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Features: By Lauren Weiner Choosing to veil and other paradoxes Near the very heart of a
question Americans have been asking themselves since September 11, 2001 — “Why
do they hate us?” — lies the question of how different
societies treat their women. Americans by now seem bored and faintly
embarrassed when feminist stories make the headlines. Who wants to hear
about chauvinism at a stodgy American golf course when most of the
meaningful barriers to female achievement in the United States have already
been scaled? Yet as routine as the self-assertion of women is here, in
other parts of the world it may be the most contentious issue of all.
In Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries —
where adherents of extreme variants of Islam try to intimidate peaceful
Muslim majorities — antipathy toward the West revolves around sex and
gender every bit as much as it revolves around “globalization”
or the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or infidel soldiers
quartered on sacred lands. The dogma purveyed by the Taliban of
Afghanistan, Jemaa Islamiya in Southeast Asia, and Hamas in the West Bank
and Gaza, among others, would encourage polygamy; lower the age of marriage
for girls (the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 made girls legally
marriageable beginning at age nine); require women to cover themselves in
public; deny women marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights
equal to those of men; punish females accused of adultery or prostitution
with death by stoning; and, most fundamentally, unite church and state (a
theocracy being the Islamists’ preferred way to impose the
aforementioned rules on a society).
We must understand radical Islamism if we are ever to
counter its malign force. By the term radical Islamism I mean the varieties
of political Islam that take their inspiration from the early writings of
the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, from Sunni Wahhabism emanating from Saudi
Arabia, or from the Shiite theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All
three are radical because they define Islam in opposition to all that is
non-Islamic. In other words, these violent strains share in being
reactionary. And one of the things about our way of life against which they
have reacted most strongly, going back to at least the 1920s, is feminism.
This article will examine the radical Islamist reaction
to feminism, along with other related matters: the participation of women
themselves in radical Islamist thought and political acts; how attempts by
governments to secularize their populations actually fed Islamism in the
universities; the “Islamic revival” in Egypt; the less than
healthy view of sex evinced by Islamists; the treatment of women in
Afghanistan and American feminists’ role in bringing that treatment
to light; and, finally, an emerging “Islamic feminism” (as
opposed to Islamist feminism)
that I believe deserves support and encouragement.
Coeducation and its discontents
Media commentators have explained to Americans over and over again since
the attacks on New York and Washington what scholars have been documenting
for decades: Radical Islamism is steeped in resentment. Iranian writer
Daryush Shayegan tells us the Islamists’ “consciousness is
wounded” by Western achievements. They use religion as a political
weapon, he says, and their program is twofold: to wound the West in return
while at the same time coercing mainstream Muslims into practicing a
strange, stripped down version of Islam that will bring back the glorious
age of the Prophet Muhammad.
Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle East historians,
places this resentment in the widest possible context: Islam’s
fortunes and misfortunes since its advent in the seventh century. Its
unimpeded rise, from the time of the victorious and prosperous Prophet
Muhammad, lasted a thousand years. The defeat of the Ottoman Turks outside
of Vienna in 1683 began
a decline that has been just as steady, lasting to our own day. Lewis
contrasts this up-down trajectory with the early struggles and checkered
history of the Jews and Christians. How galling for Muslim radicals, he
says, that the once persecuted Jews and Christians have come to define the
world we live in. And, he adds, where Judeo-Christian and Muslim societies
contrast most notably is on the woman question. Herein lies the
West’s greatest vulnerability, or so the adherents of political Islam
— the Islamists — believe.
In a recent interview, Lewis noted that, unlike
Christianity in all its forms, Islam and most of the rest of the world
allow and practice polygamy and concubinage. Western visitors to Muslim
lands have
talk[ed] with horror of the subordination and ill-treatment of Muslim women (and, I might add, with ill-concealed envy of what they imagine to be the privileges of Muslim men). Muslim visitors to the Christian world are shocked and horrified by the loose and promiscuous ways of the West and also the absurd deference, as they see it, given to Western women.1
One such visitor, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, a founder of
modern Islamic fundamentalism, spent time in the United States from 1948 to 1950. He observed with disgust that, in
the very churches of the Christians, there were dances at which the sexes
mingled and touched. Such a sight convinced Qutb that Christianity had lost
its way, leaving a society and a way of life that were debauched and ready
to be defeated.
The Islamist project to attack the West and
“purify” the faith began to take root in Egypt in the 1920s. In 1924, a reformist government opened a
modern university that permitted women to attend. At the same time
Egypt’s first feminist, Huda Shaarawi, set aside her veil in public,
and photos of her uncovered face made the front pages of Egyptian
newspapers. It was also when Sayyid Qutb and others were establishing the
first Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. But Islamism didn’t
come to full fruition until the 1970s, starting to win large numbers of adherents at the precise
moment that feminism was at the height of its political power in America
and Europe and gaining a foothold in the urban centers of the less
developed countries.
The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi draws the
connection very directly in Beyond the Veil:
Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Indiana
University Press, revised edition 1987). Mernissi’s book, first published in 1975, addresses the vast changes
in Muslim societies as the European powers were relinquishing their
colonies. Not only were rural populations migrating to the cities, but the
universities in those cities — for centuries the exclusive preserve
of local male aristocracies — were being democratized. Those whom
Mernissi calls “traditionally marginalized and deprived male rural
migrants” were for the first time permitted to seek higher education
in Rabat, Lahore, Beirut, Amman, and other centers. So, too, were women.
