Here is a story that should – but won’t – shame Western feminists:

Kainat Soomro should have stayed silent. After being battered and gang raped for four days her traditional, conservative village in rural Pakistan expected the 13-year-old girl to keep her story to herself.

She refused.

That was almost four years ago. Today Kainat is a vocal campaigner for women’s rights as she struggles for justice in her own case and tries to overturn the traditional, conservative culture that expects rape victims to suffer in silence.

It’s a surprising story of extraordinary courage and persistence, worth reading in full.

And here is another:

On Thursday, December 9, 2010, a unique and unbelievable incident took place in Kolkata [Calcutta]. Over 2000 divorced and destitute Muslim women assembled at College Square. … These unfortunate women were either divorced by oral ‘triple talaq’ or simply driven out by their husbands along with their children.

They selected the date 9th December as on this date the Muslim lady Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hussain… died in 1932. She spent her life for the uplift of the Muslim women and founded the first Muslim Girls’ school, the Shakhawat Memorial School, in Kolkata for educating the Muslim girls. But her activities were highly condemned and bitterly criticized by the Muslim clerics, who wanted to see Muslim women illiterate. It is needless to say that these clerics were in favour of using women as sex objects and as machines for producing children as many as possible. In fact, they practically excommunicated her from the Muslim society. The bitterness went to the extent that when she died on December 9, 1932, the clerics refused to bury her body in Muslim burial ground.

And here’s a sample of what a Western female academic, Professor Jane Smith, has to say about  the subjugation of women in Islam (from the abstract of an article accessible – at a price – through this page):

The Qur’än cites men as the protectors of women, the righteousness of the latter defined in terms of obedience to males. A predominant theme in contemporary Muslim writing, expressed by both sexes, is the naturalness of the circumstance in which women because of their innate qualities and characteristics have clearly defined roles and cannot appropriate functions reserved for men. Their somatic and psychological differences determine the distinct—but complementary—duties prescribed for each. Few Muslim women, even those who may be critical of the restrictions imposed by Islam, are sympathetic to much of what they see as characteristic of Western feminism. In Islam women are freed from many of the problems and concerns that are assumed by men, a situation which they often feel is not easily to be given up.

Tell that to the women who were divorced and left destitute by their husbands, and dared to complain of their plight at the gathering in Calcutta.

So what is feminism all about? This definition comes from an article by a feminist :

Feminism is defined by dictionary.com as: “The doctrine — and the political movement based on it — that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men.”  This is a very accurate definition of the word Feminism.

But it’s for Western women only, you see.