Given that wearing the niqab is not a divine injunction, we have a right to ask questions about its advantages and disadvantages. All ancient societies required women to cover their faces because they considered women a source of temptation and thought that vice could be prevented only by isolating and secluding them. This argument assumes that men will fall into temptation simply by seeing the face of a beautiful woman. This denies a man’s capacity to control his instincts. Besides, if women must cover their faces so as not to arouse men, what should a handsome man do? Doesn’t his handsome face equally arouse women? Should we require handsome men to cover their faces, so that men and women both wear the niqab? We also find that the eyes of a woman who wears the niqab, if they are beautiful, become themselves a powerful source of allure. So what should we do then to prevent arousal? A well-known Saudi religious scholar, Sheikh Mohamed al-Hadban, has thankfully understood this problem and advocated that Muslim women wear a niqab which reveals only one eye, so that women cannot possibly arouse men by the way they look. I do not know how these poor women could go about their lives, looking out on the world with one eye through a single hole.
The niqab prevents women from living as human beings with rights and obligations equal to those of men. How could a woman work as a surgeon, a judge, an engineer, or a television broadcaster when she is hidden behind the niqab, whether with one eye or two eyes uncovered? Most Saudi scholars strongly oppose women driving cars, presenting three arguments for this position: women would immodestly have to take off the niqab while driving; they would be able to go wherever they want, which would encourage them to rebel against their husbands and their families; and (according to Sheikh Muhammad ibn Salih al-‘Uthaymin) “women are by nature less decisive than men, have weaker sight and are less capable, and if they face danger, are unable to respond.” This is the real view of the advocates of the niqab and it indicates that they despise women and have contempt for their abilities. Of course they are unable to explain the overwhelming superiority women have achieved in education and employment throughout the world.
The most serious aspect of the niqab is that it dehumanizes women. Throughout human history there have been two attitudes toward women: the civilized attitude, which sees women as fully competent and qualified human beings, and the regressive attitude, which can be summarized as seeing her as feminine and hence limited to the role of acting as a source of sexual pleasure, as a factory for producing children, and as a maid in the conjugal home. These three roles are linked to a woman’s body rather than her intellect, and hence for them the woman’s body acquires supreme importance, while her intellect, her education, and her work, even her thoughts and feelings, are secondary, if taken into account at all.
Advocates of the niqab believe that to let men and women mix leads necessarily to temptation and vice, and so the only remedy for this state of affairs is to segregate the two genders completely and to make women cover their faces. If this argument is valid, then Saudi society must have done away with vice completely and forever because in Saudi Arabia segregation is total and all women are obliged to wear the niqab. In fact Saudis have a large organization called the Association for the Promotion of Virtue, which works day and night to monitor people’s behavior and punish them as soon as they commit the slightest moral misdemeanor. But has virtue been achieved in Saudi Arabia? Studies and statistics affirm the opposite. One study, by Dr. Wafaa Mahmoud of King Saud University, found that a quarter of Saudi children between the ages of six and twelve were victims of sexual harassment. Another study by Dr. Ali al-Zahrani, a specialist in psychiatric diseases at the Saudi Ministry of Health, has corroborated this finding.
Dr. Khaled al-Halibi, the director of the Family Development Center in the Saudi province of Ahsa, conducted a study and found that 82 percent of the secondary schoolchildren he surveyed had suffered from forms of sexual deviance and that in one year alone (2007) 850 Saudi girls ran away from their families because of assault within the family, mostly of a sexual nature, 9 percent of children were the victims of sexual abuse by their guardians, one in four girls in the Gulf were subjected to sexual harassment, and 47 percent of the children surveyed had received obscene invitations on their cell phones.
The communications revolution has given rise to a major social crisis in Saudi Arabia, as young men who are socially and sexually repressed have started to use the cameras on their cell phones for immoral purposes. In 2005, images taken by cell phone showing four young men trying to rape two women wearing the niqab in a Riyadh street were widely circulated in Saudi Arabia. The question is how could a young man try to rape a woman when he could not see her body or her face? The answer is that as far as he was concerned she was not a human being but a body, just a sexual object, and if he could enjoy her while escaping punishment then he would not hesitate for a moment. In short the state of Saudi society with regard to sexual deviance and assault is no better than that of other societies, if not worse.
So finally, if the niqab does not bring out virtue, what is to be done? How can we overcome the temptation posed by women? The reality is that virtue never comes about through prohibitions, seclusion, and repression but rather through upbringing, setting an example, and willpower. When we see women as human beings with moral volition, dignity, and independent personalities, when we recognize their rights, as endorsed in Islam, when we trust and respect women and give them a full opportunity to be educated and to work, only then will virtue come about.
Democracy is the solution.
