Wednesday, June 6, 2007

"I'm a Danish Muslim."

Awesome article from the Guardian about Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a muslim woman in Denmark who is redefining assimilation.

The 25-year-old social worker, student and town councillor describes herself as a feminist, a democrat, and a socialist. She has gay friends, opposes the death penalty, supports abortion rights, and could not care less what goes on in other people's bedrooms. In short, a tolerant Scandinavian and European.

She is also a Palestinian and a devout Muslim who insists on wearing a headscarf, who refuses, on religious grounds, to shake hands with males, and who is bidding fair to be the first Muslim woman ever to enter the Folketing, the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.

For the extreme right, the young activist is a political provocateur, an agent of Islamic fundamentalism bent on infiltrating the seat of Danish democracy. To many on the left, Ms Abdol-Hamid is also problematic, personifying through her dress the reactionary repression of women and an illiberal religious agenda that should have no place in her leftwing "red-green" alliance of socialists and environmentalists.

As a result of announcing her parliamentary candidacy earlier this month, the young Muslim and Danish citizen has been thrust to the centre of a debate tormenting Denmark and the rest of western Europe - on the place and values of Islam in modern Europe and the treatment of large Muslim minorities.


The article just gets better. This is a woman of courage and conviction; a true Danish patriot and the personification of the sort of assimilation without surrender of identity that Tariq Ramadan preaches to European muslims (and a model for muslims in the West in general).

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