Religion Dispatches
…r her. At the same time, I sympathized with Muslimah Pride’s irritation at Western feminist arrogance, and felt somewhat ashamed. We are always so ready to pounce when non-Western women are threatened. Indeed, as scholar Lila Abu-Lughod points out, even Americans who are not feminists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah…
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…vel headed cost-benefit analysis when it comes to discussing the crimes of Western armies, civilian dead, and where next to bring the civilizational goods of democratic modernity. This is the “we” whose public voice constitutes the consensus around shared national values. The problem with Marion’s “we” is not the way it assents to the specified content of liberal rights and secular values (indeed, such values are shared widely – beyond the West an…
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…le. This 400-year period of occupation was only temporarily interrupted by Western Christian empires vying with the Ottomans. When in the 19th century, Serbian and Greek nationalist movements began to throw off the Turkish yoke, independence was often accompanied by interference from the modern Western powers, such as Great Britain, France and the United States. Throughout this entire time, Russia was actually the exception for the most part. At l…
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…rogram in which students from Russia, other post-Soviet states and various Western countries got along well and became friends. In my second year, however, a chill fell over the classroom. The Westerners sat on one side, those from Russia and Ukraine on the other—minus one Ukrainian who had dropped out—and the two student factions openly antagonized each other. The Stanford in Moscow program became officially defunct. In my third year, there were…
Read More…issive women’s clothing has to be controlled by liberal laws in democratic Western nations? Socialist MP Maria Roth-Bernasconi was irritated that Calmy-Rey may have angered Iranian feminists, and Social Democrat MP Liliane Maury Pasquier complained that the minister should have shown solidarity with “the women who fight against wearing the headscarf.” Sigh. Let secularized Christendom discover, once and for all, that Muslims don’t have the equival…
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…strong, who has called Islamic veiling a reaction to swift installation of Western standards in non-Western societies. In her 2000 book The Battle for God, she identified burkas as “a tacit critique of the darker side of the modern spirit” and a way for Muslim women to maintain their identity while transitioning from rural traditions to industrialized urban living. “Burka Avenger,” in other words, may do more to encourage the large majority of Pak…
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…rganization (NGO) had registered 8,000 gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the Western and Central regions of the country which, if accurate, would represent a significant increase over past estimates. Within days, religious groups united to call on the Ghanaian government for action against sexual minorities. Both Christian and Muslim coalitions have declared that they will not support a politician who favors relaxing the laws covering homosexuality….
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…y means the declining significance of religion. Many secular intellectuals today have a hard time taking religion seriously; they tend to see it merely as a proxy for material interests or conditions. I think that view is mistaken, in part because it discounts what sociologist John Torpey calls latent religiosity. My book argues that instead of abandoning notions about Jews that were derived from Christian theology, Western social thinkers sometim…
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…ritarian rule by creating, and then punishing, the image of a suspicious, “Western” other. It’s also tempting to let Kadyrov’s words shape Western discourse about Chechnya: that it (or Islam) is intrinsically homophobic, that violence, or honor killings, are simply part of Chechen life. But to do so would be to allow ourselves to fall into the trap of taking Kadyrov’s propagandist rhetoric about what is and is not “Chechen” at face value. The LGBT…
Read More…grew out of a particular tradition: namely the key texts and histories of “Western civilization.” It’s rather shocking to realize that the stereotypes found in the medieval Song of Roland are still prevalent today. To understand Islamophobia in other parts of the world—South Asia, Africa—I would have had to immerse myself in the history and cultures of those parts of the world, and frankly I am just not familiar enough with those regions to undert…
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