by Ed Husain
The problem is not Saudi Arabia or the Gulf region, but the bigotry of Salafi-Wahhabism imposed on the Muslim public space. For instance, in neighbouring Bahrain, Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates, women and men are relatively free and interact with greater mutual respect in malls and mosques. Citizens of these other Gulf countries share the same language, dialect, tribes, culture and history. The distinguishing factor is that puritanism of Salafism is not powerful in their governments and therefore not imposed as law of the land.
Even before I lived in Saudi Arabia, my understanding of the hijab as purely Islamic attire was already in doubt. There is no verse in the Quran that directly calls on women to cover their heads. I saw Jewish women wearing the equivalent of the hijab in London, Arab nuns I met in Syria looking identical to Muslim women, and similar clothing depicted in ancient pre-Christian portraits I saw of the women of Palmyra. The hijab was the dress code of upper-class women in the ancient world. As a cultural residue of antiquity, it lingered in religious guise for Jews and Christians. Arabs then embraced it as they expanded their empire and encountered Byzantium and Jerusalem. The harshness of religious authorities in Mecca and Medina often encourages other Muslim institutions to imitate the ‘holy cities’.
When my friend, an Italian–American journalist, walked with me and together we entered Britain’s central mosque in London’s Regent’s Park, she was told to cover her hair or risk being expelled. In Jerusalem, my Syrian–American friend, a Middle East analyst, accompanied me to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Across Jerusalem, she is free to be as she wants, but the moment she entered the Haram, or the place of security and serenity, the Arab police insisted that she must cover her head. What is so offensive about the hair of a woman? In contrast, when I was worshipping in Turkey in Konya at the mosque of Shams Tabrizi, Rumi’s teacher, a beautiful woman entered in jeans and carrying a guitar. She sat, meditated, and not a word was raised to instruct her to cover her hair. I saw that same freedom for women in the shrine of Bulleh Shah in Kasur, Pakistan, where local women came and went without men enforcing headgear on them.
‘Saudi Arabia,’ wrote the Lebanese historian Samir Kassir, ‘has set back the entire Arab world, the most distressing proofs of which are the invisible faces of women which it has re-exported virtually everywhere.’2 A hundred years ago, the Muslim scholars and activists Qasim Amin and Huda Sha‘arawi triggered debates in Egypt by asserting that the veiling of women was neither a part of ancient Arab culture nor a requirement of Islam. Successive grand muftis of Al-Azhar in Cairo have supported even the French government’s banning of the face veil.
The Saudi Salafi clerical classes, obsessed with covering up and concealing women, go so far as to argue that the aurah (‘private parts’) of a woman include her voice. Since a woman’s voice can be seductive, that too is aurah. Once such a view is tolerated and accepted, there is no stopping it. It snowballs. Salafi clerics have argued that even a woman’s name is aurah, and should not be mentioned in public. Most men in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf today will not speak the names of their wives, sisters or daughters. They refer to them, instead, as their hurmah, or honour. The first time I heard a Gulf Arab mention ‘hurmati’, ‘my honour’, I genuinely thought I had caused him some indignity or insult. It took a while before I realised he was talking about his wife.
But there are other populations of men who wish to control the dress of women in their countries, with all the consequences that has for their lives. A Pew opinion poll found that only 14 per cent of Egyptians agree that it is up to a woman to dress whichever way she wants. In Pakistan 22 per cent thought this, and in Iraq 27 per cent. The number was somewhat higher in Saudi Arabia, at 47 per cent, Turkey 52 per cent and Tunisia 56 per cent. What has happened to undermine Muslims’ confidence in ourselves to the extent that we want to constantly control and contain the beauty of women? That we feel threatened by allowing them their freedom?
This was not the Islam of the Muslim masses over their 1,500-year history. Almost every Muslim with an awareness of Islamic history and its key personalities is proud of the fact that the first person to believe in the Prophet was his wife Khadija. She trusted in his pure nature and sincere ways. Prior to their marriage, Khadija was a wealthy Meccan noble who employed the young Mohamed. She then fell in love with him and proposed to him, when he was twenty-five and she was forty. You won’t find a woman proposing to a man, taking her own decisions about her love life, in today’s Mecca.