July 21, 2009
The Niqab and Flawed Religiosity
Last week I wrote an article about the phenomenon of the niqab now spreading in Egypt, ninety years after Egyptian women first abandoned it. I said that Islam does not require women to cover their faces at all, based on the opinion of a group of al-Azhar scholars who wrote a book entitled, al-Niqab ‘ada wa-laysa ‘ibada (The Niqab is a Custom, Not a Form of Worship), distributed by the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments. Many other Egyptian jurists have endorsed this opinion, foremost among them Sheikh Mohamed Abduh (1849–1905) and Sheikh Mohamed Ghazali (1917–96), the great and courageous scholar who fought vehemently against what he called “the law of the Bedouin,” which aims to segregate women behind the niqab. I tried to explain the negative effect of the niqab on women and society and cited as an example Saudi society, in which all women are forced to wear the niqab. I also cited official Saudi statistics showing that, with respect to sexual assault and forms of sexual deviance, Saudi society is no better, and possibly worse, than other societies, and thus that imprisoning women behind the niqab does not prevent vice.
After the article was published, I opened the al-Shorouk website and found to my surprise that the website was flooded with dozens of messages from advocates of the niqab. Unfortunately the messages did not contain a single argument for debate but rather tried their best to insult and abuse my person, without addressing in the slightest my opinion and the opinions of the jurists I quoted. In the face of these ferocious and vulgar attacks on me, a large group of readers sprang to my defense, and I take this opportunity to thank them from my heart and to take pride in their trust and their appreciation. The truth is that these insults did not bother me because as a physician I have learned in surgery that the process of opening an abscess with a scalpel, while essential for the health of the patient, necessarily involves malodorous pus coming out. We are dealing here with a phenomenon that truly deserves to be pondered, because those who competed with each other to insult me are supposed to be religious—in fact they consider themselves more committed than others to their religion—and this provides an excellent opportunity to study their way of thinking.
I noticed first of all that they believe with complete assurance that Islam has only one form, one opinion, and one worldview. Everything that contradicts their opinion has nothing to do with Islam, and anyone who opposes their opinion is either ignorant, degenerate, or conspiring against Islam on behalf of foreign
forces. So they consider it their duty not to debate their opponents but rather to dismiss them, insult them, and disparage them, if possible, because they are enemies or conspirators, not just people with different points of view. The truth is that nothing is further from true Islam than this extremist and unilateral approach, because Islam is the only religion that requires its adherents to believe in other religions. Muslims have surprised the world over seven centuries with their ability to accommodate other cultures and integrate them into Islam’s great civilization.
Second, they expect you to agree with them when they imprison women behind the niqab, or at least to refrain from objecting. If you do object they immediately accuse you of advocating nudity and pornography. They consider the niqab to be the only alternative to decadence. We have to wonder how these people view women who do not wear hijab and how they deal with them, let alone how they view Copts, and what image of Islam they offer to foreigners if they live in western countries.
Third, they are practicing a form of piety based not on any intrinsic spiritual experience but rather on comparison and discrimination. In their view the way to religious virtue is not through disciplining themselves to do good works and suppressing their desires but rather through advertising their religious superiority over others. From their differences they acquire a psychological strength that leads them to arrogance and presumption. They imagine that they alone are truly devout and that others face two options: either to accept their ideas without discussion or face their curses and insults. They live in a delusional world that spares them the trouble of thinking about their real problems. The world for them is made up of two camps: Muslims, who have to share their opinions in every detail, and the camp of Islam’s enemies, including secularists, infidels, and degenerates. This bipolar vision, in its naivety and extremism, easily pushes them toward hatred and aggression, rather than toward love, tolerance, and the acceptance of differences—the values that true religion advocates.
Fourth, I noticed that most of their messages are full of horrendous grammatical and linguistic errors, and I concluded from this that they have acquired their religious learning by listening rather than by reading, mostly from satellite television channels subsidized by oil money that aim to propagate Wahhabi fundamentalist ideas. I watched one of these channels yesterday and found the famous preacher recounting the following incident: “The Prophet Muhammad was invited to someone’s house and ate all the food served to him except the onions. When his host asked him why, the Prophet said he did not eat raw onions in case the angels were repelled by the smell of his breath when they were bringing him revelations.” This is the level of the religious education these channels instill in the minds of simple people, and I do not think that requires any further comment.
Fifth, I have noticed that religion for them is purely a matter of formal ritual, requiring specific procedures, and so these devout people see no contradiction between insulting people and being devout. This flawed religiosity, which separates belief from conduct, is spreading like a plague in our country. Nowadays we find many people who are scrupulous about the rituals of religion, but as soon as we have to deal with them in mundane matters we discover that that their conduct belies appearances. Unfortunately in Egypt we have become more scrupulous about the externals of religion and yet less religious. Before Wahhabi ideas started spreading we were less interested in the externals of religion and more religious in the real sense—more just, more honest, and more tolerant.
