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"Gender apartheid"

Extremism in any form is bad! That's an oxymoron! However, pursuing certain policies or ideologies based on something said to be religious is frightening.

As Global Voices reports on a movement in Iran:

"Hundreds of students continued a protest at Shiraz University against “gender apartheid” on Tuesday 4th of March. The students want their university to put an end to a policy that began in February of separating men and women into different classrooms.

The students also asked the President of the university to resign and demanded better conditions in their cafeteria and dormitories. They also want to have the right to choose their own delegates. On March 4th, the protest movement entered its 8th day and several bloggers covered the story, while mainstream media in country ignored it."

Read on here. It will be interesting to see how the Iranian authorities deal with the young of the country. Some 60% of the population is under 25.

On a somewhat related topic the IHT reports:

"After almost five years of war, many young Iraqis, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

"I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us," said Sara Sami, a high school student in Basra. "Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don't deserve to be rulers."

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: "The religion men are liars. Young people don't believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore."

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religiousness among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology. While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied."

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Anonymous said…
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Amazing! Apparently the rumors from the future were true!

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