I haven’t been on an airplane in eight weeks. It’s been a wonderful chance to stick to a more normal schedule — less catching-up-before-I-leave and digging-out-from-what-piled-up.

Sticking around has meant more time to bake with my little ones, play games with the middle ones, and hang out with the big ones. It’s been really good.

Tonight I’m off to Japan, and hoping for a really good trip. Posting to the blog will probably be light for the next week, although I’ve already got a backlog of items and ideas… well, that much more to look forward to, I guess.

The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe’s favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society’s fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam. [from Damsels in Distress?,  Soumaya Ghannoushi]

A fascinating assertion. I won’t comment on the overall theme of the blog posting; the issue is complex. Worth reading, though. It will make you think.

From the comments (which are well-worth reading, too): 

There are other aspects to this complex, too. Thus there’s the tendency for societies to use female symbolic figures to represent themselves (Athena, Britannia, Lady Liberty etc). There’s the sentimentalisation embodied in the phrase “motherhood and apple pie”. Among many other things. Religions, of all varieties, being concerned with the regulation of social groups, are particularly interested in women, because of womens’ status as social vectors.

So if a society is reacting against “the west”, that reaction will inevitably take the form of suppressing the freedoms of women, for the simple reason that those freedoms have become associated with westernisation. And this reaction will be justified in religious terms. But equally, western and other interests seeking moral justification for intervention will highlight the situation of women.

…and this…

This argument is OK as far as it goes but may I add a couple of points:
1) Human rights can and do exist outside of an imperialist narrative. In the European context they arose in the struggle against ruling elites that were also involved in colonialism. Hence they are better framed in an anti-imperialist narrative.
2) My first point would of course preclude blowing the **** out of someone in order to liberate them, but not of being concerned with their state of being, or of engaging with them to improve their situation. (R.A.W.A. springs to mind). Your point about ‘the oppressed Muslim woman’ being an imperialist construction, is quite possibly true. However, if you then conceive of a Muslim world that is self-contained and separate from the ‘West’, (or wherever), you are reproducing the same fallacy; namely that Muslim human beings have an essential difference that requires special treatment. […]

…and also this…

What would you say to people like me who abhor Islams treatment of women yet opposed the Iraq war? I’m sorry but tarring everyone who recognises that Islam oppresses women as some kind of racist imperialist is simply false. I’m not impressed at all with the OP, she seems to be trying to brush the abuses of women under Islam under the carpet by pointing out how western governments exploit this abuse as propoganda for their imperialist wars. […]

Another reference to the MEX article.

An informed post on Google Phone’s Android Community blog, summarizing my MEX article, published earlier this week. (Android is Google’s recently announced new open-source platform).

[Note that Power2B is a technology company, not an interface design company. We study interface needs and future trends, and then innovate to enable those dreams to become reality.]

“As the many thousands of people who have Google as their homepage already know, search can be as simple as a box on a page.  Mobile search, however, requires something of a paradigm shift; no matter how glossy the UI, tactile the interface or clever the design, emulating desktop search on a cellphone is a frustrating, scroll-heavy experience.  Sarah…, of interface design company Power2B, discusses the demands for a semantically-linked, three-dimensional mobile search environment in an article for MEX today, resolving in what she calls “mesh connectivity vs. linearity” — where search navigation is guided one step at a time through a series of clarifying options.”

While I do link to YouTube videos, or sites that embed them, I do not embed them directly in my blog. Why not? YouTube uses the end of each video to promote links other videos and advertisements, and does not give me any control over what is displayed there.

Same goes for Google Ads, by the way. I’d rather have no advertising at all than find myself advertising products or services I don’t believe in, don’t support, or am offended by.

I was on one site (the homepage of a Jewish organization), and was sad to see Google Ads for missionary messianic Christian cults showing up in the sidebar. Cults are savvy enough to choose keywords that will show up in searches for Jewish content. On another occasion, a religious venture capitalist was unwittingly posting links to pornographic videos (the links being embedded in the closing frame of a humorous YouTube video); I wonder how many people activated one of those links intending to navigate to the main page of the humorous video?

Surely the site owners in both of these cases were not aware of what was creeping through the cracks, but that isn’t good enough. Not for me.

Many people will say, “Who cares? It’s just advertising. You don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe the ads are fine.” Sorry; I do know. I do care. I believe I need to take responsibility.

Many thanks to the talented group at Emara Design for designing and setting up Really Sarah Syndication, with Yaniv Kalimitzky leading the effort. Great look, great implementation.

Just like my cell phone camera lets me catch snapshots of the visual images I see around me — not as clear as a good digital camera, but it’s there with me — the BB lets me capture snapshots of thoughts I have when I’m not sitting at the computer. I’m not talking about quick email fire-offs, but blog thoughts like this one: in the taxi, in a waiting room, while nursing the baby. There’s a stress-reduction in not worrying that I’m going to “lose the thought” before getting it down. That’s my primary use of the Blackberry, as it turns out.

The secondary use is to ensure that I don’t miss important emails while on the road.