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by Denis MacEoin • January 5, 2018
at 5:00 am
- "I say that when
a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually
harass her and a national duty to rape her." — Nabih Wahsh,
Islamist lawyer, on Egypt's al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.
- The Iranian Revolution
of 1979 sparked off increasingly revolutionary movements across
the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many
countries denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under
earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey,
following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women's rights being
increasingly denied.
- We urgently need to
drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values --
whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities,
anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. There are also growing
numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find
wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against
the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.
Egyptian
lawyer Nabih Wahsh recently advocated on television for sexual
harassment and rape in retaliation for the temptation caused by
uncovered women. (Image source: MEMRI)
For a time, one could not open a newspaper or visit an
online news site without finding yet another scandal about sexual
harassment. Lawyers are presumably going to have a field day for
years to come. In the UK, a further wave of accusations has shaken an
already shaky parliament and the Government, whose Cabinet is
increasingly in disarray. In the US Congress, Hollywood and
elsewhere, similar claims are still being made, with #MeToo stories
being shared by women, while there is an unknown number of
accusations in US statehouses.
Sex scandals in the West are far from new.[1] The
irony is that this brings us face to face with attitudes to the same
problem in the Islamic world.
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