Peter van Onselen, Tony Abbott, and a hefty dose of orientalist thinking ...

(Above: the good old days of nunnery, when a nun could head off to the tropics and go quietly insane, in Black Narcissus).

So much silliness today, it's hard to know where to start.

There's the conservative, but usually rational Peter van Onselen trying to make sense of Tony Abbott making a fool of himself in The Australian Women's Weekly, now live on the intertubes here at Abbott's women. And he didn't inhale!

Abbott should keep himself pure with a vow of silence, van Onselen moans:

But the Opposition Leader needs to learn to control his opinions. He shouldn't have taken the bait when asked the question. Most men know the last thing a woman wants is to be told what they should do by a man.

Oh yes, those pesky, vexatious, unfathomable, difficult, always problematic, hard to know women. Can't ever plumb their depths, but there's a few golden rules, like never try to tell them what to do, because next thing you know a frisky filly will be kicking you in the balls.

Sometimes a less interesting interview with less prominence is better than a high-profile interview that lands you in trouble.

Yes, just shut up already, it's what we all believe, well men at least, but if you don't say it out loud, we can all just think it. The last thing we need is for a politician to say what he thinks, even if it's no different to what Chairman Rudd might think:

There is nothing unusual about a father of three daughters hoping his girls don't give up their virginity lightly.

I would challenge any Labor MP with children to come out and disagree with the statement. Perhaps the Prime Minister could do so at his next church-front news conference this Sunday.

Next week? How about he says there is nothing unusual about a father of three sons hoping his sons don't give up their virginity lightly?

As opposed to say going out and rooting like rat and sowing wild seeds Tony Abbott style, before settling down to the quiet life? Though it does raise the vexed question of where the root rats would be without women who were interested in sex as well.

Would that be what Abbott tells world outside next his church-front news conference?

And the week after? Women as dangerous uncovered meat tempting the unwary?

Van Onselen is indignant at the irony of it all, and the vicious stereotyping of Abbott's views, when it can only be noted with sad irony that Abbott brought it all upon himself:

The irony shouldn't be lost on anyone that in order to paint Abbott as a male chauvinist who tells women what to do, Rudd's office told Gillard's office she had to go on the attack because Rudd needed to remain prime ministerial and stay out of the fray.

Well the real irony, as Gabriella Coslovich notes, in Memo Abbott: Virginity debate is no man's land, is the way high Catholic culture intersects with high Muslim culture when it comes to the fetishising of female virginity, as she found chatting with a Moroccan university student:

When we got on to the topic of virginity, things got interesting - it was a woman's virginity under question, of course. A man's is rarely scrutinised, is rarely a matter of contention or commodification or fetishistic obsession.

He told us that in his culture the virginity of a woman was highly valued, and that Muslim men wanted to marry virgins. A woman who had lost her virginity was a liability. However - and this was an interesting aside - if the woman was rich and beautiful, her missing virginity could be overlooked.

Ah yes, cash can overcome male religious principles any day of the week. Is that why being a member of the upper and political classes is one long snuggle fest?

You see, there's no way to spin stupidity, or old fashioned conservatism, no matter how hard a van Onselen might try.

Abbott didn't single out women; he applied his religiously conservative views about sex before marriage equally. Because he was being interviewed for a women's magazine, and because he has three daughters and no sons, the focus of his comments in a personalised piece was - surprise, surprise - women.

Well surprise, surprise, women take a view about this kind of highly specious claptrap and cant.

How about some prescribed reading for Abbott and van Onselen? Surprisingly, it comes in The Australian, courtesy Lauren Wilson Making a gift of yourself:

Many male politicians won't put their personal views on such deeply personal matters into the public arena because of the grilling that could ensue.

Is Abbott refreshing, then? Not if the ideas he espouses are as old as the dawn of time.

And that's the point, as Wilson's line on Abbott's gaffe neatly segues for us into taking a look at Muslim feminists deserve to be heard, which is oddly reminiscent of the kind of fierce feminism often talked by Catholic nuns:

Orientalists writing on Islam and Muslims have tended to represent Muslim women as infantilised and oppressed, victims in need of rescue by the enlightened West. This is a classic example of the tyranny of self-projection, where the ''rescuer'' assumes a position of superiority so the belief systems, values and norms of Muslim women are judged against the Western experience.

