Egyptian Islamist parliment to enact law permitting husbands to have sex with dead wives as well as

[snagglepuss]

law permitting marriage with 14 yr old girls and ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.

snip

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives - for up to six hours after their death.

The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135434/Outrage-Egypt-plans-farewell-intercourse-law-husbands-sex-dead-wives-hours-AFTER-death.html#ixzz1tA4NShYH



For those who take issue with DM the same is reported elsewhere such as alarabiya.net

snip


Many members of the newly-elected, and majority Islamist parliament, have been accused of launching attacks against women’s rights in the country.

They wish to cancel many, if not most, of the laws that promote women’s rights, most notably a law that allows a wife to obtain a divorce without obstructions from her partner. The implementation of the Islamic right to divorce law, also known as the Khula, ended years of hardship and legal battles women would have to endure when trying to obtain a divorce.

Egyptian law grants men the right to terminate a marriage, but grants women the opportunity to end an unhappy or abusive marriages without the obstruction of their partner. Prior to the implementation of the Khula over a decade ago, it could take 10 to 15 years for a woman to be granted a divorce by the courts.

Islamist members of Egyptian parliament, however, accuse these laws of “aiming to destroy families” and have said it was passed to please the former first lady of the fallen regime, Suzanne Mubarak, who devoted much of her attention to the issues of granting the women all her rights.




http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/04/25/210198.html

[jberryhill]

1. Does "to enact" mean to imply that passage is likely?

Pieces of legislation are introduced in legislatures all of the time. Getting them enacted is a different story.

The limited information in the Daily Mail article seems to indicate that this is not a wildly popular proposal.

[B2G]

6. Very likely

The Muslim Brotherhood controls both branches of Paliament now.

This is not good.

[jberryhill]

43. So?

Where is this supposed piece of legislation sponsored by that group?

CS Monitor is calling bullshit on this story, btw.

[pampango]

45. CSM: Egypt 'necrophilia law'? Hooey, utter hooey (Don't believe everything you read on the Internet,

kids. At least until there's like, you know, some proof.)

...an opinion piece by Amr Abdul Samea, a past stalwart supporter of the deposed Hosni Mubarak, that contained a bombshell: Egypt's parliament is considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death.

It was soon mentioned in an English language version of Al-Arabiya and immediately started zipping around social-networking sites. By this afternoon it had set news sites and the rest of the Internet on fire. It has every thing: The yuck factor, "those creepy Muslims" factor, the lulz factor for those with a sick sense of humor. The non-fact-checked Daily Mail picked it up and reported it as fact. Then Andrew Sullivan, who has a highly influential blog but is frequently lax about fact-checking, gave it a boost with an uncritical take. The Huffington Post went there, too.

There's of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt's parliament. I'm willing to be proven wrong. It's possible that there's one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.

Stories like this are a reminder of the downside of the Internet. It makes fact-checking and monitoring easier. But the proliferation of aggregation sites, newsy blog sites, and the general erosion of editorial standards (and on-the-ground reporters to do the heavy lifting) also spreads silliness faster than it ever could before.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/0426/Egypt-necrophilia-law-Hooey-utter-hooey

Good to know that DU would never fall for this.

[azurnoir]

47. ah but as you read the thread there aresome DUer's

Last edited Fri Apr 27, 2012, 12:20 AM - Edit history (1)

that are luvvin them some of this stuff, fact check be damned

thanks for the post something seemed fishy about this one to me

[jberryhill]

48. Kinda interesting what spills out on these occasions

[patrice]

2. Does the DM need to remind people that Egypt is Islamist? Was this a particular sub-sect of Islam

that did this?

[snagglepuss]

8. Are you trying to deflect the story to the DM? Other media as well as

Egyptians refer to the parliament as Islamist dominated.

[B2G]

10. Not just Islamist dominated

but dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is what a number here warned of last year. It appears the warnings are coming to fruition.

[Spoonman]

20. You ain't seen nothing yet!

I tried to tell people what was going to happen, and darn near got tomb-stoned for it.

