and take them with them to France.

These two monks, at first, came to Spain, by order of their superior, Hildouin II, to collect the remains of S. Vicente de Zaragoza, patron of his abbey, but, having arrived in Barcelona, they had news that the saint's body was no longer in Valencia, where it was led, and that the hopes of being able to find him were zero. However, if they wanted to take advantage of the trip, they could go to Córdoba, where they found the relics of the Mozarabic martyrs who had been executed only a few years ago. This is what our French monks did. They arrived in the Umayyad capital and lived there for about two months, taking steps to allow them to take the relics of Jorge, Aurelio and Natalia, who had achieved martyrdom in July 852, what they achieved after quite a bit of effort. They started the journey back with his goal almost accomplished. They did not have S. Vicente, but they did returned with the remains of three martyrs, but when they arrived in France they found themselves with the unpleasant surprise that their community was refugee in

Esmans, since Paris was occupied by the Normans. A few years later, the monk Usuard received the commission from the monarch Charles the Bald to prepare a martyrology, and in it he included some references to those Andalusian martyrs, so that the Spanish saints passed to the French saints.

Muhammad's patience was wearing thin. In 859 Eulogio was imprisoned, and if we follow the great Dozy, the event occurred in the following way.

In Córdoba there lived a young woman, Leocricia, daughter of Muslims, but through a nun in the family, had converted to Christianity. She ended up confessing it to his parents who tried to get her to return to the bosom of the Mohammedan religion, but since they could not obtain it, they began to mistreat her. Leocricia was afraid that in the end her conversion would become public and asked Eulogio and his sister Anulona for help. Maybe Eulogio saw in Leocricia many of the traits of the already martyred Flora, who had so much shocked in his heart, and he promised that he would be by his side unconditionally.

Leocricia pretended to return to the faith of her elders and her parents trusted again in it, so they found it natural that one day, it would come out richly dressed and jeweled to go, as she said, to a wedding. But where she went to Eulogio and Anulona's house so they could take her to the house of one of her coreligionists and hid her.

Seeing that she did not return, the parents and the Córdoba police began the search of the girl, but they could not find her. It was his friendship with Anulona that cause of her perdi-

tion because she spent a day with her, and the servant who was to pick her up to return to her hiding place, she did not arrive until dawn. Fearing to be recognized if she went out at that time, she decided to stay one more day with her friend, until nightfall. But a spy or simply someone who knew where the fugitive was, told the cadi who sent soldiers to arrest Leocricia and Eulogio, who at that time was reaching his sister's house.

Brought before the cadi, Eulogio declared that he had taken care of instruct the young woman in Christianity in the same way as he would with the Muslim leader if he asked. Leocricia, confessed of apostasy, was sentenced to death, but Eulogio was only sentenced to be whipped.

Perhaps out of pride, Eulogio did not settle for the punishment of whipping. Everyone died before him! All his life preaching martyrdom, martyrdom that many of his supporters had suffered with joy, and he I was going to be less holy than them! It was something he couldn't consent. He was taken to the council room where one of the dignitaries who knew him since he was young, he asked him why he had such a desire to die, if there was no something in his life worth keeping. If he retracted of his continued blasphemies against Muhammad and Islam, he would be forgiven immediately.

The cultured Muslim society felt more pity than hatred for the fanatics and they also felt that they had to proceed to shed blood with those who seemed to have gone crazy. But for Eulogio there was no longer a possible retreat. If he had retracted, the contempt of his people would be even worse than death. So he stood firm

and he bravely climbed into the scaffold, prayed briefly and placed his head on the slash that was severed with a well-aimed blow. It was March 11, 859. Four days later Leocricia suffered the same fate.

His death caused a great impact in Christian Spain and immediately, Eulogio became a saint, a multitude of miracles were attributed to him everywhere.

Some years later, Alfonso, king of León, in a truce signed between him and the emir Muhammad, stipulated that one of the conditions was that the remains of S. Leocricia and S. Eulogio would be handed over, something that Muslims gave them a thousand loves.

Deprived of their most fiery champion, the Mozarabs of Córdoba were calming down on their own. Practically all types of opposition ceased and only on rare occasions there was the case of a new martyrdom.

#al andalus. historical figures #al andalus. personajes históricos #al andalus #book scans #al andalus history #bookblr #historyblr #spanish history #emirate of cordoba #eulogio de córdoba #álvaro de córdoba #emirato de córdoba

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djuvlipen · 1 year

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This is the most palatable form of activism you could come up with yet it's the only one liberals can fathom. It's always the same: amplify voices, educate yourself, donate to liberal associations and/or NGOs.

Two problems:

- amplifying voices and educating yourselves both put the emphasis on the individual yet what Romnia need is an actual movement that highlights the struggles we face *collectively, as a group*, and not as mere, isolated individuals you can dissasociate from their mothers, sisters and friends.

