Tuesday, December 1, 2009

WOMEN'S RIGHTS OR MEN'S RIGHTS?


Lubna Hussein worked for the United Nations until she quit to avoid dragging the UN into her legal troubles in her home country Sudan.  In September of 2009 she was arrested and fined, for wearing pants in Nairobi, $200.  She showed up in court wearing the same pants she got arrested in.  The judge refused her lawyer entry into the court room. She was charged the fine thereby Sudan avoided international outrage because according to the current translation of Islamic law she could have been whipped!  Consistent in her defiance, Lubna Hussein refused to pay the fine, and viewed jail as an opportunity to observe the conditions of jail as a journalist! 

"Sudan is partly governed by Islamic law, which calls for women to dress modestly. But the law is vague. According to Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing” can be fined and lashed up to 40 times.
It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of female protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled, “God is great.” "

My questions are concerns and observations of law and priviledge; male priviledge. Whose rights are being served, and whose rights are being upheld?  In protests right or wrong Muslim men always evoke Allah to justify anything deemed worthy of being protected for their benefit.  Why? Where does that place their mothers they claim to die for?  Where does this reasoning come from? Muslim men share the same myth/creation stories Christians and Jews claim as their own.  Yet each set of men believe and justify the same things in degrees: wars, subjugation of land, people and women, and the upholding of the past as an example of the best ways to live.  Each religion shares a common history, and passionate belief, contradictory in nature, about the role and place of women.  Each view has led to horrible atrocities upon the women and wombs that births the nations they cry unto Allah, God and Jehovah.  My question?  Ain't this some shit

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories & father of four



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