Where is the harm?

I often read or participate in depressing exchanges on blogs and forums where some religious person admonishes me for suggesting that we in the west should support and raise awareness of the issues surrounding the emancipation of Women in oppressive (theocratic) cultures, particularly Muslim women living in Western countries such as the UK and France. In the best tradition of religious apologetics they claim that it is not my place to comment on the affairs of such women, and to do so is effectively making a mountain out of a molehill.

Reading between the lines the message is normally clear, "you can't criticise religious belief".

The hypocrisy of this attitude in light of the widely reported abuses of girls and women in some cultures really surprises me, it simply does not compute, I can not understand it. When we look back at history it is full of stories of people fighting to overcome injustice, more often than not in the teeth of opposition from vested interests and religious establishments, the very least we can do from the comfort of our safe suburban sofa's is to speak about what we see and feel within our peer groups; raise consciousness and even if we don't feel able to campaign directly we can at least morally support people who do campaign against injustice.

In addition to the perception that religious belief cannot be criticised I also often sense an accusation of exaggeration being levelled at me, a sentiment of "leave the nice religious people alone, there's no harm, stop being nasty". Clearly there are a large number of religious people in the world who are indeed nice people, moderates if you will, but I would make two important observations about moderates. Firstly, most moderates (of the main faiths) don't actually practice their religions as "documented", they tend to cherry pick the morally acceptable parts and ignore the rest, labelling them "allegorical" and secondly there are a lot less moderates than there are people under the yoke of the fundamentalists, especially in the Muslim world. A recent example came up in the news of the sub-Saharan country of Mali, here the demographic is 90% Muslim, and the story was about the recent attempt to introduce laws to enforce equality in marriage. It seems the religious leaders there are firmly against such laws, in an utterly transparent comment the leader of the National Union of Muslim Women's Associations claimed that:

We have to stick to the Koran. A man must protect his wife; a wife must obey her husband. It's a tiny minority of women here that wants this new law – the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country – the real Muslims – are against it.

There was also a picture that went with this story, I have agonised about linking to it here, it is a powerful and shocking image; some might say sensationalist and I have no idea about its provenance. However I feel posting it is warranted, these are real and terrible things happening to long suffering people for no other reason than irrational "mythology"; as a father it gave me reason to seriously reflect on my incredible luck to have been born in a free and secular society.

We can both ignore this kind of thing and chalk it up to "culture" i.e. none of our business, or we can show some human solidarity. Unlike moderates who advocate an apologetic approach to religion, my position and hopefully my conscience is clear.