I was originally going to write my in my other comment, but I ended up deleting it because it had too many unfounded assertions and I couldn't quite figure out how to phrase things without denying the obvious reality...

The same goes for the women as heads of state argument. It's fine and dandy that you can find some mitigating circumstances in a lot of the cases, but does this same nepotism and political pandering not occur in states that aren't Muslim majority?

This gets to the heart of what troubles me between the three voices. If Hillary Clinton was to be elected president, would we condemn her accomplishment as only due to the fact that her husband was in office before her? Do we ignore the landmark of the first (half) black president because he also happened to make it through Harvard Law School, an institution that historically is associated with empowering primarily white males? Or do we mark each situation as nuanced but let them still stand as a milestone for each social group?

But I deleted the comment because it is still the classic stereotype of many countries in the Middle East and those neighboring that there is in fact a power imbalance across genders, and in spite of any symbolic officials, it's hard to deny this asymmetry if you've (impersonal you from here on) had any personal associations with people from these countries. They simply aren't in agreement with the western views of empowerment for all peoples.

And you know what? We've been fucking with their politics since before many of us in the US were even a twinkle in our fathers' eyes, so from what high ground are we to tell them how to lead their lives? We should criticize genital mutilation, but if you think for a minute that anyone in Iraq or Egypt is going to listen to any of the tirades that Maher spouts about how they should structure their social hierarchy, you should re-examine the last few decades of who has been paying who to murder who.

And really this article is side-stepping the point that Reza makes: you can't generalize these things, nor should you blame Islam as the sole force in what are much more complex political and social situations. Keep in mind this is all coming from someone whose family left one of those countries because they knew what religious control of the government would do to it. I don't believe that any government should be manipulated by the church, but we're still fighting to keep creationism out of schools in our own country.

I don't want to make light of some of these issues, and I wholeheartedly condemn on taking the knife to women's genitals, it's a dangerous and scaring practice that is incomparable to male circumcision as practiced in the west, but when the conversation turns to, say, the hijab, I would much rather Americans listen to those of other countries, rather than tell them what to do.