The introduction of ideas of liberty and equality into
these societies had effects that were complicated and in many cases subtle.
Clearly discernible to Mernissi, however, was an antagonism that arose
between nonveiling college women and the males who arrived in the
universities along with them. The male parvenus, in the millions, glommed
onto violently anti-Western strains of Islam out
of a sense of pique. “What dismays the fundamentalists,”
Mernissi writes, “is that the era of [postcolonial] independence did
not create an all-male new class. Women are taking part in the public
feast.” Newly urbanized and newly educated young men singled out
modern women with diplomas and careers as the worst traitors to Islam.
These zealots saw offenses against “real” Islam everywhere, but
the uncovered women in their own midst were the ultimate heretics. That generation now constitutes
the senior echelon of radical clerics issuing interpretations of Islamic
law, or sharia, and
the top level of terror networks such as al Qaeda and Jemaa Islamiya.
Yet the rigidly puritanical and misogynistic character
of Islamism has not kept it from attracting female followers. In an
interview for Vogue
magazine last year, a Saudi extremist in London told journalist Deborah
Scroggins that he and his cohorts “have turned the strict sex
segregation that keeps even many wealthy, educated Saudi women confined to
the home, and the traditions that prevent outsiders from so much as asking
their names, into political assets.” He said women give his jihad
organization money and serve on the review board of its publications. These
nonworking women, he added, have a lot of time to devote to the cause, so
they make good administrators of the group’s websites. In January of 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the recently assassinated head of Hamas, called jihad
“an obligation of all Muslims, men and women,” and women
suicide bombers have been obliging, in Chechnya and elsewhere. In April 2003, a woman who had lived in
Boston for several years was detained in her native Pakistan after the fbi put out a global alert
saying she may have ties to al Qaeda.
It was not in a theocracy like Saudi Arabia, however,
that the “feminist wing” of Islamism first developed. It arose
in places where government was secular — Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran
under the shah — and secularism was imposed on the French model,
which is to say, harshly. Their admiration of the French Revolution led
these governments to attempt a wholesale removal of faith from the public
realm. To stand up against authoritarian secularism, then, many younger
women, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, and particularly in the universities, turned to religion.
Especially after the 1979 revolution in Iran succeeded and Islamism gained even greater
force, campus activists railed against secular political establishments for
slavishly imitating Western ways. The most militant act of rebellion for
urban, educated women became wearing the traditional Muslim head coverings
banned by their governments. In her portrait of Turkish women, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Nilufer Gole notes that “as Islam politicized
itself, it moved women toward the political scene; and the black veil, the symbol of the return
to premodern Islamic traditions, acted as an expression of the active
participation of women in political demonstrations.” Ineffectual
attempts by the governments in Ankara and Cairo to stop the rebirth of the
veil among their educated elites only fed this protest sentiment. The
rising Islamist movements, writes Gole, called for the female to return to
her “traditional settings and positions. On the other hand, they
replace the traditional portrait of a Muslim woman with . . . that of an
active, demanding, and, even, militant Muslim woman who is no longer
confined to her home.” Indeed, Turkey’s prohibition against the
wearing of headscarves in public offices and universities has been enforced
sporadically since the early 1980s, with a tightening of enforcement after 1997 when the secularist army ousted
from office the country’s first Islamist prime minister. The Egyptian
government tried in the mid-1990s to ban the veil, though the matter got tied up in the
courts and came to no definitive resolution.
And so the irony reappears: Widening access to
education strengthened the hand of fundamentalist Islam. A modern
university woman asserting her “seclusion rights” is a woman
forswearing her rights in the eyes of non-Muslims and of many Muslims as
well. Women intellectuals of middle age today, exiled from various Muslim
lands, look back nostalgically to a time before Islamism was widespread.
Two decades or more ago, in Kabul, Teheran, or Baghdad, they could dress as
they pleased and move about as they pleased. These are by and large
secularist women whose adoption of Western notions of individual freedom
puts them at odds with the “feminist” wing within Islamism. The
Islamists’ often severe, scarf-plus-robe covering contrasts with the
use, especially among older women and women in rural areas, of headscarves
that leave the neck and some of the hair uncovered, or the discarding of
the veil altogether. Gole’s interviews with Islamist women at Turkish
universities record their preference for almost total coverage of the body
and their disdain for the less strict reading of the Koran and the more
modern dress habits of older Muslim women, whether traditionally Muslim or
secular. The older women “do not practice true veiling because they
are ignorant about Islam,” said one of Gole’s interviewees.
It is a matter of dispute, however, whether the Koran
demands that Muslim women cover themselves. One frequently encounters a
textual interpretation that is liberal: Modesty is required of Muslims of
both sexes, and Koranic references to veiling apply (or, applied) literally
only to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad. Islamists, on the other hand,
and some non-Islamist traditional Muslims as well, argue that the female
obligation to cover is clear in the text. We will not settle that question
here; the point is that Islamists have taken the practice and elevated it,
as Gole says, to be “the symbol of Islamization,” the visible
assertion of their fundamentalism.
