Sunita Marshall, Pakistani Model and Actress, Explains Why She Hasn’t Converted To Islam
20
June 2023
• Sunita Marshall, Pakistani Model and
Actress, Explains Why She Hasn’t Converted To Islam
• Women's Affairs Agency at Prophet’s
Holy Mosque Continues to Serve Women Pilgrims
• Taliban’s Treatment of Women, Girls
Could Be ‘Gender Apartheid’: UN Expert
• Ghaziabad: 2022 Incident of Woman’s
Murder by Suspecting Lover Shared with False ‘Love Jihad’ Claims
• France: Veiled Muslim Women and the
Politics of the New Secularism
• A Devout Muslim, I Read the Qur’an. Taliban
Treatment of Afghan Women Defies It
Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/sunita-marshall-pakistani-model-actress/d/130036
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Sunita Marshall, Pakistani Model and Actress, Explains Why She Hasn’t Converted To Islam
Sunita
Marshall is one of Pakistan’s most beautiful models and actresses.
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JUNE 20, 2023
Sunita Marshall is one of Pakistan’s
most beautiful models and actresses.
Sunita Marshall is happily married to
Hassan Ahmed and the couple has two adorable children.
Sunita Marshall recently appeared on
Nadir Ali’s popular podcast, where she discussed marrying a Muslim man, her
family’s reaction to her marriage, and why she has not converted to Islam
despite being married for many years.
Sunita Marshall is a Christian, and her
children are Muslim. It was decided prior to marriage, she explained. She
stated that she has no plans to convert to Islam and that there is no pressure
on her.
Sunita Marshall stated that she is a
Christian and that her children are Muslim. She stated that it was decided
prior to marriage. She revealed that she has no plans to convert to Islam and
that her in-laws are not pressuring her to do so. She stated that the religion
that her children will follow was decided prior to her marriage. She stated
that she will not convert unless she has received her inner consent.
When asked about marriage, she stated
that she had two wedding events, one for Muslim marriages and one for Christian
marriages. She stated that a church ceremony was her preference. She stated
that she also wore her white gown.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk
https://dailytimes.com.pk/1105343/sunita-marshall-explains-why-she-hasnt-converted-to-islam/
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Women's Affairs Agency at Prophet’s Holy
Mosque Continues to Serve Women Pilgrims
Photo:
Indians in Gulf
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19 Jun, 2023
The Women's Affairs Agency at the
General Presidency for the Affairs of Prophet's Mosque in Madinah continues to
provide the best services to women pilgrims visiting the Prophet's Mosque, in
accordance with the programs and plans set for this purpose.
These include organizing the crowd
movement, explaining regulations and giving instructions, conducting training
courses and workshops to improve the performance of female employees and
teaching them different languages to facilitate communication with all
pilgrims, and helping visitors to the Prophet's Mosque perform their rituals
with ease.
Source: alriyadhdaily.com
http://alriyadhdaily.com/article/8217ce326d2d41888fbadafc8a0da80b
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Taliban’s Treatment of Women, Girls
Could Be ‘Gender Apartheid’: UN Expert
June 19, 2023
A UN expert said on Monday that the
Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women and girls may amount to gender apartheid,
given how severely the de facto authorities of the country continue to violate
their rights.
Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights, expressed similar concerns on the opening day of the Council’s
summer session, adding that the de facto authorities had “dismantled the most
fundamental principles of human rights, particularly for women and girls”.
“Grave, systematic and institutionalized
discrimination against women and girls is at the heart of Taliban ideology and
rule, which also gives rise to concerns that they may be responsible for gender
apartheid,” UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in
Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva, reported
Reuters.
The UN defines gender apartheid as
“economic and social sexual discrimination against individuals because of their
gender or sex.”
“We have pointed to the need for more
exploration of gender apartheid, which is not currently an international crime
but could become so,” Bennett told reporters on the sidelines of the Council.
