This isn't the least bit surprising.

The world has seen countless rebellions against repressive authority, everywhere such authority could be found to exist for any length of time.

However in only the tiniest handful of these many rebellions over thousands of years, will you find strong female leadership.

The Joan de Arcs, the Boadicas, they are slightly less rare than feathers on a fish.

Islamic repression of women endures because it is women specifically that it represses.

And it is the very nature of the fairer sex itself which prevents more liberated women from vibrant, vigorous, and heavy handed opposition.

I'm quite sure this statement will be met with the most thorough resistance, but on principle and ideal, not based upon cold hard reason, which is what it would take to refute it.

The truth is we all know which sex is the more violent, the more aggressive, the more prone to violent resistance and which the more prone to passivity and acceptance.

One might think it a criticism of character, but it is more accurate to say that it references the adaptability of the two sexes. Between the two, I must also assess the fairer sex as the more adaptable.

Historical sources agree, slave traders in days long past wrote about their journeys, and more than once is it commented that where male captives bound for bondage became sullen and resentful and bore watching for signs of rebellion, before the journey was halfway done the captive women began to feel optomistic about their prospects.

One could argue that there is an evolutionary component here to promote the passage of genes. A man at the bottom of a social order will be lucky to pass off his genes at all, his sole hope for a future for himself or his offspring is to achieve status, people with status get lots of nookie, people with none, get none. Therefore violence and the willingness to commit it are key to his genetic future.

The woman on the other hand, need only win the affections of high status males in her new society, being sullen, violent, or resentful would run counter to her best chance for a genetic future. She doesn't need to do violence herself, which is good, since she is not as physically adept to it as any possible mate she would acquire would be. Mind you such a system is not perfectly separated by sex, but it is an obvious trend with but few exceptions.

Bottom line, if Islam abused men as it did women, it never would have gained ground in the first place, but it appealed to the interests of men in some of their basest ways, and oppressed the sex in society that would adapt best to it, even cooperate with its own oppression. Ironically our own present society makes these trends more obvious, since so few self proclaimed feminists, who in theory argue for equality, will actually act in opposition to people who are genuinely opposed to equality between sexes. Instead they focus their ire on the west, which poses no threat to their ideal for equality, they fight the nonviolent and embrace the abuser.

I can't help but think they're rather like a lot of battered wives that way.

Islamic repression of women endures because it is women specifically that it represses.

And yet, who is it that raises young Islamic men? I suppose it could be Stockholm Syndrome writ large, but the keys to the kingdom lies within reach.

if Islam abused men as it did women

It does. In Islam, having sex with boys isn't really sex. So it isn't considered a terrible thing, even if it really is.

Well, apparently it's not enough to kill their own women, now an Islamic cleric is offering a reward to anyone who kills this Christian woman, Asia Bibi, because she supposedly (gasp!) blasphemies Islam.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40490458/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia

Perhaps Abu-Lughod forgets about the dress reform movement in the late 19th century which lead to the abandonment of the corset. Or feminist bra burning during the 1960's. Western women felt empowered to do these things because they were under no real threat of imprisonment or death.

Abu-Lughod is disingenuous when she equates fashion peer pressure to the very real threat of violence and loss of life.

And I hardly think that a burqa is a fashion statement.

"Bottom line, if Islam abused men as it did women, it never would have gained ground in the first place..."

Tell it to this guy:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1210221/Pictured-Ghastly-face-Lal-Mohammed-man-mutilated-defying-Taliban-Afghanistan-vote.html

Islam is not a paradise for men. The average man in a country like Afghanistan is not the king of his castle. He is nothing more than a wretched, frightened slave of Allah. He has no more freedom in any meaningful sense than a Western convict serving life without parole. Mullahs, jihadis, & village elders tell him what to believe, what is right & wrong, when to pray, when to wake up, and which hand he must use to wipe his bum. Any defiance of their will, and he can end up like Lal Mohammed. But Islam does give the lowliest man the right to savagely abuse his wife & daughters, and to murder them in turn for defying his will & insulting his "honor". That is the dynamic that explains the enslavement of women in Islam to men who are not free themselves.