The new Humbert Humberts
Islamism has, according to its practitioners and some of its academic and
journalistic promoters, yielded a feminism that is far superior to ours,
because Western licentiousness has been removed. “My niqab [body covering] is my
freedom, because it lets me choose who does and who doesn’t see
me,” a daughter of Cairo’s political elite told the London Guardian’s Geneive Abdo. A
former fashion model interviewed by Abdo added: “When I put on the
veil, I put on my brain as well.” Abdo, researching her pre-September
11 book, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000),
donned long garments to penetrate the sexually segregated salons of
Cairo’s high society. Her subjects had gone against their secularist,
cosmopolitan upbringing to embrace the teachings of Egyptian clerics such
as Sheikh Omar Abd al-Kafi, who preached Muslim distrust of Christians and
endorsed the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the life of Satanic
Verses author Salman Rushdie. Newly pious
Egyptian men and women “spread their own, unorthodox brand of Islam
to friends and followers within their elevated social circles,” Abdo
writes. The Mubarak government’s crackdowns on al-Kafi and other
Islamist Pied Pipers of the Egyptian leisure class merely enhanced their
mystique.
Abdo’s labeling Islamism an “unorthodox
brand” of Islam is telling. The main purpose of her book was to show
English-speaking readers a benign or mainstream Islamism that was
supplanting the murderous rage of Osama bin Laden (a Saudi of Yemeni
extraction), Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), and their like. This was
wishful thinking, no doubt born of a belief that non- and anti-Western
customs and ideas automatically deserve respect, and supported by the fact
that they were catching on like wildfire among influential Egyptians at the
time. In fairness, one cannot fault her too much for underestimating the
relative strength of the terrorists. That she did not foretell September 11 makes her a lot like the
rest of us.
Then, too, Abdo’s glowing depiction of “the
Islamic revival” among Egypt’s intelligentsia dimmed
considerably when she confronted certain aspects of it, such as
clitoridectomy (which, she asserted, apparently on the authority of the
Egyptian government, is performed on 97 percent of Egyptian girls). Abdo tried in vain to dissuade
one of her Egyptian acquaintances from having his six-year-old daughter
undergo the operation. The secularist government banned clitoridectomy in
Egypt in 1997, but,
as with veiling, the ban is rarely heeded. Clitoridectomy has no precedent
in the Koran, Abdo pointed out; it is a pre-Islamic African practice. The
objections she raised with an Islamist leader, Sheik Mohammad al-Berri,
prompted this explanation:
A woman can be aroused at any moment. Even if a woman is riding in a car, if she hits a few bumps, she can become sexually aroused. Once this happens, a man loses control. So you see, this practice certainly is not meant to punish women. But it is necessary.
Islamist regulation of women’s morality —
which is seen as the key to regulating male morality — apparently
makes considerable use of the imagination.
In fact one senses beneath their primness an unhealthy
obsession with sex. This is nowhere more evident than in accounts of life
in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Azar Nafisi, a U.S. literary scholar born
and raised in Iran, taught comparative literature at universities there
during and after the overthrow of the shah. Her autobiographical Reading Lolita in Teheran (Random
House, 2003)
describes an Islamist regime that “went so far as to outlaw certain
gestures and expressions of emotion, including love” and that levied
upon women who did not totally cover their heads, hair, and bodies monetary
fines, up to 76
lashes, and jail terms. While love was being ejected from the public sphere
(as were other emotions — it was verboten to grieve publicly for relatives killed by Saddam
Hussein’s bombs in the Iran-Iraq war, for example), in private things
were, by government fiat, supposed to get considerably steamier: The
mullahs brought back a practice long banned in the Muslim world,
“temporary marriage” (concubinage), so that Iranian men
“could have four official wives and as many temporary wives as they
wished.”
It was the habit of the bachelor leaders of the Muslim
Students’ Association on campus to declare that their only beloved
was God. The rules imposed on women to aid male chastity could never be
strict enough: Nafisi recounts that one of these young men got a female
student expelled from the university “because he said the white patch
of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him.”
Equally telling in this regard was the professor who became agitated when
one of his students chose to write on the novel Lolita. The professor’s reaction
was not disapproval of a Western novel about pedophilia — his
sympathy was entirely with the pedophile. Indeed, if he sympathized more
with Humbert Humbert than even Vladimir Nabokov meant readers to do, this
was because he “had a thing about young girls spoiling the lives of
intellectual men,” writes Nafisi. Notwithstanding the
professor’s censure of “Nabokov’s flighty young
vixen,” when he sought a new wife he insisted she be no older than 23. He found one at least 20 years his junior (and, as
Nafisi points out, a child bride exactly Lolita Haze’s age would have
been acceptable under the regime’s revision of marriage law).
When the mullahs suddenly revived concubinage in Iran,
Wahhabi religious authorities in Saudi Arabia raised objections, saying
that it contravened the Koran. But in general, Saudi fundamentalists, no
less than Iranian, put the 1950s hall monitors in the shade when it comes to being moralists
with sex on the brain. According to Soraya Altorki, a sociologist who has
studied women, marriage, and the family in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, the Arabic
word fitnah denotes
the disorderly behavior of men who have been sexually tempted by women; the
word also means “femme fatale, a woman who can drive men to
distraction and destruction.” This linguistic conflation of cause and
effect is one more reason to conclude that Islamism does not remove
licentiousness from society but simply wraps it in layers of misogyny.
