"Copts, Women, and Beer" - that's the title of a post at the new Tharwa Project blog Tharwalizations. Ammar explains that it's a pithy stand-in for the concept of individual rights that must be respected in the Middle East:
In a conference on civil dialogue that took place a few years ago, participants discussed the possibility of conducting a serious dialogue between Islamists and secularists. I remember that, at the time and in response to an Egyptian colleague who advocated dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood in his country, we coined the term “Copts, Women and Beer” to reefer to three main issues that one needs to deal with, which are: diversity issues, gender issues and privacy issues. But perhaps, the three issues boil down to one thing really: the issue of boundaries and intersections between the public and private spheres...
...When one moves beyond the general affirmation towards the discussion of specific issues related to “Copts, women and beer,” that is, to issues of diversity, gender and privacy, specific objections voiced by the Islamists tend to belie any commitment to the general principle of freedom.
It's a nice slogan not just for assessing Islamists' commitment to human liberty, but also the region's ruling regimes. The only additional key aspect missing is freedom of expression, which remains the central problem in states like Tunisia where "Copts, Women, and Beer" do okay. We need an even better slogan...
How about: "Copts, Women, Beer and Heresy????"
Posted by: Ammar Abdulhamid | March 15, 2006 at 08:23 PM