Der große Akbar Gandschi hat wieder einen richtungsweisen Essay geschrieben über die Unterdrückung der Frau im Iran als Symptom der Krise des Systems. Zitate:
Most secular intellectuals see Iran’s gender apartheid as an integral part of the country’s general system of apartheid. Iranian apartheid is based on a particular interpretation of Islam that divides society into “insiders” and “outsiders.” The class of insiders includes the coterie of the ruling Court, but extends beyond that to encompass all of the pious. This pervasive privileging of the rulers’ ideology ends up creating gender apartheid, because every time the rulers increase inequalities between men and women, they receive the approbation of the traditionalists. The rulers have on occasion shown some flexibility and have even made some adaptations in their ruling ideology. And they have no qualms about suspending beliefs considered foundational to the faith, such as the sanctity of the mosque; the country’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, once temporarily suspended belief in the oneness of Allah. But they have never wavered in their belief in the natural superiority of men over women, and its concomitant idea that women are less capable than men of using reason and bearing responsibility.
As secular intellectuals have emphasized, the ruling ideology conceives of society as analogous to a family, whose members are uninformed minors in need of supervision. This notion of guardianship is intimately connected to the traditional belief in Islamic jurisprudence, which maintains that among minors women are the most minor of all, that among the uninformed women are the most uninformed of all.
Many secular intellectuals believe that devaluing and humiliating women is not only in itself despicable, but that it also degrades the entire society. … Every time the rulers want to intimidate their opponents, they increase their attacks on women. Their suppression of women today in fact signals their weakness. …
… The official ideology in Iranian society betrays a male inferiority complex that is unleashed on women. A litany of humiliations contributes to this inferiority complex, including the one resulting from historical backwardness compared with the West.
In the secular intellectuals’ approach to the question of women, cultural critique is central. They point out that humiliating and insulting women, viewing them as sexual objects, and subjecting them to policies that institutionalize these views have contributed to the deterioration of men’s attitude toward women. Iranian culture, they say, has regressed much in this area since the advent of the Islamic Republic. Criticism of women’s subjugation, they stress, must not be confined to politics and law. Rather, fundamental cultural change is needed: a democratic re-education of the entire society, which requires imbuing men with the spirit of freedom and equality.
When we talk of secular intellectuals, we must bear in mind that not all of them are anti-religion, although they accuse religious intellectuals of a vain search for modern progressive ideas in religion. It is possible to have faith, even Islamic faith, and yet believe in secularism, in the separation of church and state, and in the potential of reason to assess and explicate the affairs of this world. In the West, there are many thinkers who hold religious beliefs but are secular in their approach and offer radical critiques of the religious tradition.
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