- European NGOs have been undermining, isolating and crushing Romani grassroots movements precisely because the big Romani rights associations and NGOs want to push a neoliberal agenda that goes against the well being of the Romani working class, ie >80% of the global Romani population. In this context giving to NGOs harms Roma in the long run, although it can provide some relief in the short run.

When they say "give to (this or that) Romani creator", same problem: emphasis on the individual, not on Roma as a people facing a common struggle, with the added injury that those english-speaking self-employed Romani creators on the internet are more likely to be mixed with white and middle-class, and therefore privileged over the dark skin working class majority.

Of course they would rather say "donate to NGOs and educate yourself" (and don't watch Wandavision and don't say the g slur and what have you) because it would make them too uncomfortable and make them feel too threatened in their privileged, middle-class lifestyle to say that supporting Romani women actually means:

- dismantling the sex trade and abolishing prostitution (in a very white, very gentrified manner, several of the associations listed actually want to decriminalize raping Romani women for money)

- abolish sexist Romani cultural practices like the pañuelo, dowry and child marriages

- abolish religions, Christianity and Islam at the top of the list

- fund more shelters and clinics to actually help homeless women, alcoholic and drug addicted women

- stop pushing Romani neighbourhoods and building Romani designated areas in highly polluted sites

- condemn segregation and give proper formations to healthcare professionals, teachers and administrators when it comes to accompanying Romani women and children in hospitals, at school and with administrative papers

#Roma #Antiracism #original post

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hindulivesmatter · 8 months

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You literally called "love jihad" a crime against Hindus. So, people electing to have interfaith marriages are somehow committing a crime against Hinduism by doing so. Muslim men who marry Hindu women are doing it to carry out some type of Great Replacement by converting them to Islam to make India more Muslim.

I wanted to put that plainly because you're clearly banking on that your non-Indian followers don't know what that means. You are saying that people choosing to marry who they love are somehow against Hinduism because those people are not Hindus. You are claiming that Muslim men who fall for Hindu women are actually part of some great conspiracy.

I want people to understand how crazy and conspiracist this logic is so they understand why to take every claim you have of "hindus are still oppressed in India" with a massive grain of salt. You are literally promoting the Hindu version of The Great Replacement Theory and of white people panicking over white women having mixed race babies.

You do not care about Muslims. It is a smokescreen. You think they are lesser and you support people oppressing them.

Yes, love jihad is extremely dangerous to Hindus. Luring a girl under false pretenses and then converting her without her consent is called love jihad. That is not the same as interfaith marriage.

Do you want me to deny the alarming number of cases of women being murdered by their Muslim partners? Or the fact that if a couple is entering an interfaith marriage, always have to convert to Islam. By that logic then, why can't the Muslim person convert to Hinduism?

I'm banking on my non-Indian followers? If they don't know what it means, they can either ask or do a Google search.

"You are saying that people choosing to marry who they love are somehow against Hinduism because those people are not Hindus."

When the fuck did I ever say that? Stop putting words in my mouth holy fucking shit.

"You are claiming that Muslim men who fall for Hindu women are actually part of some great conspiracy."

Again, NO. I am saying that there are cases of Muslim men, CHANGING THEIR NAMES TO HINDU NAMES, WEARING HINDU SYMBOLS, and courting Hindu women. They then reveal themselves after they are married. Do you even hear how insane you sound?

"I want people to understand how crazy and conspiracist this logic is so they understand why to take every claim you have of "Hindus are still oppressed in India" with a massive grain of salt. You are literally promoting the Hindu version of The Great Replacement Theory and of white people panicking over white women having mixed-race babies."

I'm sorry, I had to laugh here. What the fuck is wrong with you. Did you even go through my blog before sending me this? I literally reblog cases of actual Hinduphobia and violence against Hindus. That's literally it.

"You do not care about Muslims. It is a smokescreen. You think they are lesser and you support people oppressing them."

Bro. I'm sorry, so just speaking up about Hinduphobia means I do not care about Muslims? I promise it isn't that deep. We don't have an agenda like the one you've made up in your head. All we want is to co-exist in PEACE. I will never understand you people. Violence against Muslims is a real thing, and I 100% condemn it. You make up shit about us in your head, and pretend we're foaming at the mouth, ready to murder all the Muslims. You lunatic.

#hindublr #hinduphobia #desiblr #hinduism #receipts #anon asks #answered #dumbass #insane anon

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athingofvikings · 6 months

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A Thing Of Vikings Chapter 90: Ties Of Blood And Seed

Chapter 90: Ties Of Blood And Seed

One particularly thorny problem that faced the Imperial Assembly Of Law was the question of legal definitions of marriage. At the time of the Assembly, there were no less than twelve legally and culturally distinct practiced forms of marriage within the bounds of the Empire, and the general legal chaos this caused was part of the impetus for the Assembly in the first place. The jurists thus assembled faced a significant problem in trying to reconcile the various forms. Consider the difference between Latin Catholic marriage, which did not allow for divorce, and every other form, which did allow for divorce (and several forms were, in fact, explicitly temporary unless renewed).

