From the nineteenth century onwards, when Western influence on the Arab world began to challenge Moslem customs, the practice of veiling women has been at the centre of a contentious debate involving Westerners, Islamic reformers, Islamic nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists. It has frequently provoked revolution, violence and bloodshed. The West in its drive to dominate and control Arab nations held up veiling as proof of the backwardness and inherent inferiority of Islamic cultures. In response, those who fought against the colonial powers often seized on the custom as fundamental to the preservation of a Moslem identity as it confronted the overwhelming political, economic and cultural might of the West. Meanwhile, women, whose welfare and status was supposedly at the heart of this battle, were ordered to veil or unveil at the dictate of whichever tendency had achieved hegemony. The West’s concern for their treatment has usually not been allowed to interfere with the more important goal of domination.
And always behind this and other arguments looms the question of Islam’s inherent misogyny. It would indeed be a miracle if a religion so closely related as Islam is to both Christianity and Judaism did not exhibit powerful misogynistic tendencies. Islam after all accepts the Biblical tradition as one of divine revelation, including its misogynistic stories about women. The Fall of Man myth is as important in Islam as it is in Judaism and Christianity as the key to explaining woman’s lower status.
While early Islam accorded women some rights that were denied them under Christianity, such as the right to inherit property, Mohammed (570–632) adopted other practices including polygamy, seclusion and veiling, that adversely affected how women were viewed and treated. In the years following the death of Mohammed, as Arab armies swept as conquerors into the Middle East and North Africa, women were removed from public life, segregation was instituted during prayers and stoning introduced as a punishment for adultery. At the same time, Islamic civilization was reaching a peak of intellectual, scientific and artistic splendour. It preserved the learning of the Ancient World and transmitted it back to the barbarians who had triumphed in the West after the fall of Rome. Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer and translator of the Arabic erotic masterpiece, The Perfumed Garden, described Baghdad, which stood at the heart of this culture, as ‘the centre of human civilization, which was then confined to Greece and Arabia, and the metropolis of an empire exceeding in extent the widest limits of Rome . . . essentially a city of pleasure, a Paris of the ninth century.’391 As in the Kamasutra of India (see Chapter 6), woman in The Perfumed Garden is celebrated for the beauty of her sexuality, and the book, like the earlier Indian and Chinese works on eroticism, is a guide to achieving sexual satisfaction for both men and women. ‘Praise be given to God,’ it begins, ‘who has placed man’s greatest pleasure in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyment to woman.’392 This unashamed and explicit recognition of woman’s sexuality puts Islam, erotically speaking, closer to the Eastern tradition than to Christianity, with its consistent repression of the body.
But it would not be the first time that such recognition as well as respect for learning and the arts coexisted alongside intellectual, spiritual and social contempt for women. From the eighth century onwards, the word for ‘woman’ became synonymous with the word for ‘slave’. However, Islam absorbed many local customs and traditions as it expanded, so that scholars argue that it is difficult to isolate misogynistic or discriminatory practices that are specific to Islamic cultures. For instance, polygamy, veiling and seclusion were long-established features of the higher echelons of Byzantine society.393
The Islamic medieval theologian Ghazali (1058–1111) expressed the same familiar misogyny as his Christian and Jewish counterparts when he stated: ‘It is a fact that all the trials, misfortunes, and woes which befall men come from women.’ He lists the eighteen punishments women must suffer as a result of Eve’s disobedience. Among them are menstruation, childbirth, and pregnancy. But he is careful to go beyond the biological to include in the list purely social customs deeply prejudicial to women, such as ‘not having control over her own person . . . her liability to be divorced and inability to divorce . . . its being lawful for a man to have four wives, but for a woman to have [only] one husband . . . the fact that she must stay secluded in the house . . . the fact that she must keep her head covered inside the house . . . that two women’s testimony [has to be] set against the testimony of one man . . . the fact that she must not go out of the house unless accompanied by a near relative.’394 By making a social custom an expression of the will of God, Ghazali gives it the power of religious sanction. Some but not all of these customs have been traced back to Mohammed. But Ghazali represents a conservative consolidation of Islamic thinking about women. One leading Arabic historian can name only one major Moslem scholar, Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), as being sympathetic to women, and calls him ‘probably unique’.395 With the decline of Arab power, and the growing penetration of the Middle East by Europe and then the United States, such practices – or ‘punishments’ as Ghazali has it – represented the lowly status and cruel treatment of Middle Eastern women. They became part of the propaganda war that was and is being waged between the West and its Islamic opponents
Contradictions, inconsistencies and at times downright duplicity have ever been a part of the West’s engagement with Moslem nations. The British, who occupied Egypt in 1882 condemned veiling as part of the backwardness from which they were trying to rescue Egyptians, yet at the same time cut funding for education for girls.396 Efforts at economic reform in Iran in 1951 fell victim to Cold War rivalries when the CIA and Britain orchestrated a coup that restored dictatorial power to the Shah. Egypt gained independence from Britain in 1953 after a political uprising in which women played a prominent role. It brought President Gamel Abdel Nasser (1918–70) to power. In 1956, he granted a limited form of suffrage to women. The same year, the British, French and Israelis invaded Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Though he became increasingly dictatorial, Nasser remained a figure of popular esteem because he was viewed as someone who stood up to Western aggression. The opposite was true of the Shah of Iran. After 1951, Islamic fundamentalists saw his modernizing programme, which included banning the veil, as a sell-out to the Western powers. This provoked a huge demonstration of women in Tehran in 1979 demanding the right to wear the veil. The same year, the Islamic revolution in Iran put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power. He imposed severe restrictions on women, removing them from public life as he pursued his aim of reversing the gains made under the Shah’s reign. The new laws included a punishment of seventy-four lashes for defying the new dress code requiring them to be veiled at all times when in public. They reduced Iranian women to ‘the status of privatized sex-objects required to be at the disposal of their husbands at all times’.397 Women accused of violating the restrictions were exposed to male violence and gangs of fundamentalists attacked them in the street if they were judged inadequately covered. The legal system was overhauled and became a codified misogyny. Women judges were dismissed, and evidence from women witnesses was not allowed unless corroborated by men. Women were barred from attending law school. The marriageable age for a girl was dropped from eighteen to thirteen. Since the Ayatollah was an enemy of the United States, his conduct towards women was held up as an example of the barbarism of Islam and proof of the need for a strong Western deterrent in the Middle East, while it was conveniently forgotten that the West’s complicity in supporting the Shah’s dictatorship against its democratic opponents was at least partly to blame for the Islamic backlash.
