Once I began working on this book, I looked everywhere for examples of women trying to reclaim Islam’s positive messages, trying to carry forward into the twentieth century the reformist zeal with which Muhammad had remade the lives of many women (other than his own wives and the Muslim army’s war captives) in the first Muslim community at Medina. It turned out to be a frustrating search. In most places the direction of the debate seemed to be exactly the reverse. Palestinian, Egyptian, Algerian and Afghani women were seeing a curtain come down on decades of women’s liberation as Islamic leaders in their countries turned to the most exclusionary and inequitable interpretations. For those women who struggled against the tide, the results were a discouraging trio of marginalization, harassment and exile.
In Morocco, Fatima Mernissi’s Koranic scholarship has made a formidable case for Islam as a religion of equality and human dignity, whose message has simply been buried over time by self-serving misogynists in positions of power. Yet her work is read in Western universities much more than it is in Moroccan mosques. No matter how precise her research into the hadith, the male-dominated Islamic establishment doesn’t seem willing to open its ears to the scholarship of a Muslim woman who doesn’t veil or otherwise flaunt her piety.
Perhaps that is why I found the brightest hope for positive change camouflaged among the black chadors of devout Iranian women. Even the most narrow-minded fundamentalists can’t criticize the Islamic credentials of women such as Khomeini’s daughter Zahra Mostafavi or Rafsanjani’s daughter Faezeh Hashemi. Their conspicuous adherence to religious rules gives them a high ground from which to make their case for women’s rights. So far, they have used that position sparingly, to get women a greater political voice, more equal job opportunities and the right to participate in sport. To be sure, these women will never tear down the walls of tradition. They will never make the arguments that can be made within Islamic reasoning against veiling or polygamy. But within those traditional walls they can make a much safer haven for women at risk of abuse and exploitation in the name of Islam.
To Western women, that mightn’t look like much. It is easy to see these grim figures in their heavy shrouds as symbols of what’s wrong rather than what’s right with women and Islam. But to Muslim women elsewhere in the strictest parts of the Islamic world, the Iranian woman riding to work on her motorbike, even with her billowing chador gripped firmly in her teeth, looks like a figure to envy.
“They are our Superwomen,” said Iman Fadlallah, the shy twenty-four-year-old wife of the Hezbollah sheik in southern Lebanon who had sat on his terrace and warned me about this book. Iman’s father, the most prominent Hezbollah cleric in Beirut, had abruptly ended her schooling when she was fourteen years old, choosing a husband for her whom she didn’t meet until the wedding. Now she stayed mainly in her house raising her children. In Iran, where she had lived with her husband while he continued his clerical studies, she had glimpsed a much wider world, even for the most devout of women. She spoke wistfully of Iranian women’s opportunities to study and work. “We have to struggle to be as strong as they are,” she said.
Everyone has her own way of remembering her travels. Some keep journals. Others take photographs. I go into the bedroom and open my closet. There are memories hanging there, semaphores from six years and twenty countries. There is the homespun scarf in red and black, still faintly scented with wood smoke from the cooking fire of the Kurdish woman who untied it from her own hair to wrap around mine. There is the long Palestinian dress Raed’s mother Rahme made for me so that I would feel comfortable sitting on the floor among them. I still have the Italian pin-striped “king suit,” a discreet little mend hiding the rip from the day I toured with Hussein in the Jordanian desert. I threw out my wedding shoes—the ones with the tide line of camel blood. And I keep meaning to give away the pair of black acrylic socks I had to buy in a hurry when the Islamic dress inspector at a Tehran bank objected to the inch of too sheer stocking peeking between the top of my shoes and the hem of my chador.
Limp on a hanger is the chador itself, the big black square of silk and synthetic that I used to despise. But that well-worn black rag, stained on the hem and torn on the shoulder, has become an old friend. Like a 1980s dress-for-success suit, it has been the camouflage that helped me do my job in a world where I wasn’t quite welcome.
When I look at that chador I no longer get the little shudder of fear or the gust of outrage that I used to feel when I saw the most extreme forms of Islamic dress. These days my feelings are much more complex. Chadors are linked in my mind to women I’ve felt close to, in spite of the abyss of belief that divided us.
When I lived among the women of Islam, I became part of a world that is still, in the last decade of the twentieth century, an intensely private one. In public, most women move like shadows, constrained physically by their hijab or mentally by codes of conduct that inhibit them. It is only behind the high walls and the closed doors that women are ever really free.
For me, entering that world touched emotions that had been a long time dormant. From the time I’d taken my first job, as a cub reporter on the sports desk of The Sydney Morning Herald, my career had pushed me into a man’s world. When I became a foreign correspondent, most of my colleagues were men. It wasn’t until I went to Cairo and started seeking out Muslim women that I realized I hadn’t made a close female friend since I left school.
I’d forgotten how much I liked to be with women. And yet there was always a sourness lurking at the edge of even the sweetest encounters. Squatting on the floor of a Kurdish friend’s kitchen, helping the women with their bread making, I realized what an agreeable thing it was to be completely surrounded by women, to have a task that was ours alone. As the women’s deft fingers flung balls of dough under my rolling pin and the fire roared beneath a baking sheet of blackened metal, I felt contentment in shared work well done.
