Global News and Analysis

Source: The Nation

Muslim women are fighting for their rights from within Islamic tradition, rather than against it.

Throughout the Muslim world, a groundswell of feminist sentiment is growing among women who are seeking to reclaim Islam and the Koran for themselves. For decades, many women believed they had to choose between their Muslim identity and their belief in gender equality. It was an impossible choice—one that involved betraying either their faith or their feminist consciousness. Four years ago, a global movement called Musawah—“equality” in Arabic—began to make the case that women can fight for justice and equality from within Islamic tradition. For many Muslim women, this came as a revelation. read more

The trouble with trying to tell the story of Occupy Wall Street was that it was always a million things at once. You could go to one meeting, or one action, which might have seemed especially important, but there would be something else going on meanwhile that could just as easily be the next big thing. Each sub-thread of the story, each concurrent reality, made some kind of claim to be a genuine article, an authentic manifestation of what this movement was or should be all about. You needed a lot of eyes to see it all. You needed, perhaps, a social-scientific study. read more

Source: BBC News

Uruguay has become the first country in the world to make it legal to grow, sell and consume marijuana.

After nearly 12 hours of debate, senators gave the government-sponsored bill their historic final approval.

The law allowing registered Uruguayans over 18 to buy up to 40g (1,4oz) of the drug a month is not expected to come into force before April.

The government hopes it will help tackle drug cartels, but critics say it will expose more people to drugs.

Dozens of supporters of the bill proposed by the left-wing President Jose Mujica gathered outside the Congress in Montevideo to follow the vote. read more

Source: The Baffler

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille. read more

Source: Truthout

This is a shorter and slightly revised version of an interview with Noam Chomsky which appeared on Sunday, Dec. 8 in the Syriza-aligned paper Avgi in Greece.

C.J. Polychroniou and Anastasia Giamali: Neoliberal ideology claims that the government is a problem, society does not exist and individuals are responsible for their own fate. Yet, big business and the rich rely, as ever, on state intervention to maintain their hold over the economy and to enjoy a bigger slice of the economic pie. Is neoliberalism a myth, merely an ideological construct? read more

Source: Color Lines

The warders called us by either our surnames or our Christian names. Each, I felt, was degrading, and I thought we should insist on the honorific ‘Mister.’ I pressed for this for many years, without success. Later, it even became a source of humour as my colleagues would occasionally call me ‘Mr.’ Mandela.
—Nelson Mandela, “Long Walk to Freedom”

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them at Robben Island – the notorious island jail that held the principle leadership of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. It was at that jail, with the help of his comrades, that Mandela wrote his story, “Long Walk to Freedom” (published in 1994). In this book, one gets a sense of Mandela as the deeply political figure that he was: a lawyer who fought against apartheid — a lawyer who discovered that the law was the barrier to change and so moved to politics, including terrorist operations against the intransigent apartheid state. read more