I lived in Cairo, but "opinion" outweighs working knowledge around these parts!

Israel will soon be fighting two terrorist organizations on separate fronts.

[B2G]

21. Ditto

The celebrations were in full force here last year. As long as it was change, who cared what kind of change it was?

We're about to find out.

[Spoonman]

25. The "cause mob" mentality

I have seen it here numerous times.
Everyone jumps on the soup du jour news story and rally cries in unison.

Don't think, just follow the crowd and scream at the top of your lungs....... we can't all be idiots if we all agree.......

[patrice]

11. No. Just needing a little more information, because I'm curious about whether they have

anything like at least a few of the sorts of variations we see in what we refer to as "Christian", partly because I'm wondering why those differences didn't succeed politically due to the Arab Spring.

[B2G]

17. The MB was a major force behind the Arab Spring

and they have an agenda. It's not a good one.

[patrice]

19. Making friends with PNAC in that agenda? That has to do with how political they are relative to

how religious they are, I suppose, but I also imagine that there's no separating the two in some environments.

[MADem]

9. Well, Egypt had a lot of Muslims, but it prided itself -- before Mubarak was deposed--on being a

rather multifaceted group of societies. The thing that linked them all was their EGYPTIAN culture, not their Islamic culture. That seems to be shifting these days.

There are many flavors of Christians in Egypt, very ancient and orthodox faiths, too, closer to the old school Catholics than the RC church is today. There were only a few Jews who stayed after the "troubles" with Israel (previous to that there was a very vibrant Jewish community in Egypt, centered in Cairo--they moved to Israel and other nations when the shit hit the fan in the middle of the 20th century). I would guess they'd regard this as the last straw--I imagine they're packing. I would if I were them, frankly. And of course, the pre-Christian/pre-Muslim pharonic culture was always a point of pride, to say nothing of tourism. The more secular types would identify with that cultural aspect.

Egypt is not going to be fun for awhile. The loudmouth religious-right-wingnuts are going to get their way, and the people who don't agree with them, because they are used to living in an authoritarian regime, won't pipe up until it is too late and the loudmouths have already consolidated power. They'll be stuck in the mud, like Iran was post-Shah.

Shame.

[eissa]

3. No different than what the "pro-democracy" protestors in Syria want (eom)

[riderinthestorm]

7. Yup, and what "pro-democracy revolutionaries" are bringing to Libya, Sudan, Morocco etc nt

[tabatha]

13. Be careful of generalizations.

25 Apr Libyan ‏ @Tripolitanian Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
The main reason why I support the banning of religious parties is so that the same thing that happened in Egypt doesn't happen in Libya 1/2

You may not have read that Libya recently banned parties based on religion.

[atreides1]

4. And yet?

Mubarak was the bad guy?

[seabeyond]

5. cause i know having sex with a dead wife will maintain the family bond. i was afraid

of this watching what was happening after their protests.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

12. What a clusterfuck.

Isn't it sad/ironic that "tyrannical strongmen" like Mubarak, Gaddafi, and Hussein were better for the women of their counties than what is/may be replacing them?? Just like the Soviets were better for the women of Afghanistan until we armed the crazy fucks.

[tabatha]

14. Sweeping statement

Muburak - the people who demonstrated against Muburak were the liberal youth. They are not going to be happy with the MB.

Gaddafi - Libya has recently banned political parties being based on religion. Ask Libyan women (not your opinion) of life under Gaddafi.

Hussein - I happen to agree with that assessment. In fact it was one of my arguments when discussing this with RWers - who tried to bring up gender mutilation, to which I replied I think you have the wrong country.

Just as I responded with country-specific information, I think you should look at country specific information regarding the MB.

Finally, you may want to scroll down to the section on women in this PDF

http://www.libyanjustice.org/downloads/Mizaan%20newsletter%2023rd%20april%20-%20FINAL.pdf?utm_source=smartmail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mizaan+-+Issue+1+

[riderinthestorm]

15. You may want to read this: Why do they hate us?

Why Do They Hate Us? - The real war on women is in the Middle East
In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.


