Dare We Stand Up for Muslim Women?
It's the smell I remember. Shahnaz's face -- what was left of it -- reeked of a day old barbeque, left out in the rain. Her flesh was a mess of charred meat: her skin, the soft flesh of her cheeks, and the bones beneath had been burned away. Her nose was gone. Her lips hung down over her chin like melted wax. Her left eyelid couldn't close, so it watered all the time in an endless stream of tears. Shahnaz -- who was 21 years old -- had been punished by having acid thrown in her face. Her crime was to be a Muslim woman who wanted to be treated as equal to a man.
Shahnaz loved education -- especially science, and poetry. But when she got married -- at the insistence of her family -- her husband ordered her to stop schooling and start breeding. "You are a woman, that is your only job," he said. But she refused. She wanted to work for herself, and enrich her mind. So she kept going to school, despite his beatings and ragings and threats. So one day her husband and his brothers carefully gathered up battery acid, pinned her down, and hurled it into her face.
She ended up in the Acid Survivor's Foundation in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I saw her earlier this year. In Bangladesh, acid attacks on "uppity" women are epidemic, peaking in 2002 with more than 500 women having their faces burned off. Fewer than 10 percent of the attackers are ever convicted, because juries and judges say the women bring it on themselves by wearing 'revealing' clothes, or refusing to obey men.
Munira Rahman, director of the foundation, explains: "From the late 1980s women were increasingly getting jobs in Bangladesh. Women were suddenly more independent, and they could start to turn down marriage proposals and choose for themselves. This is the backlash from men who see women as property." It is just one tactic in a global war to keep Muslim women at heel. In Saudi Arabia women are kept under house arrest, banned from driving or showing their faces in public. In Afghanistan, the Taliban massacre teachers who dare to educate girls. In Iran, women are stoned to death for adultery. In Somalia, women's vaginas are butchered, with the clitoris cut out and the remains crudely stitched up. These are not freak exceptions: they are often state policy.
It is here, in our open societies, that the freedom of Muslim women is slowly being born. Last week Amina Wadud became the first ever woman to lead British Muslims in prayer. All over Europe and the US, Muslim women are pushing beyond a literal reading of the Koran and trying to turn many of its ugliest passages into misty metaphor. Yet our support for these Muslim women fighting to be free is hobbled -- both when it comes to ordinary people, and when it comes to governments. Many of us feel awkward talking about the rights of Muslim women because we have overdosed on multiculturalism.
We ask nervously: Isn't it just their culture that women are treated differently? Isn't it a form of cultural imperialism to condemn these practices? The only rational response is to ask: Whose culture do you want to respect here? Shaznaz's culture, or her husband's? The culture of the little girls learning in a Khandahar classroom, or of the Taliban thug who bursts in and shoots their teacher? The culture of Amina Wadud, or of the misogynists protesting outside? Muslim societies are not a homogenous block -- and it is racist to pretend they are.
Our governments are equally hobbled from supporting Muslim women -- for a very different reason. They claim to oppose the Taliban or the Iranian Mullahs because they abuse women. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, they declare the just-as-vile regime "our close friend" and lavish cash on it. Why?
You can glimpse the answer by looking at the little-told story of the writing of Iraq's constitution. In the original draft drawn up by the Iraqi political parties in 2004, there was a guarantee of equal rights for women -- alongside a clause stating that Iraqi oil belongs exclusively to the Iraqi people. The Bush administration panicked. In the bargaining that followed, the US government demanded an opening of the oil fields to foreign companies -- and in return they haggled away all women's rights, allowing Shariah courts run by misogynist mullahs. While we as a society are addicted to oil, our governments will always put petroleum before feminism. While we suck on the Saudi petrol pump, smearing rhetorical oestrogen onto our bombs looks like an ugly trick.
So how do we practically side with Muslim women like Shahnaz and the tens of millions like her? Any answer has to involve three steps. First: no more bogus 'respect' for fundamentalism within open societies. If you literally follow an ancient Holy Text -- whether it's the Koran, the Bible or the Torah -- you will hold disgusting views about women, and you should expect to have them criticised and mocked. By raising critical questions, we help the women inside Islam who are trying to turn the ugliest passages into metaphorical steam.
Second: kick our oil addiction. Until we do that, we will only ever see Muslim societies through the bottom of an oil barrel. Third: Once we're no longer junkies, we can pressure our governments to create a programme of real economic empowerment for Muslim women. My friend Irshad Manji, the Muslim feminist, has called for the EU and US to fund a big programme of microcredits -- small, no-interest loans -- for Muslim women across the Middle East to start their own businesses or get a decent education. This would slowly give them a sliver of independence with which to reinterpret the Koran (or leave it behind). This isn't only morally right: It helps us too. How much can jihadism -- an ideology committed to enslaving women, Taliban-style -- spread in a society where women are free to argue and answer back?
