Religion Dispatches
…nation. I am a Muslim feminist who does not wear a headscarf. When I, as a Pakistani woman who has immigrated to the United States, visit areas in Pakistan where women normally cover their heads, I wear a headscarf—precisely to show solidarity with them, and to not exaggerate my separateness from them. Without awareness of the role of neo-colonialism, imperialism, economic exploitation, race, culture, class, and gender, feminism is incomplete. Wit…
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…hemy are still used to violate freedom of religious conscience, whether in Pakistan, where members of the persecuted minority Ahmadiyya Muslim community are accused of “defaming the Prophet”; or in Iran, where seven Baha’i leaders have been unjustly imprisoned since 2008 on charges of “warring against God.” Libertarian Theology I don’t mean to compare Matt Stone and Trey Parker to towering reformers and prophets of history or to persecuted religio…
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…freedom-loving urban constituency. Throughout Afghanistan people have cell phones and access to the internet. It’ll be difficult to have the same kind of social control two decades later. Another factor is the way the Taliban came to power in recent months. In February 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo represented President Donald Trump in meetings with Taliban representatives in Qatar. Trump essentially surrendered to the Taliban in excha…
Read More…Gender Concerns International, headquartered in The Hague, with offices in Pakistan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Myanmar. “What we need is equal responsibility for the climate and equal responsiveness to the climate from both men and women.” I was as astonished at the lack of human rights language as I was about the gender shifts, visible, apparent, mind boggling everywhere in the exhibits and the speakers. Responsibility. Responsiveness. Not we h…
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…e Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America, South Africa, South Korea and 11 European countries (including Britain, France and Germany) voted against, on grounds that it put too much emphasis on traditional family structures. South Africa unsuccessfully tried to insert language that took account of same-sex marriages and other non-traditional arrangements. Efforts by Western delegations to include…
Read More…imes, has inflicted violence on women and girls from Vietnam, Okinawa, and Pakistan to Chile, El Salvador, and Somalia and has avenged the deaths of its soldiers by its own “honor killings” that lay siege to entire towns, such as Fallujah in Iraq. It is appalling that in these catastrophic times, many U.S. liberal feminists are focused only on misogynistic practices associated with particular local cultures, as if these exist in capsules, far from…
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…articles—one for each youth—on protecting, respecting, and establishing a number of things. But if you had listened carefully, everything would have started to sound a bit off. The text being read was in fact not the 1989 human rights treaty but instead “A Declaration on the Rights of Children and Their Families: A Call From the Children of the World.” The subject of the event was not as the protection of children as such but the “protection of t…
Read More…ish but Muslim, which you know. “Where are you from?” he asked, and I said Pakistan. “Oh,” he responded, “so you speak Arabic?” My desire to flinch complicated by yes I do speak Arabic. But should I blame him? When I was growing up, all I knew about Pakistanis—other than that we weren’t Arabs and didn’t speak Arabic—was that we were Muslim. I believed all Indians were Hindus, because all the Indians I knew were Hindu. Fortunately, adolescence, att…
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…the Netherlands, Germany, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Qatar, Portugal, Canada, Mexico, the Russian province of north Ossetia, Indonesia, South Africa, Morocco, Japan, Israel, Jordan, Italy, and Spain. They took us into their virtual communities, houses, and mosques, invited us to fatwas, took us on a virtual Hajj to Mecca, and discussed their perceptions of extremism, integration, creative collaboration, and cultural…
Read More…round moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and taking a harder stance on Pakistan (both countries with strong al-Qaeda presences), al-Zawahiri is obviously reacting out of panic. Obama’s promises to end the war in Iraq, close Guantanamo Bay, and use more diplomacy in the Muslim world all translate to more international cooperation from the US and less support for al-Qaeda. Without international support, Al-Qaeda has to draw on localized support,…
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