Divorce was just one area of consideration, albeit a contentious one. The necessity of witnesses (needed in Christian forms, not needed in Judaic forms), multiple spouses (allowed in Norse, Islamic, and Gaelic forms, recently outlawed in some Judaic forms, and strictly forbidden by Christian forms), the necessity of clergy or ceremony, the obligations of the spouses to each other, the allowance of same-gender marriages, and, most contentious of them all, mixed marriages between members of different groups… all of these and more were potential problems that needed to be overcome.

The solution which was eventually adopted was, in the general vein of the Assembly's solutions, a broad secular code that stepped back from the religious arena and concerned itself strictly with recognition by the state. Under that code, any consenting group of adults (barring certain degrees of consanguinity, itself a topic of debate) could choose to register as "married" in the eyes of the state, so long as the group—ranging from the typical two to a record nine—had an agreement arranged beforehand on the particulars of their nuptials in regards to divorce, inheritance, descent, and marital obligations (there were a number of rules instituted there as well, to avoid cases of marital slavery and other abuses).

A number of standardized formulations were likewise hammered out to suit the needs of particular forms of marriage, but these were not required by the law, and it was completely within the realm of acceptability to submit more esoteric arrangements (and often needed in the cases of the larger marriages). In effect, it was the official legal position of the Empire that the relationships between the marriage participants and their religious and social home groups were not a concern by the Imperial state, at least not beyond how those relationships informed their marriage contract.

While this was strongly opposed by social conservatives, the fact was that bickering between the conservative groups sabotaged their efforts to stop it. No one group of them could get the rest to agree on which implementation of marriage they desired to be backed by law, even as all of them agreed that they did not approve of the more broadly defined version. This strife among those who wished to have marriage be more narrowly defined according to their own desires allowed for the passing and implementation of the law in the Grand Thing. And while this did not bring an end to strife regarding marriage within the Empire, it at least allowed for a legal unity in terms of recognition of what a marriage was and wasn't.

