Muhammed Shah Aga Kahn III Quotes
A second cause of our present apathy is the terrible position of Moslem women. There is absolutely nothing in Islam, or the Koran, or the example of the first two centuries, to justify this terrible and cancerous growth that has for nearly a thousand, years eaten into the very vitals of Islamic society…. the present system … means the permanent imprisonment and enslavement of half the nation. How can we expect progress from the children of mothers who have never shared, or even seen, the free social intercourse of modern mankind? This terrible cancer that has grown since the 3rd and 4th century of the Hijra must either be cut out, or the body of Moslem society will be poisoned to death by the permanent waste of all the women of the nation.
The Hijra was the spread of Islam after The Prophet organized the first Muslims. Islamic reformers have been trying to improve the legal and cultural position of women in Islamic Societies ever since with little success, even in modern times. The notable exception was the Turkish Revolution led by Ataturk. He was familiar with Aga Kahn arguments for reform and put the force of law behind them. See {444998}.
Sultan Muhammed Shah Aga Khan III, 1877-1957, 48th Imam of the Shia Ismaili Moslems, President of the League of Nations, First president of the All-India Muslim League, Referring to the Majority of the Moslems of India at the turn of the 20th century, Presidential Address to the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference, Delhi, India,1902
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Despite this pronouncement which kept Caliphs from being female, modern Islamic states (Pakistan, Indonesia) have had female Presidents.
Dr. Saadawi was fired from her government post for revealing the status of women in the country. She was also actually arrested and jailed as well for impairing national “values.” See .{586709}.
This 12th century observation which appears so obvious has been ignored by the vast majority of Islamic scholars and writers subsequent until modern times, and even then they represent the small reform minority of Islamic thinking.
Given the time, this was an amazing demand. Fuller preceded all the more famous American feminists and was an inspiration to them.
She was chiding the Egyptian military who in the Arab Spring, turned on demonstrators and soldiers in the middle of the central square stripped a female demonstrator half naked and beat her badly;
She had been appointed by President Truman to be the US Delegate to the First United Nations sessions where she had a major role in forming the organization to meet the needs of the United States (The veto in the Security Council for example). John Foster Dulles, our Secretary of State was publically totally against having any woman in that position and later would come to regard Mrs. Roosevelt as a great danger. See {585211} . Yet he admitted that she did a good job with the UN. She was 62 at the time, and while we do not consider that as very old any longer, there were very few people who would be active in politics at that age and certainly no women. She stayed active however until her death more than a decade later.
Her audiences were all familiar with the Adam & Eve Biblical narration.