Finally, the most dangerous aspect of this flawed religiosity is that it completely separates the private from the public. Those who bombarded the al-Shorouk website with insults imagined that in this way they were defending Islam. Yet they live in Egypt, where millions of people are impoverished, unemployed, ignorant, and diseased, where people die standing in bread lines or fighting to obtain clean water. But their flawed religiosity prevents them from making an objective analysis of any phenomenon, because in their opinion poverty is either a punishment or God’s choice and they can never see it as the natural result of corruption or despotism. Besides, this flawed religiosity is totally depoliticized, because these people have learned from Wahhabi sheikhs that it is their duty to obey a Muslim ruler, even if he is unjust or corrupt. This leads them to accept despotism. They come out in angry demonstrations in protest at the French government’s decision to ban the hijab in French schools, while in their own countries elections are regularly rigged and tens of thousands of detainees, mostly Islamists, spend the flower of their youth in prison without trial. Egyptians are abused and cruelly tortured and their wives may be abused in front of their eyes in police stations and at State Security premises. But none of that arouses their religious anger because the religion they have been taught does not include defending general human values, such as freedom, equality, and justice. Resisting injustice and despotism in Egypt is a costly exercise through which you may lose your freedom, your dignity, and perhaps your life, whereas hiding behind a fictitious name and slandering people on the Internet is an easy form of struggle and costs nothing.
This experience has confirmed to me once again that there are two battles in Egypt: a battle to bring about democratic reform, to prevent the transfer of power from President Mubarak to his son (as though the country were a poultry farm), and to assert the right of Egyptians to freedom and justice, and another parallel battle of no less importance, in which Egypt is defending its civilized and open-minded interpretation of Islam against the invasion of reactionary and regressive Wahhabi ideas that are liable to obliterate our cultural heritage and turn our great country into a Taliban emirate.
Democracy is the solution.
July 28, 2009
Piety in Front of the Camera
In the 1960s there was an al-Azhar sheikh in my family by the name of Sheikh Abdel Salam Sarhan, a man of awesome appearance with his great stature, his al-Azhar garments, and his stentorian voice. We who were children at the time loved him because his pockets were always full of chewing gum, which he would share out among us. When people needed his opinion on any legal matter, he would receive them hospitably in his house and explain the rules of Islam to them. It was out of the question at the time that Sheikh Abdel Salam would ever charge any fee for his efforts. In fact all he asked of people is that they pray for him and his family. What I learned from Sheikh Abdel Salam, may he rest in peace, is that a real man of religion is a great personality no less worthy of respect than a doctor or a judge. I also learned that making people aware of the precepts of their religion is the true vocation of the ulema, although Sheikh Abdel Salam’s time has passed, Egypt has changed, and a new generation of preachers has arisen, different in every respect. Since Egyptians are naturally devout and increasingly resort to God because of the poverty, injustice, and humiliation they face in this world, since there are millions of illiterate people and even the educated find it hard to access the original sources of Islam, the new preachers have become the main source of religious learning for millions of Egyptians, and hence play a decisive role in shaping public awareness. For this reason we should take a close look at this phenomenon to understand its nature.
First, most of these preachers do not have any academic training in the religious sciences and so their success is not the result of any deep knowledge of religion so much as of their persuasiveness and their personal appeal. That’s why they are so careful to be neat and elegant and to use simplified everyday language to reach as large an audience as possible. In just ten years the new preachers have become a basic element in the commercial media market, in every sense of the word, and the fees they demand depend on the amount of advertising their programs generate. This of course increases as the size of the audience grows and the best-paid preachers are those whose programs generate the most advertising revenue. Suffice it to say that their fees last year ranged from 150,000 to a million Egyptian pounds a month, and some have devised new ways to sell their advice on matters of Islamic law, such as the Islamic pho
ne line and escorting rich people on the hajj and the umra for outrageous fees. Forbes Magazine of the United States has published the incomes of some of these preachers and they are enormous. Of course we would like everyone to enjoy great wealth but we should remember that the Prophet Muhammad lived poor and died poor and that his companions never made money out of preaching, but rather spent money on spreading the message of Islam. Throughout Islamic history, calling people to God has never been a way to make a fortune. When I imagine how millions of poor Egyptians who live in shantytowns and cemeteries gather around the television to watch people talk to them about religion and then at the end of the month these wretched people are just as they were, while the bank balances of the preachers have grown by a million pounds, I can’t countenance the contradiction.
Second, many of the new preachers rely on exciting the religious feelings of the audience during the program. This climaxes when the preacher starts weeping and makes the audience weep in fear of God. Another contradiction is striking here. Everyone who has appeared on television knows that dealing with the various cameras during the recording session requires preparation and expertise. With full respect, I wonder how the preacher manages to handle simultaneously the strong religious emotions that make him weep and the need to pay attention to the cameras and their movements, which requires him to turn rapidly from one camera to another, based on the instructions of the producer.
On the State of Egypt: A Novelist's Provocative Reflections Page 10
