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Assaults in Cologne and other European cities part VI

1000 replies

HelpTheAnimalsFirst · 15/01/2016 10:54

Thread 6.

OP posts:
januarybrown1998 · 16/01/2016 22:34

I came back to check if the petition is ready to sign.

Can anyone post or PM me a link?

I'm standing by as is DH with many friends, family, colleagues and others who were horrified by what happened to our German sisters and would like to hear the government's reassurance that they will protect women's equality in the UK.

emilybohemia · 16/01/2016 22:39

Lumela, it was asked as a way of taking the piss though, out of me and Muslim women. Also, what does it have to do with what happened in Cologne?

MariscallRoad · 16/01/2016 22:44

We R are waiting for the petition. I ll sign it and my DS will sign it.

rumbleinthrjungle · 16/01/2016 23:22

Very well done!! Waiting to sign. Bravo Help for starting these threads and steering us here, and to the others who got it to this point.

I'm horrified to hear Help has been banned, it makes very clear the establishment attitude and how very difficult it has become to be allowed to talk about this subject or to protect women's rights. This is exactly the matter that needs addressing. Taharrush has never been seen in the EU before. It is not based on European values or attitudes towards women, it originates in Egypt and the ME and is based on cultural attitudes there towards women, and has travelled here with the migrants from those areas. That is plain fact. I am not prepared to sacrifice my or any other woman's safety or freedoms and allow it to become part of European life because to be allowed to question or discuss the facts showing conflicts of culture and the implications was too scary.

emilybohemia · 16/01/2016 23:34

Help said she would never speak to a woman in a burkha and that women that wear hijab are hostile to Western society, amongst other unpleasant things. If she has been banned it is likely to be because of tha, not an establishment agenda. Safety and freedoms can be discussed without saying things like that. Imagine how Muslim women on Mumsnet might have felt seeing comments like that.

emilybohemia · 16/01/2016 23:40

Cellar door, Help the animals made that remark, with the word Muslim in it. The post is still up on this thread a bit back. The one you mention is not the same one.

Which guys? Do you mean should we accept that Muslims accept the version of Islam given by extremists in some instances? I think probably not. I think we all need to know more about Islam before making judgments too quickly.

emilybohemia · 16/01/2016 23:53

Outwiththeoutcrowd,

I was being over the top about that and I don't think it is racist, I just mean that Islam is quite complex and quite hard to generalise about. I am really sorry for making you feel bad and it was uncalled for. I was being unfair.

emilybohemia · 17/01/2016 00:09

Cellardoor, here is the post by Helptheanimals,,

'We have to be prepared for the well-funded, well-organised Muslim groups to jump on our petition and say - again - the petition is against all Muslim people. As they seem to have access to an unlimited supply of Useful Idiots of every sort, we have to at some stage devise soundbites to counter the verbal attack. Immediately shoot down in flames what their rep says. They will try to steer any conversation to these events being perped by criminals. They will steer away from any debate about taharrush and general hostility and attacks on women being endemic in ME-NA'.

Are there any generalisations or unfounded assumptions here? What would the response of Muslim community groups be?

OutwiththeOutCrowd · 17/01/2016 00:11

Emily

Not particularly relevant to this thread but I'm actually in the middle of reading the Quran - in English - and have also been enjoying the work of the Sufi poet Rumi - I'm genuinely interested in Islamic culture.

emilybohemia · 17/01/2016 00:21

I think it is relevant. I used to have a Muslim friend but I didn't know much about her religion. There are so many Muslims in the world that it would be good to know more about it, even if you are an atheist. There are no mosque visits for kids as part of religious education where I live, so I was thinking of taking my daughter to one. She has been in churches already.

I always see quotes by Rumi that I like and seem wise ,but I don'tknow much more.

OutwiththeOutCrowd · 17/01/2016 00:32

Here's some Rumi for you, Emily:

"Move beyond any attachment to names.

Every war and every conflict between human beings
has happened because of some disagreement about names.

It’s such an unnecessary foolishness,
because just beyond the arguing
there’s a long table of companionship,
set and waiting for us to sit down.

What is praised is One,
so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.

All religions, all this singing, one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.

Sunlight looks slightly different on this wall
than it does on that wall
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still one light.

We have borrowed these clothes,
these time-and-space personalities,
from a light,
and when we praise,
we pour them back in."

(Sorry for the Islamic Culture Detour!)

emilybohemia · 17/01/2016 00:42

It's beautiful! It seems oddly before it's time, the understanding that we construct our identities. The long table of companionship sounds good to me.

