Mobile FGM Convoys Being Organized By Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

China has its mobile abortion clinics, and now Egypt's enlightened Muslim Brotherhood is sending out mobile medical convoys to convince families to have their young daughters undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) for free, at least according to Bikyamasr (which isn't always trustworthy). In spite of the fact that this horrific practice is actually illegal in Egypt, it is still a common tradition among the poor and uneducated.

Naturally, human rights organizations in Egypt are in an uproar over the fact that the Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party has officially sanctioned these mobile FGM units. An article on Bikyamasr isn't clear as to whether the FGM is actually being performed in those mobile units or whether they're just aggressively encouraging the practice, but either way it's reprehensible.  At least there are people trying to do something about it.

A number of Egyptian human rights groups have submitted a communication to the Attorney General against the Muslim Brotherhood`s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) to investigate the complaints of people in the village of Abu Aziz in the Minya governorate, south of Cairo, over the existence of a large medical convoy organized by the party that wanders streets and does medical examination on people, including female circumcision, or female genital mutilation, in violation of Egyptian law, conventions and treaties signed by Egypt.

In Egypt’s legal code, Female Genital Mutilation is criminalized, as well as the inciting by doctors to convince families of the young girls of the need to agree to circumcise their daughters, “as a matter of preserving chastity.”

The communication demanded Mervat Tallawy, the head of the National Council for Women (NCW) and Major General Seraj EL Din El Rouby, the Governor of Minya, and Nasr El Sayed , Assistant Minister for primary health care, and preventive medicine, and family planning, to intervene to stop what it called “a farce propaganda for free circumcision, which was organized by one of the political parties, in Minya governorate to promote circumcision.”

Thankfully, there's an effort to educate women on how not to succumb to pressure- whether they'll have any success is questionable. And women's groups and others are attempting to get the Muslim Brotherhood and others to follow the rule of law with respect to FGM, but that too is doubtful.

The National Council for Women has criticized the FJP's stance on FGM claiming that it puts

"the person who promotes it under penalty of law because FGM is criminalized, and against human rights in general and women in particular.”

FGM was a problem under Mubarak, as well, but it wasn't sanctioned by the government.

And this is what the long, hard-earned battle against tyranny got the Egyptians after the Arab Spring, a worst kind of tyranny.

Afghan Women Sold Like Cattle

It's obvious that women are considered second class citizens in many Muslim-majority countries, where they have fewer rights and freedoms than males. But in God-forsaken Afghanistan they are looked upon as commodities to be traded or sold like animals to the highest bidder. And it's not cheap to buy a wife/slave/maid, the women often fetch a good price, at least by Afghan standards. And although illegal to buy and sell women, it still happens all the time.

Hajji Rais Khan, a white bearded resident of Nangarhar’s Dur Baba district, needed only to remove his false teeth and hand over 3,000 dollars to conclude the swift purchase of a young woman for his bride.

Two other local families had quarrelled over the terms of an already implemented swap of daughters for brides. One of the fathers then learned that instead of the girls being returned home by mutual arrangement, his counterpart had simply sold on his 20-year-old daughter to an old man for 4,000 dollars. He vowed in retaliation to sell the girl in his care to “a man with no teeth”.


“I went there and removed my plastic teeth and told the man that my wife passed away two months ago and that this girl was my destiny,” said Khan. “He gave her to me for 150,000 afghanis (3,000 dollars).”

A disturbing aberration perhaps, were it not for numerous and corroborated accounts of such sales of women like livestock. These are distinct from the entrenched Afghan custom of arranged marriages for fixed dowries, and often result in the victim being sold into a life of drudgery or passed on to further buyers.


A widespread practice in bygone times, the purchase and sale of women is today not uncommon in six of Nangarhar's districts inhabited by members of the large Shinwari tribe, say officials and rights advocates.

“Women are sold in different districts of Shinwari (areas) of Nangarhar and we have taken up cases on various occasions,” said Sabrina Hamidi, the director of the women’s rights advocacy department at the Independent Human Rights Commission in the eastern region.

“I removed my plastic teeth and told the man that my wife passed away two months ago and this girl was my destiny. He gave her to me for 150,000 afghanis."

The practice continued as a result of “illiteracy, poverty and abhorrent traditions,” said Hamidi.