Um, yes, but the belief systems, values and norms of Muslim women show exactly the same deficiencies as displayed by Christianity. This doesn't have much to do with so-called western enlightenment, or an easy attempt by the authors of the piece at 'Don Quixote tilting at windmills' branding for western imperialist orientalist thinkers, so much as the consideration of religion's quest for a long-absent god, not to mention the many stupidities performed in the name of the long-absent god, often but not exclusively by men.

The work of Muslim human rights and social justice advocates is discredited and ignored. It is as if liberation and freedom are the monopoly of secular feminists. Muslim women are apparently too down-trodden to care to make a difference.

Um, well actually, liberation and freedom aren't the monopoly of anyone, but the next time I hear some apparently sane Muslim woman defend the wearing of the burka as socially and culturally appropriate, I think I'll jump up and down on the spot, before referring them to alternative views, such as Alice Thomson's Not being racist, but burka is wrong:

This shouldn't be about race, religion - or even feminism. It's about what is socially acceptable. And covering women's faces was a medieval practice that should never have been resurrected.

But back to Abdel-Fattah and Susan Carland:

If they do insist on fighting for equality and justice within an Islamic perspective, their efforts are dismissed, assuming freedom and Islam are mutually exclusive, or, worse, that Muslim women are brainwashed, suffering from a form of religious Stockholm syndrome.

Yes, but you see that's because an Islamic perspective is inherently as dumb as a Roman Catholic perspective. It's just that the Catholics, over time, have copped a pounding over their treatment of women - poor Tony Abbott - and now in most western societies, even the nuns don't dress as black, cloaked Fellini penguins in the summer sun - that's left to the nuns of South America, Africa and smaller conservative states outside the western ambit.

This patronising discourse arrogantly assumes the way to overcome patriarchy is to abandon Islam and adopt ''Western values''. How can a constructive effort to improve the situation of women begin when the conversation is so unsophisticated, demeaning and primitive?

Muslim women have engaged in the quest for dignity, democracy and human rights, for full participation in political and social affairs, since the time of Prophet Mohammed. As Amina Wadud, the American-Islamic feminist scholar, said: ''By going back to primary sources and interpreting them afresh, women scholars are endeavouring to remove the fetters imposed by centuries of patriarchal interpretation and practice.''

Oh dear, I'm afraid that has the same eye-glazing impact as a Christian scholar reassuring me that by reverting to the original sources, Christian women scholars are endeavouring to remove the fetters imposed by centuries of patriarchal interpretation and practice and the reading of Paul. Next thing you know they've gone gnostic and headed off to la la land.

Never mind, it's always great to be told how women have engaged in the quest for dignity, democracy and human rights, and been successfully opposed by generations of cheerful Christian men, happy to rule the roost in whatever branch of the many sects they happened to adopt as their world view, but not to worry, pie in the sky reform which will see women come into their own just around the corner - a bit like the heaven waiting in the afterlife with a healthy dose of virgins:

And although you may not hear much about them, Muslim women and men are doing much to improve the plight of women, from grassroots projects to legal activism and religious leadership training. They see Islam not as a stumbling block to progress, but as a platform for change.

A platform for change? A text first transmitted orally in the seventh century is a platform for modern change. Sheesh, perhaps there's hope for the old testament after all.

Or is the Koran, or Qur'an as full of the same mumbo jumbo as the Bible, and if intellectual property rights were as strong as they are now, its authors might have been facing a legal action from the scribblers of the Bible?

Jews say: Christians have no point to make;" while Christians say: "The Jews have no point to make." Yet they (all) quote from the [same] Book. Likewise those who do know anything make a statement similar to theirs. God will judge between them on Resurrection Day concerning how they have been differing.

Who is more in the wrong than someone who prevents God's name from being mentioned in His places of worship and attempts to ruin them? Such persons should not even enter them except in fear; they will suffer disgrace in this world as well as serious torment in the Hereafter.