What is peculiar about radical Islamist women —
who, perhaps understandably, dislike being leered at or accosted by
disorderly men — is their prescription for coping with the problem.
Rather than expecting men to exert control over themselves, or asking
mothers, as moral guardians, to take charge of their sons early on and
raise them to respect women, they speak of this as if it lies exclusively
with the female. Nilufer Gole quotes a passage from a 1987 article in Mektup magazine that spells it out:
We can never go into the streets with our house dresses; if we do so, we will expose ourselves to lustful gazes and will become a source of disorder for the Muslim community. . . . To increase our attraction to our husbands inside the house and to decrease it outside are our fundamental principles. That is to say, we will be appealing in the house and repulsive outside.
Of course, what numbers of educated and professional
Muslim women chose
to do became compulsory for every girl and woman in Afghanistan. One
wonders how soi-disant “repulsive” Islamist women think it
worked out when female “repulsiveness” was adopted as the law
of the land. Before the Islamist takeover in the 1980s, Afghanistan had been working in
fits and starts to join the modern world. Over the years its monarchic
governments had been rather progressive, including on the treatment of
women. Between 1996
and 2001, under
Taliban rule (as the world is now well aware), women and girls were not
allowed to get medical treatment if there was no female doctor available to
administer it; nor could they be educated, hold jobs, walk about
unaccompanied by male relatives, or (a late ruling) enter public parks.
Here was a subjugation so total that Iranians could adduce it to argue that
their Islamic Republic wasn’t all that bad for women. As one female
government functionary told Azar Nafisi before Nafisi’s 1997 exile from Iran:
“These [Iranian] young girls are a little spoiled — they expect
too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens.”
Afghan women and their allies
In the 1990s, after human rights monitors publicized the Serbs’
mass rapes of Bosnian women in the Balkans, the international community
began to view the treatment of women as a prominent aspect of war and
conflict. It became less difficult than it otherwise might have been for
human rights groups and feminist groups to draw the world’s attention
to the cruelty of the Taliban. The plight of Afghan women spurred American
feminists — specifically, those from the “equal
rights” branch of feminism that we associate with the National
Organization for Women or Eleanor Smeal’s Feminist Majority —
to do good deeds. Feminist Majority led the way, beginning in 1997, in condemning “gender
apartheid” in the largely overlooked country of Afghanistan. Equality
Now, an international research unit based in New York, also documented the
Taliban’s practices many years before the United States took action
against the regime. Lobbying by American feminists reportedly helped stop
the Clinton administration from formally recognizing the Taliban
government, which was, at least for a time, attracting positive attention
from a U.S. administration keen to foster an Afghan pipeline deal proposed
by the oil company Unocal.
Some Afghan activists say, on the other hand, that the
Americans did not have much of a feel for local conditions or culture.
These activists did not consider it helpful, for example, when Feminist
Majority sponsored a back-to-school program exclusively for Afghan girls.
Afghan girls have suffered terribly, but assisting Afghan boys — who
will otherwise be sent to radical Islamist madrassas to become the next generation of terrorists — is also
a necessity. Ignoring the boys and men of a deeply patriarchal society does
not make sense, Fahima Vorgetts of the Women for Afghan Women’s
Advisory Committee told me, “because the brothers and the fathers and
the husbands, they are the ones who control the families. They are the ones
that, if you alienate them, you won’t have any success in bringing
women to the table.” The reflexive hostility to religion exhibited by
the “equal rights” feminists also rubs some of their
non-American colleagues the wrong way. Riffat Hassan, a Pakistan-born
Muslim feminist theologian writing in the collection Women for Afghan Women (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2002)
edited by Sunita Mehta, said the support of the U.S. women’s movement
is laudable but it “must be given without the expectation or the
demand that Afghan women will follow a donor-driven agenda . . . rooted in
aversion to Islam and Afghan culture.”
Afghans and Afghan Americans trying to help rebuild the
war-torn country often speak of U.S. feminists with a mixture of awe for
their grassroots political skills, gratitude for what they have done for
Afghanistan, and unwillingness to adopt their quirks. The Afghans, like
people all around the world, embrace the American polity’s appeal to
inherent rights but resist defining those rights precisely the way Eleanor
Smeal or Betty Friedan would. Another essayist in Women for Afghan Women, Zohra Yusuf
Daoud, the first (and last) woman to hold the title of Miss Afghanistan,
wrote: “Some aspects associated with Western feminism, such as
bra-burning, revealing clothing, and sexual promiscuity are not appropriate
at this stage for Afghan feminists, if they ever will be.” A
spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,
a dissident group that has been active against every Afghan government
going back to 1977
when the country was a Soviet satellite, told me that rawa considers the Americans too
wrapped up in issues like abortion and women’s salaries compared to
men’s. She called these “luxury items” for women
struggling for the right to move about freely, to educate and support
themselves, and to have political representation.
