Inas Younis, one of the most gifted writers I know, has made her comeback with this piece (which I had a hand in editing). Some may find it controversial, but it has to be said. "A moderate Muslim misogynist does not see women as pure; he sees them as failures of purity, and as a necessary evil. He secretly sympathizes with the man who aggresses against them, but he is too politically correct and too troubled by contradiction to articulate why he feels this way. So he relies on his emotional responses to give him clues about his values. The moderate Muslim misogynist is not orthodox in terms of religious practice, and he tends to be an avid consumer of popular culture. He has an emotional attachment to his religion and a militant attachment to his politics. He tends to be an educated man permeating with intellectual flatulence, but he knows little about religion, and feels that he is not able to live up to Islamic ideals, because he has accepted the antithesis of those ideals as articles of faith. He encourages his women to be educated, not in the name of her protection, but in the name of liberty - his financial liberty. He masks his contempt towards women with humour, which he displays in the male infested dens of a hookah bar, a place where a woman needs no less than two male chaperones to protect a reputation more visible than she is. It is within these male dominated public spaces that the moderate Muslim misogynist laments his predicament, as a victim of a “modernized world.” What he is lamenting of course is the old patriarchal order where he can do no wrong. To stand purely on merit, in a free market world of ideas, is a demotion for this Armani-suited moderate Muslim. It is a step-down from a throne where the proverbial pedestal is a mere footrest. He has already found his comfort zone in a world where politically nothing works, and he has installed himself as its dictator and planted God as his protector. He feels nostalgic about the time when women were self-regulated because he had them convinced that self-repression and obedience is social responsibility and religious glory."
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:38:50 +0000
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