I realized that working for these causes while wearing the hijab can only contribute to breaking the misconception that Muslim women lack the strength, passion and power to strive for their own rights.
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The Freedom of the Hijab - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Lila Abu-Lughod: Do Muslim Women Need Saving? | TIME.com - 0 views
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But we were confusing veiling with a lack of agency. What most of us didn’t know is that 30 years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek described the burqa as “portable seclusion” and noted that many women saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled them to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men.
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But isn't the problem that they feel they need protection from "unrelated men"? True they are able to go into public, but their living spaces are still segregated. She goes on to critique Western women for feeling liberated but still being constricted by "tyrannies of fashion." However, I don't see these two issues as comparable. True, American women will face criticism and experience disadvantages if they do not conform to basic social beauty norms, but they will still be allowed to leave their homes and interact with society.
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A moral crusade to rescue oppressed Muslim women from their cultures and their religion has swept the public sphere, dissolving distinctions between conservatives and liberals, sexists and feminists. The crusade has justified all manner of intervention from the legal to the military, the humanitarian to the sartorial. But it has also reduced Muslim women to a stereotyped singularity, plastering a handy cultural icon over much more complicated historical and political dynamics.
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There is no doubt that Western notions of human rights can be credited for the hope for a better world for all women. But I suspect that the deep moral conviction people feel about the rightness of saving the women of that timeless homogeneous mythical place called Islamland is fed by something else that cannot be separated from our current geopolitical relations. Blinded to the diversity of Muslim women’s lives, we tend to see our own situation too comfortably. Representing Muslim women as
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Arabs Give Tepid Support to U.S. Fight Against ISIS - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.
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first American strikes inside Syria crackled through the region, the mixed reactions underscored the challenges of a new military intervention in the Middle East, where 13 years of chaos, from Sept. 11 through the Arab Spring revolts, have deepened political and sectarian divisions and increased mistrust of the United States on all sides.
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The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria:
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He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.
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While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to “do their share” to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqué supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance.
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Syria and the United States were “fighting the same enemy,” terrorism, and that his government had “no reservations” about airstrikes as long as the United States coordinated with it
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Egypt’s hands were full with its own fight against “terrorism,” referring to the Islamist opposition.
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Turkey, which Mr. Kerry will visit on Friday, is concerned about attacks across its long border with ISIS-controlled Syria, and also about 49 Turkish government employees captured by the group in Iraq
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at least 10 Arab states signed a communiqué pledging to join “in the many aspects of a coordinated military campaign,” but with the qualification “as appropriate” and without any specifics.
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But many Sunni Muslims were cynical about battling an organization that evolved from jihadist groups fighting American occupation.
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For Shiites, whom ISIS views as apostates deserving death, the group poses an existential threat, yet Shiite-led Iran, a longtime foe of the United States, is excluded from the coalition.
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Egypt and Syria, revolts that Sunni Islamists saw as their chance at power have been rolled back or brutally thwarted.
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But that, he said, would require fancy footwork from Mr. Obama to “make it clear this is about American security, not about favoring any side in the Syrian civil conflict.”
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Members of a range of Syrian insurgent groups that consider ISIS an enemy said they, too, opposed American strikes unless they also targeted the government.
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And even those most supportive of the strikes — members of the American-vetted groups that stand to gain new aid to fight ISIS — complained that the United States had abetted the extremists’ rise by failing to help other insurgents earlier. They said the United States was attacking ISIS now only because the group threatened it as well as the broader world.
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Arab Nations Offer to Fight ISIS From Air - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The Obama administration said Sunday that “several” Arab nations had offered to join in airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
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American officials have made it clear they do not want the airstrikes to get ahead of the ground action against ISIS, which they said would take time to mass.
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Specifically, senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials asked the United States as recently as this weekend to take action along the Iraqi-Syrian border to deprive ISIS of the safe havens it enjoys in that area.
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“success looks like an ISIL that no longer threatens our friends in the region, no longer threatens the United States, an ISIL that can’t accumulate followers or threaten Muslims in Syria, Iraq or otherwise.”
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The United States has identified ISIS targets in Iraq over the past several weeks. But officials said they were waiting, in part, to match the allied commitments with actual contributions: warplanes, support aircraft that can refuel or provide intelligence, more basing agreements to carry out strikes, and the insertion of trainers from other Western countries.
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Arab nations could participate in an air campaign against ISIS in other ways without dropping bombs, such as by flying arms to Iraqi or Kurdish forces, conducting reconnaissance flights or providing logistical support and refueling.
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Mr. Kerry characterized the strategy in an effort to make it easier for Sunni states to explain to their own populations why they would be contributing forces against Sunni extremists.
Scots independence battle reaches fever pitch on streets and screens | Reuters - 0 views
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White House seeks to win over skeptics on Islamic State fight | Reuters - 0 views
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Arab Nations Offer to Fight ISIS From Air - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...nst-isis-us-official-says.html
Middle East Racial and Ethnic Constructions Revolts and revolutions Belief Systems philosophies and ideologies Trade and Commerce

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Several Arab countries have offered to carry out airstrikes against militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, senior State Department officials said Sunday.