Further east, in Pakistan, a similar reaction to Westernization was under way. In 1980, under the dictatorship of General Zia ul-Huq, veiling was enforced. Women were declared to be ‘the root and cause of corruption’ and working women were especially condemned for being responsible for a collapse in morality and the disintegration of the family. The new regime wanted them retired and pe
nsioned off.398 The pronouncements have a familiar ring, echoing the propaganda of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s in its drive to force women back to their ‘proper’ sphere of domestic imprisonment. An Islamic adviser to the government advocated that women ‘should never leave the confines of their homes except in an emergency’. The state came close to abolishing rape as a crime when its expert on Islamic law argued that while women are visible in the public sphere, no man should be punished for rape. In other words, it is understandable if a man seeing a woman in public is overcome with lust and rapes her since she has no business being seen outside her home in the first place. If rape did occur, then a woman needed four male witnesses before she could bring a case to court. Women’s testimony and that of non-Moslems are not admissible. The misogynistic bias of the court is blatant, since it has to be supposed that any woman who brings a rape charge must have been outside the control of her male guardian when attacked, which immediately puts her behaviour in a suspicious light.
Though the harsh government of General Zia is over, its misogynistic legacy lives on. In May 2002, a twenty-six-year-old woman was sentenced to death by stoning after she had brought a charge of rape against her brother-in-law. Zafran Bibi, who gave birth to a baby girl while her husband was in jail, told the court that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by his brother Jamal Khan either on the hillside behind her home in the remote mountain country of Pakistan, near the Afghan border, or in her farm when she was alone. Applying Islamic law, the judge said:
The lady stated before this court that, yes, she had committed sexual intercourse, but with the brother of her husband. This left no option to the court but to impose the highest penalty.399
Mr Khan walked free without being charged. Human rights workers said that even if the death penalty was annulled, Ms Bibi faced a term of between ten and fifteen years’ imprisonment for having illegal sex.
Pakistan courts make little distinction between consensual sex and rape. Up to 80 per cent of all women in Pakistani prisons are there because they have been convicted under Islamic laws against adultery.400 It is reported that girls as young as twelve or thirteen face conviction and a public whipping if convicted of illegal sexual relations.401 Nearly half of all women who report rape end up convicted of adultery. The law actively discourages women from bringing a charge of rape, but if they do not, and become pregnant, they can be convicted of adultery. A few weeks after the Zafran Bibi case caught the eye of the media, that of Mukhtaran Bibi (no relation) came to light on the other side of Pakistan, in the Punjab district. She was gang-raped on the orders of the local village council because her younger brother had been accused of forming a relationship with a higher-caste woman. After a public outcry, however, the police charged six men in connection with the rape.402 The state awarded Mukhtaran Bibi just over $8,000 in compensation.403 Normally, the vast majority of cases such as this go unreported.
However brutal and repressive to women Iran and Pakistan were, events there would prove merely a prelude to what was to happen in Afghanistan, where perhaps for the first time in history a state came into being the primary purpose of which was to enact, politically, socially and legally, a misogynistic vision of terrifying cruelty.
Afghanistan has impressed itself upon the imagination of the West because the men who flew their hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, were largely products of the training camps established there over the last few decades by fundamentalist Moslems. Mohamed Atta, believed to have crashed Flight 11 into the Trade Center’s north tower just before 9 a.m. on the morning of 11 September 2001, stipulated in his will that no women would be allowed to touch his body or even attend his last rites. In fact his inhuman crime, with ghastly irony, ensured that his atoms intermingled with those of many hundreds of women in the conflagration and collapse that the crash caused. That Atta was a misogynist is no coincidence. Misogyny is an essential part of the worldview of the Moslem terrorists trained in the mountains of Afghanistan with whom America is now at war, just as it is a crucial ingredient in the recent history of that unhappy land.
