From Selma to Tunis: When Will We March Against the Segregation of Our Own Time?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Huffington Post Blog:

...Not only has the situation of African-Americans improved in many respects but, as Obama put it, the civil rights movement also swung open "doors of opportunity" for women, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays and the disabled. And it continues to offer inspiration for those fighting for freedom around the world -- in Obama's words, from "the streets of Tunis to the Maidan in Ukraine." If anyone has the right to make this point, it is our half-African president.

Yet what the president failed to point out is that, around the world, segregation is making a comeback -- including in the streets of Tunis, where the proponents of today's segregation spilled blood last week....

[...]

The system of law I am talking about is sharia law, the body of legislation derived from the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence. And the discriminated group I have in mind is women, though I could also reference Jews, Christians and gays.

No group is more harmed by sharia than Muslim women -- a reflection in part of the patriarchal tribal culture out of which Islamic law emerged. Repeatedly, women are considered under the code to be worth at most "half a man." Sharia subordinates women to men in a multitude of ways: the requirement of guardianship by men, the right of men to beat their wives, the right of men to have unfettered sexual access to their wives, the right of men to practice polygamy, and the restriction of women's legal rights in divorce cases, in estate law, in cases of rape, in court testimony, and in consent to marriage. Sharia states that women are considered naked if any part of their body is showing except for their face and hands, while a man is considered naked only between his navel and his knees. Finally, although Muslim men may marry Christian or Jewish women, Muslim women may only marry Muslim men.

Segregation, in short, is central to sharia -- a fact that no amount of contortion by self-styled Muslim feminists can get around.

True, not all Muslim-majority countries apply sharia. In Tunisia, after a heated internal debate, the Islamist Ennahda Movement -- which came to power following the Arab Spring -- opted last year not to make sharia the basis for the country's new constitution. But that is precisely the kind of moderate policy explicitly targeted by whichever jihadist gang carried out the Tunis museum massacre. And the troubling thing is that, worldwide, sharia is gaining ground. In Brunei, for example, the Sultan announced the introduction of sharia law last April. The advance of organizations like Islamic State and Boko Haram mean the most brutal application of sharia on a rising number of women and girls.

There seems to me only one possible way to react to this trend toward sharia and that is to resist it. Perhaps that is more obvious to me than to most; having lived under sharia when I was a young girl in Saudi Arabia I know just what it means to be a second-class citizen. Yet many Western liberals seem to struggle with the obvious point that if they were against segregation and discrimination in the 1960s they should be against gender segregation and discrimination now....

Read the rest HERE.