—Origins Of The Grand Thing, Edinburgh Press, 1631

AO3 Chapter Link

~~~

My Original Fiction | Original Fiction Patreon

#a thing of vikings #httyd #how to train your dragon #alternate history #historical fiction

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sisterssafespace · 9 months

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Assalam ‘alaykum sister…

First of all I want to thank you for this safe space you’ve created, I was looking for someone to advice me in real life but I couldn’t find anyone, alhamdulillah I remembered this blog.

In these past two months I’ve been getting to know a guy with marriage in mind.

It’s the first time he hadapproached a girl so he’s a bit clumsy but I feel like he tries his best.

Lately we were discussing about mixed friendship, mind you, we both live in Italy but I was born and rised here while he was rised in Egypt.

I lived my whole life in contact with the opposite gender so I kind of created my boundaries (religiously speaking) and found my balance.

During these discussions I brought how in the future InshAllah, if Allah grants me a family and a house I want it to be always full of friends (by friends I meant man and women) or how I like to play cards during breaks in uni with my male colleagues (I’m a stem major). He was quite bothered by this, he said that he knows himself and knows that these things will be a problem for him in the future.

He went on bringing up how in Islam it’s not permissible to have these kind of close interactions to the opposite gender, I know it shouldn’t have but it kind of irked me. We decided to genuinely look up these things and understand if we can arrive to an agreement

I have a really bubbly personality… I fear that if I was to compromise on this I’ll lose a part of me. But I don’t want to end things with him because I got attached (I know I shouldn’t…)

I’m 23 and I don’t know if I’m making the right choices, I fear I’m hurrying myself to get to know another person while I’m lost between uni and trying to form my own views about the world while trying my best to preserve my deen.

In your opinion, what’s the approach I should take? Which things should I keep in mind while getting to know another person?

May Allah grant you all that your heart desires and may He nourish your life. Allahumma amin

Assalamualaikum habibty, First of all, thank you for the sweet words at the beginning of your ask, may Allah swt use us for the benefit of our ummah and the women of our ummah ameen. I also want to express how impressed and proud I am of the way you speak, which can only reflect the growth, sophistication, and politeness you have; I really loved how you speak and voice your thoughts! May Allah swt bless you! If we were to know each other irl we would have absolutely been friends because you sound mature, calm, confident, warm, and especially elegant in the way you speak to others and very respectful, Allahuma berik laki I am totally inn love with your manners! And that is why I will allow myself to speak to you as your older sister if you accept that.

So, I have a couple of points I want to tackle. Firstly, and most importantly I need you to be completely honest with yourself and with Allah swt. How so? Now in your ask you kept mentioning that you want to preserve your deen the best that you can, you struggled a bit and then you found your balance etc etc, and then you said that you don't want to lose a bit of your personality or a part of yourself by giving up these friendships for this guy. Let me tell you sweetie, you shouldn't! You shouldn't give up ANY part of you for any guy, but you HAVE TO give up whatever it takes FOR THE SAKE OF ALLAH SWT. What I mean is if you were to stop the free mixing (because playing cards with guys is free mixing, let's call a spade a spade and name things for what they really are) because a guy asked you to, it will not sit well with you if you are not convinced deep down that it is impermissible and plain wrong for Muslims to do so, and you will end up resenting the guy whether it is this potential suitor or the next guy or just your future husband, in general. The thing is, you remind so so so much of my old self, tbh the community I was raised in doesn't differ much from the Italian community and basically my whole life I was friends with guys and it came very naturally to me because that was the norm in my environment so I do know and I do understand very well your position right now; however, it is simply not permissible my dear, now that you have access to this piece of information you can't just overlook it - you can ask any Sheikh or Imam, in Islam we do interact with the opposite gender but with rules and restrictions, Allah swt instilled these conditions or boundaries to protect us, not to ruin our lives or make us less of who we really are. And let me tell you something that I have also experienced firsthand, whenever you give up something or a certain relationship in your life FOR THE SAKE OF ALLAH SWT, Allah WILL replace it with another relationship a billion times better; for me for example, when I decided to give up my mixed friendships, Allah swt made me meet the most amazing sisters who completely changed my life and continue to do so and to be there for me, to teach me and inspire me everyday! But I know it is not easy to give up your lifestyle and what you were used to, and basically, that's all you've known since forever, but honey, you have to always remember that Allah swt puts us to test, to check the level of honesty and sincerity when we say that we do believe. This is your test and you have to prove to Allah swt that you are sincere in your faith and obedience to your Creator. I just need to highlight that if you choose to do this and cut off your 'extracurricular' interactions with the opposite gender, you need to have the intention that you are doing so for the sake of Allah swt and not for the sake of this guy; which brings me to my second point:

YOU ARE STILL YOUNG! There is so much you need to learn and discover about your own self, your faith, and work to be the best version of yourself you can be. Personally, I don't approve of getting attached to a guy so soon and biding your life to his choices or decisions, especially that there is nothing serious between you two. You did say he approached you with the intention of marriage, well he might as well approach your family and make it halal, that's one - and two I honestly do not believe that a guy in Italy hasn't approached a girl for a serious talk before but idk, Allah knows best. So to wrap up, as an older sister, I advise you to take a step back and evaluate your life, and ask yourself " is it worth it?" these friendships and this 'fun' is it worth the moment where you're gonna stand up in front of Allah swt on judgment day and be asked about it? talking to this guy right now, is it worth it? Always consider the moment you're going to be asked about whatever you're doing in front of Allah swt and decide if it's worth carrying on.. P.s. About you always dreaming of having a house full of friends and hosting parties and having fun, I just want to say there is fun on the halal side of things, in shaa Allah one day when you have your own home and your own family, you can host your friends still and make a separate gathering, all the girls together all the guys together, you will meet a wonderful community and you will befriend a lot of amazing women and you can all be friends and it will be your social circle and you'll visit each other and your husbands will be friends and your kids will be like cousins and everything will be better than you could have ever imagined, only because it is a situation and a scene that pleases Allah swt so He swt will bless it :')

Work on yourself, on educating yourself religiously, on getting closer to Allah swt, on becoming a better version of yourself and you will see your life transforming to a level you wouldn't have ever dreamt of my dear! May Allah swt bless you immensely and help you see rightfulness and make the right decisions in life!

I hope to hear from you soon!

Fi Aman Allah,

A. Z.

#sisterssafespace

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eaglesnick · 1 month

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“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” Seneca the Younger

Nigel Farage is jetting off to the USA for a second time in a month. Pocketing £12,000 for a speech at the “Keep Arizona Free Summit". it appears he is more interested in increasing his own personal wealth than serving the people of Clacton who elected him as their MP.

The “Keep Arizona Free” flier has this billing:

“Featuring Keynote Speaker Nigel Farage. Also known as “Mr Brexit", is a British politician, broadcaster and political analyst” (Keep Arizona Free Summit 2024)

Other speakers include the crusading Christian Brandon Tatum, a man who converted to Christianity in 2008 and now says he is working for the “Great Commission”. This means Tate is an evangelical Christian.

Unfortunately, Tate goes beyond simply preaching the word of God. Much like political Islam and Islamic extremists, Tate combines his faith with politics. He describes the Democratic Party in America as “the enemy".

“You cannot say that you are a Christian and you believe in Christian values and you turn around and vote for a party that believes in mutilating kids and gay marriage and all this other stuff,” (Tate: 30/11/23)

I’m not sure how much child mutilation and “other stuff” happened under democrats Obama and Joe Biden but mixing politics and religion is a recipe for intolerance and dictatorship: just look to Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Yemen where Islamic theocratic governments rule with an iron fist. But don’t think a Christian theocratic dictatorship could not happen in the West.

“Jesus is their saviour, Trump is their candidate” was a recent headline in an apnews.com article. And reiterating the hatred of liberal politicians, espoused by Nigel Farage’s fellow speaker Brandon Tate, Time Magazine said this:

“Trump has white evangelicals in his pocket. Whatever cognitive dissonance some devout Christians may feel for supporting a twice-impeached serial philandering liar who tried to stage a coup and threatens violence against political opponents is easily dismissed with the conviction that no Republican nominee, no matter how problematic, could be worse than losing to a Democrat.”

Another speaker sharing the Keep Arizona Free Summit platform with Nigel Farage is James T. Harris, another deeply religious man on the right of US politics, a man “committed to faith".

Farage will be in the company of like-minded people. Speaking of Britain, Farage said:

"We are a Christian country with a Christian constitution and a Christian monarch…I absolutely believe in Christian values that have made this country great." (Daily Mirror: 19/12/2015)

According to Evangelical Focus, only 6% of the UK population are practicing Christians, while 42% are non-practicing Christians. This presents Farage with a problem. Declaring his Christian believes will not bring him many votes, unlike in the USA where political evangelicalism thrives. But don’t believe for one minute right wing Christians don’t look to Farage as a UK saviour in the same way fundamentalist Christians in America look toward Trump.

This was a headline during the recent UK election campaigne:

“Reform UK: The Best Option for British Christians”. (Crisis Magazine: 01/07/24)

Fundamentalist Christians, like fundamentalist Islamist, are totally intolerant of people with values and believes that do not match their particulate brand of religious zealotry.

Railing against the concept of social justice, Crisis said that Christians in the western world (do they mean white Christians?) were:

“..ignoring the voting recommendations of bishops wedded to a “social justice” ideology largely developed by the very same prelates, priests, thinkers, and activists who variously tolerate, implicitly accept, or actively favor sexual immorality, female ordination, liturgical abuses and numerous other evils—turning instead to such parties as the Brothers of Italy, Poland’s Law and Justice Party, and France’s National Rally.”

There you have it. GOOD Christians vote for the far-right. BAD Christians vote for liberal democracy, which brings us back to the “Keep Arizona Free Summit" and its guest speakers.

All three are regarded as “good Christians” hence their invitation to speak.

I am sure the people of Clacton, where over half of those over 16 are “economically inactive” will be cheering their support as Farage pockets his £12,000 fee as a “good Christian”. Maybe, he will ask his fellow speakers to pray for the one-in-three children in Clacton who are living in poverty? Maybe Farage, the highest paid MP in Parliament, will take heed of what Jesus said about riches.

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” (Matthew 19:12)

Maybe, but I sincerely doubt it.

#uk politics #nigel farage #Brandon Tatum #james t harris #donald trump #evangelical christians. fundamentalist christians #fundamentalist islamists #dictaorship #social justice #riches #poor #jesus

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ynx1 · 2 years

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Ten Types of Modesty حیا

Ibn-ul Qayyim (raḥimahullāh) mentioned in his book Madarij us Saalikeen Vol. 2 Pg. 267 “Al Hayaa’ (i.e. modesty) is categorized into ten types:

1. The modesty of Shame: This is similar to the modesty of Adam (Alaihis salam) when he fled in paradise after eating from the forbidden tree. Allah asked him “Are you fleeing form me O Adam because of your sin?” He said: “No my lord! Rather it is out of shame that I flee from you!”

2. The modesty that results in you realizing your shortcomings such as; the modesty of the angels, those who praise Allah day and night and never enervate. On the Day of Judgment they will say Subhanaka! (i.e. Glory be to You!) we did not worship You as You deserved to be worshiped.”

3. The modesty of Magnification: This modesty is a result of knowledge. The extent of knowledge the slave has of his Lord, will determine how modest or shy of Him he/she is.

4. The modesty of Generosity: This is similar to the modesty of the Prophet (Sallahu alaihi wa salam) with those people he invited to the walimah (i.e. marriage banquet) of Zaynab Bint Jahsh (Radiyallahu anha)and they stayed with him longer than necessary, so he stood up and walked away without saying to them “Leave!”.

5. The modesty of Embarrassment: This is similar to the modesty of Ali Ibn Talib (Radiyallahu anhu)when he was too embarrassed to ask the Prophet himself about the pre-seminal discharge he was experiencing, because he was married to his daughter.

6. The modesty of Low self-worth: This is similar to the modesty of the slave in front of his lord when he asks Him for his needs, knowing that he doesn’t deserve it. In a narration of Bani Israel Musa (Alaihis salam) said: “O lord, a need or desire of this life arises and I am too modest to ask You for it O lord!” So Allah responded to him by saying: “Ask me for what whatever you like, whether it is the salt for your dough or the fodder for your herd!” And it is possible that this is because of two things:

7. The modesty of Love: This is the modesty of the one who loves another, and when he thinks in his heart of the one he loves during his absence, his modesty for him is greater than what he feels for him in his presence and he doesn’t even know why. There is no doubt that the love of a person has a stronger and more magnificent authority over the individual than the authority of the one who conquers the body physically. And because of this, kings and elite authority wonder in amazement about creation and how they are conquered because of the love they have for someone greater than they are conquered by power and physical authority. We asked Sheikh ul Islam Ibn Taymiyah (Rahimahullah) about this issue, and I mentioned this to him and he just smiled and didn’t say anything.

8. The modesty of Servitude: This is the type of modesty that is mixed with love and fear while witnessing that there is no perfection in his worship or servitude to the One he worships. And the slave acknowledges that his Lord is greater and more opulent than what he is offering of worship, so his servitude to Allah causes him to be modest of Him, and there is no way around this.

9. The modesty of honor and dignity: The modesty of the noble and prestigious soul. if he does something that is beneath his caliber, either by exerting himself or doing some random act of good, he is modest despite what he has exerted of himself with a type of modesty that is honorable and dignified, and there are two reasons for this:

10. The modesty of an individual regarding himself: This is the modesty of the noble, honorable and dignified individual due to him being pleased with the fact that he has some shortcomings. He prostrates himself out of modesty as if he has two personalities. He is modest with one regarding the other and this is the most complete form of modesty. If the slave is modest regarding himself then he is more likely to be modest in front of others

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lgbtqiamuslimpedia · 1 year

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A Jihad for Love (2008)

Director - Parvez Sharma

Producer - Sandi Simcha Dubowski

Cinematography - Parvez Sharma, Berke Baş,David W. Leitner

Writer - Javed Haider Zaidi

Cast - Imam Muhsin Hendricks,Arsham Parsi,Maryam,Abdellah,Mazen,Ferda,Qasim,Ahsan,Amir,Mojtaba,Kiymet,Sana,Maha,Pedram Abdi (Payam)

Languages - Arabic,Farsi,Urdu,Bengali, Hindi,English,French,German,English,Turkish,etc

Genre - •LGBTQ •Islam •Documentary

Year of Release - 21 May,2008

Box office - $105,651

Awards - •Best Documentary Award,MIX BRASIL •Best Documentary, Image+Nation Film Festival •Best Documentary,The Tri-Continental Film Festival,India • GLAAD Media Award •Teddy Award,etc

A Jihad for Love (preceded by a short film called In the Name of Allah) is an award-winning international documentary on Homosexuality & Islam.It took total six years to make this groundbreaking documentary.Parvez Sharma took the risk to film this documentary in most dangerous country (like Islamic Republic of Iran,Iraq, Saudi Arabia,Pakistan,Egypt).Homosexuality is a punishable crime in most Muslim World.

The work that Sharma started with this film has become a staple in many books on Islam and at U.S. University libraries.The website Faith in Equality put it at number 9 in a list of LGBT films about faith.IMDb rates the film at 13 on its list of 58 titles under the category of "Best documentaries on religion, spirituality & cults".The film first premiered at the TIFF in 2007, and has been screened to great acclaim at several film festivals around the world.The film went on to win 15 other international awards.

Plot

At starting it shows a glimpse of Islam across the globe.The film first featured Hendrick Muhsin, a South African,Pakistani Gay & Muslim.He is also the first Out Gay Imam of Africa.Filmmaker Parvez got into the deep of Hendicks's personal life struggles,his understanding of Islam & reconciliation of intersecting identities.

Mazen, an Egyptian effeminate muslim was arrested in 2001, in a gay nightclub named Queen Boat.He was beaten,forced to stand trial twice on "debauchery" charges & sentenced to a total of 4 years in prison, where he was raped.He eventually moved to Paris.Mazen also has left his families & friends in Egypt.

Sana is a Black Lesbian refugee, & a victim of FGM.She has a deeper understanding of Islam & told Parvez that Queerness is not against Islam.Sana didn't have any kind of sexual relation with any women.But she had intimate loving relations with women.Like others, she came to France as a refugee.Sana befriend with Maryam & Mazen.

Maryam is Moroccan-born queer womxn who lives in Paris.Her girlfriend Maha lives in Egypt.Both lovers met each other on Bint-al Nas - a meeting site for Arab LBTQ womxn.Maryam still believes that she deserves punishment for her lesbian sexual relationship.Both have survived abusive marriages and can only share their love for each other in private.Maryam & Maha go on a shared journey of search and discovery of female homosexuality.In Al-Azhar, they discover an old bookstore where they find a copy of the Fiqh al-Sunnah(The Laws of the Prophet).In the heart of an ancient mosque in the Citadel,they discover beautiful Islamic calligraphy as they declare their impossible love for each other.

Amir, an Iranian gay shia who has respect for Imam Hosseini.He sacrificed his life for Allah & reconciling his muslim faith.While in Iran, he was persecuted under the charges of illicit sexual conduct,illicit mannerism & received 100 lashes.After being brutally beaten and tortured in the police custody.The judge also threatened Amir that he should be punished by stoning.However he was sentenced to flogging.He told Sharma that Allah helped him to escape this traumatic situation.He fled to Turkey as soon as well.There he met 3 gay refugees - Arsham,Payam,Mojtaba.Mojtaba, another (Persian) gay muslim who ran away from Iran,due to his same sex marriage ceremony in 2005.

Ferda & Kiymet are a happy couple in Turkiye.Kiymet belongs from a conservative family.In her early Kiymet's marriage was fixed with a man.Kiymet's marriage ended up at divorce.Then she found Ferda, her soulmate.Ferda's mom is very supportive & tolerant of sexuality.Ferda is a devout sufi queer muslim, who honors Rumi - a prominent sufi icon for both LGBTQ+ & Straight Muslims.

Ahsan & Qasim are queer platonic friends.Ahsan is a Sunni Muslim & Qasim is a Shia Muslim.Both men, belongs from poor backgrounds do not adopt the western peronae of ‘gay’ and instead rely on vernacular terms.Ahsan & Qasim are part of transvestite,transgender community called Zenana,Kothi in Northern India.Most of these community hide themselves from public.Ahsan,Qasim find a safe space in his community.While Qasim is struggling with his sexuality in heteronormative society.

The filmmaker also documented the diverse tolerance of sexuality in sufi traditions (Pakistan,India & Turkey).

Is it the first film on Islam & Homosexuality?

''A Jihad for Love'' is called world's 1st film on Islam & Homosexuality.A Jihad for Love would be an international feature documentary film rather than world's first film on LGBT muslims.However there are several films that focused on LGBTQ muslim or Queerness in Islam.For Example:

Road to Love (2001)

Act of Faith (2002)

Haremde dört kadin (1965)

Hammam al-Malatily (1973)

Köçek (1975)

Ihtiras Firtinasi (1984)

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Marcides (1993)

Istanbul Beneath My Wings (1996)

Hamam (1997)

Lola & Billy the Kid (1999)

Production

