Abdel-Magied’s claim that ‘Islam is the most feminist religion’ rests on the no less ridiculous notion that it was first in allowing women to own property. If only the Wife of Bath, entrepreneur and lusty, well-heeled legatee of five husbands, could have taken Jacqui Lambie’s place and set her straight.
Remind me to pick up a hat on my way to work, preferably a rather ostentatious one. You see, I feel like asking my boss to swap his salary for mine, and in my opinion this is the best way to get away with what on a normal day would be regarded as a shocking impudence. Heavens, you know what? The more I think about it, I reckon I’m in with a shot. After all, if Monday night’s Q&A episode is a guide, it seems you can get away with spouting utter absurdity provided you wear a quaint and colourful headpiece.
This is, of course, in reference to Senator Jacqui Lambie and media commentator Yassmin Abdel-Magied getting into a shouting match when the former asserted that proponents of sharia law need to be deported from Australia. There was also the matter of enacting a measure similar to Trump’s stalled Executive Order, which attempted to ban arrivals from seven failed and overwhelmingly Muslim states where it is impossible to adequately check the backgrounds of visa applicants.
Whilst Lambie did make some salient points, albeit already established ones, arguing the interests of Australians must be put first before we look after those overseas, as is the way with most panellists on the program she failed to argue her points with any epistemic control or, for that matter, self-control. Instead, she fulminated in a manner the ABC’s admirers routinely paint as typifying those nasty conservatives. We’re actually rather measured, us conservativs, but Quadrant readers know that already. Lambie at times carried herself like a quarrelsome fool, her lesser moments were eclipsed by Abdel-Magied’s own ear-assaulting rejoinders; the latter shouting the most incoherent rant since Mohammed dictated the Quran. “Islam to me…is the most feminist religion,” was one of her paste gems.
In a video subsequently posted on Junkee, Abdel-Magied attempted to clarify the position she had taken on Q&A — and with a straight face, mind you. Sharia “is about justice and equality”, she said. Then, as can be expected of any accomplished rhetorician of the Left who is forced to address female oppression in the Middle East, Abdel-Magied suggested that it was the “conservative and patriarchal nature” of certain Islamic nations’, rather than Koranic example and injunction which sees stonings, child marriages and honour killings. That these abominations occur in lands where Islam holds sway is, apparently, no more than unfortunate coincidence.
Abdel-Magied’s claim that “Islam is the most feminist religion” rests on her notion that Islamic women “were given the right to own land” and “got equal rights well before the Europeans”. Truth hides in the shadow of Abdel-Magied’s contention; one need only consider the Wife of Bath, who Chaucer tells us was wealthy, owned a cloth business and had done very nicely as the legatee of five husbands.
Whilst Islamic women do have the right to own land, if a dispute over that land arises in an Islamic nation where sharia informs the judicial system, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan for example, and if the dispute is with a man, because certain interpretations of the Quran promulgate that a women’s testimony counts as only half that of a man’s, under the auspices of sharia the disputed land could come under the man’s ownership. Think of it as a game of he said/she said with the male’s testimony and claim being awarded greater weight.
In Australia, or any Western country for that matter, both parties would be afforded afforded equal standing before the court. Need it be said that, ideally, any verdict will hang on the credibility of evidence, not gender. A quick aside: if that land was left to a brother and sister, more often than not the brother would be entitled to double of what his sister inherits.
