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Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is the founder of Ideas Beyond Borders and Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0. I sat down and talked with him about the conversations happening around traditional gender roles and progressive gender roles. Those gender roles more in the public discourse for deconstruction, debate, conversation, negotiation, and inquiry.
When I asked Al Mutar about the reasonable and unreasonable aspects of these debates, he responded, “I see it as kind of sad that the conversation about gender roles is happening again even in progressive societies.”
Al Mutar considers the segmenting of people into categories is limiting. He mentioned a recent attendance at a Liberty Con conference. There was a discussion around the categories and the limiting of people into categories.
Al Mutar said, “In the Roman Empire, you needed the military to be strong, physical men with good equipment and all that.” He gave that as a point of comparison. Where “a good solider” might not need the same physical requirements now, this is contrasting the Roman Empire with now.
With the drone technology, Mutar explains, and the advancement of military equipment, the limitation on gender with these old views can seem outdated.
“What happens is, sometimes, they make generalizations… even if they use stats, they are using it as a generalization which is ironic because obviously statistics are the opposite of generalizations,” Al Mutar opines, “So, I don’t want to make it sound like they’re the same, but the argument is that, ‘Oh, according to stats, more men prefer jobs in engineering and more women prefer jobs in social arts and liberal arts.’”
Al Mutar emphasized less the statistics and more the point of the advancement of some arguments. He thinks that, sometimes, conversations on gender roles can lead to bad outcomes or consequences. The emphasize, he thinks, should be on the individual pursuing their potential rather than having a societal restriction on an individual based on their gender.
When sked the people putting forward this more progressive worldview rather than traditional worldview, Al Mutar talked about the emerging movement comprised of many people. Those more often are left-leaning people.
Al Mutar describes how some in this emerging movement can be extreme. Extreme to the point of ignoring the differences between men and women, in denial of the science.
“So, within the more left-leaning, anti-gender roles groups, while I’m fully supportive of that and something I’m more aligned with; there’s also a movement too that pushes against the science behind it, which I think is not helpful to their cause in trying to say there is almost zero biological difference,” Al Mutar stated.
Al Mutar looks more for the type of society someone wants to live inside. Even if the science says otherwise, he posed the question, “Do we really want to put limitations on people based on their gender?”
“If more of the secular folks make arguments based on that rather than denying the science, I think they will be able to convince more people of the arguments rather than denying basic facts,” Al Mutar concluded.
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