Nomad (35 page)

Because these Western feminists manifest an almost neurotic fear of offending a minority group’s culture, the situation of Muslim women creates a huge philosophical problem for them.

There are 13.5 million women in Saudi Arabia. Imagine what it’s like to be a woman there: you are essentially under permanent house arrest.

There are 34 million women in Iran. Imagine being a woman there: you may be married legally when you are nine; on the order of a judge, you may be lashed ninety-nine times with a whip for committing adultery; then, on the order of a second judge, you may be sentenced five months later to death by stoning. This is what happened to Zoreh and Azar Kabiri-niat in Shahryar, Iran, in 2007; after being flogged for “illicit relations” they were then tried again and found guilty of “committing adultery while married.” The punishment they were to receive for adultery was death by stoning. Their sentence was recently confirmed, on appeal.

There are 82.5 million women in Pakistan. Imagine being a girl there: you grow up knowing that if you dishonor your family, if you refuse to marry the man chosen for you, or if someone thinks you have a boyfriend, you are likely to be beaten, ostracized, and killed, probably by your father or brother, who has the support of your entire immediate family. You’re also liable to be jailed on the grounds of the Huddud, laws of Islamic transgression.

Imagine being a girl in Egypt, Sudan, Somalia—any one of twenty-six countries around the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific. Your clitoris has been cut, as well as your inner labia, and the opening of your vagina has been sewn together. Even though excision is not mentioned in the Quran, most of the 130 million women alive worldwide who have undergone this brutal ritual are Muslim women.

Virginity is the obsession, the neurosis of Islam. Wherever there is a
Muslim community, forced or coerced marriage, even child marriage, is common, even in families who are relatively educated. Like domestic violence, most people consider it normal. Men are the guardians of their daughters. A girl is therefore the property of her father, who is entitled to transfer that property to the husband he selects. Child marriage is also a logical outgrowth of the Muslim fixation on female purity: if you marry her off early, as soon as possible after menstruation, she won’t have time to damage your reputation and devalue your goods. The reality of this can be extremely bitter: imagine a thirteen-year-old girl transferred to the arms of an old man she has never seen before.

Child marriage is illegal in Western countries, of course, but other aspects of the Muslim oppression of women can readily be imported into both Europe and the United States. The fact that honor killings can occur in Texas, New York, and Georgia makes the virtual silence of Western feminists on this subject all the more bizarre and deplorable.

Western women have power. They are now firmly established in the workforce. They have access to contraception, to their own bank accounts, to the vote. They can marry the men they choose, or choose not to marry at all, and if nature allows it, they can have as many or as few children as they want. They can own property, travel wherever they choose, and read any book, newspaper, or magazine they wish. They can have an opinion on the moral choices of others and express that opinion freely, even publish it.

In the West the notorious glass ceiling within most professions has been cracked, though not altogether removed; we can now surely make time for some more vital issues. If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask for permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority.

We women in rich countries have an obligation to mobilize to assist other women. Only our outrage and our political pressure can lead to
change. We need to push the situation of Muslim women to the top of the agenda. It’s not enough to say it’s shocking, it’s appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.

Organizations from within those communities will lobby and litigate to change the subject, then will plead vulnerability and victim-hood. Their advocates among the multiculturalist intellectuals and appeasing politicians will support them. It’s essential that we maintain awareness that what we women advocates are talking about are two distinct value systems between which there is no possible compromise.

Muslim women are not the only group of women who are oppressed. As I wrote in 2006, in an article for the
International Herald Tribune
, between 113 and 200 million women around the world are demographically “missing,” and every year between 1.5 and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as the result of violence or neglect because of their sex. Female babies and young girls in many parts of the world, not only Muslim countries, die disproportionately from neglect. The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of women. Roughly 600,000 women die giving birth every year, and domestic violence is a major killer of women in every country on the globe. “Gendercide” takes many forms, but for most of these suffering women, the major issue is poverty.

The subjugation of Muslim women, by contrast, is a matter of principle.

What can be done? First, we need a worldwide campaign against the values that permit these kinds of crime. Cultures that endorse the denial of women’s rights over their own bodies and fail to protect them from the worst kind of physical abuse must be pressured to reform. They should not be treated as respectable members of the community of nations. Today human rights activists are frustrated in their work; they are denied access to data and are intimidated or ignored. A serious international effort must be made to record and document violence against girls and women, country by country, and to expose the reality of their intolerable suffering.

But the more pressing business is what feminists can do now to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West.
In America too Muslim girls may be pulled out of school by their parents, violently punished at home on a routine basis, obsessively watched over and forcibly married and even murdered in the name of honor. Such basic, brutal violations of women’s rights must be confronted head-on and effective measures to protect Muslim girls urgently devised. Ignoring the problem means abandoning the next victims to their fate; even worse, it means abandoning the core values that sustain Western society. This is what Americans can learn from Europe’s experience with Muslim immigration: we simply cannot compromise our own principles by tolerating honor killing, female genital mutilation, and other such practices.

In Holland and the United Kingdom organizations have been set up to educate the police, schools, and other government agencies about this specific type of domestic violence. However, citizens and officials still find it difficult to talk about these issues without being accused of Islamophobia and racism. In Holland, for instance, I called for a control system on female genital mutilation to be put in place. Such a system was developed, but on a voluntary basis, which is absurd, because a mother who is convinced that she is doing what’s right according to the sacred custom of her heritage will not come forward and say, “I’ve just committed an act that will send me to prison for fifteen years.”

