I've been thinking over the following criticism. I'll summarize:

When a Westerner attacks a woman, it's not blamed on the religion or culture but on the individual offender. When someone who happens to be Muslim attacks a woman, we blame it on Islam, on the whole Muslim culture/religion. This is hypocritical, vaguely racist, and wrong.

True, I think. But I think the flaw lies in the first sentence and not the second sentence.

When someone in America kills his wife....why DON'T we blame it on the culture and the Christian tradition? Why the heck not?

Western culture is damned misogynist and a lot of that misogyny comes straight from the Bible and Christianity. That's what all the witch burnings and the destruction of goddess-worship were about--destroying all the roles for women in pre-Christian Europe that were outside the home (the healing arts, for example).

We're still recovering from our own backwards, deeply misogynist past. Our pop culture, our films, our music, our advertising, continue to degrade and marginalize women.

And we all know how Christian fundies who actually believe in the Bible treat their women. Some of them can't cut their hair, wear pants, or drive, etc. etc. These things are all taken from verses in the Bible.

Now imagine if these people were in power, and forced us all to live that way, and questioning led to exile or death.

So Western culture and Christianity are bad for women. So is Islam, and the various cultures where it is practiced.

The difference is only one of degree. It's clearly better to be a woman in Europe,where there are very few Biblical literalists (or even Christians of any description) than a woman in Saudi, where everyone is a Q'uranic literalist and Islam is inseparable from the state.

These are the two extremes. There are many places along this continuum, but you will notice that the more secular a state and the less religious, the better women have it. Turkey is ferociously secular and women have many rights there, compared to, say, Afghanistan, which is still mucking about with trying to fit Islam and Sharia into the workings of the government.

All the states that have Sharia law--Saudi, Somalia, Pakistan, northern Nigeria--are invariably horrible places to live as a woman. This tells us something about the nature of Sharia and Islam, if you are willing to look.

Europeans and Americans are further along on the continuum. That's all, and I do not see why it's demonizing anybody to say so.

I'm not going to say "heirs to the Western tradition" because Muslims ARE heirs to the Western tradition of thought. They were avid consumers of Greek philosophy and thought before Ibn Rashid came along and replaced all that messy rationality with his prescription for believing that angels and demons were at work in the world instead. If, at that fork in the road, Muslim thinkers had gone with, say, Barlehvi instead, Islam would look different today. But all that is beside the point.

I think we should abhor Christianity for its misogyny and its contribution to the misogyny of our culture, and our own madonna/whore dichotomies and all the rest of it (hello, Purity Balls!), and we should recognize that Islam has all of these same things and to an even greater degree. And yes, that contributes to violence towards women. Could we say that?

I'm done now. Thanks for an absorbing discussion.