The media, women’s oppression and reality
This is going to be a long and rambling post, but it was inspired by a number of blog pieces I read, an article I read in the London Guardian newspaper, and a programme I saw on Channel 4 last week. It got me thinking about how we think of how our religion treats women and how we as Muslims treat women, and of how others think we, and they, treat women. It also got me thinking of how Islam has positions which are thoroughly unplatable to many westerners, including converts to Islam, which are precisely the issues anti-Muslim writers use to inspire hostility to Islam.
The newspaper article, Hellfire and sexual coercion: the dark side of American polygamist sects, in the Guardian last Thursday, was about the recent polygamy scandals in the fundamentalist Mormon sects in Utah and some other US states. The scandals have included incest, violent marriages and the dumping of large numbers of young men in order that the young women be available for the sects’ elders. There have been prosecutions of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons, a fact which raises serious questions for the substantial numbers of Muslims engaged in polygamy in the US.
The blog piece was by Robert Spencer, in reply to a lawsuit against the anti-Muslim Italian author Oriana Fallaci. He makes various accusations about Muslim conduct in the past which gives the impression that Islam condones rape, and casts aspersions on the character of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and the Sahaba. I will deal, insha Allah, with this in a separate article. Finally, the TV programme was Dispatches: Living with Aids, broadcast last Monday on Channel 4, in which Sorious Samura visited Zambia, among the countries worst hit by the sub-Saharan Aids crisis.
These articles and programmes are connected because they bring to mind the complex picture of the situation of women in both the Muslim world and elsewhere – particularly the third world and the parts of western society which are outside the “chattering classes”, both left and right. Hellfire and Sexual Coercion, and other articles on the polygamy issue in the USA, gives voice to claims that polygamy is somehow inherently oppressive to women. This is, of course, an assumption commonly levelled at Muslim polygamy as well – as well as at other aspects of Muslim life which differ from western custom, including the hijab. The Mormon polygamy crisis, incidentally, should make Muslims in the USA think very carefully before embarking on an unofficial polygamous marriage; the aforementioned article notes that the history of not “prosecuting people for their religious beliefs or their private conduct in their own bedrooms” appears to be coming to an end. Of course, one may observe that in the year or so after 9/11, when anti-Muslim hostility was at its height, there were no prosecutions of Muslims for polygamy, despite the fact that no real secret is made of it, and that it goes on in populated areas and not in the backlands of Utah. But that is no guarantee for the future.
Muslim polygamy differs greatly from what is observed in Utah, which may well be why prosecutors have left it alone. Muslims do not marry sisters, nor their prohibited relatives, nor more than four women. We do not see it as some sort of religious obligation. Muslims in the west are not in the habit of marrying the underage, even if our religion does not regard them as such. Still, many westerners are implacably hostile to polygamy, seeing it as some sort of affront to women’s dignity. Islam has always recognised that women are usually averse to their husbands taking other wives, and allows certain stipulations for this in marriage contracts. But there is no denying that it can sometimes be of great benefit – in cases where there are a shortage of men due to war, for example. The extreme example I commonly give is of a woman who is paralysed and unable to function, but whose position is honourable. I have personally read of such an incident, in which a woman suffered near-total paralysis due to a pill-induced stroke. Her husband was still married to her at the time I read of it, but had a long-term girlfriend on the side. Of course, most Christians would tell this man he married his wife for better or worse and so on; they do, of course, tell battered wives the same. If polygamy is allowed nowhere else, it should surely be advocated here.
As a convert from a fairly liberal background who mixes with mostly fairly liberal Muslims online and in real life, I almost forgot that the old objections to hijab and polygamy still exist, and that there are still people out there who think hijab is, as certain German politicians put it, a symbol of submission to man rather than to God, rather than the informed free choice of well-educated religious women. Q-News reported a few months ago that a German politician called Alice Schwarzer made some patronising anti-hijab comments, inspiring a group of women protestors to chant, “Alice Schwaetzer [waffler], we can speak up for ourselves!”.
It is also commonly imagined that women’s covering is somehow related to other oppressions women suffer in many Muslim countries. There is, in fact, no real correlation either with hijab or, for that matter, with Islam. Most women, Muslim or otherwise, in the Indian subcontinent do not wear the hijab as we know it; traditionally the more religious women wore a chador-type garment which usually also covered the face, and others wore local dress with a thin cloth draped over the head. But the worst excesses of misogyny are commonly reported there and in China, such as the mass abortion, murder at birth and abandonment of baby girls by families who want boys – in the case of China, they may be only allowed one child, and they want a boy. This latter situation leads to the kidnapping of women from neighbouring countries (notably Vietnam) by men who want to marry, and cannot find a Chinese bride because there are not enough to go around.
The Sorious Samura programme (there is an article on it in the Observer, here) gave another example of non-Muslim third-world misogyny, namely the murderous contempt with which women’s lives are treated in the African countries he visited. A man he interviewed had HIV, and yet continued to sleep with women and refused to wear a condom because he it diminished his pleasure; he liked doing it “flesh to flesh”. The same was true of other men he interviewed, including at a party at which condoms were being promoted.