VertigoNun · 17/01/2016 00:43

petition.parliament.uk/help

We check your petition, then publish it. We only reject petitions that don’t meet the standards for petitions.

hefzi · 17/01/2016 01:28

Islam is even less of a monolith, as PP have pointed out, than Christianity is. There are some beliefs that are held in common - such as the idea of the Qu'ran as a revealed text, for example - and others where there is little to no agreement, whether that's the authenticity of various hadiths (for want of a better description, "stories" - not meant in a derogatory way- about the Prophet and what he did or said, passed down through a chain of individuals, which can then be extrapolated from in order to explain ideas or processes etc not covered in the Qu'ran) or the sort of shari'a law they follow, or which succession after the Prophet was favoured.

Most people are aware of the Sunni/Shi'a split, but fewer are familiar with, for example, the Ahmediyya (persecuted significantly, especially in Pakistan) or the Alawites, both of whom consider themselves to be Muslim, but both of whom are considered somewhat heretical but other Islamic sects. As is often the case with religion, believer on believer violence is far more extreme in many cases than violence between religions.

HOWEVER, what all sects have in common is the attitude towards the Qu'ran as a revealed text: those of you familiar with church speak will know the difference between Christian fundamentalists - that everything in the Bible is literally true - and Christian modernists (that some of the Bible can be explained by treating it as allegory, rather than as literal truth). Obviously, that's a bit of an over-simplification for the purposes of this post, but there isn't a mainstream Islamic preacher, much less a sect, that accepts the Qu'ran for anything other than a revealed text. Because it's revealed, this means nothing may be changed or altered (as it has come directly from God through the Angel Jibreel to Mohammed) and as early as maybe the ninth century CE (so 200 years after Mohammed) scholars decided that "the gates of ijtihad" needed to be closed: basically, that there could be no more interpretations of God's laws, because all the main questions had already been answered. Essentially, this has made it very difficult, then (though this assertion is questioned by some Islamic scholars) to disrupt the orthodoxy on various aspects of religious law etc

Initially, though, the Qu'ran is actually a really ground-breaking text in terms of women's rights - essentially, it wasn't just a religious text, but also more or less a political blueprint for how to create a Godly state, so it contains lots of information about inheritance etc People make much now - and rightly so - about Islamic inheritance laws, and that women are entitled to a smaller portion than men. However, at the time it was revealed, this was a major concession - consider the position of women in 7th century Europe with regard to inheritance entitlement!

The issue of polygamy is also much misunderstood - firstly, it was only permissible any way if a husband could undertake to treat his wives exactly the same. Some scholars have argued that this instruction actually means that it is never permissible, because it is not possible for someone to give the same amount of love in the same way to two women. However, the more traditional interpretation looks at it that this must be in a material sense - that the wives must get the same standard of living etc, and the same time spent with them. The real issue here, though, was the inclusion of polygamy at all - it's not laid down in the Qu'ran as a means of men's advantage, but rather, to ensure that widows and orphans (who traditionally got a very raw deal, especially in this period in desert societies) would gain proper status and protection.

The problem is, though, that although these things revolutionised Arabian peninsular society in the 7th century, and spread rapidly through to Europe as a result of the spread of Islam (which was, of course, one of the reasons it was so important to have provision for widows and orphans - there was a lot of fighting, both internally and externally after the death of Mohammed until about the mid 8th century) revolutionising society there, it's arguable that these safeguards are no longer necessary in the 21st century anywhere in the world. Statements intended to be revolutionary in the time that they were first revealed have instead become reactionary, and tools for the oppression of women today.

I would argue that this is because continual interpretation and reinterpretation hasn't been allowed to take place wholesale- but then, I would say that, wouldn't I?!

In some places - Afghanistan, for example, there are cultural practices in some areas that pre-date Islam's appearance in the region: but are today attributed to Islam. A similar phenomenon is FGM - people in general (as opposed to just those who traditionally practice it) widely consider this to be an "Islamic" practice, whereas in fact, it's a cultural tradition, and has nothing to do with Islam whatsoever. Covering the face is also a cultural tradition, and has no basis in Islam whatsoever - it was the practice of wealthy Byzantine women in the 4th and 5th centuries, and was adopted for status by some of the conquerors. In fact, the Grand Imam of al Azhar, the oldest Islamic university, who is pretty much a hard nut when it comes to shar'ia interpretations, actually verbally attacked a group of Cairo school girls when he gave a lecture to them - he told them that covering their faces was unIslamic: and full face covering, including the niqab, is banned at the university. However, there are far more cultural behaviours, particularly surrounding attitudes towards women, that have their bases within the original text of the Qu'ran (which, by the way, for believers, should always be read in Arabic, even if the individual doesn't understand that language - think of the wars that started in Christendome over whether there should be translations of the Bible in the vernacular!) and can be traced clearly from some of the suras.