Most Americans, if they are older than 35, think of bra-burning as the
political symbol of a bygone era; if they are younger, it’s a safe
bet they have never heard of it. It is important to realize nonetheless
that this is the image of us that lives on around the world. To a degree
perhaps surprising to us, 1970s feminism’s shock to traditional societies —
which Fatima Mernissi had singled out as key to Islamism’s rise
— reverberates today. It isn’t only jihadists and
Islamists who are capable of comparing the mores of their societies to our
liberal and feminist-influenced mores and declining to hold theirs
inferior.
Many women’s advocates in the Muslim world take
veiling — politically exploited though it is by their enemies,
the radical Islamists — in stride and believe that we should, too.
Leila Ahmed, the Egyptian feminist scholar, has noted with chagrin that
Westerners who don’t know much about Islam seem obsessed by the
veiling issue. rawa,
whose members have risked their lives to protest the Taliban’s
physically beating any Afghan woman seen in public without the
all-enveloping burqa,
takes no official position on that garment, saying every woman ought to be
allowed to decide for herself whether to wear it. As Shirin Ebadi, the
Iranian human rights activist and lawyer, told the Irish Times (December 13, 1997): “When my husband
can marry three other women, when my husband can take my children, when my
husband can kill me, I have more important problems. When I find a solution
for these problems, then I will worry about hijab [veiling].”
According to many politically active Afghan women,
their fundamental rights have not been vindicated despite the dislodging of
the Taliban from power. They have a point. The anarchy and insecurity of
postwar Afghanistan, particularly outside of Kabul, have made many women
keep wearing the burqa to protect themselves. While millions of Afghan girls are now able
to go to school, millions more remain confined to their homes because they
fear retribution by Taliban or al Qaeda remnants or intimidation by the
regional mujahideen,
the heavily armed, religiously conservative warlords of the Northern
Alliance that helped the U.S.-led coalition topple the Taliban. Several
girls’ schools in the provinces have been shelled or set afire.
Islamist elements within President Hamid Karzai’s postwar government
have put in place (or in some cases continued) legal restrictions on travel
by women and on the education of married women. The U.S. military announced
in late 2003 that
it was beefing up its security presence in southern Afghanistan, a tacit
acknowledgement of the coalition’s postwar failure to secure the
country and the Bush administration’s policy drift on Afghanistan.
Female delegates to Afghanistan’s postwar
constitutional convention (at least those quoted in the press) have sharply
criticized their fellow delegates and the final draft of the constitution,
which was announced on the last day of 2003. The women numbered 100 or so of 502 delegates. A young, outspoken delegate named Malalai Joya, in
a widely reported exchange that nearly got her expelled, rose to condemn
the presence and the influence of several delegates, Northern Alliance
warlords with blood on their hands and retrograde views of women. She and
other members of an emerging female leadership in the country say they
resent the compromises President Karzai made with the warlords to produce
the final draft.
It is true that the constitution (judging from the
unofficial English translation that has been made public) declares
“the sacred religion of Islam” as the state religion and
invokes that phrase constantly. However, the degree to which the document
affirms the substance of Islamic law is not clear. It promises a government
“based on people’s will and democracy” and one that
“ensur[es] fundamental rights and freedoms” of “every
citizen of Afghanistan.” The latter phrase got amended, no doubt in
response to the outcry of the women, to read, “every citizen of
Afghanistan, woman and man.” Two of its articles grant women a quota
of political representation in the upper and lower houses of the
legislature. (The constitutional scholar Noah Feldman has made the point
that the 16.5
percent of the upper house slated to be female tops the 14-member female contingent in
today’s United States Senate.) Another article requires the promotion
of education for women and calls for illiteracy to be eliminated.
Whether the pluralistic and democratic aspects of the
constitution are honored may depend on the makeup of the new Afghan supreme
court vested with the authority to interpret it, as Feldman has noted. The
process (the loya jirga) from which the document issued was messy; enforcing it will be no
less difficult, particularly in a country struggling to emerge from decades
of war, chaos, and tyranny. The achievement of formally bringing women back
into politics for the first time in a generation should not be minimized,
however. If women successfully go to the polls — and I venture to say
any interpretation of the new constitution would support their exercise of
their suffrage — sharia and related social regulations unfavorable to women are not
likely to fare well in the long run. There is reason to believe the
majority of women in Afghanistan — and in Iraq, where an interim
constitution has been devised for the postwar transition — will, if
they are able to vote, choose candidates and policies promising to
modernize the country in ways that improve their position in society. As
Fahima Vorgetts of the women’s advisory committee, who returns
periodically to her native Afghanistan, recently told me: “This war
changed a lot of women. People are talking about politics now.” Women
in rural and highly traditionalist areas of the country have told her,
“We may be blind, but I don’t want my daughter to be blind.
Meaning, I don’t have an education but I want my daughter to have an
education. That tells me a lot, for [women] to push for a better
life.”
Defenders of tolerance and monogamy
A sobering reminder, however, that
elections don’t automatically strengthen liberal democracy can be
found in the recent history of Iran. Iranian women were granted the right
to vote by the shah in 1963. They have been voting ever since, but the mullahs who took power
in 1979 are
still in power, doing their best to rein in an ever more rebellious
populace. Sitting over the country’s political institutions is a
theocratic judicial panel that stifles the reforms and the reform
candidates approved by the Iranian electorate. (Because a too-powerful
judiciary in Afghanistan poses just such a danger to that country’s
fledgling democracy, President Karzai and the United States government
pushed for a strong executive in the Afghan constitution.)
