Feminism & Bad Parenting
Just read an interesting piece by a daughter of a famous feminist (Alice Walker) attacking her mom and feminism for her poor childhood. Now, I don’t know one thing about feminism. Don’t plan on researching it anytime soon. But it makes me wonder at the extent feminism can be used to justify negligent parenting, abortions, and other things this piece mentions. I’m sure there were good aspects of feminism, like giving women a political voice. But I just don’t agree with its worldview, that the relationship between man and woman is based on power and, hence, the solution is to balance the power between the two; in other words that the two have to be equal, in a mathematical sense, in everything they do (everything that men do that is).
Of course it’s based on some truth. Heck, Marxism is based on truth as well (in dividing the world between the haves and the have-nots) but it ain’t the complete truth (because religion and ethnicity divide people as well and, certainly, history can’t be reduced to a story of class-struggles). To me, Marxism and feminism are similar in that both, in their black and white simplicity, lend themselves easily for politics. Whoever penned the ideologies probably had politics in mind.
On the other hand, the worldview of Islam sees the cosmos as a manifestation of the attributes of God. The Koran keeps on talking about the signs of God and His names. And I can’t help but see the differences in nature — like the differences between the sexes — as being just that. (Thanks to the Vision of Islam. Great book.)
But now I’m talking metaphysics here (or whatever you want to call it) and it’d probably be more honest to talk about on-the-ground issues. The question to ask is whether Islam or feminism is equipped to address problems of gender injustice. Probably depends on the situation if you ask me. Kind of a boring and useless question to answer too, so I’ll save you all the rant and link the piece I mentioned below.
How my mother’s fanatical views tore us apart
By Rebecca Walker(Hat-tip to Margari Aziza Hill for the piece.)
acabeire
Omar
alinahasni
To be fair, there are stories about some ustad’s child who are neglected too, so I don’t think we should really base our oppinion on someone else’s experience like this – albeit it does open some eyes.
Plus, this phenomenon of children shooting back at their parents when they’re old is pretty common in the West nowadays, and I think it just reflect some of the shortcomings of their society.
Feminism is broad, so Alice Walker’s version is only one version of feminism.
Here’s my article on ‘evolutionary feminism’, if you’re interested: http://kakiblog.com/2008/06/09/some-thoughts-on-evolutionary-feminism/
Anyway, keep on thinking, writing, and fight for your idealism. I like most of your writings here.
Taufik
June 17, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Taufik. As-salaamu ‘alaykum. Now you gots some serious posts on your blog there bro. What do you study?
Omar
June 17, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Wa’alaikum salam. I am currently studying computer engineering at Toronto, Canada.
It’s a multi-writer blog just like yours, but I guess updates have been pretty rare nowadays.
Taufik
June 18, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Computer engineering? I guess you’re like one of us, doing this sort of thing on your spare time, yeah? *Sigh* lots to learn that time will only allow for. I skimmed a little through your evolutionary feminist post. If it is what I think it is, that feminists now realize that men are women are different, then my God, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out! This only confirms me in my theory that it’s better to learn the history of these disciplines, rather than the disciplines themselves, to figure out why they say the things they say (rather than swallow their findings as if it were some kind of “truth”). I think in Western academia, they are becoming more objective and open minded, and I can certainly see this with books on Islam.
Omar
June 18, 2008 at 8:01 pm