Left-of-center Ethics Alarms follower deery gets a lot of heat on Ethics Alarms, but he has a much-valued knack for spawning edifying exchanges. In this reply to one of his comments arguing that Christianity and Islam near equivilency in their more extreme positions, Ulrike delivers the Comment of the Day, in the battle following the post, “Of The Good Muslim, Paris, ‘1984’, And The Compulsion To Deny The Truth.”
Here it is:
I’d like to make the claim that 1300 years ago, in almost any society women were the losers but now the distinction can be seen by anyone who has eyes. Christians moved on from those times and their nations became successful world powers. On the other hand, oil seems to be the main driving force behind anything in the Arab League.
And yes, in the beginning Islam had a positive influence on the scientific community in so far as it united the Arabic world which up to that date was splintered into tribes. Arabic became the lingua franca and facilitated the trade of knowledge and commodities. The Arabs become the driving force in translating ancient Greek literature – I could go on and on, the list is long, but I’m too lazy. So while we still lived like Neanderthals, the Arabic world had flourishing cities that were the trade centers of the Orient.
Now here’s the rub: The decline of science and the renunciation of modernity can also be attributed to Islam. How can that be, when I just stated that it was a major factor in the rise of science. Well, not Islam as a religion facilitated this rise but its role in uniting the arabic world economically and territorially. But when the Muslim faith came to be the established force behind everything and anything its disciples started to consolidate the belief that science was equal to renouncing Allah.
If you set yourself the task to name any invention in medicine, chemistry, physics or engineering from the last two hundered years that originated in the Arabic world – you have your answer which faith benefited progress more. Christian society developed towards modernity and Muslim society turned away from it…
And though women’s rights were slow in coming, even in medieval Europe women who joined a convent could study and publish their scientific findings.
So in the end, two very very old books both contain passages that reflect a motto of “Ladies last” – but one thousand years on, one society came to the conclusion that that is rubbish and the other didn’t…
Ethics Alarms 
If men and women are intrinsically equal, how could this be true,.How were men able to dominate every society?
Define ‘dominate’. You have to look at not only who forms government and who makes the final decisions, but things like who influences those decisions and who works to produce the situations that make those choices possible.
There was a lovely little feminist gif flying around the internet of an ice cream machine plopping ice cream from the sky. A man catches the first three balls of ice cream and takes a lick, while he’s taking that lick, a woman catches the fourth ball, the man notices and declares “MISANDRY”. The point of the gif is that “Misandry Don’t Reals.”
The problem is that no one asked the question: “Who made the ice cream?”
Male disposability is a huge theme throughout history, most eloquently summed up in the adage “Women and Children First”. Feminists tout their absolutely broken 23% wage gap, but they remain conspicuously silent about the 92% workplace injury and death gap. They’ll talk about the glass ceiling, but remain moot on the glass cellar.
The fact of the matter is that women demanding the benefits of systems built and maintained by men has equivalencies to new cable companies that are complaining about monopolies while expecting to operate using infrastructure that was built and maintained by their competitors. The analogy isn’t perfect, I know. But it’s there. Women need to start doing the same work as men to expect the same benefits.
And so ‘dominate’ is a funny word. Women receive more benefit for less labor than men, they are less likely to be expected to sacrifice for basically anything, their lives in defense, their money in relationships, their time in relation to their choices. They’re 51% of the electorate, not because women are born more often, but because men die younger. But men dominate, right?
This is a pretty good book that covers the history of Islam and the West over the last 1,000 years or so: http://www.amazon.com/What-Went-Wrong-Between-Modernity/dp/0060516054
The misogynistic passages of the Bible are in the Old Testament. Christianity is based on the New Testament, the new covenant which dissolved the old when Jesus was crucified. Women are little more than pets in islam. If you want to really get a feel for the essence of Islam, ask its apostates.
Actually, even in the ot, women received unheralded rights and equality. Sure, to our modern eyes, “if you rape a girl, you must marry her and pay twice the normal dowry”seems like a massive slap in the face, but when the rule it’s replacing is “eh… You probably shouldn’t rape people, unless you really want to” then the notion of providing for her for the rest of her life without the option of divorce suddenly seems like an impressive step forward.
True, and it’s definitely better than “if you were raped, you’d better have 4 male witnesses to prove coercion, otherwise you are a harlot and brought it on yourself, and we’re going to throw rocks at you until you’re dead”. I can’t help but hope that mohammed (piss be upon him) burns in hell.
And Judaism?
This saddens me, because it treats an entire religion as homogeneous, and at that, homogeneous with respect to a small minority. It’s true that women are trivialized and infantilized in parts of the Muslim world, especially Saudi Arabia and parts of Afghanistan.
But in other parts of the Arab world they are as liberated as anywhere–e.g., in Palestine. Lebanon, Oman, and I suspect in other places. I spoke in Oman at the Sultan Qaboos University business school, where the Dean was a woman. And Hanna Ashrafi has long been one of the Palestinian leaders.
But Arabs make up a tiny, tiny fraction of Muslims. Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh have long had women as chiefs of state. In Turkey, with which I’m very familiar, I’ve met women CEOs, women professors at leading universities, and women business leaders, strong women that hold their own anywhere in their societies.
Let’s not hang the sins of the 13th century around the necks of a billion Muslims that are as diverse in their beliefs as Jews, Mormons, Catholics, and people in general.
When you read the Sultan Qaboos University mantra: “The suppression of ideas and thought is a major sin, and we will never allow anyone to stifle freedom of thought.” – it’s especially sad that their legal system is still based on the shari’ah…
You can credit this to Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) the First President of Turkey. Turkish education became a state-supervised system, which was designed to create a skill base for the social and economic progress of the country. On 3 March 1924, the caliphate was officially abolished and its powers within Turkey were transferred to the GNA.