Well-meaning people sometimes look at me kindly at this point and perform the emotional equivalent of patting my hand. They are rarely impolite enough to actually say so, but they clearly believe that this battle is a hopeless one: there is no way that half the current Muslim population around the world can be freed.

I choose not to adopt this defeatist approach. I believe the honor-and-shame culture can be discarded. To think otherwise is to define Muslims as incapable of growth and adaptation, and I can’t think of anything more pejorative and racist. To effect real change will undoubtedly require massive shifts in attitude, the dismantling of a whole infrastructure of religious thought and tribal values. But in order to achieve this we desperately need a new feminism that will attract Muslim women. The militant anti-male discourse of some
feminist leaders is abhorrent to me and, I think, a perversion of the message of Mary Wollstonecraft. Feminism in the twenty-first century needs to move on, to bridge the gap between Western women and those they’ve left behind. Just as the world’s free thinkers and lovers of liberty once banded together to support the fight against apartheid, we should be banding together to support the rights of women in Islam.

As I watched the 2008 presidential and vice presidential election campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin on TV—both of them contending for two of the most powerful offices in the world—I eagerly waited for the moment when they would talk about what they planned to do for other women, longing for the moment when someone would ask the question, demand a serious debate on the rights of Muslim women. It never happened.

Now Hillary Clinton is secretary of state; before her, Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright held that office. It appears a silent consensus has emerged in Washington that the Department of State should be headed by women. Some people complain that this is a half measure, to placate us women, because what we really want is the presidency. But I disagree. I believe having a woman as secretary of state represents a huge chance. It means that an American woman will sit down with the leaders of the rest of the world, including the Arab world, the Muslim world, and be treated not merely as an equal but as the representative of the world’s only superpower.

The liberation of women is like a vast, unfinished house. The west wing is fairly complete. Most of us who reside in this corner enjoy privileges such as the right to vote and run for office. We have access to education, and we may earn our own living if we choose to. We have managed to convince most legislators on this side of the house that domestic violence, sexual harassment, and rape are crimes for which the perpetrator must be punished. We have reproductive rights over our bodies and our sexuality; although a girl’s parents and teachers and community leaders may coach her, they make no attempt to coerce her into or out of a relationship with a man (and recently, even with another woman). Prospective mates may woo and worship but must swallow their pride if a girl rejects them.

Like all homes, the western side of the house is not always run smoothly. In some cases, the house rules are not enforced. Girls’ complaints of domestic violence are ignored or denied or the perpetrator gets off with a warning or a punishment far less severe than the harm he has inflicted. Other women may feel that they do not receive equal compensation for doing the same jobs as their male colleagues; still others find themselves hitting a glass ceiling. Thus some women seek to furnish the house with more rules and to smash all the glass ceilings.

Go to the east wing, however, and what you find is worse than unfinished. Parts of it have been started, then abandoned, and are now falling into ruin. In other parts, every time a wall is put up someone comes and bulldozes it down. In what would have been beautiful courtyards there are shallow graves of nameless girls who died because they were not seen as worth feeding or treating for a common, curable illness. In the east wing girls are transported as property by their parents, often when young, to gratify the sexual urges of adults. There are girls working the land, fetching water, tending to livestock, cooking and cleaning from dawn to dusk with no pay for their labors, while others are beaten by their closest family members with impunity. Young women die while giving birth because they lack the most basic hygiene and medical care.

In some corners of the east wing mothers are not always delighted when they learn they are pregnant. A doctor will check whether the unborn child is a girl or a boy; if it is a girl he accepts the wretched mother’s payment and removes it, and if she cannot afford the abortion, the child, once born, is suffocated or left alone to die. This abortion of girls is so systematic in some rooms of the east wing that you will find numerous boys without mates to marry them.

Closer to the middle of the east wing most women are banished from the public rooms and hallways, and if they can be glimpsed at all they are covered from head to toe in dark and ugly garments. Many never learn to read or write; they are forced into marriage and seem to live pregnant ever after. They have no reproductive rights. If raped, they must shoulder the burden of proof, and in some rooms women and girls as young as thirteen are flogged and stoned to death in public for their disobedience in sexual matters. In the eastern side of the house some people are so terrified of a woman’s sexuality that they
cut the genitals of girl children, mutilating and branding them with the mark of ownership.

These days many people from the east wing find their way to the other side of the house, even if it is only to the cramped servants’ quarters. Here in the west wing the fate of girls in the east wing seems far away. And while the girls in the west wing remain preoccupied with creature comforts like the shade of paint, the size of the chandeliers, and the shape of the hedges in the garden, not to mention that bothersome glass ceiling, men from the east wing claim western rooms for themselves, where they can practice eastern habits.

I was sitting in my office in New York, high above the great, intense hub of the west wing, fantasizing that the wealthy women of the West would one day band together to make the liberation of the hovels of the east wing their greatest priority. They would surge forward to build a new edifice of freedom, strength, and plenty for the East, knocking down the old hovels and opening the visible and invisible prison doors to allow their sisters to see the light of day.