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LIBERAL

‘Eat, Pray, Love’ thinking a ‘feminist challenge’

While there are certainly benefits to positive thinking, Swedish feminist Jenny Sonesson argues that women might not have the right to vote today if suffragettes had been satisfied writing gratitude diaries.

'Eat, Pray, Love' thinking a 'feminist challenge'

Elizabeth Gilbert’s autobiographical book “Eat, Pray, Love” has sold millions of copies worldwide. And it is primarily women have devoured Gilbert’s inner and outer journey from a claustrophobic marriage in New York to orgies of food in Rome and to an ashram in India, where she ends up in a man’s arms in Bali.

Oprah Winfrey has invited the author to her popular television show several times. The film version, starring Julia Roberts, drew over 70 percent of US female moviegoers during its opening week.

The fundamental idea in the book is that the divine dwells within us and by looking inwards, we find happiness. But “Eat, Pray, Love” is only one part of a larger contemporary phenomenon that is a billion dollar industry.

The positive philosophy insists that we choose our thoughts and therefore we can literally think ourselves to success. Many self-help books in the genre, not least the best seller author of “The Secret”, pay tribute to the law of attraction. Positive thoughts attract positive people and events. Negative thoughts have the opposite effect. Those who dwell on illness have illness, those who focus on wealth becomes wealthy.

The gospels of positive thinking have not only conquered gemstone healers, but have also gotten into the corporate boardroom. The film “Up in the Air” portrays this phenomenon with irony. George Clooney plays a redundancy consultant who continually dismisses desperate employees with the mantra: “Look at this as a new start! Anyone who has ever built an empire and changed the world has sat where you sit now.”

The problem is that if getting well, getting a new job or avoiding welfare is your own responsibility, then failure to do so is also the individual’s own responsibility. It paves the way for a cynical outlook. The American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich examined the positive philosophy after being confronted with the it when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Ehrenreich was infuriated by the claim that you can think yourself healthy. Patients she met had embraced the view that cancer as a gift that change their attitudes and were convinced that worrying would make the tumor to grow faster.

A growing trend, preached by Oprah Winfrey, is the keeping of gratitude diaries. Gratitude diaries are now even available as iPhone applications. One of the prophets, Sarah Ban Breath Nach, testifies to her personal experience of keeping a gratitude journal:

“I started by giving thanks for everything: daisies in a jam jar on a windowsill, the sweet scent of my daughter’s hair.”

In short: be grateful for what you have instead of fretting over it you have not.

Yes, it’s certainly useful to think of positively instead of burying oneself in grievances. This is shown by the success of cognitive psychology. And yes, it can give spiritual harmony and inspire good actions.

But history teaches us that it’s critical thinking and anger at injustice that brought the world forward and increased humanity’s collective happiness.

Revolutionaries such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Martin Luther King and Lech Walesa were not grateful. Democracy fighters who I met in Cuba, in Belarus and in Somalia are not grateful. And we should be happy for it. The World Values Survey research project shows that the main factors behind the increase in happiness are democracy, tolerance, freedom and global economic growth. We cannot achieve things by just sitting behind ashrams walls and meditating.

This optimistic philosophy has gained particular support among women and it is a feminist challenge to respond to it.

We appreciate that female suffrage exists, and are thankful to the fact that suffragettes wrote glowing pamphlets instead of gratitude diaries. Many of the victories of feminism are still ahead of us.

In the country where Elizabeth Gilbert’s guru lives, in India, millions of female fetuses are aborted, for example because of the dowry system. And a frightening one quarter of the world’s maternal deaths occur on Indian soil. Holy wrath is a force that can bring the world’s happiness forward, rather than gratitude.

Jenny Sonesson is the president of the Women’s Association of the Liberal Party (Liberala Kvinnor) in Stockholm.

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LIBERAL

Taboo-breaking liberal mosque opens in Berlin

With a mission to spread a liberal form of Islam, a mosque where men and women pray side by side has opened its doors in Berlin, complete with female imams.

Taboo-breaking liberal mosque opens in Berlin
German-Turkish lawyer, author and activist Seyran Ates readies for an inaugural Friday prayer at the Ibn Rushd-Goethe-mosque. Photo: John MacDougall/AFP

The Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar” ('God is greatest') resonated through the crowded Ibn-Rushd-Goethe-Mosque Friday as US-Malaysian Ani Zonneveld, one of the world's few female imams, launched the call to prayer.

Then one of the founders of the new place of worship, lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates, opened the event with words of welcome before Christian and Jewish guests and a large media contingent.

“We want to send a signal against Islamic terror and the misuse of our religion,” said Turkish-born Ates, 54, dressed in a long white robe. “We want to practise our religion together.”

Ates — no stranger to breaking taboos, having called for a “sexual revolution” in the Muslim world — vowed she would not allow ultra-conservatives “to rob me of my right to be Muslim”.

Kneeling on green carpets, the faithful — men and women, side by side — bowed to Mecca for the traditional prayer as the imam spoke in German.

Some of the women wore veils or head coverings, others did not.

'Depoliticise' Islam

The new mosque, the 88th in the German capital, is located in a rented room on the third floor of the Protestant Johanniskirche (St. John's Church) building.

All Muslims — Sunni or Shia, Alawite or Sufi — are welcome in the mosque named after one of Germany's greatest writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and 12th century Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes.

The seven founding members said they want to open their prayer hall to all groups, including gays and lesbians.

“This mosque allows Muslims to define themselves in a new way,” said co-founder and German Islam scholar Abdel-Hakim Ourghi.

He added that “we will try to depoliticise Islam”, as the religion was being torn by rival political movements. “Because religion is a private matter.”

Police stood guard outside the entrance of the building.

The founders said they had not received any threats or insults, but that they fully expected not everyone would be happy.

Time for change

Germany, with some four million Muslims, has been the target of jihadist attacks, the deadliest last December when a truck tore through a Berlin Christmas market crowd killing 12 people.

The arrival of more than one million refugees, most from mainly Muslim countries, since 2015 has worsened the fears of some Germans.

Ates — who has campaigned against forced marriages, domestic violence and so-called “honour killings” among Muslim migrants — said the project was eight years in the making.

“Many left along the way,” she said. “They told us it was dangerous, that they were afraid.”

Elham Manea, a Swiss political scientist of Yemeni background, said the time had come for change, with other so-called liberal mosques having also opened in the United States, Britain and Switzerland.

The Berlin mosque, financed by private donations, is located in the Berlin district of Moabit, which has a large immigrant population.

It was in this neighbourhood that Tunisian Anis Amri, the Christmas market attacker, frequented a radical mosque that has since been closed.

By Yannick Pasquet