Muslims Really Don’t Discriminate Against Women

The conventional wisdom in the West is that Muslims view females as second-class citizens, deserving of being treated as property, subservient to males and quietly obedient. This is why they cover their bodies from head to toe, showing only their eyes so that they can see where they are going.

A news item today puts that idea into debate, and shows once again that we in the West really don’t know or understand Islam and the Muslim culture, by revealing that women are just as good as men, at least for certain roles.

The news report says that “U.S.-led coalition forces are increasingly catching militants suspected of training women to become human bombs or finding evidence of efforts by al-Qaida in Iraq to recruit women” as suicide bombers.

And, apparently al-Qaida is not as maniacally wedded to the fundamentalist fringes of Islam as we once thought, because it goes against religious taboos in Iraq to involve women in fighting. The three recent suicide bombings carried out by women indicate, perhaps, that al-Qaida really doesn’t hew so closely to the dictates of the Islamic faith, or maybe, as the news story suggested, insurgents are merely growing increasingly desperate.

Technorati Tags: Iraq War, Radical Islam, Religion, Islam