The battle for equal rights for Muslim women is the great civil rights cause of our time. Do we want to sit it out -- or do we want to stand between Shahnaz and her acid-wielding husband and say: Enough?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his work, click here
You can donate to the Acid Survivors' Foundation online, and save women's lives. Click here.
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Mr. Hari, thank you for a very informative article.
I noted with particular interest your third recommendation above, suggesting that once we're no longer junkies (on oil), we can pressure our governments to create a programme of real economic empowerment for Muslim women. Why wait till we've gone on methadone? The EU and US can fund a big programme of microcredits you mention for oppressed Muslim women to start their own businesses or get a decent education right now, and for a fraction of the cost to bail out AIG. As you say, this would help provide entre with which to reinterpret the Koran, modify or abandon Islamic beliefs, and gradually integrate women more fully and effectively into the arms of legislative and judicial branches of their governments to protect and be protected.
Two things are absolutely imperative: Western countries can help fund and facilitate these programmes, but their actual execution has to be from the ground up by Islamic women to avoid charges of meddling; and Islamic men need to be integrated into the effort -- they need to buy into it, so to speak -- with solid education that the old ways of thinking are an unnecessary burden on the conscience and a degradation of themselves. I don't know how to get around the cultural neurosis that exists in many Islamic male minds (on matters of homosexuality and the like), that's why I'd leave it to Islamic women to figure it out and educate each other.
I’m bothered by the fact that the oppression that some Muslim women face in some Muslim cultures is tied to Islam/Islamic traditions. This line of reasoning wouldn't be acceptable for anything other than religion, especially the religion of Islam. Nobody would ever be able to get away with writing an article about crime in predominantly Black neighborhoods and saying that there's just something about being Black or something about Black values that makes them prone to criminality. So why is it alright to argue in this way regarding religion?
What's particularly interesting is that other factors that could possibly play a role in the oppression of some Muslim women under some Muslim cultures aren’t even discussed. How 'bout poverty, lack of education, legacy of colonialism, or the prevalence of pre-Islamic traditions in the culture as possible reasons why these violations exist? While this isn't the scope of this article, I wish the author could show how the teachings of Islam play a role in violence and oppression against women.
Undoubtedly, women of all countries are oppressed in some way. Unfortunately, it's more prominent in places where crime and political corruption is rampant, social mobility is rare, and access to education, healthcare, food, clean water, and other survival necessities are limited. Most Muslim countries fall into that category, but so do many Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist countries. Reforming or getting rid of a particular religion still doesn't solve the daily privations that the poor of the world live under.
Europe -- which used to call itself "Christendom," luckily got out of the prison of its religious superstitions with a fortunate combination that included the French Revolution, the Enlightenment and some help from Muslim scientific ideas that spread to the then-primitive West.
The Christians began to compartmentalize their minds, with one box for the illogical and primitive Judeo-Christian scriptures, and another for the world being improved by sanitation and science. I think the Muslims will eventually craft a similar solution. They're already struggling with an "Islamic banking" compromise to get their economies past the Islamic prohibition against interest. European Christians had similar prohibitions until they noticed that the Jews were getting rich because they were allowed to charge Christians interest.
Along with its embrace of science, the West also started to leave behind its backward ideas about the "place" of women. (It should be noted that the northern European "barbarians" were much more advanced in this when they were overrun by the Mediterranean Romans.) There's still some work to do, but the West has benefitted mightily from the intellectual and political power of its more liberated female population.
Many of us wish our Muslim brothers and sisters, co-inhabitants of the planet, good fortune in their quest.
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Islamic traditions or cultures that incorporate Islam to react to your assertions that this is somehow endemic to those traditions or cultures. However, I do know that it is 11 p.m., and I am feeling like making a quick run to the grocery store for some ice cream.
That grocery store is about 2 blocks from my house. There are overhanging trees that block the moonlight and not much artificial lighting on my street. There's not much foot or car traffic at this hour either. I am a woman. And I live in the heart of "Christian" America. My question for you is a simple one, do you think it's safe for me to make that walk to the grocery store?
I think that we all need to make a stand against violence against women wherever it occurs, but let's not do it by singling out one particular culture or society when this appears to be a universal problem.
And then when people put up security cameras, everyone starts to whine 'invasion of privacy, waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!'
standing up for the rights of Muslim women is off limits because it conflicts with the multi culturial tolerance of intolerant radical Islam. If you stand up for the rights of Muslim women then you will not do as Europe and even Canada does and allow Sharia law to creep into our legal system. The movement among the left to push for sharia law is a movement to keep Muslim women in chains and to submit all Muslims to the radicalized will of those among them who will use the power of Sharia and brute force to dominate them.
