Sunday Reading Trio: Women and Islam

UPDATE: The post contains an exchange I had with Sophia of Les Politiques.

This essay discusses the following works:

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. Translated from the Dutch by Jane Brown. Free Press, 2006.

Yasmina Kahdra, The Swallows of Kabul. Translated from the French by John Cullen. Doubleday, 2004.

I

Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong, which Juan Cole called in a 2003 review a "very bad book", takes as its premise the notion that the Islamic world, once a world power which maintained empires stretching from Spain to India, failed to respond adequately to the challenges of the West, which emerged triumphant in the 19th and 20th centuries.


The heart of Cole's criticism of the book is that it isn't clear what Lewis means by "what went wrong":

Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? is a very bad book from a usually very good author. How a profoundly learned and highly respected historian, whose career spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge of muddled thinking, inaccurate assertions and one-sided punditry is a profound mystery. While I cannot hope to resolve the puzzle, I can explain why I come to this conclusion.

Lewis never defines his terms, and he paints with a brush so broad that he may as well have brought a broom to the easel. He begins by speaking of the "Islamic world," and of "what went wrong" with it. He contrasts this culture region to "the West," and implies that things went right with the latter. But what does he mean by the "Islamic world?" He seldom speaks of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who form a very substantial proportion of the whole. Malaysia and Indonesia are never instanced. He seems to mean "the Muslim Middle East," but if so he would have been better advised to say so. With regard to the Middle East, what does he mean by the question "what went wrong?" Does he mean to ask about economic underdevelopment? About lack of democracy? About a failure to contribute to scientific and technological advances? About ethnocentrism? All of these themes are mentioned in passing, but none is formulated as a research design. If "what went wrong" was mainly economic, political and scientific, then why pose the question with regard to a religious category? Lewis straightforwardly says that Islam in and of itself cannot be blamed for what went wrong (whatever that was). Since Islam is not the independent variable in his explanation, why make "the Islamic world" the unit of analysis? Discerning exactly what Lewis is attempting to explain, and what he thinks the variables are that might explain it, is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.

In spite of Cole's frustration, Lewis' point seems fairly clear, if not clearly stated: What Went Wrong seeks to understand why the Islamic world isn't more like the West, why its institutions haven't "modernized" in order to meet the needs of its people. Lewis tells the history of the contact between Europe and Islam, in military, cultural, political, and religious terms, showing how Islamic and Christian institutions developed differently in each of these areas, and how Islamic countries responded in their contact with the West.

Lewis begins with a chapter on "Lessons from the Battlefield," showing how the once dominant Muslim armies were eventually subdued by the forces of Europe, with Muslim weakness beginning to be exposed with the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt and continuing with the wholesale colonization of the Middle East by France, Britain and Russia.

But more to the heart of "what went wrong" in Lewis's analysis seems to be the failure of Islam to adapt to social, cultural, and intellectual norms of the West. In his third chapter, "Social and Cultural Barriers," and fourth chapter, "Modnernization and Social Equality," Lewis tracks the demise of the three basic inequalities of Islam, which otherwise emphasizes equality of all believers: the inequalities granted women, slaves, and non-believers.

According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principle of legal and religious quality--unbelievers, slaves, and women. The woman was obviously in on significant respect the worst placed of the three. The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any time become a believer...only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was...

Lewis then goes on to show how, much as in the West, slavery diminished and was essentially outdated by the late 19th century. As for non-believers, their status improved as well. Women, however, did not benefit in the Islamic world from the advances made by women in the West. While the status of non-believers and slaves improved dramatically, there was no interest in improving the position of women, and the "outcome of that struggle," even today, Lewis says, is "far from clear." He explains that the liberality towards women shown in more economically modern societies in the Islamic world, the need for women in the workforce, was part of the backlash of "fundamentalist" political movements such as the Iranian revolution of 1979. "Khomeini," Lewis says, "spoke with great anger of the inevitable immorality that would result from women teaching adolescent boys."

Lewis makes an interesting distinction between "westernization" and "modernization". The status of women is an example for Lewis of the differnce. While many Islamic regimes recognize the need for modernization, Lewis argues, they do not see the need to more fully integrate women into society. That, he explains, would be "westernization" and an imposition of Western social ideals into Islamic society, not "modernization." While Islamic states recognize the need to modernize their economies and to take advantage of the technological advances of the modern world, doing so cannot mean importing irreligious Western social mores and practices.

