[Times-UK] Phyllis Chesler - In Afghanistan, married for two years to a Westernized Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college, I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughters-in-law and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence). I learned not to romanticize Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learned that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes. Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues have demonized me as a racist "Islamophobe" for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have denounced the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated. The writer is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the City University of New York.
2007-03-08 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive