Amina a Tunisian Woman Protested about Anti-Women policies and Anti-Women acts in Tunisia.

[BainsBane]

219. I looked through their entire site

and saw only a couple. Their protests are based primarily in Europe and they specifically oppose the notion that they should adapt their ideas to different cultural contexts.

No I wouldn't prefer to live in Saudi Arabia. I do believe women in Saudi Arabia have a right to set their own priorities, however. What especially bothers me is that people here on DU can't be bothered to distinguish between Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, or Turkey. You are educated and know better, so you have a responsibility not to contribute to such stereotypes. You've read post-colonialist theory, so put that to use on this board and don't contribute to the monolithic view of Islams and Muslims that is rampant here.

I attended a conference where a scholar gave a paper on honor killings. He pointed out quite persuasively that police and the media commonly label as honor killings cases that would otherwise be seen as domestic violence. A man kills his wife in Saudi Arabia or a Muslim neighborhood in London, it's an honor killing. Elsewhere it's a batterer who ultimately killed his wife. The Muslim woman is no more dead than the non-Muslim woman.

Tomorrow I'm going to attend a presentation on the affair of the scarf in Paris. That episode reveals that veiling is far more complex than FEMEN and most here understand.

"Islam and the French Republic: the Affair of the Muslim Headscarf (1989-2004)
Carine Bourget, French and Italian, The University of Arizona
In the second half of the twentieth century, France became home to a substantial Muslim minority. One of the most salient and long lasting effects of the phenomenon of immigration from North Africa to France will be to have moved Islam up to the rank of second religion of France.

The “affair of the scarf,” sparked in 1989 when Muslim girls were expelled from their public school for refusing to remove their scarves, started a national debate that culminated into the 2004 law that bans certain religious signs in public schools. This talk will give an overview of the development of the affair, and delineate the other issues that played into the debate, as both the French public school and the Muslim scarf became symbols for various crises affecting France. In addition, it examines how Arab writers living in France have presented the affair of the scarf in non-fiction writings. "