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Mr. Kerry, who is in Paris to attend an international conference the French are hosting on Monday on providing aid to the new Iraqi government, has already visited Baghdad; Amman, Jordan; Jidda, Saudi Arabia; Ankara, Turkey; and Cairo.
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10 Arab countries joined the United States in issuing a communiqué that endorsed efforts to confront and ultimately “destroy” ISIS, including military action to which nations would contribute “as appropriate.”
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The United States has a broad definition of what it would mean to contribute to the military campaign.
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“Providing arms could be contributing to the military campaign,” said a second State Department official. “Any sort of training activity would be contributing to the military campaign.”
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President François Hollande of France told Iraqi officials that his country would be willing to carry out airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq,
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Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia has also said that his country will join the air campaign and is sending as many as eight FA-18 attack planes, as well as an early warning aircraft and a refueling plane.
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such as flying arms to Erbil in the Kurdistan region or Baghdad, conducting reconnaissance flights or providing logistical support and refueling. The officials said the Arab offers were under discussion.
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“The Iraqis have asked for assistance in the border regions, and that’s something we’re looking at,” the first State Department official said.
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“They have a very new air force,” a third State Department official said, referring to the Iraqi military. “Their targeting is not nearly as precise as ours and they have made some real mistakes.”
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“I disagree completely with ISIS in thought and means, but I do not accept that America fights them,” said the scholar, Sheikh Yusef Qaradawi, leader of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, in a Twitter message reported around the region. The United States, he said, “is not moved by Islamic values but by its own interests, even if it spills blood.”
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his scholars’ union declared ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate “null and void,” arguing that its extremism stigmatized more mainstream Islamists and undermined broader Sunni opposition movements in Syria and Iraq.
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Now his criticism of the American role may increase the fears of a backlash against Arab governments that publicly join the campaign.
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groups of Iraqi forces, Kurds and Syrian rebels stepped up to provide the fighting forces on the ground.
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choke off ISIS’s ability to reap $1 million or more a day from oil sales,
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trainers from other Western countries.
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White House presses Congress to vote now on arming Syrian rebels | Fox News - 0 views
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ISIS Video Shows Execution of David Cawthorne Haines, British Aid Worker - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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a vital ally of the United States
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Alan Henning, another British citizen
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We will do everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice, however long it takes.
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The group is currently holding Mr. Henning and another British citizen, as well as two other American aid workers.
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ISIS warned that the hostages would die if relatives made their identities public.
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“We don’t pay ransoms to terrorists when they kidnap our citizens.”
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tortured
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The BBC reported that imams across Scotland, where Mr. Haines’s parents live, called for the release of Mr. Haines and other hostages during Friday Prayer last week.
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Obama, in Speech on ISIS, Promises Sustained Effort to Rout Militants - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Nations Trying to Stop Their Citizens From Going to Middle East to Fight for ISIS - NYT... - 1 views
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The Push to Keep Scotland in the Fold - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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warned Scots against thinking that they could count on retaining the pound sterling as their currency should they secede.
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women, who were more cautious earlier in the campaign, are turning toward the “yes” camp, as are working-class voters, even though the Labour Party opposes independence.
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more socially inclusive country that it says can be built only with the powers that independence would bring
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they are bluffing and that if London refused to negotiate a currency union, Scotland would walk away from its share of the national debt.
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U.N.'s Ban urges Assad to seek political solution to Syria crisis | Reuters - 0 views
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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged President Bashar al-Assad to seek a political solution to Syria's war, saying this would help international efforts against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, al-Hayat newspaper reported on Wednesday.
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In an interview with the pan-Arab daily, Ban said years of war between Assad's forces and armed rebel groups had allowed militants such as Islamic State to take root in the region.
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Asked whether Assad would have any role to play in an international coalition being assembled to fight Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the U.N. chief said Assad could contribute by working politically towards an end to the war in his country.
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slamic State, a militarily-powerful al Qaeda offshoot that wants to create a jihadist hub in the heart of the Arab world, has made rapid territorial gains in both Iraq and Syria in recent months that have alarmed regional and Western powers.
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when Assad was sworn in for a new term as president, he vowed to recover all Syria from Islamist insurgents and dismissed the Syrian opposition abroad as traitors. But he also said he would be willing to work with the country's internal opposition, without giving details.
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The United States has carried out weeks of air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq, but the outlook for U.S. air raids in Syria is much less clear.
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While Iraq's government welcomed the role of U.S. warplanes to attack the militants, Assad has warned that any strikes conducted without his country's permission would be considered an act of aggression, potentially plunging any U.S.-led coalition into a broader conflict with Syria.
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"But it is important that the international community is united and shows strong support for any action that has to be taken to root out this terrorism."
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International and regional powers have backed opposing sides in the civil war, with Russia and Iran supporting Assad and Western powers and Gulf Arab states largely backing the rebels.
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Ban also said a U.N. Security Council decision to support military action against Islamic State would be "an excellent and an appropriate way" to deal with the group but that its brutal killings were why, "some countries took some military action," in a reference to U.S. air strikes in Iraq.
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U.S. President Barack Obama is expected on Wednesday to outline a plan to deal with Islamic State. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Baghdad as he began a tour of the Middle East to build military, political and financial support to defeat the militants.