Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / December 23, 2007
THE "QATIF GIRL" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia'sKing Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges againstseven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeksearlier, Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to GillianGibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had beensentenced to prison, but government-organize d street demonstratorswere loudly demanding her execution.
In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after adeath sentence against her was revoked. She had originally beenconvicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two othersattempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to therapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging innonmarital sex.)
The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and itwas not coincidental that each case had triggered an internationalfuror. But for every "Qatif girl" or Nazanin who is saved, there arefar too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance nevercomes.
No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whosefather was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because sherefused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else,"one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad hada problem with that."
No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdishimmigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last yearafter she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with aman not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked todeath with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden70 miles away.
More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain'sMuslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.
There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murderin Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi policesay that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year byIslamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notesaccusing the victims of "un-Islamic behavior."
By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, andthe sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality,are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violenceand depravity:
In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped aspunishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman fromanother tribe.
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after sheuncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor ata friend's wedding.
In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because hesuspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend myhonor, fame, and dignity."
In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leavinga burning building because they were not wearing headscarves andabayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.
The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center ofIslamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in atelevision interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh AhmadAl-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."
When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repressionof women was among their first priorities. They issued a decreeforbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work andschooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country'shealthcare system, civil service, and elementary education."
Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, andseven out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in "TheLooming Tower," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Underthe Taliban, many of them would become beggars.
"Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. MohammedHalim, a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his familyand horribly murdered last year - disemboweled and then dismembered -for defying orders to stop educating girls.
All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that willnever be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it.As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices.It took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. Butthere are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is http://us.f362.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=jacoby%40globe.com.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