And after women are sold, contact is usually severed with their own family, often for the rest of their lives, which makes the women extremely vulnerable . Once sold, the woman effectively belongs to her buyer, his to work, abuse or resell as he sees fit.

Read the rest here.

I don't see any hope for women in Afghanistan, especially once NATO pulls out.

Chechnya's Kadyrov Condones 'Honor Killings'

The one thing that can be said for communist rule under the Soviets was the fact that they managed to maintain control over the Islamist elements in their midst. No forced veils for women, no gender separation, women had equal rights. Yes, there were other major issues regarding lack of freedom (including religious), but that lack was not imposed by religion.  But as is happening in Africa and the Middle East, the rise of hardline Islam in Muslim-majority countries that used to be secular, like Chechnya (when it was part of the former Soviet Union),  is becoming problematic.

In fact, over the past five years, things have gotten dire for women in Chechnya under the leadership of President Ramzan Kadyrov, whose Mufti, former pro-separatist father, Akhmad Kadyrov, was president for a year until he was blown up in 2004. Women are being forced to wear the hijab (veil), there is government support for polygamy, alcohol is banned and now the Chechen government has formally condoned 'honor killings' against women. In fact they are advocating it. Women are turning up dead all over Chechnya, and Kadyrov's response: they had "loose morals" and so they deserved to die. That's because Kadyrov believes women should remain barefoot and pregnant (a typical fundamentalist Muslim belief) since women are the property of their husbands.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW) Kadyrov has been quoted as saying:

I have the right to criticize my wife. She doesn’t [have the right to criticize me]. With us [in Chechen society], a wife is a housewife. A woman should know her place. A woman should give her love to us [men]… She would be [man’s] property. And the man is the owner. Here, if a woman does not behave properly, her husband, father, and brother are responsible. According to our tradition, if a woman fools around, her family members kill her… That’s how it happens, a brother kills his sister or a husband kills his wife… As a president, I cannot allow for them to kill. So, let women not wear shorts…

Here in Chechnya if a woman is running around, if a man is running around with her, then the both of them are killed. According to the information available, there was a woman who was “working” with the killed [women] – she wanted to take them away from the [Chechen] Republic, [she] was in the process of obtaining travel passports for them in order to sell them to brothels [abroad]. It’s being said that the women’s relatives [found out and] killed them… I’m simply talking about [our] customs. Ask anyone, even the youngest boy, “What are you gonna do if your sister starts running around?” Anyone will tell you, “I’ll kill her!”

He has also been quoted as saying he wants to make Chechnya “more Islamic than the Islamists.”

Even though Kadyrov is credited with bringing some stability to Chechnya, and was actually nominated by Vladimir Putin for president, he obviously has no respect for Russian law.

Some observers say Mr. Kadyrov’s attempt to impose Islamic law violates the Russian Constitution, which guarantees equal rights for women and a separation of church and state.

“We are a traditional, conservative society, but the government has gone overboard,” said Lipkhan Bazaeva, head of the Women's Dignity Center, a nongovernmental organization promoting women’s rights in Grozny. “They are declaring unacceptable limits on women — as an individual, she has no rights even if her husband beats her, despite Russian laws.”

And the human rights violations that are rampant in Chechnya will remain so, since most activists are too afraid to do anything about it after Natasha Estemirova was murdered.

“You hear about these cases almost every day,” said a local human rights defender, who asked that her name not be used out of fear for her safety. “It is hard for me to investigate this topic, yet I worked on it with [human rights activist] Natasha [Estemirova] for a while. But, I can’t anymore. I am too scared now. I’ve almost given up, really.”

Estemirova, who angered Chechen authorities with reports of torture, abductions and extrajudicial killings, was found in the woods in 2009 in the neighboring region of Ingushetia with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Her killer or killers have not been found.

But it hasn't stopped the young ones from flouting the strict rules.

Milana, a ninth-grader in Grozny, wears thick eyeliner, dons tight miniskirts, smokes cigarettes and dates boys: all things a proper Muslim girl is forbidden to do in Chechnya.

She said she has heard it from her father countless times: A Chechen girl who loses her virginity before marriage is a prostitute, and Allah will punish her.

“If only my parents knew some of the things I did,” she said with a giggle. “My parents are too strict with me, but it is like that here.”

