Writing about Muslims, especially the status of Muslim women, represents part of wider campaign. Its designs are becoming more obvious every day: the fight against terrorism is in reality a fight against Islam.
A Kashmiri woman activist, describing the suffering of her people under Indian occupation for 54 years, described her people as victims of the double standards policy followed by the United Nations.
According to her, 8,00 women have so far been killed and 7,000 raped by Indian forces. In addition, 30,000 widows and 100,000 orphans have been created since the start of the latest uprising.
The Indian government is blocking any international attempt to assist these victims and is fighting Kashmiri charity organizations.
Not one of the 13 resolutions passed by the UN on Kashmir has been implemented.
These are shocking figures that remind us of the continuing suffering of the Palestinian people; it goes on with the evident blessing of the American administration and shameful silence from the rest of the world.
Let us consider what is happening to Muslim women in the United States, the country of so-called democracy, freedom and justice.
A South Dakota court has recently ruled that the custody of a five-year-old child should go to the father because the child’s mother had embraced Islam and was planning to travel abroad with her Egyptian husband.
And what about a recent article in the Guardian by Edward Pilkington who wrote about the status of Saudi women. He wrote, “In public life, women are almost entirely segregated from men, excluded from the workplace, confined to special ‘family sections’ in restaurants, taught in separate schools and colleges and forbidden to drive.”
Citing signs of reform, including allowing women to have identity cards, Mr. Pilkington concluded the card “brings to an end the iniquitous legal position in which a Saudi women simply does not exist.” As a child, he said, the Saudi woman is the ward of her father; as an adult the ward of her husband and as a widow the ward of her sons.
He then went on to cite the case of an Italian woman who divorced her Saudi husband because he wanted to take a second wife. The woman has been told she may never see her daughter again. Predictably the writer chose not to mention anything about child custody in Islam.
I wish Mr. Pilkington had said something about the American woman who lost custody of her five-year-old child because she became a Muslim and began wearing hijab (head scarf).
I wish he had written about the Afghan women teacher who was prevented by a German court from wearing hijab in class because the court saw in this a religious affiliation contrary to the state’s policy of neutrality.
To those writers attacking the hijab, I want to ask why they don’t attack nuns who wear long dresses and cover their heads?
Doesn’t such clothing obstruct their movements and prevent them from fulfilling their desires in expressing themselves? It seems there are no limits to which these writers will not go to attack Islam.
21 July 2002