The Prophet was married to Khadija for twenty-five years until her death. He later remarried a number of times, notably to a much younger woman, Ayesha bint Abu Bakr.3 She was strong in character, and deeply involved in spreading the Prophet’s message. After he passed away, she led an army against the fourth caliph, Imam Ali. The fact that a woman could lead troops in battle speaks volumes about the strong women the Prophet had around him, and early Muslim men’s acceptance of them in leadership roles.
Ayesha bint Talha, a niece of the Prophet’s wife Ayesha, famously refused to wear the veil, claiming that God had created female beauty and her own attractiveness, and it was too precious to hide. Sakina bint al-Husain, a granddaughter of the Prophet, also protested against the veil and refused to allow her third husband to take a second wife. She divorced him when she discovered he was having an affair. Neither woman was punished for her independence, nor did their menfolk seek to force them to cover up.
They were rooted in Quranic knowledge instinctively and understood the Prophet’s disposition. They were not busy defining their identity based on opposing the modern West. A contemporary Muslim scholar has produced a forty-volume encyclopedia of Muslim professors who taught men and women.4 The great commentator on hadith Imam Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (1372–1449) noted that 800 of his hadith narrations included women in the chain of teaching and connecting a saying back to the Prophet. This illustrated the central role of many women in education and preserving knowledge in early Islam. In the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, women taught in the main hall. In my own early visits to the Prophet’s mosque in Medina in the late 1990s, I saw that women were allowed to gather freely near the Prophet’s tomb. Now they are not allowed. Gone are the days of Imam al-Tabari (839–923), whose Quranic exegeses are still a top five must-read for scholars, whose school of thought held that women may lead men in prayer. What happened to that Islam of freedom for women?
In pre-Islamic Arabia, men bequeathed women to their sons as part of their inheritance, along with horses, camels and other livestock. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) also suggested, in Beyond Good and Evil, that we should think of women as property. The great guru of postmodernist thinking offered no evidence for this position – it was self-evident to him. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he went even further, concluding that women are not capable of friendship; that they are animals, like cats, birds or, at best, cows. ‘Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip,’ he advised men who sought ‘the recreation of the warrior’. In contrast, the Prophet Mohamed was centuries ahead of his own time.
Every erudite Muslim in the world today believes, rightly, that the Prophet was a liberator of women. All recognise their Prophet as being a feminist of his time. Abdullah ibn Abbas, the Prophet’s cousin, frequently reminded Muslims that the Prophet commanded his wives and daughters to leave their homes and join the festivals and fun of Eid gatherings with people.
The fault with many Muslims today is our failure to grasp the spirit of the Prophet’s actions and the motives behind his divine sanctions relieving the plight of women. Many families buried girl babies because daughters brought shame on the household. Those of today’s Arabs and Muslims who have sadly clung on to that mentality have abandoned the progressive ways of their Prophet. He abolished infanticide; he stopped the practice of passing women on to heirs by way of inheritance; and he changed the rules on dowries – now money went from the man to the woman directly, so that she owned it, and not her parents. Even in the event of a divorce, she would retain her own
financial assets. Previously, divorce had been a purely male prerogative, but the Quran granted women the rights to divorce their husbands and inherit property. By the standards and in the context of the Prophet’s time in seventh-century Arabia, Muslims were among the most advanced of communities in terms of recognising women’s human status and granting them rights.
But somewhere in all the travails of history Muslims lost that spirit of the sharia and the Prophet. This trend grew more conspicuous as the loss of Muslim dignity became an issue. Muslim men turned inward as they lost their sense of dignity and manliness before the world. Just as a confident man feels no need to control his wife and household, neither does a confident society need to oppress its women. Even at the end of the caliphate, in the early twentieth century, the last caliph, His Majesty Sultan Abdul Majid II of the Ottoman empire, could be seen and photographed in public with his unveiled daughter and her husband, an Indian Muslim nawab.