Even in the US we have seen women killed in "honor killings". I don't think it's politically correct to fight for equal rights for Muslim women.
THE CLASS OF THE NEW GENERATION ALWAYS HAS ;)
I am an American-born, progressive white guy who spent a year living in a Muslim country. I met many wonderful and generous people. But even thirty years ago, we expatriates were talking about the inferior status of the women we met and, mostly, shaking our heads.
Should we want to see that change? Of course. But what is the ethical way to make that change happen? We must lead by example at home -- and we must make sure we are not dependent on abusive people for things we need.
When the United States runs torture camps like Abu Ghraib, when we imprison people in Guantanamo Bay for years without charges -- we lose the moral authority to lecture anyone about their human rights abuses.
I also endorse Mr. Hari's explicit connection between American oil addiction and our inability to solve the problem. Interestingly, there's a hidden parallel in his story:
"From the late 1980s women were increasingly getting jobs in Bangladesh. Women were suddenly more independent, and they could start to turn down marriage proposals and choose for themselves. This is the backlash from men who see women as property."
Regular folk in America ARE like "Muslim women" -- economically dependent, in need of oil. The Petroleum Mafia kingpins are like (well, some of them in fact are) Muslim men. They abuse us, but -- they own us.
Let's get "independent" and "uppity," shall we? Let's build a renewable energy program, the likes of which the world has never
Bizarre cutoff, just my last word!
"Let's get "independent" and "uppity," shall we? Let's build a renewable energy program, the likes of which the world has never..."
...seen.
BAGHDAD – Engineering student Haifaa Salman has discarded the Islamic head cover she started wearing two years ago after militants threatened to "punish" her if she kept showing up at college with her hair uncovered.
"I was forced to wear it," the 22-year-old says, recalling the day in 2006 when two men on a motorbike stopped her outside campus to deliver the threat. But, she adds, "It's different now. Life is normal again. College women wear what they please. The extremist groups are gone."
Agreed.
Literalism is a mental illness.
All the worlds religions should remove the hate speech from their holy books.
It's time for religions to grow up.
I'm always curious if the people who deny the fact that the Koran, bible and other religious texts contain passages which are extremely offensive to women are being intellectually dishonest, or if they are simply naive. It really doesn't take much research at all to find examples of extreme misogyny. I suggest that everyone do so for themselves so that they can see the truth of what these so called "peaceful" religions actually teach.
Curiousgirl- you've committed the same mistake I said Mr. Hari did- you've grouped Islam in with the religious texts which are 'offensive to women' without providing any serious substantiation whatsoever.
You've conflated the historical experience of Western Christianity with all other religions and reflexively labeled them all as misogynistic or enabling misogyny.
Any cursory reading of religious history will reveal that religious figures appropriate the authority of religion to actuate personal or monarchical agendas on citizenry at large. In most cases, religion is the innocent bystander as no mainstream religion explicitly calls for the sorts of crimes we see perpertrated by men of religion.
A Bangladeshi man cannot stand the thought of a woman challenging Bangladeshi patriarchy, so he disfigures her face.
An emperor cannot afford to have his citizens question the wisdom of his policies, so he colludes with the Church so the latter may use his status as an intermediary to teach compliance to the former.
The agents of hatred and murder are the same today as they were yesterday- they are human beings, irrespective of the religions they identify with.
You completely missed the point of my post. I'm not talking about the way religion is used, I'm not trying to say that Islam and Western Christianity are the same thing (although they are a lot more similar than many will admit) and I'm not denying that it is ultimately people and not religions who perpetrate violence on one another.
I'm talking about the books. Period. Just the books. What I am saying is that you can open up the koran or the bible and find some extremely offensive things being said about women by prophets and other figures. That is simply a fact and if you have either a bible or a koran lying around or can locate them on the internet, I'm sure you can see it for yourself. It's right there in black and white. You can tell me the sky is red all you want, but I know that it's blue.
The Prophet of Islam stopped female infanticide when it was a widely practiced culture in the pre-Islamic Arabia.
Female babies (fetus and new borns) are still killed in China and India today because men are culturally and socially "more important". Why don't you go and research these two countries and see how the number of men are far outnumbering the number of women. Men from remote villages have to go to bigger towns to find a wife. Watch National Geography much? Why is this never ever discuss when Women's issues are discussed in the West?
Muslim women are not made up of a single entity. Pakistan had a Muslim woman for a leader , Benazir, so did Turkey, Tansu Chiller. Indonesia had Megawati Sukarno Putri for President..and yes, Bangladesh, Sheikh Hassina. All these women are Muslim and they were voted into office by both men and women.
And America serves us Sarah Palin??? That is in itself a crime. But I won't blame Christianity.
"And America serves us Sarah Palin??? That is in itself a crime. But I won't blame Christianity."
