And your view is?

snigdhasen — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:14:00 -0600

Panera, welcome and sorry I missed this comment.

Yes, the last line gets you, right? Well, I think Scientific Indian, who I quoted there, has a strong opinion about the issue.

But if you have an arguement, please do write about it!

woah? watz w/ the last line?

panera — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:28:28 -0500

actually, you're not wanting to know about others' arguments or opinions it seems...so I can easily just say what's an a stand if no one else allowed to argue against it?

Tale of two sub-continental ladies -- One voted in, the other hounded out

snigdhasen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:16:26 -0500

Fehmida Mirza and Taslima Nasrin -- both are former physicians and well-known Muslim women from the Indian sub-continent. On Wednesday, destiny (and politics) drove them in dramatically different directions.

While Mirza was elected as the first female Speaker of Pakistan's National Assembly, Bangladeshi author Nasrin -- (my previous post that discusses her is here) --- had to leave India for an undisclosed location in Europe.

Mirza, a 52-year-old former doctor who ran her family business, was the candidate nominated by late Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party and has been elected to Parliament three times. She hails from Bhutto's hometown, Sindh, and was raised in a political (and well-off) family. Her husband is reportedly a close friend of Bhutto's husband and now PPP co-chair, Asif Ali Zardari.

While news of the first woman speaker of the Muslim world can't help but raise hopes, many Pakistanis aren't buying into the rhetoric just yet. First, she's a privileged Pakistani. Second, will all this finally trickle down?

Huma Imtiaz, at The World Has Stopped Spinning, is simply happy that the "National Assembly will resonate with the sounds of Madam Speaker". A few others are skeptical.

Commenting on a post at All Things Pakistan, Tina said:

While I am very happy for Dr. Mirza and wish her the best, the high-achieving women of “influential families” (and it looks like she is a landowner, too) are not the representatives of average women any more than their fathers/husbands/brothers are representatives of the average man. The “influential familes” are there to feather their own nests and the fact that their female members are sometimes involved in the process should not surprise anybody. Yet tomorrow this will be on all the feminist blogs on the internet as “a great step forward for women’s rights”. Please. It’s really not. A great step forward for women’s rights would be the repeal of the Hudood ordinances or the emergence of a prominent woman in any field whose achievements don’t have their roots in her family’s high connections.
Figureheads are just that–figureheads. Some may argue that figureheads have some symbolic value that “trickles down” to other women. But during England’s infamously sexist Victorian times, when women didn’t have any semblance of rights, couldn’t vote, travel without a companion, live independently, or own property, England was ruled by a queen.
So let’s judge Dr. Mirza by what she does for women, and not claim that this represents progress for women just because she happens to be one.

I see Tina's point. But I'd like to cut Pakistan some slack here. It's a start and she's been voted in. At the least, she, like Bhutto, should be able to inspire many women to aspire for top jobs.

Nasrin, on the other hand, hasn't been so lucky. The award-winning, controversial Bangladeshi author -- also a former doctor and a radical feminist by her own admission -- had to flee her country a decade ago, after her books about fundamentalism in her country ruffled too many feathers. After remaining in Europe for a while, she returned to live in Kolkata, West Bengal (the Indian state, bordering Bangladesh, where people share her mother-tongue Bengali or Bangla).
But her works, allegedly criticizing religion for the way it treated women, starting drawing the ire of some in India as well, and she soon started loosing support of the writers' community there (more for literary than religious reasons, we are told).

Last year it came to a head when she was attacked for her alleged anti-Islamic stance. The state government washed its hands off it, and since November last year, she has been moved from one "secret" location to another, until she landed somewhere in Delhi, where she broke down mentally and physically. She finally decided to leave India -- the country she hoped to call her permanent home some day --- for an undisclosed location in Europe. (It seems she may be in one of the Scandinavian countries.)

Nasrin left India deeply dejected and disillusioned. She has promised to make public details of her experience with the Indian authorities. She has been quoted by a newspaper as saying:

"A person who couldn't be scared by fundamentalists has been defeated by cold-blooded state terrorism inflicted by the Indian government. My terrible experience has shattered all my notions about a secular, democratic India."

It's ironic that the government of a country bound by a constitution that ensures freedom of speech and expression, has time and again failed to uphold it. How a government can pick and choose its battles regarding whose sentiments are hurt by what, is beyond me. In a democracy, religion should strictly be a matter of social discourse, not a political one. Unfortunately, the violent ones have their way, because the rest don't care or won't react equally passionately.

Nasrin probably found herself alone for that reason, too -- people who were not fundamentalist in their worldview, just did not care enough to fight for the cause of a "foreigner".

It is indeed a sad day for a country that calls itself free, when a person has to leave -- hounded out, to be more precise -- because he or she is critical of what many people hold to be true.

While I do believe that religion -- if left to the individual to relate to and develop-- is capable of doing a whole lot of good, I appreciate the argument that The Scientific Indian makes here:

Some of us intensely dislike religious fanatics because they have lowered our quality of life greatly by their blindingly stupid theologies, their inexcusable idiocy, their repeated blasphemy of Reason and their actions that have caused immense harm and death. Are these good reasons to offer a bounty for anyone who beheads religious fanatics? How silly would it be to offer such a thing, how unacceptable and criminal it would be to want to kill someone because they spoke disagreeably or acted disagreeably? Which is why we do no such thing even in those moments when the lunacy of religion exceeds limits that we thought were insurmountable. Instead, limited as we are, we study religious texts, religious histories, epics and mythologies. We try to understand in our own limited ways how all this came to be.
[...]
For those who apologize for religion, here are some suggestions: try being a woman in a society that thinks you are a property to be traded, try being raped, try being in exile running from fanatical killers - try atleast one of these things before you come offering your rhetoric. If all that you can do is speak from your cushy armchair like you know shit, fuck off.

BlogHer - Tale of two sub-continental ladies -- One voted in, the other hounded out - Comments

And your view is?

woah? watz w/ the last line?

Tale of two sub-continental ladies -- One voted in, the other hounded out