Bismillah (In the name of Allah) was considered as an early working title for this documentary.Among muslims,the word Bismillah is very auspicious & used before beginning actions,speech,writing.But the tittle was not considered as the final title of this film due to controversy.

A Jihad for Love is produced by Halal Films, in association with the Sundance Documentary Film Fund,Channel 4 (UK),ZDF (Germany),Arte (France-Germany),Logo (US) & SBS Australia.The director & producer Parvez Sharma & co-producer Sandi Dubowski raised more than a million dollars over a 6 years period to make the film.

In an interview with The NY Times,Parvez Sharma said that he "would shoot touristy footage on the first 15 minutes & the last 15 minutes of a tape", with interviews for documentary in between, to avoid having his footage seized at customs.He compiled 400 hours of footage from a dozen countries ranging from Iraq to Pakistan to the UK.The nature of the work placed him at considerable personal risk.He adopted hardcore guerrilla film-making tactics,pretending to be a tourist in one country,a worker for an AIDS charity in another country.Wherever he went,he asked his queer friends to keep copies of footage and destroy the tapes once he had successfully smuggled the masters out of the country.

During his filmmaking Parvez traveled several countries including Pakistan, Iraq, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, USA, UK, Turkey, France, Saudi Arabia, South Africa,[...].

Interviews

In an interview with NY Times magazine,Parvez Sharma said,"Being gay and Muslim myself,I knew that this film had to be about us all coming out— as Muslims. It's about claiming the Islam that has been denied to us." With a target audience of "faithful Muslims," he undertook a variety of outreach tactics, including leafleting mosques,blanketing MySpace,screening in Astoria for 15 key progressive Muslim leaders.In an interview to Der Spiegel, Sharma explained the significance of the title: "I'm not looking at jihad as battle.I'm looking at the greater jihad in Islam, which is the jihad as the struggle with the self.I also thought it was really compelling to take a word that only has one connotation for most -- to take that, reclaim it and put it in the same phrase as love,which is universal.I really think it explains it very well.

Film Screening

A Jihad for Love first premiered in Toronto International Film Festival(TIFF) in September 2007.At its premier,the director was given a security guard for safety reasons.After this film festival A Jihad for Love got huge applaud internationally.A Jihad for Love film premiered as the opening film of Panorama Documente of the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008.

The film was screened in The Rio Film Festival,Brazil on September 2007,Morelia Film Festival,Mexico, on October 2007,The Sheffield DocFest on November 2007,London Gay & Lesbian Film Festival on March 2008,Melbourne International Film Festival on July 2008,Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival on March 2008,etc.A Jihad for Love's first premier in African continent was The Out in Africa Film Festival in Johannesburg and Cape Town,November 2007. On April,2008 A Jihad for Love film was successfully screened at Istanbul International Film Festival.It was the first time that the film allowed to screen in a muslim-majority country.Film also screened in Q! Film Festival of Indonesia.Although singapore banned the film from festival in 2008 due to its sensitive subject.

Popularity

A Jihad for Love film's sale and broadcast on NDTV, South Asia's largest network in 2008 would have a "remarkable" impact on this LGBTQ cause. "NDTV's broadcast has in effect made the film available to over one billion viewers in India,Bangladesh,Pakistan, & large portions of the Middle East and Africa.The various distributors and their Total Rating Points in European television, the Indian/South-Asian sale with its claimed footprint of 15 billion viewers, the theatrical release & the purportedly large numbers of Netflix viewers made the filmmakers and the TRP experts arrive at a number of 8 million total viewers calculated over a period of four years for this documentary.

International Muslim Dialogue Project

Immediately after the film's theatrical launch around the USA,Parvez & Sandi launched the International Muslim Dialogue Project on 2008.The aim of the project was to organize screenings of the film in Muslim Capitals.Sharma called it the "Underground Network Model" of film distribution.He invented this model sending unmarked DVD's of the film with friends & colleagues to Muslim capitals across the world with full permission to sell pirated copies.Some of the boldest were Beirut,Cairo,Karachi,eight cities in Indonesia & Kuala Lumpur

The film was screened privately screened in Iran,Palestine,Bangladesh and Somalia.

#gay muslim #lgbtq muslim #homosexuality in islam #homosexual muslim #muslim gay #lesbianmuslim #lesbian muslim #arab #asian #qtpoc #documentary

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menalez · 1 year

Note

Here is a critique: Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism’s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where’s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven’t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them—“provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can’t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor’s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn’t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention—stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world—except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn’t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” who cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment’s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations—an accusation leading to his sister’s barbaric punishment—as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities “among educated and liberal families.” In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times “to cleanse the family honor,” and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her “immoral behavior,” had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. “The whore is dead,” the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women’s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women’s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to “lose their voice” in the face of women’s oppression.

The first variety—radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers’s term)—starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: “The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.”

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence—and specifically, male violence against women. “Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,” according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches “The Sexuality of Terrorism” at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists’ view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists’ “discomfort” with the Afghanistan bombing was “deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.”

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable—“Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,” as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. “Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,” wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. “They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.”

