Gamal Abdel Nasser on the Muslim Brotherhood

04 Friday Sep 2015

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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?'”

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

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

Read on:

Consider the Great Problem of Women’s Bodies

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Religion, Science, Speeches

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burqas, Islam, Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape, women's rights

“Consider the great problem of women’s bodies. What to do about them? Well this is one thing you can do about them:

You can cover them up.

Now it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as ‘wrong’ in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they’re wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?

Well, who are we not to say this?

Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I’m not talking about the voluntary wearing of a veil — women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned. But what does ‘voluntary’ mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father’s first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame?

Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her.

What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing?

Now, to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it’s like to go to a news stand almost anywhere in the civilized world:

Now, granted, for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images.

But if we are in a reflective mood, we can ask, ‘Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women’s bodies?’ I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children?

Probably not.

OK, so perhaps there’s some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. Perhaps there are many such places — again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape.”

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From Sam Harris’s TED Talk on The Moral Landscape. Watch this particular excerpt below: