I just finished reading Mona Eltahawy's article "Why Do They Hate Us?" in Foreign Policy magazine. I really wanted to like this article given the vicious and personal attacks hurled at Eltahawy on Twitter from men and women. More importantly it's not everyday that a major magazine devotes so many pages to the tragedy of Muslim women.
However, the article is simplistic, tabloidish, written with what I call "Starbucks readers" in mind and well, extremely lazy with nothing but a listing of one tragedy after the other.
Eltahawy doesn't provide the needed historical, cultural and religious context and as a result doesn't answers her question. Worse, she realizes that she needs to conclude with "So what is to be done?" so she throws half cooked and incoherent ideas as the way forward.
UPDATE:
FP asked six observers to weigh in on Eltahawy's claim that many of the men of the Arab world hate women. Leila Ahmed, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, responds to Eltahawy's story here.
Images from FP Magazine.
