Leftist Muslim blogger Ali Eteraz has been beating the drum about the Pakistani divorce reform proposal, and feeling kind of lonely in doing so.<\/p>\n
Today, he uses<\/a> this history to talk about the interaction between domestic reformers with the Muslim world and Western progressives.<\/p>\n This might be part of the reason that so many Muslim ‘reformers’ like Irshad Manji, Hrsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, end up becoming a “chamcha” (joke for insiders) to the neo-imperial right. They become unhappy with the progressives for seeming so “distant” from activism and so flock to those who seem “all up in the bizness” (even if its the worst way to do bizness). It’s a sort of Reformist Dilemma<\/a> I discussed earlier.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Reformists are activists; and that means they are impatient. They don’t want to sit around and explain why demanding equality in divorce rights is not cultural imperialism. The neo-right doesn’t bother to ask such questions, and therefore draws the Reformists to it. I see that Ziba Mir’s film was made and financed in 1998. Back then it was the progressives who were the vanguard of human rights advancement in the world and the conservatives preferred isolationism. I doubt that a left group in England today would fund her film. They would be more concerned with how such a film would advance the neo-con ambitions over Iran. While the concern is legitimate, I think it is overwrought. In the end, progressives need to usurp and re-assert their former dominance in the international human rights arena. At the time being, they have utterly and totally lost their status. So they have been supplanted.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem is that mainstream progressives are caught in a logical bind; they can’t promote that which further imposes perceived Western hegemony; and at the same time they can’t abandon their human values.<\/p>\n