the guy by the door ... » Women of Islam http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm ... who looks after things. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:15:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ My friend the Sunni http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/11/women-of-islam-ii-my-friend-the-sunni/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/11/women-of-islam-ii-my-friend-the-sunni/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:23:37 +0000 fensterm http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/11/women-of-islam-ii-my-friend-the-sunn I moved this and The Imam to a Web 1.0 page Women of Islam.

But my weakly related note is time sensitive: I passed the Roxbury Mosque on Saturday. It appeared to be not quite finished. I expected it to be complete by now

]]> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/11/women-of-islam-ii-my-friend-the-sunni/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Women of Islam: Excluded from Mecca? http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/08/women-of-islam-excluded-from-mecca/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/08/women-of-islam-excluded-from-mecca/#comments Sat, 09 Sep 2006 01:51:20 +0000 fensterm http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/2006/09/08/women-of-islam-excluded-from-mecca/ It was a pleasure arriving at work today. I was greeted by a new coworker studying for her JD with a professor I regard as progressive.* She is always handsome, but today her hijab was pink. I couldn’t help but notice. I hope Allah will not find her immodest**. The only jewelry she wears is a ring professing her faith. She speaks English as well as I do except when she wants to emphasize something. Then she speaks better than I do – quite nuanced. We talked a bit about her studies. Then I asked her about the Saudi family considering excluding women from Mecca. The tension between discipline and nuance on one hand and anger on the other was quite dramatic, but not at all like my neighborwomen in Dorchester.

I was touched by American feminism in college and graduate school followed by working and politicking in Cambridge for 17 years. I am tempted to say that I think the men of the Saudi family have stepped in something or stepped on something dear to themselves, but that would be crude. So I won’t. I don’t know if I get voice an opinion in matters Islamic, but if asked …
* The TRIM petition, which was a very limited response to the loss of rent control, was very well crafted, but Mike Turk felt that past successes [real or imagined] entitled him to operate in executive capacity. That’s just not the way to build a volunteer organization. And people remembered the gross mismanagement of the breakaway Cambridge SOCC.
** One year at Lamont I had a regular who won Islamic Woman of the Year. She always wore black from head to toe. She appeared rather serious, but when I remarked on her celebrity, she giggled – a lot like the stereotypical schoolgirl. I was surprised. Then I felt something shift within me. It was a prejudice shattering.
I cannot hold the images of the Islamic women I have met at Harvard together in my head with one young mother of a four year old I saw on TV. She had made a videotape, crossed the border into Israel, made her way into a gathering, and blown herself up. “Religion” is not an adequate explanation. There has to be more, much more, for her to “voluntarily” desert her child.

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