But an hour into the labor, as my shoulders ached and scalding sweat dribbled down my back, I began to resent the boy toddler who kept ambling up to the steaming pile of fresh bread and breaking off tasty morsels in his fat little fists. His sister, not much older, was already part of our bread-making assembly line. Why should he learn so young that her role was to toil for his pleasure?
The nunlike clothes, pushed to the back of my closet, remind me of all those mixed feelings. Every time my hand brushes the smooth fabric of the chador, I think of Nahid Aghtaie, the Iranian medical student who gave up an easy life in London to go home and work at low-paying jobs to advance the goals of her revolution. I remember her, in Gum, drifting toward me over the marble-floored mosque to tell me that she’d prayed for me “to have nice children.” And then I think of her beautiful face—the small visible triangle between brow and lip—radiant on the morning of the murder of Rushdie’s Japanese translator in July 1991. “This,” she said triumphantly, “shows the power of Islam.” I told her that, to me, it no more showed the power of Islam than an Israeli soldier’s shooting of a Palestinian child showed the power of Judaism. Why not, I asked her, cite the “power of Islam” in the humanitarian work that Iran was doing for the flood of Iraqi refugees that was then pouring over its borders? “Because nobody notices when we do such things,” she said. “But every news report in the world will note this execution.”
Eventually I became worn out by such conversations. Friendships with women like Nahid were an emotional whipsaw: how was it possible to admire her for the courage of her convictions, when her convictions led to such hateful reasoning?
Just after that trip to Iran, tired from months of covering the war with Iraq and its aftermath, I went home to Australia for a brief vacation. My plane landed in Sydney just ahead of a flight from Jakarta. As I waited for my luggage, the doors to the arrival hall swished open on a crowd of Indonesian-Australians, waiting to greet their relatives. Almost all of the women were veiled. A swift, mean-spirited thought shot through my jet-lagged brain: “Oh, please. Not here too.”
I wasn
’t raised to be a bigot. My parents considered religious intolerance a sin. My mother had seen too much of it in her childhood, among rural Irish Catholic immigrants. Her mother’s marriage to a non-Catholic had been an act of courage. Hers was a typically Australian story: within two generations she had kicked the dirt of the old country’s prejudices from her shoes and adopted Australia’s own “religion”—a passionately tolerant secularism. It happened to almost everybody. One of the most revealing statistics I ever learned about my country concerned the twelve members of the Board of Management of Sydney’s main synagogue. In 1890 those twelve men were among the city’s most observant Jews. Less than a hundred years later, none of the twelve had a single identifiably Jewish descendant. Mixed marriages and the siren song of secularism had claimed them all.
I wondered if that would happen to the new wave of Muslim immigrants. Would their children, too, learn to doubt the Koran’s doubt-free prescription for how to live? Would they see that Australia, where atheists routinely got elected prime minister, was a much fairer, gentler society than the religious regimes of places like Saudi Arabia and the Sudan? Or would they, as their numbers increased, seek to impose their values on my culture? During the Rushdie outcry, Australian Muslims had demonstrated, as was their right. But pictures of their toddlers holding placards saying “Rushdie Must Die” had sent a shudder through the society.
An Iranian-born friend who lives in London, a gentle, middle-aged woman who practices family medicine, says the only war she would willingly fight would be one to stop Islamic fundamentalism telling her how to live her life. She is a Zoroastrian, a member of the ancient Persian faith in which dark and light, good and evil are forever locked in a struggle for supremacy.
Should we also struggle to stop Islamic extremists telling others how to live their lives? As Westerners, we profess to believe that human rights are an immutable international currency, independent of cultural mores and political circumstances. At a Geneva conference on the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1993, Iran was among a handful of countries that argued otherwise. Cloaking their argument in fashionable dress such as cultural relativism, delegates from Iran and Cuba, China and Indonesia argued that the West had imposed its human rights ideology on nations whose very different religious and political histories gave them the right to choose their own. To me, their argument boiled down to this ghastly and untenable proposition: a human right is what the local despot says it is.
The concept of the universality of human rights prevailed at the conference, and the charter was not amended. And yet the charter has done little so far for the genitally mutilated, the forcibly secluded, the disenfranchised women of the world.
Is it even our fight? As a mental test, I always try to reverse the gender. If some ninety million little boys were having their penises amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet.
Sometimes substituting race for gender also is an interesting exercise. Say a country, a close Western ally and trading partner, had a population half white, half black. The whites had complete control of the blacks. They could beat them if they disobeyed. They deprived them of the right to leave the house without permission; to walk unmolested without wearing the official segregating dress; to hold any decent job in the government, or to work at all without the permission of the white in control of them. Would there have been uproar in our countries by now? Would we have imposed trade sanctions and subjected this country to international opprobrium? You bet. Yet countries such as Saudi Arabia, which deprive half their population of these most basic rights, have been subjected to none of these things.
