Who'd Be Female Under Islamic Law?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in The Independent:

I am a Muslim woman and, like my late mother, free, independent, sensuous, educated, liberal, contrary and confrontational when provoked, both feminine and feminist.  I style and colour my hair, wear lovely things and perfumes, appear on public platforms with men who are not related to me, shake their hands, embrace some I know well, take care of my family.

I defend Muslims persecuted by their enemies and their own kith and kin. I pray, fast, give to charity and try to be a decent human being.  I also drink wine and do not lie about that, unlike so many other good Muslims.  I am the kind of Muslim woman who maddens reactionary Muslim men and their asinine female followers.  What a badge of honour.

I am aware that my words will help confirm the pernicious prejudices that fester in the minds of those who despise Islam.  Yet to conceal or excuse the violations would be to condone and encourage them.  There have been enlightened times when some Muslim civilisations honoured and cherished females.  This is not one of them.  Across the West – for a host of reasons – millions of Muslims are embracing backward practices.  In the UK young girls – some so young that they are still in push chairs – are covered up in hijabs.  Disgracefully, there are always vocal Muslim women who seek to justify honour killings, forced marriages, inequality, polygamy and childhood betrothals.  Why are large numbers of Muslim men so terrorised by the female body and spirit?  Why do Muslim women encourage this savage paranoia?

I look out of my study at the common and see a wife fully burkaed on a sunny day.  She sits still.  Her children and husband run around, laughing, playing cricket.  She sits still, dead, buried, a ghost.  She is complicit in her own degradation, as are countless others.  Their acquiescence in a free democracy is a crime against their sisters who have no such choices in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

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