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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: feminism

Gamal Abdel Nasser on the Muslim Brotherhood

04 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Gamal Abdel Nasser on the Muslim Brotherhood

Tags

Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, Burka, Egypt, Egyptian History, feminism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hijab, Islam, Islamic History, Muslim, Secularism, Tarha, women's rights

“In ‘53, we really wanted to compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood, if they were willing to be reasonable.

I met the head of the Muslim Brotherhood and he sat with me and made his requests. What did he request? The first thing he asked for was to make wearing a hijab mandatory in Egypt, and demand that every woman walking in the street wear a tarha (scarf). Every woman walking [someone in audience yells ‘Let him wear it!’, crowd erupts].

And I told him that if I make that a law, they will say that we have returned to the days of Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who forbade women from walking during the day and only allowed walking at night, and my opinion is that every person in his own house decides for himself the rules.

And he replied, ‘No, as the leader, you are responsible.’ I told him, ‘Sir, you have a daughter in the Cairo school of medicine, and she’s not wearing a tarha. Why didn’t you make her wear a tarha?’

I continued, ‘If you… [crowd’s cheering interrupts] if you are unable to make one girl, who is your daughter, wear the tarha, how can you tell me to put a tarha on 10 million women myself?'”

__________

Gamal Abdel Nasser, saying the now nearly unsayable in a 1966 speech in Cairo.

As Menachem Begin once observed, “Civilization is intermittent.”

Read on:

  • What could’ve been between Arabs and Israel
  • Lawrence of Arabia’s prophetic take on the Middle East
  • Sam Harris analyzes the veil
  • Steven Pinker on feminism

Gamal Abdel Nasser

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Steven Pinker on Feminism

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Science

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

biology, cognitive science, discrimination, Elizabeth Spelke, feminism, feminists, gender, gender discrimination, gender relations, human nature, men, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, women

Steven Pinker

“I am a feminist. I believe that women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and harassed for thousands of years. I believe that the two waves of the feminist movement in the 20th century are among the proudest achievements of our species, and I am proud to have lived through one of them, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences.

But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, ‘I guess sex discrimination wasn’t so bad after all,’ or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.
..”

__________

From Steven Pinker, in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke on the topic of Science and Gender. You can find more of Pinker’s thoughts in his superb collection Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles.

Since his breakout book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker has outlined and continually advocated a conception of human nature which I find extremely compelling. It’s foundational claim is that we are not plastic in the way twentieth-century behaviorists would suggest. Human nature is not malleable in any robust sense of the term; but instead it is very rigidly pre-programmed by our biology, which is — perhaps not intuitively — the reason for our complex abilities and variations. The fact that, say, we are wired to acquire a rigid grammatical structure in childhood, and hence speak a language, is what allows us to communicate in such a wealth of information, emotion, and ideas to others. Of course we are plastic in the sense that we learn the language of our childhood environment (I’m not writing this in Japanese, after all), but our ability to internalize grammar emerges from our biological make-up, which we do not choose. (Pinker, who studied in the M.I.T. linguistics department under Chomsky, uses this example among others to emphasize his point.)

Pinker delineates and actively patrols the fine line separating gender distinction from gender discrimination, and for that reason, his debate with Spelke is worth reading or listening to.

More from Pinker, one of our clearest and best communicators of cognitive science:

Steven Pinker

The F Word

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

Hitler, Stalin, and the Power of Ideology

Boston Marathon

The Psychology of Terror

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