“It appears if one applies the definition of
apartheid, which at the moment is for race, to the situation in Afghanistan and
use sex instead of race, then there seem to be strong indications pointing
towards that.”
Since the Taliban seized power in August
2021, the group banned women from going to schools, and later in December last
year, they banned women from going to universities and working with aid
agencies.
Source: khaama.com
https://www.khaama.com/talibans-treatment-of-women-girls-could-be-gender-apartheid-un-expert/
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Ghaziabad: 2022 Incident of Woman’s
Murder by Suspecting Lover Shared with False ‘Love Jihad’ Claims
19TH JUNE 2023
Several users have claimed on social
media that a young woman named Asha, a resident of Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh,
was brutally assaulted and murdered by her lover, Nadeem when she refused to
convert to Islam. Several people amplified the claim with the ‘Love Jihad’
angle and shared pictures of the victim and the accused.
Twitter user Deepak Sharma
(@TheDeepak2023) shared the images on June 1, 2023, with the caption: “Name-
Asha, Resident- Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, Result- Lover Nadeem inserted an iron
rod from below and took it out of her mouth. Ghaziabad’s extremely intelligent,
Asha used to go to drink juice every day, it was not known when she fell in
love with Nadeem while drinking juice. Asha refused to change her religion when
Nadeem asked her to. The result is in front of you.” The tweet received over
2,000 likes and was retweeted 1,623 times. The account was later suspended by
Twitter.
A twitter account by the name of ‘Manish
Kashyap (Son of Bihar) Parody’ also amplified the claim. The tweet received
over 9,500 likes and was retweeted over 4,000 times.
Fact Check
A keyword search led us to a tweet by
Ghaziabad Police from September 20, 2022, in which they reported that a man
named Nadeem was arrested for murdering Asha Devi. The tweet contained a
detailed report of the case. It stated that Suman alias Asha Devi lived
separately from her husband and children. She and Nadeem had developed a mutual
relationship. However, Nadeem suspected Asha to be involved in multiple affairs
and hence on the night of September 17 last year, Nadeem murdered Asha by
stabbing her multiple times with an axe and later dumped her blood-stained
clothes near a local temple. Hence, it is worth noting that the incident is
almost a year old and the ‘Love Jihad’ angle, which suggests Nadeem trapped
Asha in a romantic relationship in order to convert her, is baseless.
The Police report states: “During the
interrogation, the accused said that about a year ago he had met Suman alias
Asha Devi, who then started meeting each other frequently and both of them had
a mutual relationship… The deceased used to live separately from her husband
and children and Nadeem fell in love with her. However, when he called her once
or twice, he found her phone busy for a long time. Nadeem suspected that Suman
alias Asha Devi had relationships with other people. The accused objected to
her talking to anyone over the phone late at night, but the deceased did not
listen to her. Angered by this, on the night of 17.09.2022, Nadeem went to
Suman alias Asha Devi’s room with an axe and a pair of clean clothes in his bag
and after dinner, both of them spoke and fell asleep. When Suman alias Asha
Devi was sleeping at around 03.00 am, Nadeem attacked Suman alias Asha Devi
with the axe on her neck. As soon as she was attacked, she fell down from the
bed. Abhi Nadeem stabbed her in the back with the axe and killed her…. He later
dumped her blood-stained clothes near a temple on the bypass road.”
The ACP of Nandgram released a statement
on Twitter on June 1, 2023, with the caption, “Today, on 01.06.23, a tweet was
received on social media, due to which social and communal harmony was likely
to deteriorate. The tweet of that Twitter handle was quickly denied, necessary
action is being taken by registering charges against that Twitter handle~ ACP
Nandgram.”
The tweet also carried a notice by
Ghaziabad Police stating that the incident happened on September 17, 2022, in
Ghaziabad, UP, the same day when Nadeem was arrested by UP police. A case was
filed under section 302 IPC and the accused was also arrested. The notice also
mentions that a Twitter handle by the name Manish Kashyap (Son of Bihar) Parody
initially amplified the false news.