Princess Durru Shehvar, daughter of Abdul Majid II, was by no means the only example of a confidently modest, fully Muslim woman, without hijab and yet not violating any part of the Quran. The elite Muslim families of Damascus, Cairo, Delhi, Isfahan, Baghdad and even Kabul were similar in appearance and mannerisms. They saw no contradiction between being pious believers and living in harmony with the surrounding world. The nightlife in Kabul and Cairo might not have been to everybody’s taste, but it provided a symbol of freedom for millions. As Tunisia’s Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi says of his country today, the mosque is open for those who want it, and the beach is also open to those who want it.5 It is not for the government to impose its reading of the sharia on people. That flexible, tolerant spirit is returning once again among leaders such as Ghannouchi in Tunisia, and soon others should follow.
This loss of confidence within Islam, of being at ease with the contemporary world, occurred some decades ago. There was no sudden rediscovery of ‘true Islam’, because the puritanism promoted by Egyptians, Saudis and Iranians was no more ‘true’ than the Islam of the recent past, or of Caliph Abdul Majid II’s daughter Durru Shehvar. The rise in assertive wearing of the veil in the Muslim public space was a reaction to the Western miniskirts and sexual freedoms of the 1960s. At first, the women of Kabul, Tehran and Cairo wore miniskirts, too. Even in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, there were Muslim girls attending school without a headscarf.
But as the Muslim Brotherhood re-emerged on campuses in Egypt in the 1950s, King Farouq Islamised the public space as a way of attacking the Egyptian nationalist socialists; and in the 1970s the Iranian cleric Ruhollah Khomeini led a revolution against the US-backed Shah in Iran. In all instances, in Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Islamists were fighting against symbols of the West – and what more pertinent emblem of Westernisation than the visible Muslim woman, who, once brought into line, would showcase the paradigm shift on beaches and in workplaces and homes across the Muslim world? If the West is about immodesty, then we in the Muslim world are modest. If the West exports high heels and miniskirts, then we return to the sharia of literalism and bring back the burqa. By the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, a new dress code had been solidified. If Shi‘a women could wear those chadors and fight in the armed forces, then so could Sunni women in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world. A new competition to out-hijab each other commenced.
With the rise of Western influence came ideas of feminism and women’s liberation. Muslim societies and male clerics responded by trying to secure ‘our mothers, sisters and daughters’ from the corrupt West. The modus operandi shifted from differentiation to outright opposition: if Western women wore miniskirts, then Muslim women must cover up completely – face, hair, bosom, arms and legs, and all in black. Yet this was not the way Muslim women appeared historically – orientalist travellers of the eighteenth century wrote extensively about the sexual freedoms and openness of the East.
By the standards of the seventh century, the Prophet Mohamed raised the status of women. Whereas previously they had been seen on a par with camels and horses, they were now recognised as fully human. But in their determination to oppose the West, today’s Islamists have flouted the spirit of the Prophet. The assumption is that the wearing of the hijab betokens a safe Muslim society. They argue that the West is home to decadence and immorality and its women are lewd and promiscuous.
However, a 2013 United Nations report found that almost all Egyptian girls and women reported being sexually harassed (99.3 per cent), 96.5 per cent said they had been subjected to unwelcome physical contact, and 95.5 per cent were verbally harassed on the streets. In Yemen, another fully veiled society, 90 per cent of women have experienced harassment, especially being pinched by men in public. In Saudi Arabia meanwhile, 86.5 per cent of men blame these experiences on ‘women’s excessive make-up’.
In the West, after the 9/11 attacks in America and the 7/7 London underground attacks, when hijab-wearing women were bearing the brunt of Western Islamophobia, prominent Muslim scholars including Zaki Badawi, Abdullah bin Bayyah and Hamza Yusuf Hanson called for women to be allowed to remove their veils if their safety was threatened. The same hijab that is supposed to make women safe in the East is now allegedly jeopardising women’s safety elsewhere.
The ugly reality is that many Muslims, and Islamists in particular, have missed the point: it is not women’s clothes and make-up but male attitudes that are the threat. And unless male attitudes change, women’s lives will continue to count for little in Mecca, where girls can be burnt to death for not wearing a headscarf, with precious little outcry in the Muslim world. Forcing women to hide their hair, ears, necks, arms and legs in case they provoke lust in a man is not the way to create a healthy, free and confident society.