When the revolution was gathering steam, the Ayatollah
Khomeini, in an eclectic and pragmatic move — and recall that the
entire movement was eclectic, a coalition of Shiites and Marxists out to
rid Iran of imperialism, capitalism, monarchy, and the decadent influence
of the “Great Satan” — exhorted women to go out in the
streets and demonstrate against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. After Pahlavi
was forced into exile, the Islamic Republic repealed important laws that
protected women’s rights. Yet it also expected women (properly
veiled, of course) to help the revolution advance and prosper by entering
higher education and the work force. Hence the birth of what Azar Nafisi
called “the myth of Islamic feminism. . . . It enabled the rulers to
have their cake and eat it too; they could claim to be progressive and
Islamic” at one and the same time, even as they indulged in the
inveterate Islamist habit of denouncing Nafisi and other “modern
women as Westernized, decadent and disloyal. They needed us modern men and
women to show them the way, but they also had to keep us in our
place.”
That female reformers are bursting out of their
allotted place in Iran became obvious to the world when Shirin Ebadi won
the 2003 Nobel Peace
Prize. The human rights activist and lawyer believes regime change can come
to her country through constitutional processes. She told the Weekly Standard (November 3, 2003): “The situation in
Iran is different from Iraq and Afghanistan. There were no mechanisms for
internal change in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iran, there are.” Ebadi
said traditional Shiism — unlike the Islamist variant of Shiism that
is wielded as a political weapon by the Teheran government —
countenances enough of a separation of religion and state to enable people
of different faiths to form a polity together. It is not surprising that
the Bush administration’s search for Muslim allies in the wake of
September 11 has
concentrated heavily on Shia believers like Ebadi. (Shiism is branded as
heretical by the Wahhabis, the Islamist Sunnis of Saudi Arabia.)
Perhaps the two most important matters about which
Americans and Shirin Ebadi agree are her championing of religious tolerance
and her disapproval of polygamy. She is not alone in holding these
particular views, leading one to suspect that Islamic feminism may not be
as mythical as Azar Nafisi said. These views are, it seems to me, the
markers of an Islamic feminism that the United States should wholeheartedly
support as a direct challenge to the “feminist” wing of
Islamism. Women authors and political activists of many Muslim and Western
nations hold that, while the Koran permits polygamy, it seeks to limit a
practice that was widespread at the time of its promulgation in the seventh
century. The relevant verse, they point out, is both conditional and stated
in the negative: If a man fears he cannot support more than one wife, he
should have only one. Nevertheless, there are Muslim men who defend
polygamy — strictly speaking, the term is polygyny since the verse
refers to men taking multiple wives, not vice versa — as religiously
compulsory and a way to fulfill their sexual desires without resorting to
adultery.
The clash of interests that polygyny touches off has
long been evident. The feminist pioneer Huda Shaarawi recounts in her
memoirs that, as a 12-year-old bride in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, she
was told by her mother that her family tried in vain to get the groom (her
cousin, with a wife and children all older than Shaarawi) to agree in the
marriage contract to give up sexual relations with his first wife.2 Today
one hears of advocacy on behalf of first wives to enhance their legal power
to obtain a divorce should they oppose a husband’s intention to marry
again. Women or their families have, from either vantage point, tried to
enforce monogamy.
In Iran, a husband’s multiple marriage option is
sometimes brandished as a threat — a way to assert power over
one’s wife, according to women interviewed in Haleh
Esfandiari’s book Reconstructed Lives (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). There are reports out of Indonesia that, to evade the
Indonesian law allowing polygyny only with a first wife’s consent,
some men take another wife and keep it a secret from their first wife and
children. Polygyny was hemmed about with legal restrictions during the
dictator Suharto’s 32 years of secular rule. In the time since he was forced to step
down in 1998, public
disapproval of polygyny has eroded and the practice has flourished in
Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population. It
flourishes also in Malaysia, where current law demands that a husband prove
that starting and providing for a new family won’t lower the
standard of living of the wife and children he already has. Powerful
Malaysian clerics are challenging these restrictions. When a regional mufti
nullified the requirement of wifely consent, a Malaysian women’s
group, Sisters in Islam, responded with a controversial public information
campaign called “Monogamy Is My Choice.” Its aims are
strengthening wives’ legal options and creation of a national
marriage and divorce registry for Muslims so women can find out the status
of their husbands or husbands-to-be. (The country’s current database
lists only the marriages and divorces of non-Muslims.)
Polygyny has been banned in the Muslim world only by
secularist Turkey and Tunisia. Sisters in Islam cannot afford to be
perceived as seeking a ban, given the strong backlash against the group by
Malaysia’s religious establishment and growing Islamist movement.
Sisters in Islam Executive Director Zainah Anwar insists that the goal is
not a ban but simply allowing women to choose whether to participate in a
polygynous marriage or not. (In comments to the New Straits Times [March 19, 2003], she made clear her
belief that few women would choose it.) When Anwar spoke in
Washington, D.C. on the status of women under sharia in May of 2003, in the midst of the anti-polygyny
campaign, her prepared remarks did not touch on polygyny at all. She walks
a fine line in confronting the social and legal practices that set men
above women in Malaysia. Her reform-from-within approach — she is a
believing Sunni Muslim — is comparable to Ebadi’s in Iran.
