More CRAP

Et tu, FT?

CRAP stands for Courageous Reformist Arab Personalities, of course.

Comments

[Issandr El Amrani]

Adam,

I'm late getting back to your request for why I don't like the article -- I've been feeling a bit ill for the last few days.

First of all, it's a badly written article full of cliches and pompous stylistic flourishes. It marks the continued decline of the FT Weekend edition from an enjoyable highbrow newspaper to an ode to luxury consumerism. It is really one of the laziest and badly written article I have read in a while.

Secondly, the Palestinian blogger it refers to has barely written anything. He could have at least referred to an established Iraqi female blogger (Riverbend, I believe, is one) or even an Egyptian one like the very fun and smart Miss Mabrouk. But instead he chose a really irrelevant blog, and used it in a stereotypical way: as if for a young Arab woman being chatted up was a transgressive act.

Thirdly, the crux of the issue. While I don't have any problem per se with Wafa Sultan, even if I disagree with some of the things she said in that MEMRI edit of her Al Jazeera appearance (there was a line about Jews having achieved their aims without violence, which is patently absurd when applied to Israeli Jews who carried out all sort of terrorist acts, the occupation of Palestine, invasion of neighboring states, extrajudicial killings etc.), I do not find her representative of courageous reformist Arabs -- and I know plenty of them. There are so many people in the Arab world who labor tirelessly for reform in one way or the other it's practically insulting to glorify this woman who is not so much a Muslim reformist as a non-Muslim who wants to do away with Islam. (Same applies for Irshad Manji: no particular problem with her, but don't expect Muslims across the world to suddenly be okay with homosexuality. I know half a dozen Arab gay activists who have the good sense to realize that and work progressively on the issue.)

This is really the problem: Sultan and Manji are really targeting a Western audience and playing to Western stereotypes. I suspect (or know in Manji's case) that they are most interested in publicizing themselves. Meanwhile, the real Arab reformers in the Arab world who have worked for years in human rights, civil society, politics and elsewhere are completely ignored. The whole Wafa Sultan affair shows, once again, what total ignorance the Western media intelligentsia has of the Arab world.

[The Arabist » The Missio]

[...] Laila Lalami, aka Moorishgirl, has a long review essay in the Nation about Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, two women we’ve written about here before. It’s the most intelligent review of their work I’ve seen so far, particularly as people tend to either dismiss them (as I tend to) or praise them as Courageous Reformist Arab Personalities (CRAP). The late unpleasantness over Hirsi Ali beyond stripped of her seat in parliament and Dutch citizenship was a rather pathetic affair I didn’t feel like commenting on, but it did highlight the manipulative nature of at least some of these people. But that’s beside the point. Lalami’s critique goes to the heart of the problem: Meanwhile, the abundant pity that Muslim women inspire in the West largely takes the form of impassioned declarations about “our plight”–reserved, it would seem, for us, as Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern. The veil, illiteracy, domestic violence, gender apartheid and genital mutilation have become so many hot-button issues that symbolize our status as second-class citizens in our societies. These expressions of compassion are often met with cynical responses in the Muslim world, which further enrages the missionaries of women’s liberation. Why, they wonder, do Muslim women not seek out the West’s help in freeing themselves from their societies’ retrograde thinking? The poor things, they are so oppressed they do not even know they are oppressed. [...]