Lewis also discusses the concept of "secularism" in Islam. Agreeing with Karen Armstrong and her competing history of Islam, he shows that Islam does not have a history of separating state and religion in the way that Christian states understand it. Contrasting Islam with Christianity, Lewis explains that Christ's admonition to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's," has led to a dominant belief in the separation of faith from civic governance. In fact, the church developed separately from individual states, and the notion of "canon law" versus "common law" is a distinction unheard of in Islam. As Lewis explains, there is no Islamic equivalent to "the church", no ecclesiastical hierarchy, and no clergy:
"Islam recognizes no ordination, no sacraments, no priestly mediation between the believer and God. The so-called clergyman is perceived as a teacher, a guide, a scholar in theology and law, but not as a priest." While early Christians were persecuted by state power, until Consantine converted, "Muhammed was, so to speak, his own Constantine," the original leader of the Muslim faith who also ruled politically. From the beginning of Islam, the ruling of society and organization of society was centered around Islam. The notion of secularism was foreign to Islamic states. "Since the state was Islamic, and was indeed created as an instrument of Islam by its founder, there was no need for any separate religious institution. The state was the church and the church was the state, and God was head of both, with the Prophet as his repesentative on earth."

Lewis concludes without offering a prescription for change, but suggesting that the current course of Islamic states in trending towards fundamentalism as a means to combat modernity and preserve the purity of Islam. Ironically, Lewis asserts that his book was in page proof at the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

II

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's writings collected in the volume The Caged Virgin seems to respond directly to the question "what went wrong" with a clear and specific answer. While she deals more generally as well with the question of modernity and Islam, her specific focus is Islam's treatment of women. Ali even has an essay in her book entitled, "What Went Wrong," and discusses directly Lewis's argument. A sample:

Lewis's position is unambiguous. The subtitle of his book, The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, is revealing. The people who abandoned Islamic civilization have not fully experienced the intrusive, painful, but ultimately liberating process of modernization as their neighbors and rivals in the Christian West have. Lewis warns that a downward spiral of hatred and resentment, anger and self-pity, poverty and oppression can result from rejecting modernity, but he hopes that Muslims will use their talents and energy to achieve a common goal, so that one day Islamic nations may become an important civilization again.

A little background: Ali came to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage which her Somalian parents had arranged for her. In the Netherlands she became involved with women's issues, and worked as an interpreter for Somali women who found their way to abortion clinics and battered women's shelters. Her experiences, some of which are described in the book, reinforced her antipathy towards Islam. She eventually ran successfully for the Dutch parlaiment, where she fought to abolish the practice of genital mutilation (a campaign which is also described in the book). In 2004, she wrote a screenplay entitled Submission which was realized by the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. The screenplay is included as a chapter in The Caged Virgin. The short film was broadcast on Dutch TV, and Van Gogh was murdered shortly after.

Since then, Ali has moved to the United States, where she presumably feels less threatened by the European Muslim community she has so thoroughly attacked in her work and has unfortunately taken up residence with a new set of tyrants, the American Enterprise Institute. At the same time, her attack on Islam has invited a vigorous response from European intellectuals such as Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. For background on this discussion, visit Pierre Tristam's Candide's Notebooks, here and here. One can also read Ash's remarks on Ali, along with his review of Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam, here at the NYReview site.

Ash is exactly the kind of European liberal intellectual that Ali attacks ferociously in her book. In Ali's view, Muslim men have appropriated Islam in order to subjegate women throughout Islamic culture. Moreover, she argues that European liberals like the Social Democratic Party, whom she left in order to join the more conservative Liberal Party, have accomodated Islamic mysogyny in the name of tolerance and multi-culturalism. Ali responds specifically to this kind of criticism, levelled against her by Ash and Buruma (in this case, Ash):

Ali performs a great service in drawing our attention to these horrors, which are the dark underside of a supposedly tolerant "multiculturalism." However, some Muslim women object to the way in which she blames their oppression on the religion of Islam, rather than on the specific national, regional, and tribal cultures from which they come. (Ali herself acknowledges that genital mutilation is not prescribed in the Koran.) Buruma reports a televised meeting she had with women in a Dutch shelter for abused housewives and battered daughters, several of whom objected strongly to the film Submission. "You're just insulting us," one cried. "My faith is what strengthened me." According to Buruma, she dismissed their objections with a lofty wave of her hand

.

