The Serpent's Wisdom

Well, i never imagined that a proclamation of women's rights would squick me, but the town of Herouxville, Quebec, managed to do just that:

A sign at the entrance of this rural Quebec town says: Herouxville welcomes you. Unless, that is, you plan on stoning a woman to death, sending your kids to school with a kirpan or covering your face other than on Halloween.

The town council of Herouxville, a sleepy town dominated by a towering Roman Catholic church, has adopted a declaration of "norms" that it says would-be immigrants should be aware of before they settle in this town.  Among them, it is forbidden to stone women or burn them with acid.

from Quebec town outlines societal 'norms' for would-be immigrants

Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, said the declaration had "set the clock back for decades" as far as race relations were concerned.  "I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion ... in a public document written by people in authority who discriminate openly," he told Reuters.

from Town to immigrants: you can't kill women

Well... i'm glad to hear that the town frowns on stoning women to death, burning them alive, or throwing acid on them.  Everyone everywhere should frown on these sorts of things.

But the proclamations and signage are worded so as to single out immigrants, in such a way that it underscores and perpetuates certain racial stereotypes.  It has to be read in the larger global context.

I'm especially thoughtful on this lately because i'm currently reading Color of Violence and the first piece therein is a blockbuster dealing with racist stereotype scripts and the way they color bias in the enforcement and creation of laws, particularly in the matter of justice for women.

In this set of "norms for immigrants to follow" is the implication that we are normal, moral people who treat women well whereas you are unschooled and barbaric and have to be told the proper way to treat women.

What is the proper way for westerners, who are concerned about cases they hear of stoning women to death in other countries, or burning them alive, or throwing acid on them, to voice their concerns about these things?  The proper way is to tie misogyny and racism in another culture with misogyny and racism in your own culture and understand them both as reflections of a global pattern of oppression.  The proper way is to let voices of dissent from the other culture speak for themselves rather than paternalistically speaking for them.  A "we are good, you are bad; listen to us, we'll tell you the right way" stance which presumes cultural superiority (in the global context of Euro-American colonization of the rest of the world, no less!) is not the proper way to voice these concerns.

In the last week there has been a storm in the mass media about controversy over some comments Pope Benedict made about Islam.

You can read a translated text of the lecture at the heart of the controversy here.

Reading this text, it is quite immediately obvious that the mass media -- surprise, surprise! -- is mis-portraying the essence of the controversy. Muslims are not just 'overly sensitive' and protesting the Pope's obscure quotation of a medieval emperor -- though certainly that quotation doesn't help.

This entire lecture is a diatribe about the superiority of Catholic "reason" over the explicit irrationality of Islam and the godlessness of secularism. And this came from the Pope.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

The violent actions of some Muslim protesters -- possibly including the assassination of a nun in Somalia (the perps gave no explicit motive) -- doesn't make it any easier for Muslim scholars to rebut Benedict's comments. (Nor, for that matter, does reality.)

But it would be nice to see the Pope demonstrate in what universe the Catholic Church has adhered to this lofty idea of Catholicism as a non-violent marriage of faith and reason. Not this universe, to be sure.

Catholics have been saying this about themselves since Thomas Aquinas. I've yet to see how it really works. Instead, what i see is an abundance of irrationality which is defended very eloquently.

Eloquence is not reason.

One more time: eloquence is not reason.

Reason demands full openness of discourse, inside and outside the organization. The Catholic Church does not have this. There is no recourse for dissenters or even, in some cases, for innovators; they are censured, cajoled by superiors to 'humbly reconsider' or to 'respect tradition,' forcibly silenced, denied participation in sacraments, defrocked, excommunicated. In previous eras, they were also tortured or executed.

Coersion of dissidents is defended with eloquent expositions, which are then described as "reason" because they are moderate and intellectual in tone.

If 'Truth' will truly prevail, then there is no reason to fear any line of inquiry. So why does the Church suppress any critique of doctrine? This is not a marriage of reason and faith. What kind of faith turns away from the truly difficult questions?

The Catholic Church is guilty of the same charge Benedict makes of Islam.

This Pope is fond of warning about dangers he perceives in secularism -- and i think he perceives the same danger i do, of meaning being driven out of our cultural discourse. I am an atheist and i can see the same dangers, but i do not think the solution is for humanity to seek refuge in the deafening echo chambers of religion or tradition.

Sometimes i'm just absolutely stunned by the depths to which hatred of women can sink. And i'm dismayed when i see how often the primary excuse is "defending our religious traditions."

Maybe it's the peace, love, and compassion speaking, but no principle is worth defending if it creates injustice.

Lawmakers from a coalition of six Islamic groups threatened on Tuesday to vacate their parliamentary seats if Pakistan's government changes a rape law criticized by human rights activists.

... Under the current law, approved by a former military dictator in 1979, prosecuting a rape case requires testimony from four witnesses, making punishment almost impossible because such attacks are rarely public. A woman who claims she was raped but fails to prove her case can be convicted of adultery, punishable by death.

Maulana Fazalur Rahman, a leader of the Islamic coalition, said Tuesday that lawmakers in his group would vacate their seats in the National Assembly if the government tries to get the assembly's approval to change the law.

"We will render every sacrifice for the protection of the Shariah (traditional Islamic) laws," he said at a news conference.

However, the ruling Pakistan Muslim Party — which has a majority in the assembly — has praised Musharraf for taking steps to amend the law and end the four-witness requirement.

from Rape law rankles some Pakistan lawmakers

from antiwar_dot_com:

US observers, including US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have continually worried in public about Iraq becoming a theocracy, and have rejected that option. But the American-appointed Interim Governing Council has suddenly taken Iraq in a theocratic direction that has important implications for women's rights. As reported here earlier, the IGC took a decision recently to abolish Iraq's civil personal status law, which was uniform for all Iraqis under the Baath. In its place, the IGC called for religious law to govern personal status, to be administered by the clerics of each of Iraq's major religious communities for members of their religion. Thus, Shiites would be under Shiite law and Chaldeans under Catholic canon law for these purposes.

The IGC has ceded to the religious codes jurisdiction over marriage, engagement, suitability to marry, the marriage contract, proof of marriage, dowry, financial support, divorce, the 3-month "severance payments" owed to divorced wives in lieu of alimony, inheritance, and all other personal status matters.

For the vast majority of women who are Muslim, the implementation of `iddah or the obligation of a man to support a woman for 3 months after he divorces her (a term long enough to see whether she is pregnant with his child) has the effect of abolishing the divorced woman's right to alimony. This abrogation of alimony was effected for Muslims in India in the mid-1980s with the Shah Banou case, as the Congress Party's sop to Indian Muslim fundamentalists. The particular form of Islamic law that the IGC seems to envisage operating would also give men the right of unilateral divorce over their wives, gives men the right to take second, third and fourth wives, and gives girls half as much inheritance from the father's estate as boys.

Mass Demonstrations by Women, Others, Against Sudden Islamization of Iraqi Law