On Phyllis Chesler and Jack ‘n’ Condi

This Tuesday I found [an interview](http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1746131,00.html) in the Guardian with the American “feminist” Phyllis Chesler, whose recent output – much of it on [Front Page Magazine](http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1947) – seems to consist of attacks on Muslims and articles intended to stir up panic about anti-Semitism (like [this one](http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13547)). Chesler’s thesis is that feminism is affected by “a moral failure, a moral bankruptcy, a refusal to take on, in particular, Muslim gender apartheid”. She also accuses feminists of being “much more concerned about the occupation of a country that doesn’t exist – namely Palestine – than they are concerned with the occupation of women’s bodies worldwide”. (Tags: phyllis chesler, jack straw, blackburn, condoleezza rice.)

Chesler’s attitudes are shaped by her experience as the wife of a superficially westernised Afghan in the early 1960s. In the *Guardian*, she claims that she found herself “clapped up in very posh purdah”, where she “wasn’t supposed to go out without the chauffeur and without servants in tow and other women of the family”. In FPM, [she recounts](http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11669) the contempt she showed for local sensibilities by appearing on the verandah of her house (open to public view) in a bathing suit. (Bear in mind, Afghanistan is landlocked …)

Chesler may have been a groundbreaking feminist in the early 1970s, but today she invariably parrots the FPM line, complete with its blindnesses and inconsistencies:

>But are the Islamic nations as culturally monolithic as Chesler suggests? Wasn’t Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take a particularly tendentious example, secular? And didn’t it offer professional careers for women? “I don’t think that makes any big difference. Saddam’s regime gassed Kurds and perpetrated genocide. His men kidnapped women and prostitutes off the streets and subjected them to private rape sessions. So merely because his Iraq was religiously secular, and women had certain rights, doesn’t mean that we as intelligent western publics should be condoning genocidal states.”

I would actually dispute that Saddam Hussain committed genocide; it has taken this long, when the country has been occupied, for accusations of genocide to become commonplace. We all know what he did to suppress Kurdish and Shi’ite uprisings, and that he used nerve agent on civilians, but brutally suppressing an uprising is not the same as the organised massacre of a population with the intent to wipe it out or at least reduce it drastically. The fact that western military action has made matters in Iraq worse for a lot of people, including a lot of women by encouraging the rise of Saudi/Taliban-style moral vigilantism, does not seem to occur to her.

The phrase “gender apartheid” is fairly typical of the “terminology hijackings” we regularly see from FPM types; the reference is obviously to South Africa, in which blacks and whites were separated by whites who objected, among other things, to race mixing. It also pushed blacks off their own lands and onto infertile patches so they would be forced to do cheap labour for whites to survive. It was certainly not “posh purdah”, and is not the same as maintaining some degree of separation between the sexes to avoid temptation or trouble (keep in mind, in many Muslim societies cousins routinely marry). In some places the separation is more rigid than in others, but in any upper-class home, in any culture, you are likely to be required to respect some unfamiliar and (to you) onerous customs if you come from an average family which, for example, has never employed servants of any sort. (The hypocrisy is also clear: these people are also very fond of accusing other people of drawing inappropriate “moral equivalences” – witness their rage whenever someone compares America, or Israel, to their enemies.)

And the situation of women in the western world right now – that is, middle-class women, for the most part – is not the result of being vilified or attacked by foreigners, but of a progressive movement lasting a hundred years which started as a reaction to the appalling situation women were in in the Victorian age in which they could not even protect their own property. Supposed attempts to advance women’s rights in the Muslim world have generally been the work of local rulers, not western colonisers, and has often purposely excluded religious women. To take an extreme example, female genital mutilation persisted in Somalia (as in Egypt) throughout the British and Italian occupations and has started to decline only in the last couple of decades, on the population’s own initiative. We all know the attitudes some Muslims have towards western women, but given that western women do not change their behaviour on account of these attitudes (I do not mean avoiding certain cafés, but changing the way they dress in general), it can hardly be expected that Muslims change theirs in response to the dictates of arrogant foreigners either.

I missed my chance to blog on the Jack & Condi tour when it was news because I was busy and then away, but I find it quite understandable that Condoleezza Rice was not welcome in any mosque in Blackburn. It is not only the Iraq war the Muslims object to, but to such matters as speeches about crusades and an enemy named Satan, their kidnapping of Muslims to Guantánamo Bay, their abuses of inmates there, in Abu Ghuraib and in Afghanistan, and to the various abuses which have affected Muslims in the USA itself. Muslims do read the news and some of us get the CAIR email circulars, so we’re aware of the way Muslims were treated by vindictive police after 9/11 (such as Dr Taha Alwani). The likelihood is that whoever issued the threats had no intention of carrying them out (would the police not have been able to stop an invasion of the mosque in any case?), but did so because they did not want Jack Straw and Condi Rice in the mosque, regardless of how buddy-buddy the local Muslim leaders are with Jack Straw or what favours Straw has done the local Gujaratis.