Yep, the same old pie in the sky nonsense about judgment, Resurrection Day and suffering eternal torment in the Hereafter, and as usual atheists get the bad press from all religious quarters.

While meanwhile hell still happens on earth in the here and now:

In Jordan, there is a strong push, spearheaded by the journalist Rana Husseini, to fight honour killings. Husseini's team has publicised each crime despite death threats. She has led the charge for law reform and mobilised protest rallies which even princes from the Jordanian royal family have attended. Far from fighting Islam to achieve this, Husseini tells the murderers during interviews that their acts contradict the teachings of Islam and are punishable by God. Most of them concede this.

Well I'm sure that will please the victims, to know that their killers were in theological error. In much the same way Christians now surely repent their witch-hunting. Except when some modern harlot deserves a good dunking.

In Malaysia, groups such as Sisters in Islam offer free legal clinics to teach women their rights under Sharia and civil law, run campaigns to stop domestic violence and hold education programs for women with a goal of "justice and equality within the family".

But when will they be able to run free philosophical clinics offering up to women the notion that Islam is as meaningless as Christianity?

In the United Arab Emirates, Ahmed al Haddad, the head of the Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department, has started a program to train women to become muftis. Previously, women religious advisers were only allowed to speak on "women's issues".

Then perhaps they can come over to Australia and explain to George Pell how women should be able to become bishops, and to the Jensen heretics how women aren't the problem, they are. Second thoughts, why bother. Why become a Stockholm syndrome afflicted member of a deluded faith? I'm with Groucho, I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

The training will enable them to work as equals to men in issuing religious rulings in all areas. There is nothing new in this. Islamic history is "rich in examples of highly learned women acting as muftis and issuing decrees on all matters", al Haddad said.

From within the guise of a deeply misguided religion? Oh send that club a second wire. Count me out. I don't want decrees from highly misguided women, no matter how learned they are in their misguidedness.

The Shura Council of the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity, an advisory council comprising of Muslim women scholars, activists and specialists from around the world, aims to "critically engage with dominant Islamic interpretations of social issues and practices and promote religiously grounded arguments that enable women to make dignified choices based on their own religious tradition".

What, the one that offers them hellfire and damnation if they don't believe within the approved religious tradition?

There is a long way to go for women in many Muslim societies, just as there is for women everywhere. But if we are interested in change, it is time to let go of outdated Orientalist arguments and ill-informed generalisations that see Islam as ''The Problem''.

Well I'm sorry, but arguing that having a problem with Islam is some kind of outdated Orientalist bias, as opposed to the kind of problem secularists and humanists have with all kinds of religion, is just so much specious nonsense. There's nothing outdated about the notion that religions, still running around after a few thousand years in search of their long absent god have little to offer the world, and it might be a generalisation but it's hardly ill-informed to suggest that Islam is a problem, in much the same way as Christianity and for that matter Scientology are "Problems".

It is time to respect the fact that Muslim women are fighting for their rights and doing so without giving up their allegiance and commitment to Islam. Their quest does not stem from imported Western values but is integral to the Islamic tradition. Demonising their convictions is unhelpful - and a repudiation of the feminist ideal of the right for women to autonomy and freedom of choice.

Oh come on, give a gherkin a break. The whole point of autonomy and freedom of choice is to be able to demonise other peoples' convictions. At least if you follow the religious way.

That's why Christians, used to handing out the demonising and battering of atheists, humanists, secularists, satanists and sinners, now feel battered in the west by the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, and long may the counter-battering continue.

And a little battering and demonising of the Muslim faith wouldn't hurt either. Just don't try doing it in countries where allegiance and commitment to Islam is integral to the Islamic tradition.

You might discover then what idle chatter about the right of women to autonomy and freedom of choice and the freedom to say that religions are for loons will get you ... and it might not be nice ...

Oh yes, and now back to the demonising of Tony Abbott's convictions. Such fun ...

Oh for god's sake use a condom or go on the pill. Even Tony Abbott says contraception's okay.