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn’t have Joan Crawford in mind), that’s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as “renunciation,” “resistance to injustice,” and “reconciliation.” The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I keep looking for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys!’ ”

Gender feminism’s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naiveté hasn’t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: “The key reason behind women’s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.” Even female elected officials are on board. “The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,” urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. “If we’d had women at Camp David,” he said in July 2000, “we’d have an agreement.”

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women’s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of “meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.” “Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,” Ensler wrote proudly of the summit’s concluding proclamation—despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. “[B]uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,” Ensler cooed. “Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.”

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: “When you’re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.” Now it’s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons’ efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn’t an authentic, indigenous—and therefore appropriate—expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against “global hegemony.” He was mesmerized by this new form of “political spirituality” that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the “transfiguration of the world.” Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband’s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women’s basic rights, when a struggle against “the planetary system” was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism—not to mention with women’s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress “gender complementarity” rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of “Islamic feminists” are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur’an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur’an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity’s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world—and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam—in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite—Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women’s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur’an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment—the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women’s equality—except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there’s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel’s “masculinist military culture”—Israel being white and Western—though she would never dream of pointing out the “masculinist military culture” of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the “degradation” of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of “the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,” as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a “device for ranking the ‘other’ men as inferior or as ‘uncivilized,’ ” according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Spivak’s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. “When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,” Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. “Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,” she says. “What is driving Islamist men is globalization.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating “agency” against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. “Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,” Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. “Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,” she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won’t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn’t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? “I don’t know,” Cooke answers, “I’m interested in discourse.” The irony couldn’t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the “Other” endorse that Other’s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda—subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing “group rights for minority cultures” over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a “barely tolerable institution.” Some women, she went so far as to declare, “might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.”

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women’s Day—“Afghanistan Is Everywhere”—was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don’t women in the West parade around in bikinis? “It’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,” columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson’s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn’t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of “women’s human rights,” meaning not simply women’s civil and political rights but “economic rights” and “socioeconomic justice.” Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state “as an emancipatory institution,” in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are “unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members” and seeped in “nationalist ideologies” as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations “depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,” writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement’s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women’s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to “take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to eliminate “stereotyped roles” to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty’s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, “the personal is international.” The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother’s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur’an in accordance with “committee guidelines.”

Confusing “women’s participation” with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women’s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections “to leapfrog women to power.” Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn’t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.

The truth is that the free institutions—an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections—that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things—and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women’s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country’s top priority. There has been a “seismic gender shift on matters of war,” according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there’s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase “America the Horrible,” went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war “was worth it.” Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand—that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

my god this dude wrote the world’s worst thesis and sent it to the worst candidate possible (a muslim-born woman from the middle east that regularly talks about the issues feminists apparently never talk about)

#btw ive gotten several of these anti-feminist rant messages and eventually i will probably get bored of u and block u jsyk #i know these are all dumb copy pastas from reddit probably but i get enough msgs as is #anonymous #long post

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