Ali's response is very simply this: that Islam, in spite of the "strength" it gives women like those described above, creates conditions by which women are objectified and abused. In Ali's view, Islam has created a cult of virginity by which women are kept more or less encaged, hence the "virgins' cage", and their sexual purity kept intensely suspect. Men, however, engage in occasionally libertine behavior, for which they suffer no consequences. The double standard leads to a virtual imprisonment of women, severe restrictions on their work and family life, sexual abuse, and a profound shame that surrounds any sexual indiscretion, tantamount to expulsion from the family. Ali sees the European view of human rights and freedom, but suggests that European liberals don't care to protect the rights of Muslim women out of a fear of offense of the Muslim population.

Ash is correct that Ali acknowledges that the Koran does not mention genital mutilation. However, Ali points out that Muhammed did marry a nine-year old girl, and suggests that Islam essentially condones the double standards and the view of women as property of men. What Ali seeks is not, however, to destroy Islam. She seems to have fond memories of many aspects of her Islamic upbringing. What she seeks is, as she calls it, a "Voltaire" who will lead Muslims to a more modern and rational faith, one that is in accord with human rights and freedom for women. One radical idea Ali worked to fulfill is a law requiring girls to undergo physicals in order to ensure they have not had genital mutilation, and prosecution of parents whose daughters have received the practice.

Ali explains that the tribal, but not Koranic, practice of genital mutilation that has become widespread in Islamic cultures is bound up with the cult of virginity:

People blame me for not drawing a distinction between religion and culture. Female circumcision, they say, has nothing to do with Islam, because this cruel ritual does not take place in all Islamic societies. But Islam demands that you enter marriage as a virgin. The virginity dogma is safeguarded by locking girls up in their homes and sewing the outer labia together. Female circumcision serves two pruposes: the clitoris is removed in order to reduce the woman's sexuality, and the labia are sewn up in order to guarantee her virginity.

She goes on to argue throughout the book that Islam tends to segregate Muslims immigrants, especially women, from integrating fully into European society, and has inhibited the development of Islamic nations, keeping them "backward" and keeping their peoples ignorant and poor.

Ali concludes her book with an essay entitled "A Call for Clear Thinking":

Muslims must review and reform their approach to Muhammad's teachings if those who love freedom and the open society are to coexist peacefully with them. The terrorists and their allies the fundamentalists should not dictate to us Westerners the rules of the game. We must maintain and proclaim our core values of free and open debate, of rational thinking, and the rule of law, not religion. In this, the resolve of the British people to preserve civil rights is brave, and should be an example to all of us. The use of torture and the denial of legal rights to suspects of terrorism will serve only to corrupt Western systems and views of the West as a model of openness. Such actions also provide the terrorists with facts that serve as ammunition to prove their specious argument that the West is hypocritical and morally confused.

III

Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul)set his novel The Swallows of Kabul in the Afghanistan of the Taliban. It tells the story of Mohsen, a member of the middle class prior to the rise of the Taliban, and his wife Zunaira, who had been a scholar. Zunaira is increasingly isolated and depressed by the conditions in Kabul. A proud woman, the thought of going out of the house in a burqa is abhorrent to her. As a man, her husband naturally enjoys full priveleges of freedom and movement. She resents him terribly, as though he is a personal manifestation of the Taliban in her own home. She complains to Mohsen:

We're not anything anymore. We had some priveleges that we didn't know how to defend, and so we forfeited them to the apprentice mullahs. I'd love to go out with you every day, every evening: I'd love to slip my hand under your arm and let you sweep me along. It would be marvelous to stand in front of a shop window, leaning against you, or to sit at a table, just the two of us, chatting away or making fantastic plans. But that's no longer possible. There will always be some foul-smelling ogre armed to the teeth who'll reprimand us and forbid us to speak outdoors. Rather than be subjected to such insults, I prefer to stay inside my own four wall.s. Here at home, at least, when I see my reflection in the mirror, I don't have to hide my face.

