An excellent article by Kola Odetola on why Muslim women, in particular working class women, are turning towards organisations that would be classified as fundamentalist in the West; Hamas, Hizbollah etc.

“Curiously missing from the western left’s narrative in the issue of women’s rights in the poor world has been the calamity wreaked upon it by neo liberalism over the last 20 years. While there’s a lot of talk of the poverty created by the colonisation of the third world by the IMF and World Bank, it’s rarely linked to the rise of Islamic consciousness in these parts of the world.

“The fact is the economic genocide perpetrated by the west on the poor world over the last two decades has generated industrial prostitution there on a scale probably unprecedented in the etire history of the human race. Faced with ruin, deafened with spurious western talk of women’s rights – from Africa to Asia, from Latin America, to ‘recently liberated’ Eastern Europe, most women from poor families can now only survive by selling their bodies to men, mostly wealthy most pro west males, in prostitution of one form or another of varying degrees of degradation. In the third world and parts of Eastern Europe, women are now the major bread winners, feeding their families, keeping a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, by trading their bodies for the means of survival. Imperialism and its local acolytes have turned two thirds of the planet, the home of the overwhelming majority of the world’s females to one giant brothel, underneath the blazing neon lit legend, forever flashing – ‘Women’s rights’.”