The thread that runs through the recent history of Afghanistan, linking it to the attacks of 9/11, is the ferocious resistance to any attempt to have women treated as human beings. Since 1959, when a reforming government decreed that women were no longer required to veil, Islamic fundamentalists have been at the centre of that resistance. Sometimes they have collaborated with various nationalist groups, as well as a patchwork of tribal alliances – these have united periodically to fight a common enemy – before invariably turning their weapons on each other. Afghan women obtained the vote in 1964. At this point, Afghanistan was more progressive than most Moslem nations: In cities such as Kabul, some girls were allowed to attend school. Nonetheless, the vast majority of women remained illiterate. And those who did dare seek an education faced fundamentalist fanatics such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose first memorable action as a mujahideen or holy warrior was when he commanded a group that threw acid in the faces of young women who attended school unveiled. Later, his men crucified a young woman student, whose naked and bisected body was found nailed to the doors of a classroom in Kabul University.404
The United States only really began to pay attention to Afghanistan when pro-Soviet socialists staged a coup against the government in 1978. The new regime’s efforts at reform, often aimed at bettering the position of women, were fiercely resisted, and support for Islamic fundamentalism grew. This prompted the Soviet Union to intervene in late 1979. From this point, the United States firmly supported Hekmatyar, who by that time was a puppet of the fundamentalist Pakistani regime of General Zia ul-Huq. Under the Reagan administration, billions of dollars were funnelled through the Pakistani secret service to Hekmatyar and his supporters.405 More moderate mujahideen were never bankrolled to the same extent. The Soviets were forced to withdraw in 1989 after a bloody war, though Hekmatyar’s contribution to their defeat has been disputed.
US policy-makers obviously assumed that communists were more dangerous than misogynists. History would prove them wrong. The movement known as the Taliban emerged out of the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal. It was made up mainly of religious students trained in the madrassas or Koranic schools of Pakistan. Its roots lay in Deobandism, an ultra-conservative tendency in Islam that dated back to the nineteenth century and came from Northern India. It taught a strict, literalist reading of the Koran.406
Misogyny was to the Taliban what anti-Semitism was to the Nazis: the very core of their ideology. As they spread their rule from Kandahar in the south, to Kabul in the north, women were systematically driven from the public sphere. In a long series of decrees, the misogynistic equivalent of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws against German Jews, women were forbidden to work, go to school, attend male doctors, wear make-up or any form of decoration, appear in public unless accompanied by a male relative and completely covered from head to toe in a burka – the dark veil of opaque cloth, attached to a close-fitting cap – which completely encloses a woman’s body. Only a peephole at eye level allows any light into this walking tomb. Television was banned, as was music, dancing and any form of entertainment. The radio droned out Koranic prayers and what seemed like a never-ending stream of restrictions and edicts such as:
Public transport will provide buses reserved for men and buses reserved for women . . . Women and girls are forbidden to wear brightly coloured clothes beneath the chadri [dark veils] . . . A woman is not allowed to go to a tailor for men. A girl is not allowed to converse with a young man. Infraction of this law will lead to the immediate marriage of the offenders. Women are not allowed to speak in public because their voices arouse men. Women engaged to be married may not go to a beauty parlour, even in preparation for their weddings . . . Merchants are forbidden to sell female undergarments.407
Men too were targeted. They were forced to grow beards and wear a white cap or turban. Nobody was allowed to display photogra
phs, or have their photograph taken, even at festive occasions such as weddings. It was against the law to whistle. The Taliban even found Koranic justification for banning whistling kettles. This was literalism gone mad.
But however absurd or insane their decrees, the Taliban enforced them with frightening cruelty. Their moral police, under the aegis of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, patrolled the streets. They attacked two women on a Kabul street and beat them senseless with whips. Their crime: wearing white shoes under their burkas, a gesture seen as an insult to the flag of the Taliban, which is white. Another Kabul woman was seized in the street and denounced. Her crime: wearing nail polish. Her fingers were cut off on the spot. Women were flogged for going out alone. Two women convicted of adultery were dragged to the Sports Stadium in Kabul, which had become a public execution ground. Before a large crowd, they were shot in the back of the head. As one young woman who lived through this nightmare expressed it: ‘Even though they seem to follow one another without rhyme or reason, these decrees have a certain logic: the extermination of the Afghan woman.’ The Taliban, she wrote, ‘tried to steal my face from me – to steal the faces of all women.’408 Women fought back. One woman opened a secret beauty salon in Kabul. Her patrons came and went with the surreptitiousness of conspirators bent on some dreadful revolutionary act: in fact, that is what putting on make-up had become. Others opened schools for girls in their apartments. Girls were advised to carry some religious tract with them at all times, and if the apartment was raided, religious works were always on hand in the hope that the morals police could be persuaded that the children were undergoing only religious instruction.409
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 26