The HIV infection rate is in double figures in every country in that region; it tends to be lower in countries further north where there is a high Muslim population. I’ve spoken to Muslims from Kenya and Malawi who told me that HIV/Aids is indeed an issue in the Muslim communities there. As a recent article in Foreign Policy which was linked off Mere Islam, we Muslims may assume that our religious beliefs and values are an innoculation, but we cannot allow this to make us complacent. The practices which have been observed which are blamed for making HIV spread like wildfire in southern Africa – parents having sex in front of their children who then try to copy them, secret societies in which members have sex with each other’s wives, “ritual cleansing” of widows by having sex with her husband’s relatives – are unthinkable in a Muslim society, we can’t think we are not in danger from the things which spread Aids in other places: drug abuse and sexual misconduct by people who then spread the virus to their wives and children.
There are four things which make women’s lives difficult in Muslim countries and their diasporas. One is political movements which use women as a pawn – and they include secularists as well as religious fundamentalists. The former refuse rights to religious women so that being religious is less attractive, actually reinforcing the stereotype that women in normal Muslim dress are backward and oppressed; the latter enforce extreme examples of Islamic dress and other restrictions on women, in one well-known case denying all girls education. It’s worth noting that they did this on the grounds of security, yet this same group were also claimed to have improved the security situation when they were in power by, among other things, removing the vast supply of firearms to which people had access.
The second is cultural practices which are against Islam (honour-related murders, FGM and so on), and misinterpretations of Islamic law such as those reported in Pakistan, in which women are said to have to prove that they were raped with four male witnesses. Cases like this routinely appear on Spencer’s blog (and other sites like it) as an example of what may be expected if Islam gains political power anywhere. Finally there is poverty, and the lack of an open society in some Muslim countries.
It’s probably fair to say that, for the middle class in particular, this part of the world has become a very good place to be a woman, a result of having an affluent open society and a growing acceptance of women’s rights and capabilities. In the time since the basic political and economic rights were secured in the early 20th century, the women’s campaign has moved onto such issues as demanding childcare for mothers who want to work or study, as well as ratcheting up the laws on rape so that more men may be convicted. It’s worth noting that the British Home Office has a close relationship with an outfit called the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, which has published reports by such people as the egregious Julie Bindel, which was founded in order “to both develop feminist theory and practice, and take this perspective into professional training, especially that of social work”.
Feminist positions have in many places become mainstream – in many students’ unions, for example, there are paid women’s affairs officers, and this part of the unions’ activities is included among what are known as liberation campaigns. When people talk of gender disparities, they talk only of those which favour men; when the gender situation in a given country is discussed, they usually do not mention the fact that men are forced to spend a year or more in the armed forces, with no equivalent for women, even in countries where men are offered a civilian alternative and where women are allowed to serve in the forces. In one book I came across, a travellers’ guide to a Swahili-speaking country, the convention of calling a mother “mama” followed by her eldest child’s or son’s name was presented as somehow oppressive to women, as if it stripped her of her individuality and reduced her to “just a mother”; in fact, the same convention applies to men as well (baba instead of mama). There is even an organisation in the UK calling itself Justice for Women, run by the aforementioned Bindel, which has campaigned – in many cases successfully – for leniency for women who murder, sometimes with premeditation, their abusive husbands.
Our society looks at other parts of the world and sees women with little freedom; one intemperate polemicist recently commented on a right-wing website that the “time devoted to the micromanagement of women in most, not all, Muslim societies is unique in the world, not shared by any other society”. In theory, our society provides women freedom unmatched anywhere else; in practice, young people especially, boys and girls, find themselves under enormous pressure to conform to fashion, to say nothing of all the other pressures of the modern school environment. Some people do manage to break out of this and be individuals, particularly when they go to college, but lower down the educational ladder the story is starkly different. A recent BBC Panorama documentary showed the pressures children found themselves under to acquire clothes of “name” brands, or risk losing friends – children did not want to be seen in so-called “Nicky No-Names”.
This “freedom” to follow the crowd, to wear expensive and often indecent clothing and listen to rubbishy music, is as much use as the “freedom” to vote in a rigged election. But our society’s concern for justice and the respect of people’s rights and dignity has certainly awakened parts of the Muslim community to the rights women are granted under Islam but denied by some Muslim societies. It’s true that there are some restrictions on what women can do in Islam which do not apply to men. But they are not the reason why women’s lives in Muslim countries are often difficult; the same problems often affect their non-Muslim neighbours. And while some women find themselves despised for being women, others find themselves despised for the religion they defend by people claiming to be upholding their rights, but in fact more interested in what, and whom, they are pushing down: in some cases Islam and Muslims, in others religion and religious people in general. Of all the difficulties women face around the world, you will still find people obsessed with what women wear on their heads! Certain western societies have on more than one occasion found a society better than their own and kicked them over; today, given the deep malaise in their own societies, it should not be a surprise that some people harbour resentment at immigrants who find ways of preventing their own communities from going down the same roads.
