Bill O’Reilly Says Muslims Will Diss Hillary, but 8 Muslim Countries Chose Female Leaders

*Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)*

This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s Web page.

Bill O’Reilly maintains that one downside of having a woman president is that Muslims won’t respect her.

For Mr. O’Reilly’s information, here are the women leaders of Muslim-majority countries, most of them freely elected by Muslim publics and all of them respected by the latter:

Tansu Çiller, elected prime minister of Turkey, 1993-1996

Benazir Bhutto, elected prime minister of Pakistan 1988-1990, 1993-1996

Mame Madior Boye, appointed prime minister of Senegal, 2001-2002.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, elected president of Indonesia, 2001-2004

Khaleda Zia, elected prime minister of Bangladesh, 1991-1996 and 2001-2006

Sheikh Hasina, elected prime minister of Bangladesh 2009-

Roza Otunbayeva, president of Kyrgyzstan, 2010- 2011

Atifete Jahjaga, elected president of Kosovo 2011-

Juan Cole

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Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the proprietor of the Informed Comment e-zine. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in…