SELF-CRITICISM:

Malaysia 'apartheid' row deepens (Jonathan Kent, 3/11/06, BBC News)

There has been an angry reaction in Malaysia to remarks by the daughter of the former PM comparing Muslim women to black South Africans under apartheid.

Conservative Muslim women's groups say Marina Mahathir brought shame on the country by saying new Islamic laws have made local women second class citizens.

Her remarks were published with cuts in her regular newspaper column on Friday after being held back for several days.

Marina Mahathir is a prominent campaigner for women's rights. [...]

"In our country, there is an insidious growing form of apartheid among Malaysian women, that between Muslim and non-Muslim women," she said.

She has argued vociferously that the changes to the law represent a step backwards for women's rights in Malaysia.

"As non-Muslim women catch up with women in the rest of the world, Muslim women here are only going backwards," Ms Mahathir said.

"We should also note that only in Malaysia are Muslim women regressing; in every other Muslim country in the world, women have been gaining rights, not losing them."

Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats (JOHN M. BRODER, 3/11/06, NY Times)

Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 11, 2006 7:58 AM