From DEBRA@OLN.comlink.apc.orgSun Aug 27 12:52:06 1995
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 02:48:00 +0100
From: Debra Guzman <DEBRA@OLN.comlink.apc.org>
Reply to: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org
To: beijing95-l@netcom.com, beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org
Subject: WCW: Egypt's Al-Azhar slams Women's Conference document

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## author     : chai@UIUC.EDU
## date       : 23.08.95

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[This article has been excerpted.]

         CAIRO, Egypt (Reuter) - Egypt's most influential
         Islamic institution has charged...next month's U.N.
         Conference on Women, seen by many as a way to back
         women's calls for equal rights, contradicts
         religion and seeks to destroy the family.

         In a statement published Tuesday in several
         Egyptian newspapers Al-Azhar said the conference in
         Beijing ``aimed at creating a new kind of life
         which is against religious values and destroys
         moral barriers and deeply rooted traditions.''

         The conference draft document ``ignored the
         fact...these values, barriers and traditions were
         the ones which protected many peoples and nations
         from falling into the abyss of sexual corruption,
         psychological disturbance and the swamp of moral
         disintegration,'' Al-Azhar said.

         Al-Azhar, a 1,000-year-old bastion of Sunni Muslim
         orthodoxy, called for amendments to the conference
         program of action and appealed to Muslim countries
         and all those who support religious values to
         express their reservations.

...

         It said the conference was a continuation of
         attempts made during the U.N. Population Conference
         held in Cairo last year to enforce new concepts of
         family, raising children, sexual relations and
         abortion.

...