The assured male attitude existed among Muslim men. Take, for example, the enlightened thoughts of a tenth-century scholar from Muslim Spain on the status of women, and free love. Imam Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi (994–1064) wrote on logic, grammar, ethics, history, theology and, reflecting the interests of his time, comparative religion. His books on jurisprudence are still required reading in seminaries but, sadly, less attention is paid to his progressive writings on women and love. Contrary to the prevailing Muslim view of his time, Ibn Hazm argued that women were no more likely to commit sins than men. Women, he said, had the right to be leaders and hold political office, though he did not go so far as to say they could become caliphs. His views on gender equality were perhaps a millennium ahead of their time, and he was attacked for them. Some of his books were burned.
He celebrated love and attraction between women and men, rather than creating barriers between them. His acclaimed book The Ring of the Dove is a free-spirited guide for lovers. Based on his own experiences, Quranic stories and sayings of the Prophet, it starts with some insightful teachings on the ‘signs of love’. Here Ibn Hazm reflects on the way love-struck men behave:
How often has the miser opened his purse strings, the scowler relaxed his frown, the coward leapt heroically into the fray, the clod suddenly become sharp-witted, the boor turned into the perfect gentleman, the stinker transformed himself into the elegant dandy, the sloucher smartened up, the decrepit recaptured his lost youth, the godly gone wild, the self-respecting kicked over the traces – and all because of love!6
Ibn Hazm lists different ‘outward signs of love’, from ‘exceeding cheerfulness’ to ‘much clandestine winking’, ‘endeavouring to touch his hand’ and ‘drinking from the same cup and seeking the very spot against which his lips were pressed’, noting that ‘sleeplessness too is a common affliction of lovers’. How true many of these traits were for this Muslim a thousand years after Ibn Hazm! And of course they are also true for countless millions of others.
Between prose passages, Ibn Hazm interjects poetry to illustrate his thoughts and feelings. In keeping with his views on the equality of the sexes, he interchanges references between women and men, underlining the point that women also love, lust and yearn – and it is not ‘devilish’ or ‘evil’ to
do so, but is fully human. Again, where do we find Ibn Hazm’s broadness of mind when Saudi authorities forcibly separate the sexes in Saudi Arabia, or post Arabic warnings on dating websites today?
Here, by contrast, is Ibn Hazm reflecting on life’s joys and challenging the puritans:
She sat there privily with me
And wine besides, to make us three,
While night profound o’ershadowing
Stretched out its long and stealthy wing.
A damsel fair – I would prefer
To die, than not live close with her;
And is it such a dreadful crime
To wish to live this little time?7
Ibn Hazm helps young lovers, with the wisdom of his own experiences and encounters, by explaining the different ways love can occur, from being asleep and dreaming of a potential lover, to falling in love with the description of someone relayed by a third party, to getting to know someone after ‘long association or extended familiarity’, and finally ‘love at first sight’ – though he thinks this last category is ‘merely a kind of lust’, and love requires more than just a glance.
Like Ibn Hazm’s other books, The Ring of the Dove is known among Muslim scholars, but its message seems to have been lost. This is unfortunate, for if the spirit of that book were to be found among today’s Muslims, the sexual vulture culture in today’s Cairo or Riyadh or Tehran might not exist. Denying the normal human sexuality of women, and suppressing both genders’ natural inclination to fall in love creates a sexual dysfunction in Muslim societies that has too often gone without scrutiny. At the core of controlling female appearance, presence, behaviour and education lies a Muslim male fixation with trying to control women’s sex lives.
16
Sex
In 2013 in Saudi Arabia, a man divorced his wife because she raised her legs as he penetrated her. How dare she display such sexual confidence? He took it as a sure sign of extramarital sexual experience and therefore grounds for divorce. In 2015, a husband threw his newly wed wife off a balcony in Cairo because he concluded she was not a virgin. She did not survive the fall. These terrible instances are symptoms of a hidden problem.
