Dr. Hawa Abdi – “Heroic, Female, and Muslim”

7 Comments

1. 

   Safia Farole

   December 16, 2010 at 9:23 PM

   Dr. Hawa is doing a tremendous job in Somalia. May Allah increase brave women such as herself.

   One thing I don’t like about Nic Kristof’s articles is that he always seems to conflate “Islam” with “Muslims”. Check out his opening paragraphs to see what I mean:

   “What’s the ugliest side of Islam? Maybe it’s the Somali Muslim militias that engage in atrocities like the execution of a 13-year-old girl named Aisha Ibrahim. Three men raped Aisha, and when she reported the crime she was charged with illicit sex, half-buried in the ground before a crowd of 1,000 and then stoned to death.

   That’s the extremist side of Islam that drives Islamophobia in the United States, including Congressional hearings on American Muslims that House Republicans are planning for next year”

   Dear God! Just exchange Islam for Muslims in his quote and Kristof would then have it correct. I’ve seen this too often in his articles – he uses these terms interchangeably. Its not “the ugliest side of Islam” – its “the ugliest side of Muslims”. Som one get ahold of this guy!

   It just gets under my skin every time he writes about Islam and women’s rights, and he smear Islam like this. He does a fabulous job covering women who would other wise go unrecognized, but I’d like to live to see the day when he stops pinning things on Islam. I should try emailing him, but I doubt op-ed columnists respond to readers.

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     Tariq Ahmed

     December 16, 2010 at 9:57 PM

     I agree, quoting Kristoff leaves a bad taste in the mouth, so you’ll notice I was very selective. Still, I do not read Glamour so but for his very attention-grabbing (and on some levels condescending) headline, I would have missed this story completely.

     Because of his demonstrated bias, I hesitate to subscribe to his description of the events in Dr. Hawa Abidi’s story. You sound like you have followed this story somewhat: how accurate is what he wrote?

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       Safia Farole

       December 16, 2010 at 11:54 PM

       Taiq, I read about Dr. Hawa a couple of months ago and I shared with my mom who she is and it happens that my mom was aware of her work back in the good ‘ole days in Somalia. She was an ob-gyn that many Somali women went to, and thats how my mom came to know her. Kristof’s description of her work sounds fair – I’m not sure of its exact acccuracy because as I mentioned, her story is quite new to me too. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she is helping Somalis that way – after the war broke out in Somalia, many Somali women rose up in those days to clean up the mess. Ask any Somali female elder and they’ll tell you about the courage of Somali women to undertake the task of mending their broken society back together. So Hawa’s story is not an anomaly – more like something that could be expected of Somali women.

       But I’ve been reading Kristof for the past 3 years, and I notice how he repeats this conflating of Islam with Muslims frequently. You would expect him to be able to discern between the sources of Islam and Muslim action (given the numerous Muslim countries he’s visited). I hope he comes to realize this one day.

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         lily prince

         December 17, 2010 at 10:07 PM

         I think Nicholas Kristof just might reply to you if you wrote him. And I think he would appreciate it that you point out his error. He’s not a light weight. Also, in his article, he commented that it was the extremists in religion who cause the problems.

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         Tariq Ahmed

         December 17, 2010 at 11:52 PM

         Jazak Allah khayr for your elaboration. I think I may be more cynical than you and Lily: I think Kristoff is an experienced writer who is fully aware of what he is conveying. Why else start off a piece about Dr. Hawa Abdi with such a dramatic and chilling example that has nothing to do with her?

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2. 

   lily prince

   December 18, 2010 at 11:26 PM

   What do you think it is that he is conveying? Enlighten me.

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     Tariq Ahmed

     December 19, 2010 at 12:23 AM

     Don’t get me wrong — Kristoff does not seem like those people in America who hate all Muslims and hate anything about Islam. You can see plenty of those people attacking Kristoff if you do a Google search like this one (search terms are kristoff and islam if the link does not work).

     And you can run a similar search on the NYTimes web site where you will also pull comments by readers.

     Mr. Kristoff likes certain Muslims, and he seems to encourage other Americans to like them, too. But to oversimplify the issue, it’s not just that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims in Mr. Kristoff’s world, but good Islam and bad Islam, too. “If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be employed more productively, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy.” — Kristoff. What’s Kristoff’s idea of the right direction for Islam? Look to the same link: “One important school of Koranic scholarship, Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that the Koran need not be interpreted literally…”

     That group typifies what is wrong with what he would call the “good side” of Islam. If anything, Kristoff’s good Islam would be Muslims reinterpreting their holy scriptures as liberally as do Jews and Christians. Yet orthodox adherence to the Prophet Muhammad’s understanding of Islam, the understanding embodied by his actual students and companions even as they faced situations that had never been confronted directly by the Prophet (Allahumma salli wa sallim alaa Nabiyyana Muhammad) — that orthodoxy not only protects most Muslims from Mutazilism and similar deviations, but it also saves us from those people who reinterpret Islam as a warped license to kill their enemies, the so-called jihadists.

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