It is, I suppose, possible to argue that outside pressure is counterproductive when it comes to traditions that are seen to be religious, even if in fact they aren’t. Early attempts to ban genital mutilation by colonial-government fiat were dismal failures. But, even if we decline to act on what goes on inside others’ borders, there is no excuse for not acting inside our own.
In an era of cultural sensitivity, we need to say that certain cultural baggage is contraband in our countries and will not be admitted. We already draw a line at polygamy; we don’t recognize divorce by saying, “I divorce you.” We have banned these things even though the Koran approves them. It should be easier to take a stand against practices that don’t even carry the sanction of the Koran. “Honor” killings need to be identified in court and punished as the premeditated murders they are. Young women need to be protected against marriages arranged during hasty “vacations” abroad for teenagers too young to give informed consent. And, most urgent of all, clitoridectomy needs to be made illegal.
In 1994 the United States still had no laws whatever banning migrants from countries such as Somalia and the Sudan from mutilating the genitals of their daughters, and the operation was taking place in migrant communities throughout the country. The first ever bill on the issue had just been introduced to Congress by Colorado Democrat Patricia Schroeder. While it addressed education of migrants and laws against carrying out mutilations within the United States, it didn’t propose any means of protecting girls taken out of the country for the procedure.
There is something else we can do: advance the right to asylum on the grounds of “well-founded fear of persecution” to women from any country where fathers, husbands and brothers claim a religious right to inhibit women’s freedom. In January 1993 the Canadian government, after almost two years of consideration, granted asylum to a Saudi student who had requested it on the grounds of gender persecution. It was, they said, “an exception.” Why should it be? “Nada,” as she asks to be called, experienced the same violent harassment that any woman is subject to from her country’s authorities for the “crime” of walking outside her home with uncovered hair. If Nada had remained in Saudi Arabia, and continued to disobey, she might have found herself imprisoned and even tortured, without formal charges ever having been laid.
There is, unfortunately, no chance that granting of automatic asylum to women suffering such gender persecution would lead to a flood of refugees. Only a minority have the means to leave their country, or even their house, when men control the keys to doors and the car, and must sign their approval for the shortest of journeys. But such a step would send a signal to regimes whose restrictions have nothing to do with the religion they claim to uphold. And that signal would be that we, too, have certain things we hold sacred: among them are liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness and the right to doubt.
It is a long time since I stood under Rafsanjani’s gaze at a press conference in Iran and told him I was wearing a chador “in a spirit of mutual respect.” At that moment, standing in my black shroud under the hot TV lights, I had a mental image of myself, as I liked to be in summer, bare-skinned on the beach near my parents’ home. The “mutual respect” I had in mind demanded that he, and those like him, acknowledge my right to sunbake on those Australian sands and, if I chose, to take The Satanic Verses along as my beach reading.
Last year, when I was home in Sydney, I lay on that beach beside a Muslim family who seemed not the least bit troubled by the exposed flesh surrounding them. While the man splashed in the shallows with his toddlers, his wife sat on the sand, her long, loose dress arranged around her. It made me sad that the woman’s tiny daughter, splashing so happily with her father and baby brother, would be, one day soon, required to forgo that pleasure. But that would be her fight, not mine. At least, in Australia, she would have a choice. She would choose between her family’s values and what she saw elsewhere.
Every now and then the little girl’s mother fiddled with her headscarf as it billowed in the sea breeze. That woman had made her choice: it was different from mine. But sitting there, sharing the warm sand and the soft air, we accepted each other. When she raised her face to the sun, she was smiling.
GLOSSARY
Abaya: A black cloak with arm slits that falls from the top of the head to the ankles. Generally worn in Persian Gulf countries.
Allah: The core of the Islamic faith is its monotheism. Al Lah is simply the arabic for the God.
Andarun: In traditional Persian homes, the inner, or private, quarter where women live, barred from contact with the outside world.
Anfal: Literally, the spoils of war. The name of a chapter of the Koran and the code name given by Saddam Hussein to his terror campaign against the Kurds.
Aqd: A wedding contract.
Ayatollah: Literally, reflection of God. In Shiite Islam, the most learned of religious teachers and law interpreters receive this title.
Burka: The face mask, made of leather or stiff fabric, worn by women of the Gulf countries. Covers the entire face except for the eyes.
Caliph: Literally, one who comes after. Muhammad’s successors as leaders of the early Muslim nation.
Chador: A square of fabric that falls from the top of the head to the ankles and is held or pinned closed under the chin. Worn in Iran and among Lebanese Shiite women.
Dhow: A boat commonplace in the Persian Gulf.
Esma: A clause in a wedding contract giving a woman the right to divorce.
Farsi: The official language of Iran.
Fatwa: Aformal legal opinion or decision by a religious leader on a matter of religious law.
Feast of the Sacrifice: The last day of the Hajj. All pilgrims, and other Muslims who can afford to, slaughter a sheep and distribute its meat to the poor.
Fitna: Chaos, civil war. In some Arab countries, fitna is also a slang term for a beautiful woman.
Hadith: A saying of the Prophet Muhammad or a saying about him or his teachings by contemporaneous sources.
Hajj: The pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to make at least once in their lives, if they can afford it. Also, the month of the Islamic calendar in which the pilgrimage takes place.
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