Just mention 9/11, or the horrors inflicted on Afghan women under the Taliban rule, or the cruel flogging of young northern Nigerian teenager Bariya Magazu for the crime of having become pregnant, and rage flows easily through our veins.
Rage against the medieval cruelties of fanatical Muslims; rage against terrorism; rage against the male domination that dons a religious robe as a disguise for sexual sadism.
It's difficult, when daily headlines fuel our anger, to keep a reasoned perspective.
In fact, it was courting insult and verbal abuse for any journalist, after 9/11, even to wonder aloud how such extremist ideas and actions could have taken root.
Enter Dr. Ayesha Imam, who has just completed a speaking tour of Canada. (Her doctorate is in social anthropology from the University of Sussex). Together with the Nigerian women's rights organization, Baobab, of which she was co-founder and executive director, Imam is the winner of the $25,000 John Humphrey Freedom Award from the Montreal-based Rights and Democracy.
Imam points the finger for some of the more recent outrages in Nigeria straight at an economic disaster engineered by the West.
Structural adjustment programs, or SAPS, were dictated to the African continent by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund back in the 1980s and early '90s.
African poverty, they decreed, could be solved only by extreme capitalism. In order to qualify for loans, African leaders had to slash social spending on health and education and switch agriculture from subsistence farming to cash crops that would compete in a free trade world. It wasn't long before entire populations were, in Imam's words, "immiserated." As public programs vanished, and crushing burdens of hunger and sickness fell on the shoulders of the most vulnerable women and children, religious organizations stepped in to fill the gap.
By the time the World Bank and the IMF admitted the scope of their error, it was too late. Many African economies were hobbled, and medieval-style religious leadership had surged to local power.
Dignified and soft-spoken, her head decorously covered with a white scarf, Imam is a Muslim feminist who has worked tirelessly for women's human rights in her native Nigeria and across the Muslim world, relying on serious scholarship to make her case within Islam.
As I listened to her deliver a public talk, and then interviewed her privately, I had to admire her steely resolve — couched in the politest terms — not to be co-opted. Not by Western feminists, not by inflammatory media, not by eager Islam-bashers. For those willing to listen, she offered a rare, informed perspective that was both more difficult to hear and more enlightening to grasp than the usual fare.
Baobab, her organization, employs 15 full-time staff and has nearly 100 volunteers, all of them researching the impact of laws —Islamic, Christian, secular and customary — on women's rights.
Right now, Baobab is actively appealing the case of Amina Lawal. The young woman was sentenced by a sharia court to death by stoning. Her crime: pregnancy outside of marriage. A first appeal court recently insisted that the death sentence be enforced once Amina's 8-month-old daughter is weaned.
In case you're astonished that Baobab relies on Islamic law to appeal such a case to a higher court, Imam will wryly remind you that Baobab has successfully appealed seven or eight such sentences in the last three years. One of its rare failures was the case of young teenager Bariya Magazu. The harshly extremist governor of Zamfara state pressured the court to hasten Bariya's flogging, precisely to show his contempt for Western protesters. For now, Imam prefers that Western supporters channel their protests through Baobab, which is knowledgeable about local attitudes, rather than acting independently and provoking a Muslim backlash.
Sharia law, Imam insists, is no different from Christian or secular law in this respect: It varies hugely, from era to era and from country to country, and always reflects the interests of the men in power who codify and enforce it.
Just think of the way U.S. President George Bush, in pandering to his evangelical supporters, has imposed fundamentalist Christian principles on millions of developing world women. As we recently learned from the United Nations, those women will be cheated of essential health care and safe childbirth funding because of Bush's blinkered view of reproductive rights. In Israel, even a secular Supreme Court has not being able to pry the grim strictures of Orthodox family law from the throats of Israeli women. And in "secular" Canada, anyone who has worked in the past to change outmoded matrimonial, rape, reproductive, property and employment laws knows that the law has always entrenched hierarchical male interests.
When Imam grew up in northern Nigeria, the daughter of a Muslim doctor and grandaughter of a Muslim religious leader, there were no such extremes as the strict isolation of women, flogging and stoning to death.
Now she thinks she knows why a reactionary form of sharia law has swept across 13 of the 19 northern states in the last four years.
"It's a question of identity politics — cynical politicians stir it up in place of party politics. Partly it's in order to lay claim to resources," Imam explained. "Who will get the best stall in the market, who will receive the fees, who will allocate the community lands?"
Structural adjustment programs shut down schools and clinics, drove up the child and maternal mortality rates and condemned entire generations to illiteracy. The rewards for religious affiliation began to look tempting, as Muslim religious groups offered free schools and clinics.
"And then the service turns to coercion," Imam said. "A mother learns that unless she covers herself, her child won't be able to continue at school."
Hopeless economic misery doesn't just happen. It's often inflicted by the richest on the poorest. And, inevitably, the price for that misery will be paid by many hapless bystanders. If we're satisfied with self-righteous rage against obvious villains, rather than seeking out more complex understanding and solutions, we only sink deeper into the mire.
My mistake: The late Dr. Orville Hjertaas, whom I recently wrote about as Saskatchewan's beloved "Dr. Medicare", opened his clinic and ran for office in Prince Albert, not Swift Current.