More...
In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion, a bulldozer that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so powerfully says.

Yes: They hate us. It must be said.

Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn't everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I'm not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system -- one that treats half of humanity like animals -- must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us?page=0,0#.T5V6QE0n7SQ.twitter


This was a thread a few days ago, which of course dropped like a stone.... Just an inconvenient meme since it doesn't glorify the Arab Spring post-revolutionary situation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002601790

[leftynyc]

16. That was a terrific article

and there are several others regarding sex in that edition. Unfortunately, the lives of many women in some Muslim countries are little more than slaves and incubators.

[redqueen]

18. I was just about to post that too. Thanks. nt

[hifiguy]

37. I just read the article at that link.

One of the most powerful things I have read in ages. Ms. Eltahawy is a brave woman who puts her more-than-justified outrage into a compelling and infuriating piece of prose. Brilliant work.

[4th law of robotics]

22. So someone actually argued for the right to commit necrophilia?

What a weird concept.

[B2G]

23. More importantly, women are being stripped of their rights

to work and to an education.

I couldn't care less about the necrophilia crap.

[4th law of robotics]

27. I expected that women would lose whatever rights they had

that sort of goes hand in hand with an islamic government.

I hadn't heard the necrophilia one before.
That makes it weird, although less terrible in the grande scheme of things than the rest of it.

It's like if they took over and demanded all homosexuals be stoned to death . . . and also outlawed sno-cones. Obviously the stonings would be worse, but I imagine the sno-cone thing would get a lot of attention because it's so bizarre.

[eissa]

28. Although women will get the brunt of it, it won't be just them

Coptic Christians will suffer even more than they are now, and of course the usual suspects: artists, writers and intellectuals will be on the chopping block. They've already arrested one of the most famous Egyptian actors of all time, 71-year old Adel Imam, for "insulting Islam" in past movies.

[4th law of robotics]

29. Oh no doubt, the whole thing is awful all around

I wasn't meaning to imply otherwise.

The bit about having sex with your dead wife just stuck out to me because the thought of someone standing up and demanding that right struck me as surreal. All the rest of it is par for the course. Stand up in an islamic nation and demand women not be educated or other religions not be tolerated and you can expect a decent amount of support.

I just wouldn't have expected the guy who stood up and shouted about sleeping with his dead wife would get as much of a following as that.

[etherealtruth]

41. It's not so much a right of necrophilia (though that is how it is enacted)

It is to illustrate the right a man has over his possessions (in this case his wife).

[LibertyLover]

24. Reading this brought back memories of sitting in Ancient Egyptian History class

and listening to the professor explain that some female mummies that had been examined showed evidence of decay prior to mummification. According to my prof, ancient Egyptian embalmers were notorious for being willing to have sex with the bodies of their female clients, so families took care if one of their younger, good-looking women died, to keep her body at home a few days so that the embalmers would be less willing to have sex with it.

[ladjf]

26. Why would the men want to have sex with a dead person? Is that simply a perversion that is

now legal?

[closeupready]

30. Seriously, is that something people do, and don't talk about?

It's kind of like widows or widowers who say that they were visited by their deceased spouses - they don't talk about it, but if pressed by researchers, they admit to thinking this, that the spirit of their deceased loved ones visited them after death, either in dreams or as ghosts.

Sometimes, people behave in ways that don't make sense.

I suppose this would make sense in the sense that maybe a man wants his wife to rest with a part of him inside her.

Or does that make no sense, and I'm losing my mind...?

[Johonny]

33. you don't have use all your rights granted by the state

but just encase your wife does turns into a really hot undead vampire you would still for up to 6 hours be allow conjugal visits. This seems like a good sound hedge law for the vampire hunters of Egypt.

[ladjf]

51. Hey, man. You have a dark sense of humor. nt

[badtoworse]

31. They sound like great guys

This the religion of peace?