That's OK, you have our permission. :^)
Aren't American feminists actually supposed to, like, care about women's rights? Then why don't they care 1% as much about stories like this as they do about equal pay for equal work? The silence is deafening.
Oh, but we do care - you just aren't listening!
I think the article betrays an assumption that every religious community has had the same experience with its text that Christianity has had with the Bible.
There's nothing in this article to suggest that Mr. Hari actually read the 'ugly' passages in question, nor is there any indication as to why the Qur'an or Islam is necessarily the source of these heinous practices. In fact, there is not a single reference to an 'ugly' passage, though the article's strength is contingent upon the illusion of the so called ugly passages.
The entire supposition that literal interpretations disenfranchise women of basic rights and divest them of any relevance is as anachronistic as it is unfounded.
I find no reason to credulously follow Mr. Hari's line of argument when it is painfully obvious that it conflates Biblical history with Islamic history, assumes parallels, and then uses these assumptions to impugn the Qur'an.
Not to mention that when one looks at Christian scriptures regarding women in context, women are actually honored and free.
I'm a Muslim woman from Bangladesh. As a doctor, I am aware of the incidents of acid throwing. This terrible crime is done for many twisted reasons, but the most common reason is a disgruntled suitor, not a husband whose wife "was trying to be equal" as Mr. Hari suggest. And in Bangladesh, it happens across the board--- to Muslim, Hindu and Christian women. The nearby country of India, which is predominantly Hindu, has also a similarly high rate of acid throwing.
I have to agree with the poster before me that misogyny is pervasive and world wide. Linking it to Islam may tickle the fancies of some, but it's simplistic, and considering that Christianity and Judaism stand shoulder to shoulder with Islam on Women's right it's also unreasonable and unjust. Actually, Islam grants women rights not found in Christianity and Judaism.
For my father it was this comment reputed to the prophet Muhammad--" Whoever has 3/5/7 daughters and takes good care of them, he will achieve Paradise"__--that encouraged him to love and cherish his daughters. For my husband it's "The best among you are the ones who are the kindest to your wives." For my son it's "Paradise is under the feet of (through doing good unto) your mother." I've been loved and cherished as a Muslim girl my whole life and want the same for all my sisters regardless of race and religion.
Another very common reason for Acid throwing is unpaid dowry. The dowry system is non-existant in Islam, yet it is widely copied from the Hindu culture for fiscal gains. When very large dowries cannot be paid by the bride, the result is acid throwing. Again this is not a case of a husband trying to prevent his wife from claiming equal rights under islam, but pure greed, unadulterated and evil.
It heartens me to know that "mmd" felt "loved and cherished as Muslim girl my whole life". There is hope then. Unfortunately, what "mmd" misses, and many other posters, including "incredible" and "Moeed", is the main purpose of the Hari's article, which was not to impugn Islam or Muslim societies in general - indeed, Hari writes that "Muslim societies are not a homogenous block". The reactionary responses by these and other posters only further obfuscates the issues. The main purpose of the article was to demand of feminists everywhere their attention and active support for this particular group of women, women who have had their faces melted off. Whitewashing this particular problem, and it's problematic prevalence in Muslim-majority societies, by saying that women everywhere suffer is an excuse for inaction that feminists should not tolerate. Attacking this problem is not akin to attacking Islam; please don't conflate them.
"... misogyny is pervasive and world wide."
Certain form of misogyny are present in all cultures. Granted .But the world shudders faced with Medieval barbarism of Sharia laws.
There abolutely NOTHING in modern Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or Taoism that come closes to hallucinatory laws of modern Sharia fatwas.
NO COUNTRY in the world beside Muslim stones women to death for adultery, amputates limbs for theft or actively encourages manhunts to murder writers like Rushdie. Come on. This is an old trick-- deflecting criticism by accusing others of the same behavior.
Sharia: "Cases of serious nature, like that of adultery attracts a very hard punishment in Islam. Flogging a hundred times for unmarried couples and stoning to the married ones. "
"An Islamic court in Nigeria recently upheld a sentence of capital punishment by stoning for a woman accused of adultery. The case is the latest in a series of sentences passed under sharia law."
http://www.islamic-sharia.org/general/on-the-testimony-of-women-2.html
But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, they declare the just-as-vile regime "our close friend" and lavish cash on it. Why?
3 letters-O I L
Oil. YOu're saying like it something dirty and something that you don't use on daily basis. What, you're having a problem with a concept of securing strategic resources. Regardless, Saudis And Kuwaitis are not worse than Iranians. And pssst, let's use up their oil before we start extracting ours.
Then information about the draft of Iraq's constitution is especially enlightening...
Iranian constitution... enlightening?? Where a ultra conservative mullah runs the country?... Precious.
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