Intrepid as lion tamers, these women have a prudence that tells them when
and where to confront, when and where to desist.
Their work does not receive any backing at all from
certain feminists: namely, the multicultural and postmodern ones considered
to be at the cutting edge of academic thought in the West. “Polygamy
can be liberating and empowering,” said one such cutting-edge
feminist, Miriam Cooke, head of Middle East Women’s Studies at Duke
University. If we could just shed our Western predilection for monogamy,
Cooke told Kay S. Hymowitz of City Journal (Winter 2003), “we might imagine polygamy working.” She speculated
to Hymowitz that some wives may be relieved not to have to service a
husband so often, while other wives may use the opportunity to take on new
sexual partners, too. When Cooke was asked how likely wives would be, in
strict Muslim settings, to go on sexual adventures, her reply was the
postmodern equivalent of a shrug: “I don’t know. I’m
interested in discourse.” A male social anthropologist at the
University of Oslo was described as positively
“fundamentalist-friendly” by the literary critic Bruce Bawer,
writing in Partisan Review (July 22, 2002):
One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims [in Norway], explained the professor, was that in their native countries “rape is scarcely punished,” since Muslims “believe that it is women who are responsible for rape.” The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
Shirin Ebadi’s and Zainah Anwar’s efforts
to defend women ground under the heel of sharia, Afghan women seeking to vote under a new constitution
— none of these causes would make even the smallest amount of headway
if such ostentatious relativism were the norm in the wider world beyond the
elite campuses of the United States and Europe. At least the “equal
rights” feminists are animated by a conviction that there are rights
everyone shares; having taken leave of that conviction, the academic left
is capable of excusing the worst cruelties of our time — as long as
the perpetrators are members of “the Other.” As Azar Nafisi has
said: “In the strange world of Middle Eastern Studies, any attempt to
condemn gender apartheid is branded an imposition of Western
values.”
Feminism(s) and freedom
How do western women stack up against the above-outlined standard of
Islamic feminism — a feminism that is respectful of religious faith,
committed to pluralism, and protective of monogamy? The truth is that
Western feminists and liberals of various stripes fall short in different
ways and to different degrees.
Two liberal journalists, Sasha Polakow-Suransky and
Giuliana Chamedes, wrote an article entitled “Europe’s New
Crusade” in the American Prospect (August 26, 2002). While it dealt with the ill-treatment of Muslim immigrants
in Europe in the wake of September 11, the piece was most notable for its critique of European
multiculturalists, gays, and feminists for their unhelpful political
stances. The authors rightly faulted the multiculturalists for being silent
about the threat posed by Islamist sects in Europe that advocate violence.
They were far unhappier, though, with the 1970s-vintage feminist Oriana Fallaci, and the late homosexual
politician Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands for criticizing Islamic
intolerance. After witnessing the Twin Towers’ collapse, Fallaci
wrote a broadside for the Italian daily Corriere
della Sera in which she heaped scorn on
“the sons of Allah,” and the daughters, too, for submitting to
polygyny and wearing the veil. Fortuyn, before being assassinated by a left-wing extremist,
was gaining a following among Dutch voters in 2002 with his insistence that Muslim immigrants assimilate
or be kept out of the Netherlands.
According to the authors, Fallaci’s and
Fortuyn’s confrontational defense of Western freedoms was harmful — it would
only incite the white, Christian, heterosexual majority in Europe to
greater heights of prejudice toward Muslim immigrants. Polakow-Suransky and
Chamedes clearly preferred that both the anti-religious bent of “equal rights”
feminism and militant homosexuality’s anger stay trained on the
Christian majority as the real problem (it being the locus, in their view,
of most Continental religious, ethnic, and sexual bigotry). Thus, despite
their chastisement of the see-no-evil multiculturalists, their
article’s overriding
message was to let Islamism largely off the hook in the name of political
correctness. In making their plea for the continued alliance of feminists
and gays with multiculturalists under the umbrella of a broad left
coalition, they seem to have lost sight of what it is about the West that
is most worth defending.
Several American feminists have put forward a feminist
reading of the Koran, which in itself seems a very healthy development. One
of the more prominent efforts in this line is Qu’ran
and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1999) by Amina Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam.
Inasmuch as it is a linguist’s highly detailed study of the Arabic
text of the Koran, I am not able to judge whether sound reasoning has been
used to reach the conclusion that the words of the Prophet Muhammad offer
justice to women as well as to men. Certainly Wadud is at one with the
Islamic feminists I have been discussing in saying that domineering male
interpreters of the text, not the text itself, are responsible for
misogynistic practices under the aegis of Islam. Nor do readers of Wadud
find a breezy multicultural endorsement of polygyny; she roundly condemns
it.
The trouble comes when she announces that two of the
three “commentators whose exegetical works were consulted” for Qu’ran and Woman were
Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abdul Ala Maulana Maudoodi, the two principal Sunni
theoreticians of Islamism. The political project of Qutb — inciter of
the destruction of infidels and the coercion of nonfundamentalist Muslims
— was to cure the Muslim world of the “hideous
schizophrenia” caused by separating church and state. Yet to hear
Wadud tell it, Qutb, in his writings on the Koran, “discusses the
shared benefits and responsibility between men and women in the Islamic
social system of justice” and is generally something of a feminist.
