If you're anything like me...

...this sounds impossible!

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand upon pillars of salt and sand

-CP

I miss reading books for fun.

Here is a something I've been meaning to write about--Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (I confess, this is not taken from my thesis, not an original post. Sorry for my laziness)

Critics such as Hirsi Ali argue that the West has it right and that the East, especially the Muslim world, has it dead wrong. Pointing to the number of Muslim immigrants in Europe and America and the overwhelming number of Muslim women in battered women’s shelters, she asks, “What does the West have that we don’t?” She then goes on to answer her own question. “Muslim women in the West will benefit more from the dominant Western culture that is adhered by the majority of the population and that offers them good opportunities to shape their lives according to their own insights” (Hirsi Ali 6). To support this claim, she points to the status of women during the colonial period. During her lecture on “Women and Islam” at Scripps College in February 2009, she maintained that Muslim women under colonial rule were better off than after these countries gained independence. According to Hirsi Ali, Muslim women were granted more rights and freedoms under British and French rule. After independence, such rights were taken away and restrictions on women were tightened once again.[1] Given such “facts” from history, it is only logical that the West must intervene once again. “We in the West need to make a concerted effort to counter Islamic education and all those other Islamic institutions that lead to self-segregation and thus contribute to the continuation of a hopeless tyranny over women and children” (Hirsi Ali 7). There are two claims that Hirsi Ali and like-minded “universalists” are making. The first is that had it not been for the presence of the West, Muslim societies would have continued in their oblivion of violating these universal rights. The second is that without future foreign intervention, these societies will continue to operate under their own mistaken conception of morality without any opposition.

In order for morality to be “universal,” it must be common to all people, regardless of nationality, race, culture, or religion. That is to say, it must apply to a wider human community that supersedes the local one. Ideally, if morality is truly universal, shouldn’t all humans ascribe to the same one? The cause of moral universality would greatly benefit from the assertion of a universal moral compass—a conscience that is commonly held by all humans and responds the same way to a given situation. After all, what makes a right universal? According the Stephen James, a universal right addresses the basic needs of human nature, “constituted by our shared physical needs, social needs, and moral potentiality.” He then makes this claim: the universal conception of human rights requires at the very least the "existence of a human subject who is conscious and able to make and justify moral choices" (James 2). This final point—that all humans are moral agents—is essential. Without acknowledging this, morality is reduced to nothing more than the traditions shaped by the cultural contexts of different people. Without this, people are not moral agents who actively decide what is moral and immoral; they just robotically follow the pre-existing system that they have been born into. But people who are moral agents must accept and reject the laws that their society places before them. How can critics such as Hirsi Ali claim universal human rights while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that individuals within Muslim societies are capable of distinguishing them? There is an inherent contradiction in asserting that universal human rights exist while maintaining that without the help of the West, this existence will go unrecognized.

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[1] This controversial assertion is at best, a huge generalization, at worst a completely inaccurate statement. In addition to our inability to fully know what colonialism meant for different women in different regions, official reports have been inconsistent in their findings. The 2005 Arab Human Development Report notes that the rise of parties that stress women’s rights to education, employment, health care, etc. began under Western colonialism. The Center for Research on Globalization states that crimes and abuses against women (including rape) in Iraq were at their highest levels during British colonialism. Such varying reports (albeit from different regions) suggest that this claim does not deserve Hirsi Ali’s label of “fact,” especially as she uses it to back her advocacy for present and future Western intervention.

Epiphany of the day:

I have the best boyfriend in the world!

Epiphany of the day:

Reading about the Holocaust in comic book form does not make it any less depressing