Analysts say dating can be an escape for teenagers such as Milana who often live double lives.

“It is a great temptation to break from tradition when they are away from their family, said Ms. Bazaeva. “They have a good time, but it is not without consequences, not in Chechnya.”

Some kids marry early to get around the strict rules, like 20-year-old Abu-Khadzh Idrisov who got married at age 14 so he could have sex. Divorced a year later, he remarried at 18 to a girl he kidnapped- a common tradition in Pakistan.

He spotted his future wife at a park in Grozny and, with the help of his friends, kidnapped her.

“When I married her, I honestly knew only two things: her name and the school she studied at. We talked together once,” he recalled. “But we have traditions and extremely strict rules in Chechnya, and you can’t just ignore them. I carry my family’s name, and if I tarnish it, I will have problems.”

I suppose it's easy for a family belonging to a religion that encourages having lots of babies to pop off one of its own. What's the loss of one or two children when they probably have plenty more.

Source: Washington Times

Iran's Gender Apartheid- Video

It is oft quoted that Islam promotes women's rights- it's a fallacy of course, at least in most Muslim-majority countries.   
This interesting video about 'gender apartheid' in Iran proves the extent to which they lack rights.

Men Forcing Wives To Undergo Female Genital Mutilation

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is one of the most horrifying rituals still practiced today. And it's not just Muslims chopping off the genitals of young girls, Christians in Africa are just as guilty, in spite of widespread efforts to ban the practice.  In fact, according to one report out of Kenya,  people are going out of their way to ensure that the tradition lives on by changing the season in which it's performed- from December to August,

...to avoid media spotlight and scrutiny from Government agencies.

FGM is performed on girls as young as a few days old and usually through puberty, but now per that same report, married women who were mercifully spared the knife as young girls are being forced to have the procedure done.

"Those who evaded the cut are now being forced to undergo the cultural practice or their husbands be denied land inheritance," said Women Rights Institute for Peace (Wrip) Executive Director Mariam Suleiman while releasing the report.

This was after Wrip undertook project activities geared towards preventing attempts to subject girls to the cut in November and December in Baringo County.

Suleiman said husbands force their wives to undergo the cut to avoid missing out on family inheritance.

Some chiefs and their assistants from the areas were accused of shielding FGM perpetrators from prosecution.

Circumcision period

"In East Pokot District the community in collusion with the Provincial Administration has changed the circumcision period from December to August to avoid the public, Government and media focus that comes at the end of the year," Wrip Executive Director stated.

She added that those who escaped the practice midyear are forced by their relatives to undergo the cut in December.

The report showed that only 99 girls underwent the cut in the months of November and December while 125 escaped and sought refuge in churches and at homes of relatives who are against the vice.

Suleiman further stated that lack of awareness of constitutional rights has made some girls not to seek legal action against perpetrators of the vice for fear of reprisals from their parents.

"There is need to educate them on laws, the court processes and the outcome especially on the fact that moving to court will not have their parents arrested," she said.

The Wrip boss urged anti-FGM stakeholders to let the campaigns be a continuous process to end the vice.

It's all about control. Shameful.

Saudi Woman Locked In Her Room By Her Father For 18 Years

According to Kabar, a local  daily paper, a 36-year-old Saudi Arabian woman has been locked up in her room for  18 years. 

To punish his daughter, for reasons unknown, her father locked her up when she was a teen, and she's been there ever since.

Police deny any apparent problems, however, the paper quoted neighbors and human rights activists as confirming the woman is still confined to her room in the eastern province of Qatif.

“Neighbors and human rights sources said the girl was apparently subject to family punishment and violence and was locked up in her bedroom when she was a teen ager,” Kabar reported.

“They confirmed the girl is still confined to her room and is not allowed out…the sources urged authorities to immediately intervene and free the girl as she has been deprived of education and all other needs in life.”

“What this father has done is totally unjustified and cruel…perhaps he is suffering from mental problems given the fact that he has not yet realized the consequences of this act against his own daughter all these years,” said Alia Al Fareed, a member of the Saudi Human rights Commission in the eastern area.

No apparent problems?  Just that she happens to be female. This is just how little women are regarded in countries like Saudi Arabia. Lock 'em up like animals.