Katoucha, accidental death and other news of interest to feminists

Katoucha, ex-supermodel and campaigner against female circumcision, is found drowned in the Seine.

First female "maazun".

A Holiday Blessing for all whom I love

And Keith Ellison, First Muslim Elected to Congress

Like it says. And even better, he's my Congressional rep. Cool.
That's Keith in the picture up there, next to Amy.

Saudi girls just wanna have fun

In Veil Power (The Guardian) Brian Whitaker deconstructs the myths and truths about the place of women in society in Saudi Arabia. Many of the practices that the West assumes are Muslim "law" and oppressive and hateful to women are, in fact, customs backed up by an often tortured interpretation of the Koran and the choice of women more than of men. The underlying assumption in cultures throughout the Middle East is that sex is an overpowering force, that women cannot help but be temptresses, and that men cannot possibly control their lustful natures in a sexually unsegregated society. This not only leads to women having a completely separate existence, but it leads Arab men into serious trouble when they travel or migrate to or work in the West, where there is an assumption that men are responsible for their own behaviour towards women. So, what's in it for the women of regimes like Saudi Arabia where the "Muslim" way of life is so entrenched that it hardly matters that it's not actually enshrined in law. Well, for one thing, they get better parties.

Soul of a Butterfly

This morning I read a book review for a biography/autobiography of Muhammad Ali from the Times Online Books mailing list. Sometimes, a really good review is almost as good as the book itself. This review was excellent, and is the sort of thing I aspire to in my book reviews. Reviews of books that the reviewer didn't enjoy are rarely good, only when the reviewer is good with corrosive sarcasm and the book is bad enough in a big enough way to deserve it. But a good review of a good book gives you a taste of why that book is so good, gives you a taste of the book itself and gives you a little more besides.

Take love, for example: and the book is all about love. For Ali, it seems essential that he loves vast numbers of people, and is loved back by them. I was there in Atlanta when he lit the Olympic flame, and I felt the oceans of love washing towards him from America and the world. I have been at prize-fights where the very name Ali gets a bigger cheer than either contestant. Ali: the world’s most beloved sportsman; perhaps the world’s most beloved human.
Which is odd when you remember that he spent years as a hate-magnet. Quite deliberately: he modelled his free-wheeling braggart monologues on a wrestler named Gorgeous George, reasoning that the more people who wanted to see his ass whupped, the more tickets he would sell. He was always an actor, an illusionist, a man who adores conjuring tricks. He still does them; though now, as a devout Muslim who will never deceive, he afterwards insists on showing you how it was done.

Baghdad Really is Gonna Be Burning Now

Riverbend had this appalling story in her latest post. It's covered, and I know this because she linked to it, at Yahoo. But I am searching my massive list of US blogs and a few British ones and so far I have found nothing which indicates to me that the Western media is either censoring the story completely or, what's worse to contemplate, nobody is that interested. Although I don't have the links handy, Jeanne has posted about a couple of similar incidents in the past; at least they happened on the street and not actually IN A MOSQUE! Arkhangel has come back to the blog world (for which I am thankful, as his posts are some of the best in my usual reads) to discuss, very eloquently as always, the mosque-desecration photo story that I mentioned earlier.
Taken all together, this seems to illustrate a trend. That the worse things go for the Americans, the more they keep doing the same incredibly stupid and dangerous and cruel and unnecessarily ignorant things in Iraq, in a shocking downward behavioural spiral that feels and smells like a decaying empire. I am with Riverbend on this one - it makes me physically ill. Unlike Riverbend, I don't live in the middle of it, trying to survive. Sister, my prayers are with you daily.

Fear and Loathing in modern global history

I just finished watching part two of a three-part documentary on BBC2 called The Power of Nightmares. It is about phantom enemies, extremism, idealism and fantasy futures fueled by imagined triumphs. My own unfulfillable fantasy is that this show could be screened on American television. Somehow, I doubt that that will ever happen, and that is very depressing. This show is a masterpiece of subtle analysis and adroit connecting of the seemingly random dots in the news stories of the last decade. Watching it, I was overwhelmed by a cascade of "aha!" moments, as bits of knowledge were imparted that comprised missing pieces of the moral puzzles of modern life. I got answers (or at least possible answers) to such questions as: What was the real purpose of the Clinton wars? (Not its avowed purpose.) What is going on inside the world of Islamic political philosophy? (A lot more than you'd ever guess from watching the western media.) Is there any hidden meaning to some of the terrible violence that happens in the middle east? (Yes, but not really hidden, just ignored due to some clever misdirection.) Who really won the Cold War? (It wasn't really a war, and nobody won anything. A rotten government collapsed, and thus some other people were able to change their governments for better ones, but that's part of the cycle of history and was more due to the "cold warriors" looking temporarily in another direction.) Who is John Galt? (Apparently he is this creepily insightful guy named Leo Strauss.)

I will probably have more to say on this later. This was one of those things (films, books, programs) that makes you think, and all the things you think don't come to you at first, but over days and weeks of slow rumination. If I can find the time, I need to do some research on the two prime movers behind today's ascendancy of nightmare: America's neo-cons and Arabia's extremist Islamists. It seems I know a lot less about these guys than I thought I did.