...I refuse to wear a burqa. Of all the burdens they've put on us, that's the most degrading. The Shirt of Nessus wouldn't do as much damage to my dignity as that wretched getup. It cancels my face and takes away my identity and turns me into an object.

Another couple inhabits the story as well. Atiq is a jailer, and his wife Musarrat is ill. She loves her husband dearly, although she seems unable to please him. She lacks energy. She knows she is dying. Atiq sees her as a martyr, and, paradoxically, resents her helpfulness and generosity. Atiq is ill at ease, and even his friends are able to sense it. If you wife displeases you, they tell him, divorce her. But stop acting so glum. Atiq can't divorce her, as he feels a perpetual obligation to her, which only increases his resentment.

Mohsen one day convinces Zunaira to walk with him. She wears the burqa. But their walk is interrupted by a talk in a public square by a famous scholar. A guard of the Taliban forces Mohsen to stop and listen. When he approaches, Zunaira is laughing with her husband. The guard tells them they should be ashamed. He strikes Mohsen in the face, then lectures him. When Mohsen protests that he can't stay, he is given two lashes with a whip on his shoulder. He is then instructed to stay and hear the sermon. Zunaira, meanwhile, is forced to wait with the other women. Two hours later, she is weak and barely able to walk home. At home, she tells her husband, "don't touch me," and Mohsen feels stung again.

In a later argument over the events of the day, Zunaira strikes her husband and kills him in a freak accident. She is arrested, and sentenced to death.

While she is at the jail, Atiq sees her without her burqa and falls in love with her. After his wife discovers his feelings, she gives up her life in a final selfless act of love for her husband. She devises a plan to substitute herself for Zunaira and suffer the public execution that Zunaira is scheduled to suffer.

Zunaira walks out of the jail disguised then as Atiq's wife. She wants to go home, but must go to the execution first. Atiq tells her to wait for him, and that he will take her someplace safe after it is over. But after it is over, Atiq cannot find Zunaira. The women are indistinguisable from one another, and the sybmolism is clear: women are no longer individuals, they have been objectified by the Taliban, turned into dispensible and replaceable objects. Your wife displeases you? Divorce her. Trade her in for another. But Atiq, who has lost his humanity to the oppression of the Taliban, is no longer able to distinguish those characteristics that make us human, that make women special. The woman who loved him unconditionally he allowed to walk away to her death. In a poignant final image, Atiq pulls burqas one by one, frantically, from every woman he can reach, looking for his love Zunaira. Outraged, his countrymen pelt him with rocks until they rob him of his conciousness.

This is Khadra's final image of the Taliban and militant fundamentalist Islam: women forced into anonymity, and death to anyone who dares to look them in the eyes.

The following exchange took place on Candide's Notebooks regarding this essay. Sophia is the author of the blog Les Politiques.

Ohdave, I wasn't able to comment on your page, I am leaving my comment here. First, I think there isn't much to say about Lewis about the modernisation of Islam. I think you cannot tackle this problem without considering the colonial history of Muslim middle eastern countries. There is a great bias in analysing the relation of Islam to modernity without taking this apsect into consideration. I think Lewis has discredited himself on all what he has written on the middle east and I would not stop one moment at any of his arguments.
Hirsi Ali is still sticking to her storyline as a poor girl forced into marriage while during the controversy in the Netherlands her parents went public to say that there is no truth to this story. Ali herself was not genitally mutilated because her father was a 'liberal' when compared to the rest of his countrymen. Another lie in Ali's assumptions about genital mutilation is that it is to keep the girl virgin. I read many essays by a doctor and a scientist who was against genital mutilation in the excellent but now defunct magazine 'The Scientist' published by the NYAsci that was put into death by the Bush administration for lack of funds. I should retrieve these essays or at least some of them in my papaer archives, this was before internet. The authoir who was a leading scientist fighting the practice explains what is genital mutilation and it is rooted in cultural practices. Ali got it wrong all the way. Genital mutilation is practised not within the virginity framework but under the false belief that it increases the pleasure of men during sexual relationships. If a girl is not operated, she is considered as unfit for marriage. Societies live with many false beliefs because this doctor interviewed men who told her that they end up stoping any sexual relationship with their wives because of the mutilation. However, as genital mutilation is considered a prerequirement for marriage and as most of these families are poor and want to see their daughters married, first thing they do is to make their daughters fit according to cultural beliefs. There are many scientists working with NGOs to stop genital mutilation which has to do with economic and cultural apsects of certain societies rather than Islam.
About Ali. Before becoming an extremist anti-anything islam or Muslim, she was an extremist Muslim when she was living in Arab countries with her family. She became indoctrinated by her teacher (female teahcer) into adopting a fundamentalist version of Islam.
I am very suspicious of Ali's motivations. These people have often personal vendettas against their own demons and it seems to me that what drives Ali in not Elightenment, it hurts me deeply to think that people consider an extremist like her an enlightened person. An enlightened person is a rational and tolerant person and Ali is neither of these. She is an extremist being on the Muslim or the anti-Muslim side.
Yasmina Khadra is very symptomatic of the New Islam, and yes there is a New Islam. First the author took his wife's name as his pen name and he has a humanistic, while critical look at his religion.
Of all the three above, only Khadra qualifies for me as the one we should read on Islam. We should discard the other as rubbish, and I am not exagerating...

