Europe’s civilizing mission is humanitarian - its duty to intervene to spread the good word, protecting the oppressed against local tyrants. The conditions by which this protection is granted are always dictated by the protector and never the protégé. Though this is not said, it is a given.
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
Many commentators have dismissed the French ban on wearing the niqab as a xenophobic reaction, writes Marie Gilbert. Hinging on French understandings about state, religion and women, the debate is in fact more sophisticated. It deserves to be heard rather than caricatured
Orthodox Jewish feminists may seem to outsiders to be a contradiction in terms. But as Cassandra Balchin discovers while talking with Israeli Orthodox Jewish feminist, Dr. Debbie Weissman, Jewish politics in Israel is anything but straightforward.
"The essential problem in relation to our predicament as women, but also with our world, is the architecture of human relations - a system of social organization that is based on hierarchy. This architecture is all pervasive from the family to the state and it holds across the world. We decided th
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Fatin Abbas argues that the uprisings that have erupted across north Africa and the Middle East in recent months attest to the visionary power of Fanon's work and to its enduring relevance.
The question of religion’s place in modern secular societies is intellectually contested and politically divisive. Here, the scholar Tariq Modood argues that European experience and institutional development can favour an accommodative model that respects religion yet goes beyond both toleration a
The murder of two men by a CIA agent in Pakistan raised issues of masculinist national sovereignty and honour, and exposed the uncomfortable privilege that religious laws based on power, rather than religion, extend to men, says Afiya Shehrbano Zia
In India, the existence of deep religious diversity has ensured a conceptual response not only to problems within but also between religions. Without taking it as a blue print, the west must examine the Indian conception and learn from it, regarding peace between communities, community-specific ri
"Egyptian women are lucky in one way. They have witnessed the predicament of Iranian women and seen how the Islamic state has hijacked the Iranian revolution, changed the laws and reversed women’s gains. My advice to Egyptian women is “do not give way to a government that would force you to choose
‘Multiculturalism’ entails society offering a full range of prospects, membership, and respect to all its members – regardless of cultural and religious differences –while also creatively accommodating them in a fashion that is both morally persuasive and practically effective for the majority of
The debates triggered by a 14-fold increase in violent crimes against women in Turkey in the last seven years have pitted Islamic male scholars and journalists against Islamic women writers, reports Sertaç Sehlikoğlu