Decadent west to Middle East : Hold fast against the onslaught

Arab Big Brother pulled amid protests, says the headline in the Guardian. And I say, good on ya, Arabs. I wish we could get rid of our Big Brothers and similar LCD, crapola TV shows. You can call it morality, and I suppose it is, but I mainly call it dignity, and over here, we don't have much of that left.
God, I'm getting old and crotchety.

Riverbend on Ashoura

Baghdad Burning's Riverbend has a beautiful post about . . . well, just read it, it's good.

Veiled threat

Jon Henley, writing in the Guardian, discusses the way the French ban on headscarves for Muslim schoolgirls may be about to backfire in a serious way. The original story was covered by this blog and a number of others.

Religion's sexual problems

Karen Armstrong, in an article titled The Eve of destruction, traces the origins of the constantly resurgent misogyny in most modern-day religions. It's not as simple as you probably think.
Quote on Islam:
The Prophet Mohammed, for example, was anxious to emancipate women and they were among his first converts. . . There is nothing in the Koran about the veiling of all women or their confinement in harems. This practice came into Islam some three or four generations after the Prophet, under the influence of the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who had long covered and secluded their women in this way.
Quote on Christianity:
Jesus . . . and St Paul had women disciples. They did not ordain them as priests, because there was no Christian priesthood until the third century. The early Christians espoused a revolutionary egalitarianism; a priestly hierarchy was too reminiscent of Judaism and paganism, which they were beginning to leave behind. Those who today condemn women's ordination as a break with tradition should be aware that priesthood and episcopacy are themselves innovations that depart from the practice of the primitive church.

I have further thoughts, too, on this article, which is sparked by the looming possibility of a breakaway Anglican "wing" which only allows male priests. There are still (and probably always will be) some things about the British psyche that are totally impenetrable to me. Quite a number of them have to do with the Anglican church. This is a country that is almost aggressively secular, not compared to France, obviously, but certainly compared to the US. Less than 10% of nominally Christian Britons are churchgoers or practitioners of any religious devotions such as prayer or meditation. Yet the Anglican church, due to Establisment of Religion, wields enormous if narrowly-channeled power. That's why this ongoing controversy over the ordination of women and female bishops really puzzles me. My own church in the US (United Methodists) is far more conservative on many social and "lifestyle" issues than the centre of the Anglican church in the UK, and yet has had female bishops for decades. The UMC had one major schism in the 19th century over slavery, and has been threatened with another over "reconciling" with gays and lesbians, but the ordination of women was relatively serene, and they (the women) are now some of the most popular and influential bishops. So what accounts for the Anglican hysteria? Misogyny? God forbid!

Riverbend explains cousins and veils

This is the follow-up to the "sheikhs and tribes" post in Baghdad Burning from Monday. It really should be called "veils and hijabs" rather than "cousins and veils" because the main point is a) that male cousins do not force Middle Eastern women to wear veils and b) Westerners often call a hijab a "veil" even though they don't look at all alike. And they conflate veils, burqas and other garments that are not even "Islamic" but simply the traditional modest dress of a particular culture. Read this blog, so you won't be in danger of making ignorant, culture-bound mistakes. I did, and I am a better person for it.

Blogkeeping

If you are one of those people who look at the stuff around the edges of a web page, you may notice that I added a Contact Me link above. Feel free to send e-mail and express yourself.

I also added a few more News links. One of them, Common Dreams, is a great site that I just discovered thanks to my best friend Joani (thanks, Joani!) sending me an article from it by Arthur Schleshinger, Jr., whom my fellow baby-boomers may remember as JFK's "special assistant" and more lately, his biographer. In this article Schleshinger mentions (and it is, I think, the third article I have read to mention it) the speech by President John Addams where he says that America "will not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Thinking of JFK and AS, Jr. being such comsummate cold warriors and all, made me make one of my strange lateral connections. In the Cold War days, the other side, whom we styled, quaintly, "the Soviets", did, or were accused, of exactly that. We used to pride ourselves, as Americans, that we didn't have to export our ideology the way they did, though we granted that they saw themselves as destroying the monsters of capitalist imperialism that stalked abroad. But we thought that the American way of life, the capitalist ideology, the doctrine of freedom, just had to be superior because it sort of exported itself: it leapt off the shelves, it turned up everywhere. Non-Americans could claim to despise us, but they all wanted to be us, even the "Soviets", apart from a few fanatics, would defect at the drop of a hat. And then the Cold War ended (we won) and still there were people who despised us, and they weren't even "Soviets". In the world of Islam, we found some opponents who seemed far more resistance to the old American Schmooze, they did not think our ideology was like flapjacks at all, and they seemed remarkably slow to adopt our way of life, even when they had the dosh to do so. So now at long last we have found a monster worth going abroad to destroy? Well, yes, Al Qaeda fits that bill. But Saddam only ever wore the trappings of Islam as a political technique - he is the opposite of a fanatic, and we really don't (do we?) mean to "destroy" Islam itself. Another hint that maybe the war against Iraq is a winnable proxy for another fight we know we cannot win, at least not satisfyingly and now.