Daily Kos moron: No evidence women have it tougher under Islamic law
In the United States, there’s now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. But there’s scant empirical evidence to support the claim — mostly, we’re treated to detailed reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that just six percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If you ask average Americans how they came to their beliefs about how badly women suffer in Islamic societies, most will reply that “everyone knows it.”
But I’ve seen no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women’s ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to higher education. In other words, you can use a comparison of women’s status in Saudi Arabia and Sweden to make an intellectually weak argument for Western superiority, but there’s little support for the notion that women living in “traditional” Islamic cultures enjoy a lower social status than those in orthodox Christian, Jewish or Hindu communities, to name a few examples. Think of the perfectly backwards Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Christian communion in the world. Or consider the country where women may be brutalized more terribly than in any other, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is 70 percent Christian and 10 percent Muslim. Or go to Utah, where tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalists believe that women are literally the property of their fathers or husbands. Of course, Mormon fundamentalists are the exception that proves the endless benevolence and equality of the West, while whatever despicable caricature of justice perpetrated on a woman by the House of Saud is breathlessly recounted as emblematic of Islamic culture as a whole.
Comparing the “Muslim world” to the rest of the world poses an intellectual problem — how does one even look at the role of Islam in a society, specifically, rather than dozens of other variables that might influence women’s outcomes?
Yes folks, little Joshua IS that stupid.
H/T Hot Air, LGF
March 9th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
[...] Autowiki wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/8/113441/9355/729/472186 In the United States, there’s now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. But there’s scant empirical evidence to support the claim — mostly, we’re treated to detailed reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that just six percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If yo [...]