We also came across a 2022 report by ETV
Bharat, titled ‘जूस बेचने के दौरान हुआ प्यार, लव मैरिज के बाद
कुल्हाड़ी से काट डाला, जानें क्यों‘. The
viral images are included in it. The report stated that the two shared a mutual
relationship and that Nadeem had murdered Asha with an axe suspecting her
involvement in multiple affairs. Hence, it is clear that the incident is from
2022 and the accused Nadeem, was in a mutual relationship with Asha. The claims
of ‘Love Jihad’ are, therefore, false.
Source: altnews.in
https://www.altnews.in/ghaziabad-2022-incident-of-womans-murder-by-suspecting-lover-shared-with-false-love-jihad-claims/
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France: Veiled Muslim women and the
politics of the new secularism
Hanane Karimi
19 June 2023
The exclusion of Muslim women who wear
the headscarf in France reveals the hegemonic order enforced in the country, as
well as the sexism and racism that characterise it.
In my book, Are Muslim Women Not Women?,
I borrow from bell hooks, an African-American intellectual, and apply to Muslim
women who wear the Islamic headscarf in France the question she asked about the
exclusion of Black women from the feminist struggle.
In the end, they, too, are excluded from
the cause of women. This is what struck me in 2017 during a public debate on
the question "Does secularism guarantee equality between men and
women?", an event organised by the Senate delegation for women's rights.
In the heart of the Luxembourg Palace, I
was publicly booed because I had dared to respond to feminists who were
advocating for an even wider ban on the veil. "If I understand correctly,
you want to exclude women under the guise of gender equality," I said.
"Isn't that paradoxical? Need I remind you that under the veil, there are
women."
These women oppose women who choose to
wear the headscarf in France, comparing them to those who suffer in Iran, Saudi
Arabia and Afghanistan, where they are forced to wear it.
These very women are fighting in these
countries to be able to survive as women, to go about their lives freely, to
study or work or to become top athletes. And yet, there we were in the process
of deciding on the merits - about "equality between men and women" -
of excluding them from participation in the Olympic Games because they wore
what is imposed on them in their countries.
Radical otherness
This dilemma guided the writing of this
book, the chapters of which come from sections of my doctoral thesis,
Assignment to Radical Alterity and Paths to Emancipation: A Study of the Agency
of French Muslim Women. I wanted to focus my remarks on the origin of the
discrimination and exclusion that target Muslim women who wear the headscarf.
To do so, I traced the fabrication of
"the radical otherness" of French people of African and North African
descent, which finds its origins in the exclusion and stigmatisation of
post-colonial immigrants in the 19th century and, before that, in the way
French imperialism viewed Islam as "the imperial enemy", as the
French philosopher Mohamed AmerMeziane has explored.
I relied on many authors to retrace this
socio-history, in particular the Algerian sociologist of
"emigration-immigration", AbdelmalekSayad, who was a true precursor
of a new sociology of Islam.
In this work, I paid particular
attention to questioning the framework from which we think about social
phenomena, without which biases and unexamined assumptions, especially
regarding North/South relations, prevent objective reflection.
Islam is a "dominated"
religion because it is a "religion of the dominated" but also,
previously, of the colonised under "protection" or French domination.
France has thus built a relationship of domination with Islam and Muslims, and
sometimes even an enterprise - at times concealed, at times assumed - to
domesticate Islam and Muslims.
Tracing the political socio-history of
the marginalisation of immigrant and Muslim populations of African and North
African origin has allowed me to study the filiation between the hated figure -
the incarnation of "heretical femininity" - of "veiled
women" and her ascendants.
Undesirable and illegitimate
This is what I propose in my work, where
I focus on this "figure", on the political discursive construction of
which it is the object, and on the alleged or perceived dangerousness
associated with that figure.