The problem, as ever with religion, is not necessarily the religion itself, but the ways in which is it used: and, inevitably, the ways in which it is misused by the patriarchy. However, in Islamic countries (and I mean countries that self-define as Islamic, not have significant populations of Muslims or Muslim majorities) the religion, and more importantly, the uses of religion by the elites, has had a significant influence on the post-Islamic culture, and this is the effects we have seen across Europe. I don't think it's possible to quantify precisely the break down of religion vs culture, but it is easy to spot sometimes the religious origins of some of the cultural behaviour. This is why I think it's disingenuous at best, and incorrect at worst, to try to separate the two in these instances we have been discussing across these threads.

hefzi · 17/01/2016 01:36

F' me - that was longer than I thought it was going to be! Sorry Blush

For those who are more interested in the tensions between universalism and cultural relativisim, which is what has been playing out in much of this discussion internationally as well as on MN, here is the OIC's effort at producing an Islamic human rights' document. Articles 5 and 6, connected with marriage and the status of women, are probably of particular interest to universalists and feminists, but I think it's an interesting document in general. It also is a good template for how a culturally relative (based on religion) approach to human rights might appear. It's also useful for demonstrating the role of the Qu'ran in determining the issue of rights etc

VertigoNun · 17/01/2016 07:48

JK may be grieving, I don't know how close she was. JK is dd's hero, she will be pleased to read that article. It's good to know she is onside and a leftie thanks for posting.

RomComPhooey · 17/01/2016 07:50

The comments under JK Rowling's article are bonkers. If that's the average level of discourse out there, it's worrying.

Wordsaremything · 17/01/2016 08:06

Dreadful article by Rowling.

fourmummy · 17/01/2016 08:10

hefzi thank you for your post and your insight. It would be difficult to imagine the Koran as anything other than similar to other great, involving and ostensibly complete works. It would be wrong to do that. However, as we all know, societies and their practices change in light of new information. Knowledges supersede other, new interpretations come to light, conditions change. This is a quote from Carl Sagan that is relevant here:

*In science, it often happens that scientists say, you know, that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion"

Egosumquisum · 17/01/2016 09:28

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Egosumquisum · 17/01/2016 09:31

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shins · 17/01/2016 09:40

"Mr Okwonga, a poet, journalist and communications consultant living in Berlin, said the assaults on women in Cologne and other German cities including Hamburg and Stuttgart on New Year’s Eve, were appalling – but that the incidents should spur greater discussion of women’s rights, rather than focusing primarily on the alleged race of the perpetrators."

I think people were focussing on the CULTURE of the perpetrators, culture being negotiable and up for criticism and capable of change in a way that race is not. I'm so tired of this being hijacked into a race issue. And I'm tired of articles that say "The attacks in Cologne were terrible but..."

Can't JK Rowling formulate her own opinion about what happened, instead of relying on a man's perspective which focuses on the alleged victimhood of the attackers? Doesn't she have any sympathy for the real victims? I skimmed over her Twitter feed for that week and the only other thing she posted on the subject was a retweet of a news article reporting how a couple of Cologne women were rescued from attack by a Syrian man. Which is a nice story. But it's not the main story. I despair.

Wordsaremything · 17/01/2016 09:48

I entirely agree Shins. Does she not have an opinion of her own? 'Poet and communications consultant' But he's male and black, so must be taken seriously.

(And her books are shite as well. Will never forget my disappointment - naively thought it would be great children's literature. She borrows ideas from the classics too- plagiarism or subtle referencing? Take your pick. derail sorry )

OutwiththeOutCrowd · 17/01/2016 09:49

Fourmummy, my own background is in science and the fruits of the Islamic Golden Age are very familiar to me - all the ‘als’ – algebra, algorithm and alchemy. I find it interesting that the father of the scientific method was the Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham who wrote:

"The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and ... attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."

If only it were possible for Muslims not to feel tied to viewing the Quran as inerrant and to follow the advice of Ibn al-Haytham.

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