Yesterday the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia announced that the kingdom’s girls are, in the eyes of men and Allah, ready to marry at the age of 10 or 12. Rebuking those who called for the servitude marriage age to be raised, he noted that Islamic law doesn’t oppress women and cited the old ones as proof: “Our mothers and grandmothers got married when they were barely 12. Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age.” That surely settles it.
While polite attention is fixed on Saudi women and the prohibitions against driving or competing in the Olympics, several shocking articles have appeared this week which put the spotlight on women in Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan. In Why Do They Hate Us, Mona Eltahawy pulls no punches:
Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.”
What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,” all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing — or divorce either.
After this opening salvo, which presumably starts with Egypt because Eltahawy was born there and was recently raped by Egyptian police, she angerly tours other Arab countries, all united to one degree of another in the abuse of women and use of Islam to justify it.
From the fire of the Middle East we go to the frying pan of Pakistan, where Zara Jamal reports things aren’t any better. In To Be a Woman in Pakistan: Six Stories of Abuse, Shame, and Survival, we glimpse a small world of suffering. Jamal prefaces the six stories with this odd observation:
Westerners usually associate the plight of Pakistani women with religious oppression, but the reality is far more complicated. A certain mentality is deeply ingrained in strictly patriarchal societies like Pakistan. Poor and uneducated women must struggle daily for basic rights, recognition, and respect. They must live in a culture that defines them by the male figures in their lives, even though these women are often the breadwinners for their families.
Is Jamal suggesting that the abuse of these women is a byproduct of free-floating or traditional patriarchy? If so, my questions to her would be how did this patriarchy develop and how is it maintained? It surely isn’t by vague obeisance to tradition or patriarchy. The “mentality” and “culture” that Jamal mentions are anchored in and justified by a particular reading of Islam, even if she wants to minimize or not mention it. While questioning and complicating standard narratives is good, complexity needn’t eclipse truth.
In a piece which probes closer to the core of these issues, we have Karim Sadjadpour’s The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets). In the past, I’ve sometimes thought that these kinds of societies should be analyzed using a Freudian approach. As Sadjadpour shows, this can bear some fruit:
Ayatollah Khamenei contends that the health of the family unit is integral to the Islamic Republic’s well-being and is undermined by female beauty. Although to some this worldview is fundamentally misogynistic, Khamenei sees men, not women, as untrustworthy and incapable of resisting temptation:
In Islam, women have been prohibited from showing off their beauty in order to attract men or cause fitna [upheaval or sedition]. Showing off one’s physical attraction to men is a kind of fitna … [for] if this love for beauty and members of the opposite sex is found somewhere other than the framework of the family, the stability of the family will be undermined.
Interestingly, the word Khamenei employs against the potential unveiling of women — fitna — is the same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Ahmadinejad’s contested reelection. In other words, women’s hair is itself seen as seditious and counter-revolutionary. Even so-called liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long fixated on this issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s first post-revolutionary president, who has spent the past three decades exiled in France, reportedly once asserted that women’s hair has been scientifically proven to emit sexually enticing rays.
Against this backdrop of repression, temptation, frustration, and domination, other countries are attempting to gauge whether the Iranian government is fundamentally rational or irrational. Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, the ayatollahs continue wrangling with their other great fear — that Western sex will invade Iran and the revolution will eventually become limp:
Khamenei’s vast collection of writings and speeches makes clear that the weapons of mass destruction he fears most are cultural — more Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga than bunker busters and aircraft carriers. In other words, Tehran is threatened not only by what America does, but by what America is: a depraved, postmodern colonial power bent on achieving global cultural hegemony. America’s “strategic policy,” Khamenei has said, “is seeking female promiscuity.”
All this leaves me wondering: What it is about some men in some countries that makes them so fearful of women? When personal weakness and insecurity marry themselves to religious and political power, the results aren’t pretty.
Photo by Aaron Goodman for Foreign Policy