Women rights in Islam

[pineapplebunnybounce]

And that's from a moderate Islamic country?

I'd hate to see a more fundamental or conservative spin on all that.

It must be very baffling if you've only lived long term in more liberal societies and you may feel like omg, how can we survive with this madness? The truth is, humans can get used to almost anything if they've dealt with it for a long enough time. M'sia is constantly portrayed as the muslim country who "got it right", basically because a huge minority (~30% M'sian Chinese, ~13% M'sian Indian, the rest indigenous) is able to coexist with the muslim population (they're Malays, it's a race, but legally, if you're Malay you have to be muslim, they're the ones that suffer the most even though they get all the gov benefits, IMO) without much violence and we get a long very well. Except when it comes to politics, then the minority is completely screwed by the majority and the idea is that Malays are entitled to more rights than the rest of us and they truly truly believe so and will always vote for the party that will keep the inequality.

I think it's considered moderate because if you go to M'sia, you won't see burkas (if you do they're tourists from Saudi, who go there often), you will see lots of muslim girls in miniskirts, makeup, clubbing. You'll see a modern society, in other words. But there's this dissonance where the laws and politics (and about many of the citizens) have a primitive mindset, but the technology and lifestyle has moved forward.

And people looking from the outside would try to think, hm, is Islam responsible for this? Or is it something else? But having lived with the system for so long, I can tell you that when the religion enters politics, there is no separation between the two, it seeps into all parts of politics and then into your life and it's futile to try to decide which is political and which is the "Islamic" influence, this is the reason why many say that islam is a very political religion, because the religion does come with it's governing ideology (shariah, for example), and if I'm not mistaken, the arrangement M'sia has (where nonmuslims have less rights) is also outlined in the religion, basically nonmuslims are "dhimmies" and this is how we're supposed to be treated.