I wrote here about Obama adviser Dalia Mogahed’s pro-Sharia appearance on a Hizb ut-Tahrir television show in Britain. Now, in “Does Sharia Law Promote Women’s Rights?” in FrontPage (October 20), Cinnamon Stillwell reveals even more about the deceptions, half-truths and soothing fictions about women’s rights under Sharia that Mogahed and Nazreen Nawaz peddled on that program:
[...] In delivering these outlandish pronouncements, Mogahed was soft-spoken and careful to confine her commentary to the results of her study. Not so with fellow guest Nazreen Nawaz, who took up the bulk of the interview expounding didactically on the benefits to be bestowed upon humankind by the revival of a Khilafah state, or caliphate. The caliphate envisioned by Nawaz is a mythical one, hearkening back to the so-called “golden age of Islam,” where, according to the party line, all was progress and advancement and everyone lived in harmony. If we could only return to the halcyon days, she urged, all the considerable problems of the Muslim world would be solved. As she put it: “Islam came to solve human problems.” These utopian beliefs reflect those Marxists who insist that “real communism” has not yet been implemented, Stalinism or totalitarianism is an aberration, and that the solution lies in implementing a “true” Socialist state. Claiming that the brutality of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the mullahs in Iran are distortions of sharia law rather than examples of its true implementation, Nawaz promised that under the proposed caliphate, rulers would be democratically elected and accountable to the people, while women’s rights would be protected.
Demonstrating the utter delusion of a fanatic, Nawaz alleged that:
Nonetheless, Nawaz conceded that “there is evidence from Islam that says the Muslim woman cannot be the ruler of a state. This is from the Islamic text,” but managed to justify this exclusion by pointing to recent Muslim women leaders such as the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan who, she claimed, have “brought very little in terms of the lives and the standard of living of women in these countries.”
She also defended Islam’s “strict regulations in terms of social laws” and expressed admiration for precisely those features of Islamic law that most oppress women:
In contrast, Nawaz condemned the West for allowing women too much personal freedom, citing the breakdown of the family and promiscuity as the results:
These are indeed dire consequences, just not, as Nawaz believes, of personal liberty. Rather, they result from the dissolution of the moral framework that supports liberty itself. The struggle to maintain the family structure and women’s dignity amidst growing libertinism is alive and well in the West. But when given the choice, who would trade liberty for the opposite outcome: totalitarianism?
Furthermore, Nawaz demonstrated a lack of understanding about how women’s rights, and indeed human rights, have been achieved historically in the West:
In the face of this vigorous defense of sharia law and strident condemnation of secular democracy, Washington insider Mogahed said not a word. Only when prompted to comment directly on one of Nawaz’s diatribes on the fictional caliphate did Mogahed finally speak, and then she restated the results of the Gallup poll in such a way as to provide backhanded support for Nawaz’s Islamist views. As she put it:
If making Islam a “greater and more authentic part” of Muslim’s lives results in the implementation of sharia law, based not in mythology but in contemporary practice, the predictable outcome is the furtherance of backwardness, repression, intolerance, and inequality afflicting the Muslim world today. Is this really, as Mogahed would have it, what Muslims want?
Read it all.