Women who wear a headscarf are not only
undesirable and illegitimate in the eyes of the nation - they are undisciplined
creatures who must be educated and converted. If they resist, they become
dangerous and are then stigmatised as such: now they are the Muslim enemies.
The goal is to prevent them, in a
"civilised" way, from evolving in their society by restricting their
access to certain spaces and certain functions through the creation and
expansion of rules of religious neutrality that are incompatible with the
wearing of the headscarf.
Laws and regulations, speeches and
attacks, make them, in the eyes of their detractors, women stripped of their
humanity and their femininity.
I then describe the discriminations, the
exclusions; their mechanisms but also the forms of domination and their
alienating effects. I also identify the alliances that are created to protect
the French hegemonic order, in particular between feminist groups and political
groups that come together to reorient and redefine secularism - what I call the
policies of the new secularism.
Ultimately, what is at stake is the
preservation and centrality of a hegemonic and, it must be remembered,
normative order. Its centrality allows me to conceptualise the notion of
paradoxical femininity.
A paradoxical femininity
In the game of domination, women are
positioned on a scale designed to evaluate their conformity to "good"
femininity. "Bad" femininity, meaning bad or dangerous women, are
disqualified, caricatured, despised and stigmatised - they are targeted as
heretics to the hegemonic order.
And the women who personify this bad
femininity endorse a paradoxical femininity: they embody both a heretical
femininity vis-a-vis the partisans of the new secularism and a hegemonic
femininity vis-a-vis the supporters of an orthodox reading of Islam.
My book also aims at a disalienation
vis-a-vis the hegemonic order and more specifically one of its mainsprings:
hegemonic femininity. This is why I have also chosen to name the alienation of
the dominant group a racial hegemony, which is never recognised as such but
which is nonetheless real, as is the case with universalist feminists.
I also name the alienation of the
dominated, who find themselves locked up despite themselves in a reactionary
posture towards the power that the dominants exercise over them.
Relations of domination imply effects:
alienation is unknown, implicit and mechanical. It affects perceptions and
perspectives, worldviews and bodies.
This aspect seems central to me.
Excerpts from interviews provide a striking account of how Islamophobic
domination distorts the bodies of the women concerned, altering their
self-esteem, which sometimes leads to the desire to distinguish themselves from
the group of stigmatised peers.
This distinction is also a source of
alienation and illustrates the incorporation of social contempt, racism and
Islamophobia.
The views expressed in this article
belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of
Middle East Eye.
Source: middleeasteye.net
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/france-muslim-veiled-women-politics-new-secularism
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A Devout Muslim, I Read the Qur’an;
Taliban Treatment OfAfghan Women Defies It
Sakina Amani
JUN 20, 2023
In the years since the Taliban regained
control of Afghanistan in 2021, Afghan women have increasingly grappled with
persecution and a severe mental health crisis. The imposition of sharia law,
derived from Islam, has sparked outrage and concern among international human
rights communities as the Taliban has systemically stripped away women’s rights
and freedoms.
As a woman born into a Shia-Muslim
family, the Taliban’s implementation of sharia law has never made sense to me,
even after studying Sunni Islam subjects throughout my education. There is one
Islam with various schools of thought, including Sunni and Shia branches, and
these different schools have followers across the globe, primarily in the
Middle East, South and East Asia, Africa and among Muslim refugees worldwide.
Despite the differences in interpretation, none advocates for the complete
denial of basic human rights for Muslim women.
After taking power, the Taliban’s first
move was to change the Ministry of Women Affairs to the Ministry of Vice and
Virtue, which became an unquestionable symbol of the disappearance of women’s
rights. Afghan women have been barred from education, denied the opportunity to
work, subjected to oppressive dress codes, excluded from participating in
politics and decision-making processes, and have had their access to healthcare
restricted. They face harsh punishments for violating any of these strictures.
Source: crikey.com.au
https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/06/20/afghanistan-taliban-womens-rights-quran-sharia-law/
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URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/sunita-marshall-pakistani-model-actress/d/130036