This is not easy to reconcile with his rabid reaction against the social
mixing of the sexes, mentioned above. True, one could argue that Qutb stood
for a sexual politics of “separate (very separate) but equal.”
But Wadud does not so argue. Neither Qutb nor Maudoodi (the foremost jihadi ideologue of the
Indian subcontinent) is presented in political context. Filling in that
context would have meant defending Qutb’s and Maudoodi’s
fundamentalism or else trying to deny it. In any case, exercises in
mainstreaming these ideologists of holy war do not serve the cause of
women.
The feminist reading of the Koran advanced by Asma Gull
Hasan is not that of a scholar but that of a young American giving the
illiberal elders in her family a hard time. Apparently building upon
schoolwork she did at Wellesley College, Hasan put together American Muslims: The New Generation (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), a book combining the relativism
of the multicultural feminists, the policy diktats of the “equal
rights” feminists, and hefty doses of complaint about her fellow
Americans’ stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists. It is
also, in some respects, a rather charming work. The cheeriness with which
the author scolds her uncle for his “chauvinist beliefs,” or
the way she doesn’t let up on her traditionalist grandfather until he
admits that, on Judgment Day, men and women will stand equally before God,
are pure American jeune fille. Hasan is a pro-assimilation American Muslim who appreciates the
opportunities that the United States has afforded her family, originally
from Pakistan. She criticizes her fellow Muslims who display anti-Semitism.
Yet the relativism of her outlook — and it, too,
is very American — makes a muddle of her thinking. Most
disappointingly, the book treats terrorist acts such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center not as an evil to be stopped, but strictly as a painful public
relations problem for “Muslims like me, who would never think of
hijacking planes.” American Muslims was written before September 11; a year after al Qaeda struck, a Hasan op-ed in the New York Times (“Learning a
Lesson for Ramadan,” November 6, 2002) might have shown an improved understanding. No such luck,
though. The op-ed, concerning her newfound reluctance to practice her faith
openly during Ramadan for fear of discrimination, amplified the most vapid
and bellyaching aspects of the book. Airport security was now a nightmare
for her. Giving to charity risked government scrutiny. There was no
allusion whatsoever to the event that changed not only her life but the
skyline of Manhattan: the attack the year before that killed over 3,000 people. Such
stubbornness places Asma Gull Hasan, to this day, in the mushy middle on
terrorism — not a good place to be.
Betty Friedan published a memoir a few years ago in
which she recounted hearing, at international women’s conferences,
about things that women in faraway countries had to contend with, such as
clitoridectomy. Sounding like somebody from Peoria, Illinois — which
she is — Friedan wrote in Life So Far (Diane Publishing, 2000): “I thought there were certain absolute things that
under no culture would you respect. Would you respect slavery? Certain
things in women’s lives have to be absolute and under no culture
should you respect the mutilation of young girls.” When a woman
points a blameful finger — and that has been women’s job since
time immemorial — her words gain force insofar as they draw upon
eternal verities. To be sure, in her newspaper cri de coeur (which she
later expanded into a book), Oriana Fallaci went overboard in calling the
veil “stupid” and belittling wives willing to participate in
polygynous marriages. Likewise, the secularism of feminist thinkers like
Friedan can be rigid in a way that recalls not American history, tradition,
or constitutional principles, but the Jacobins’ extirpation of faith
from the public square.
Yet for all that, American women would do well to
negotiate the tensions now being felt between the Judeo-Christian West and
the Muslim East with a moral compass aligned more closely with Fallaci and
Friedan than with the multiculturalist or the grievance specialist.
September 11 has
clarified matters for many. Left-liberal intellectuals are — or at
least some of them are — groping their way toward a defense of the
West that puts them alongside, if not fervently with, the Bush
administration. This is happening even as conservatives make the case that
the fight against terrorism is a fight against people who would mistreat
women and stone homosexuals. The women writing in the American Prospect, Polakow-Suransky and
Chamedes, registered the conservatives’ arguments and were not
amused. It bothered them when “male politicians . . . suddenly began
invoking women’s emancipation” as if they cared about it. The
warning they issued to feminists and homosexual activists was that
“their causes have been effectively adopted and appropriated by those
who have claimed the mantle of defending [European] tolerance in the face
of intolerant Islam.”
It’s a rather petty warning to issue. Why not let
anyone who is willing — Westerners and those struggling in the Muslim
world to emulate the pluralism and democracy we enjoy — converge on
the need to bring about a decent life for women (and men), who deserve to
have their fundamental rights respected? This is, in fact, what the woman
question brings out especially well: the rights of human beings that are
manifest not in any penumbra of any constitution but in the full light of
day. As one of the supporters of the Revolutionary Association of the Women
of Afghanistan, a woman from Denmark, put it: “Once in a while you
can have your doubts about whether you are a feminist or not. But you
cannot, even for a second, doubt that you are an Afghan feminist.”
1 Interview with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal (November/December 2002). 2 See the chapter devoted to Shaarawi in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana University Press, 1990). |
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