Today, i attended a chat by the director of the ABC newspaper here in Madrid. He was supposed to speak of Zapatero´s pioneering promotion of an Aliance of Civilizations. he mentioned that the idea goes back to Iran´s Khatami in fact and he did start off by saying that all cultures should be respected and treated equally or something like that...Then he went on to say that it was going to be a massive challenge for the West since there are some values in Islam which just seem too incompatible- like issues with fudamental human rights, women´s rights, whihc he went to town about, then he moved to the idea that since the Shariah laid out such clear patterns and rules of law and order, that it was difficult to change or come to some of agreement...in other words, the problem was Islam. I´d like to mention briefly some of his statements which caught my attention, like at the beginning when he was asked to differentiate amongst the terms moro, arabe, musulman. he rightly noted that musulman and arabe were definitely not synonymous..that arabs arent the only muslims and then stated to name other countries with Muslim majorities, noting Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran. He then went on to say that it was India that had the most Muslims!! it drew my attention that he didnt mention neither Indonesia nor Malaysia...
Next he went to town again with the whole debate on women´s subjugation and lack of rights in Islam- how two women witnesses were equivalent to one, how women only inherited half the amount of property as men, women were forced to cover up and he even went so far as to say that he felt the suffering of those Muslim women (we assume all of them) who are forced to wear the hijab etc. Well, what im really interested is in the question segment, where it seemed students were much more knowledgeable and reasonable. Some noted that he didnt quite differentiate between Islamism (extremist) and Islam but attempted to show that it was Islam, with some of its values, that was the problem in the dialogue with the all extending hand of the west.. one guy made mention of the nationalist, socialist movements in some Arab countries, like that of Nasser for example, and its failure which led Muslims to adopt more exteme views and give attention to extremists...another spoke about the degradation and humilliation of women in all religions, and that if Europe now respected women more, it was only because it was able to partly get out of the clutch of the Church... another mentioned that like Christ, the prophet Mohammad could also have been seen to dignify and elevate the status of women... yet another mentioned, and this is a point i´d like to stress, that this whole Alliance of civilisations, which is in reaction to Huntington´s clash of civilisations, only seeks to reinforce the divide in cultures and does not promote at all the idea of one single civilisation, but that totally different cultures, almost incompatible, had to find at least something in common... Well it seems that the idea that religion is attacked only when it appears as an obstacle to the free movement of capital, has to be reinforced.. what does the West really care about women who are seemingly oppressed under veils that nobody would bother to wear if given the choice... or about the poverty and violation of human rights in these countries.. Bush in his visit to Latin America, is trying to appease violent protests by attempting to highlight this humanist side of good America, in its fight to improve the conditions of people etc... rhetoric that nobody believes... in the end, though, the debate seemed to all come back to secularism and the hijab...and women in Islam... the eternal question.. and well, the eternal paradox of me being there with my hijab, silent, passive, listening to this debate while others spoke... the guy behind me asked me if i suffered due to my hijab, going on what the guy had said.. i told him i had just read an article of a Moroccan who did a study and found more than 60 reasons why women wear the hijab... he tried to almost force me to tell this to that guy.. because as he said.. he was only fomenting.. lack of knowledge... well, thats how it ended, i left, just as i came in, silently and alone.
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