Tawik Hamid’s editorial appeared in the WSJ and is also available at Women Living Under Muslim Laws, an organization devoted to promoting women’s equality under informal and formal Muslim influence, and discouraging Islamic fundamentalism. In her editorial, How to End Islamophobia, Hamid shows how organizations like CAIR uses demagoguery by labeling those who disagree with their agenda Islamaphobic. Her editorial is an illuminating narrative on how the infection of political correctness is used to silence Muslim reformers. While her piece covers a wide range of Islamic issues from suicide bombing to Muslim support to Al-Qaeda, she notes several times how this impacts women’s equality under Islam:
To bring an end to Islamophobia, we must employ a holistic approach that treats the core of the disease. It will not suffice to merely suppress the symptoms. It is imperative to adopt new Islamic teachings that do not allow killing apostates (Redda Law). Islamic authorities must provide mainstream Islamic books that forbid polygamy and beating women. Accepted Islamic doctrine should take a strong stand against slavery and the raping of female war prisoners, as happens in Darfur under the explicit canons of Shariah ("Ma Malakat Aimanikum"). Muslims should teach, everywhere and universally, that a woman's testimony in court counts as much as a man's, that women should not be punished if they marry whom they please or dress as they wish.
Her piece leads us to the scourge of political correctness, and how it can threaten women’s rights everywhere. This political correctness stems in part from multiculturalists that preach all cultures are equal. This philosophy itself is destroyed when it tolerates intolerance. It provides a deterministic context to society based on a person’s ethnic or racial origins, or sex, inflaming identity politics and differentiation. This moral relativism flies in the face of reason and modern science. With everything modern science has to offer, how can some feminists argue for reproductive rights but ignore the contradictions of multiculturalism that passes no judgment on the practice of female genital mutilation in some cultures? A consequence of this thinking is shown in places like rural China and India, where male infants are preferred over female infants. While it’s illegal for women to abort based on the fetus’s sex, their access to abortion still leads this to be widely practiced, leading to serious demographic problems where males outnumber females. This ends up hurting women, by making them targets for rapes and male violence.
This argument against multiculturalism has been made by liberal feminists such as Susan Okin. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is another prominent critic of multiculturalism, so much in fact that a Dutch court shamefully ruled she could be evicted from her home, due to complaints from her neighbors that they feared for their safety, all because of her criticism of Islam’s treatment of women.
A rejection of multiculturalism is not a rejection of political and cultural pluralism, as articulated by James Madison and Isaiah Berlin , which recognizes diversity of interests and cultures as reality. Differences can be negotiated and compromised on for the greater good, provided groups share common underlying values. Embracing pluralism recognizes that contributions of different cultures can enrich society and serve as a barrier to racism and xenophobia. However, in democratic theory, the underlying shared value is man’s free will. This gives society freedom of speech and expression so individuals and groups can debate the balance between minority rights and majority rule, and the amount of cultural integration that is appropriate in a given society. These underlying individual freedoms allow men and women to chose their own cultural context. Replacing this core natural right with multiculturalism, animated by political correctness, can destroy them both.
Good piece. I'm surprised the PC crowd turns such a blind eye. What do you expect from the insanely liberal Dutch, though?
Posted by: | June 05, 2007 at 07:41 PM