Sophia, thanks for the correction on Ash. I will get to it soon. I don't know why my comments aren't working at my site; I'll have to look into it. Linda complained of the same problem.

About genital mutilation: I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but certain practices Ali describes such as the stitching of the labia and binding the legs together are pretty clearly designed to enforce virginity. She acknowledges that there are cultural traditions at play, but her larger point is that these cultural traditions along with the subjegation of women in Islam form a kind of two headed monster which opresses women. In fact she goes to pains, in my view, to show that in its purest form Islam is a tolerant and peaceful faith, but that there are elements of mysogyny within its contemporary practice that need to be closely examined. I don't think that is a radical argument. And the argument that I think is really compelling is that liberals in the west who have fought for the emancipation of women in our own societies tend to excuse--is that the right word?--the treatment of women in the name of cultural tolerance.
Ali's testimony on the treatment of women is compelling. Actually, I thought it was shocking. The question of the place of fundamentalist religion in general within tolerant western societies is an important one. I think you dismiss her a bit too easily. She is not an Arab Muslim, but isn't her experience as an African Muslim living (formerly) in Europe equally valuable?

Ohdave, I stil think Ali is a fraud. Nothing in her experince relates to Islam in general or to others but only to her own private fantasies about religion and womanhood.
I found the name of the Sudanese anthropologist who wrote about female 'Circumcision'. It is Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf. She taught in the US. She was a visiting scholar at the Pembrike center for teaching and research on women at Brown university and lectured at the university of connecticut in Storrs. She of course condemns female genital mutilation but she explains scientifically the origins of the practice and how to fight it. The practice, according to her is intended to dull women,s sexual pleasure and increase men's. The only association with virginity is that 'girls who are spared the ordeal by their parents are thought to be promiscuous, a man chaser'.
And sorry, the magazine I mentioned is not The Scientist but 'The Sciences' a beautiful magazine that was interrupted in 2001.
I am going to scan the article sometime soon and send it to you.
It afflicts me that intelligent people like you have as their sources on the matter someone like Ali. The only thing Ali 'knows is what she believes in' to paraphrase Tony Blair.

Ohdave,
I found on the web a lenghtier version of Musharaf's views in a pdf article.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ dif...1abusharaf.html
In which you can read that some Muslim clerics even fought the practice as early as the 1820s:
''Despite the prevalence of the ritual, historically there has also been strong opposition that can be traced to the precolonial era, when indigenous efforts attempted to extirpate it. The first resolute and strong anti-circumcision movement in precolonial Sudan was religiously galvanized in the name of Islam. Before the annexation of the Sudan by Mohamed Ali, in the Turco-Egyptian Empire in 1821, El Sheikh Hassan wad Hassona, then a powerful religious cleric, initiated a campaign to exonerate Islam and redefine its position, especially in the eyes of people who attributed circumcision to Islamic religious ideology. To this day, older women avow the miracles of this cleric, who convinced many that people can be circumcised without genital cutting...''

I would add the following quote from Ali's book regarding genital mutilation as it relates to the culture of virginity: A girl, upon being told by a doctor that she is pregnant: Then she says, "But that is impossible, I am a virgin, I can't be pregnant." She continues to deny it. She says she can prove that she is a virgin: "I was stitched." She can't have done it with a boy, because the stitches are intact.