The World Discovers the Role of Women in Muslim Cultures

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have brought Islamic cultures onto the center stage of world history. Islam’s impact on history has been less about a personal faith and more about a political, military, and social agenda.

In late 2010, a wave of social unrest known as the ‘Arab Spring’ swept across North Africa and into the Middle East. Early the next year, this movement metamorphosed into political revolutions, rattling some governments, and overturning others.

Sadly, the revolutionaries were disappointed when the governments they’d overthrown were replaced by even harsher ones. The brief glimpse of an impulse toward a free society and toward individual political liberty was crushed by Islamic dictatorships.

Not only did the Arab Spring turn into an Islamic Winter, but it did so in the realm of civilization in addition to the realm of politics. As Kamel Daoud writes,

The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms.

The reader should remember that not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. Arabic hopes were suppressed by Islamic absolutism.

In Egypt, a location known as Tahrir Square became the scene of repeated sexual assaults and rapes. This was a glimpse of how women would be treated after the ‘Arab Spring’ was extinguished.

This attitude followed Muslim immigrants as they made their way into Europe. On New Year’s Eve 2015, a coordinated and planned series of gang-rapes occurred in major cities across Central Europe, as groups of men randomly attacked women who happened to be walking by.

Kamel Daoud shows the underlying cultural connections between the ill-treatment of women in the Islamic nations and the assaults in Central Europe:

The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society.

As the data revealed the scope of the attack, and number of victims, a pattern clearly emerged. By mid-2016, police were increasing the official number of victim as more women came forth, and as more evidence was gathered from video cameras which caught attacks in public places.

Women in Muslim nations are largely depersonalized. They lack equality under the law, and are perceived as a source of immoral temptations.

They are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.

Writing in the New York Times in February 2016, in the wake of New Year's Eve attacks, Kamel Daoud described a global encounter: how the rest of the world was learned about Islamic nations as waves of emigrants left those countries.

Daoud goes on to note that recent massive immigrations into Europe, and into North America, have brought this plight of Muslim women to the attention of the world:

Today, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.

For centuries, the degradation of women in Muslim countries was an unseen phenomenon and a rarely-studied topic. For the rest of the world, it was far away.

The transportation and communication of the postmodern era, however, have brought two different cultures in contact. The world is shocked to learn specific details of the way women are treated in Islamic nations, and horrified to learn that Muslim immigrants intend to continue this behavior even after they’ve immigrated into other countries.

Climate Change: Mixed Evidence

The many different claims made about the earth’s climate are confusing and sometimes even contradictory. The thoughtful reader will disentangle each claim from the mass of propositions presented by the popular press, isolate the claim, and evaluate it without reference to other claims.

For example, the proposition that “the climate is changing” and that “climate change in anthropogenic” are separate. One might be false, and the other true, or vice-versa.

Phrases like ‘climate change’ and ‘climatic instability’ also need careful definition. Because the earth’s climate is essentially erratic and unpredictable, it is not clear what would constitute ‘change’ or ‘instability.’

Long before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels, droughts and floods appeared without discernable pattern, cause, or predictability. Mild winters and harsh winters arrived capriciously.

If one had unlimited access to data, and sufficient power to construct mathematical models, perhaps some of the historic climate events would have been predictable, or perhaps their causes discernable.

Given however, the data which researchers in fact have, there are at best vague hypotheses about what cause the Medieval Warm Period, an era from around 850 A.D. to around 1250 A.D.

During that era, exceptionally warm temperatures - outliers - are evidenced around the globe. Some data comes from direct observations: records of snowfall or lack thereof, glacial retreat, and harvests. Some of the data is indirect: tree-ring measurements and ice core samples.

Globally, droughts during the Medieval Warm Period seem to be greater in scope than anything observed in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes:

Compelling arguments both for and against significant increases in the land area affected by drought and/or dryness since the mid-20th century have resulted in a low confidence assessment of observed and attributable larges-cale trends. This is due primarily to a lack and quality of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, geographical inconsistencies in the trends and difficulties in distinguishing decadal scale variability from long term trends. On millennial time scales, there is high confidence that proxy information provides evidence of droughts of greater magnitude and longer duration than observed during the 20th century in many regions. There is medium confidence that more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed in arid Central Asia and the South American monsoon region during the Little Ice Age (1450 to 1850) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250).

Likewise, the Little Ice Age represents a statistical outlier of lower temperatures than anything recorded in the last century or two.

In sum, change and instability seem to be the defining characteristic of the earth’s climate. It would be truly unusual if the climate were predictable or if it repeated its patterns from one year to the next.

This instability seems to predate the advent of the widespread use of coal, oil, and gas. The instability seems to be no greater after the introduction of fossil fuels, given the major outliers which antedate it.