India is celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights. But Indian feminist author Rita Banerji is not celebrating it, because she does not like the Diwali story. She thinks the gods and the traditions people celebrate in India, contain the seeds of violence against women and girls. She says: [Read more…]
A mother murdered her son and set his body on fire when he struggled to learn the Quran off by heart.
Sara Ege used a stick to beat seven-year-old Yaseen “like a dog” if he couldn’t recite passages from the Islamic text. The beatings were so brutal that the boy died from his injuries, and his mother tried to burn the body to destroy the evidence. In a video recording of her interview with police, Mrs Ege told them: “I was trying to teach him the Koran.“I was getting more and more frustrated. If he didn’t read it properly I would be very angry — I would hit him. We had a high target. I wanted him to learn 35 pages in three months.
“I promised him a new bike if he could do it. But Yaseen wasn’t very good — after a year of practice he had only learnt a chapter.” [Read more…]
‘Commit sins as much as you can,but perfom hajj before you die. I’ll forgive all your sins. No worries, you’ll go to heaven’ – God
I think everybody knows the hajj story. [Read more…]
Woman and her baby daughter were burned alive by her husband and in-laws for dowry and a son.
A 25-year-old BTech graduate Pravartika Gupta and her baby daughter were allegedly burnt alive by her husband and in-laws at Delhi’s Sarojini Nagar area. In a country where 8,000 women are killed each year over dowry and rapes occur rampantly everyday, the case serves to further highlight India’s chilling attitude towards its women. [Read more…]
Evolutionary science shows we do not need religion to have order and even courtesy in relationships. True. But the statement like ‘male generally provides protection and food. Male and female have very different genetic interests. Male persuades lots of female to mate with him. Female persuades one male to be loyal and faithful to her and to provide for economic upbringing of her offspring’ sounds outdated. Is it to justify patriarchy?
Madanjeet singh, the UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and the Founder of the South Asia Foundation is one of the greatest secular humanists of our time. An attack on Malala Yousafzai prompted him to donate one million U.S. dollars to women's education and empowerment. [Read more…]
Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. – Robin Morgan
Female political leaders are not different from male political leaders in South Asia. Their acts are not less misogynistic than male leaders. Like male leaders they have no agenda to change patriarchal structure of society, or to get rid of anti-women laws, or to fight women-hating traditions. Like male leaders they believe in religion and patriarchy. Their own misogyny lowers themselves to the level of male leaders. They are no less cruel, barbaric, unethical, inhumane than men. Obviously, they believe in their own right to free expression but do not believe in their opponent’s right to free expression. [Read more…]
Feminist icon Robin Morgan is speaking with Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American Journalist and activist.
Robin Morgan: Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-American feminist, brilliant journalist and pal. She was a correspondent for Reuters in Cairo and Jerusalem. She has reported news from the Middle East for The Guardian in the UK. She has written for US News and World Report. She writes essays and op-eds for publications around the world on Egypt and the region and the Islamic world and a particular focus on women’s status. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and lots of really highly respectable wonderful journalistic places. She is a force majeure and she is here with me today fresh from the plane landing from Cairo. Are your jets still lagging? [Read more…]