I prepared the following for my grad seminar on “Women, Globalization and Religion” earlier this evening after a) reading an account of a Catholic-Muslim alliance against an international effort to improve the political and economic situation for women around the globe and b) learning about the murder of Safia Amajan, Afghani campaigner for women’s rights, by the cowardly Taliban (read that news article, and you’ll see why I choose to call myself a feminist). I have comments to respond to and Sam Harris links to add–I promise I’ll get to them tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

After being immersed in news covering Muslim outrage at Pope Benedict’s recent remarks (which ironically targeted Western secularism), it came as a bit of a surprise to learn that his papal predecessor engineered a Catholic-Muslim alliance against the international promotion of women’s rights throught the Beijing Platform for Action. Although both religious traditions have historically been at odds, it makes sense that at least some of the leaders within each of these mostly patriarchal and authoritarian traditions might converge against the real threat of Euro-American secularism, individualism, and feminism.

For Islam, the struggle is exacerbated by the association of ‘modern’ ideas, methods, and values with the same political and economic powers with their conquerors and colonizers of the past century or two; modernity is perceived as a foreign import, intrusion, invasion. At the same time, all groups involved are more than willing to selectively assimilate those aspects of modernity that most empower them. The governments of Turkey and Egypt happily adopt secularism but stop short at the full implementation of democratic freedoms. The most reactionary elements of Islam jump on the latest technological innovations–from the cassette sermons that helped bring down the Shah of Iran to the Dear Abby-esque websites where ayatollah’s answer questions on everything from chess to oral sex. Usury is in (as long as it’s called something else), but so is the veil.

Caught in the crossfire (and firing away on both sides) are the Muslim women. Their options for empowerment are decidedly constrained by their environment. If they’re living under Sharia law that already values them as half a man, do they choose to work within the system–to work the system–to tease out Quranic support for women’s rights?

But does the modern, connected world offer anything better? At least within an Islamist society, a woman, no matter how poor, is affirmed as the mother of the next generation of true believers and as defender and purveyor of sacred values. But she can be freed from all of this in exchange for a below subsistence wage and long days sewing garments that she can then see on TV and on her wealthy, secularized neighbors.

Perhaps there is an element of hope. Where the Western woman has had two centuries to change their society (leveraging religious roles and stereotypes in the process) into one that grants them legal and political (if not economic and social) parity with men, the Muslim woman is just beginning.