This is from last month, but I missed it. Egypt’s Islamists want to do away with the category “women” and replace it with “families.”
A women’s conference organized by the dominant Islamist bloc in the Egyptian parliament has called for a council for families to replace the existing National Council for Women, a state-owned daily reported on Friday.
The conference, held Thursday on International Women’s Day, also condemned the 1978 U.N. convention against gender discrimination saying it was “incompatible with the values of Islamic sharia” law, the Al-Ahram newspaper reported.
Great. Faaaaantastic. One, forget all about women, there are no women, there are only families. Two, forget all about equal rights for women, equal rights for women are incompatible with the values of sharia.
That should just about take care of it!
Why be so confrontational? Why not retain the National Council for Women and just make sure that it has no authority? I guess it’s just really important that everybody understands that you really don’t give a damn.
I never thought I would say that but I in complete agreement with the islamists on this, women equality is incompatible with sharia law and one of the two have to be discarded, where we seem to differ is on which one.
When the revolution was happening, Mona Eltahawy and people like her wered dismissing concerns of Islamism in post-Mubarak Egypt with a bunch of hand-waving about “throwing out the old farts” and such. I wonder what they’re thinking now.
I know – I follow Mona on Twitter, and I kept thinking she was over-optimistic…But she was brave, too. She still doesn’t really seem worried enough though.
Ah, I see that they’re taking a page from American xtian wingnuts. Family, from the Etruscan and then the Latin for the household members and servants over which the paterfamilias has the power of life and death. Modern codeword for patriarchal values.
Well, there’s also men. You see, men are always men and when they get married they “have a family”. Women are nothing until they get a married, and then they’re “part of a family”.