[Quantess]

32. It's just another bit of propaganda in the same vein of...

We're fighting for FREEDOM!!!

Arbeit Macht Frei

Doubleplusgood, or anything else from 1984

etc.

[B2G]

34. What is propaganda?

Please elaborate, because this bill is real and stands a very good chance of being passed.

[Quantess]

36. I responded to post #31

Islam, "the religion of peace" is propaganda.

[hifiguy]

35. Fundamentalist religion of the Abrahamic sort

= absolute batshit insanity and total repression of the female half of humanity. Twas ever thus.

[DutchLiberal]

38. I've read passage is very unlikely; only a tiny minority wants this law.

Sounds a lot like sensationalism.

[snagglepuss]

39. Which law? The law making divorce make difficult for women. the law enabling marriage at

14, the law stopping girls from receiving an eduction?

[DutchLiberal]

49. The fuck dead wives law.

I think you knew very well what I was talking about.

I'm aware of the other proposed laws. I'm not defending those. I'm not defending the islamists. I think they're backward, but hey, it's their democracy now. I've always said the majority of these people are medieval anyway, but then I was called a racist.

I was just pointing out that the part about the fuck dead wives law was sensationalism.

[jberryhill]

44. You are correct

This is a bullshit story

[Rex]

40. Wow, what a de-evolution that would be.

Not that I see a lot of respect for women in the first place, but that puts them on equal footing with already dead people...which leads to things I cannot write in public.

Sick. Pathetic. Wrong.

[pampango]

42. The Real Roots of Sexism in the Middle East (It's Not Islam, Race, or 'Hate')

Picture a woman in the Middle East, and probably the first thing that comes into your mind will be the hijab. You might not even envision a face, just the black shroud of the burqa or the niqab. Women's rights in the mostly Arab countries of the region are among the worst in the world, but it's more than that. As Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy writes in a provocative cover story for Foreign Policy, misogyny has become so endemic to Arab societies that it's not just a war on women, it's a destructive force tearing apart Arab economies and societies. But why? How did misogyny become so deeply ingrained in the Arab world?

There are two general ways to think about the problem of misogyny in the Arab world. The first is to think of it as an Arab problem, an issue of what Arab societies and people are doing wrong.

But is it really that simple? If that misogyny is so innately Arab, why is there such wide variance between Arab societies? Why did Egypt's hateful "they" elect only 2 percent women to its post-revolutionary legislature, while Tunisia's hateful "they" elected 27 percent, far short of half but still significantly more than America's 17 percent? Why are so many misogynist Arab practices as or more common in the non-Arab societies of sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia?

A number of Arab Muslim feminists have criticized the article as reinforcing reductive, Western perceptions of Arabs as particularly and innately barbaric. Nahed Eltantawy accused the piece of representing Arab women "as the Oriental Other, weak, helpless and submissive, oppressed by Islam and the Muslim male, this ugly, barbaric monster."

The other way to think about misogyny in the Arab world is as a problem of misogyny. As the above rankings show, culturally engrained sexism is not particular to Arab societies. In other words, it's a problem that Arab societies have, but it's not a distinctly Arab problem. The actual, root causes are disputed, complicated, and often controversial. But you can't cure a symptom without at least acknowledging the disease, and that disease is not race, religion, or ethnicity.

Some of the most important architects of institutionalized Arab misogyny weren't actually Arab. They were Turkish -- or, as they called themselves at the time, Ottoman -- British, and French. These foreigners ruled Arabs for centuries, twisting the cultures to accommodate their dominance. One of their favorite tricks was to buy the submission of men by offering them absolute power over women. ... Colonial powers employed it in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Asia, promoting misogynist ideas and misogynist men who might have otherwise stayed on the margins, slowly but surely ingraining these ideas into the societies.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/the-real-roots-of-sexism-in-the-middle-east-its-not-islam-race-or-hate/256362/

[snagglepuss]

46. So all fault gets deflected elsewhere. Got it.

[DutchLiberal]

50. It's Islam. Just like it's Christianity with the GOP woman-haters.