Quote:
Originally posted by moe.ron
"The Koran is an historical document. When Benazir Bhutto was president of Pakistan, a high-ranking Islamic clergyman from Pakistan came to visit me at the offices of the Nahdlatul Ulama, and asked me to issue a fatwa against Bhutto. But why? I asked him. `Because the Koran says that it is a calamity for a woman to be a leader,' he answered. `Yes,' I said. `At the time when the Koran was written, leaders had to lead their men in battle, had to ride at the head of commercial caravans heading through the desert, and so on. That is why they were all males. Leadership was personalized. Now it is institutional. Bhutto can't make a decision without her cabinet, the cabinet must bend to the legislature, and the legislature to the Supreme Court - who are all male.' `Yes, yes,' he said. `I see your point.' But he still wanted the fatwa. It is hard sometimes to break with the past, but we can't avoid it. We must continuously reinterpret the Koran."
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Actually it doesn't say anywhere in the Koran that women cannot lead a government. It has been mentioned in other books (namely the Hadith, written some 200 hundred years after the found of Islam) and there is a lot of debate and its autheticity questioned. Now, if this guy is supposedly learned and not a sexist, he would have known that.
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