The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (6 page)

T
HERE ARE THREE
kinds of Muslims in the West. The first is a silent minority that doesn’t live according to the prescriptions of Islam and clearly understands that the future rests with individualism. These people silently take leave of Islam. They work hard and, when they can afford it, they move to better neighborhoods; they send their children to university and don’t get mixed up in the current heated discussion in the West about Islam.

A second group feels greatly hurt by external criticism of their faith and takes it personally. For generations these Muslims have accepted that the blame for their distress lies outside themselves and outside the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad.

Finally there are the progressive Muslims. This group consists of individuals who say, “Let’s examine ourselves and try to figure out what’s wrong.” They want to take the cage apart piece by piece and enable more people to escape it. But these attempts to liberate Muslims in the West are being frustrated by vehemently negative reactions from, of all people, secular Westerners. The few enlightened Muslims run into direct opposition from Western cultural relativists who say, “It’s part of the culture; you shouldn’t detract from that.” Or “If you criticize Islam, you hurt your people, and that makes you a racist or Islamophobe.” I have even been called an enlightenment fundamentalist, which I took to mean that I am just as radical in my commitment to individual rights—as if that were negative—as the Islamic fundamentalists are committed to religious doctrine. Because of this, the cage persists. A type of satanic pact has been forged between Westerners who make their living by representing Muslim interests, extending aid to them, and cooperating with them in their development, and Muslims who have a vested interest in the cage—a myopic, selfish, short-term interest.

Five years ago I was still one of the silent minority; I believed that I was living in a free country. I thought that if a woman is beaten and tolerates that, she is responsible for her own misfortune. I thought if I were her, I’d run away. I would not have my hymen restored. I would start my own life over, in the here and now. But today, I think differently. I now see how important upbringing is, not only because that is how one’s life starts but also because in Islamic culture that is how the cage is built. Psychological conditioning is very powerful, and it takes great energy and force of mind and will to break out of it. Many Muslim girls are brought up according to the Koran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, to live subserviently and submissively. It is very difficult for them to liberate themselves from this cage when they are older. Every Muslim is expected to submit to the will of Allah, but the girls and women have to submit most of all. This upbringing can have so great an influence that women never succeed in escaping from the cage. Because they have internalized their subordination, they no longer experience it as an oppression by an external force but as a strong internal shield. Women who have mastered the survival strategies derive a certain pride from living this way. They are like prisoners suffering from Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages fall in love with the hostage takers and establish a deep, intimate contact with them. But it is an unhealthy intimacy, comparable to slaves who are subordinate not only in body, but also psychologically, and who preferred the certainty of their existence in slavery to a freedom that they perceive as treacherous.

When I visited with the women of the Turkish movement Milli Görüs, I found them assertive and clamorous, almost to the point of being aggressive. They angrily defended their own oppression: “I
want
to wear a
hijab,
I
want
to obey my husband.” I have also met Moroccan women who said: “I want to wear the
hijab,
because Allah the Exalted has commanded it.” “Well,” I respond, “if you want to do everything that Allah the Exalted has said, then you’ll stay in your cage.”

Meanwhile, many are waiting for an enlightenment to take place in Islam. But that enlightenment won’t come by itself. That is why the way in which Muslims think about Islam has to change. Muslims need to think differently about how they deal with their faith, about life, about giving meaning to life, and about their own sexual morality. The few Muslims who have gained their individuality can hold up a mirror to the community from which they have emerged to make them face their still-undeveloped individuality, to make them see the “I” that is constantly being oppressed and curbed by dogma, prescriptions, and the stifling culture of gossip that rules in most Islamic communities. Emancipation doesn’t mean the liberation of the community of the faithful or its safeguarding from the power of evil outside forces, such as colonialism, capitalism, the Jews, and the Americans. It means the liberation of the individual from that same community of the faithful. And to liberate him- or herself as an individual, he or she must first come to think differently about sexuality.

The best way for Islamic culture to liberate itself from its backwardness is by ceasing to blame others for that backwardness. Muslim men and women must carefully, thoughtfully reevaluate their current sexual morality and their adherence to Islamic moral guidance. They must also determine how the prescribed morality is actually practiced; what are its real-life consequences and results. For instance, how many people succeed in living up to the standard that everyone must enter into marriage virginal and pure, the way Allah wants it, according to the Koran? How do men and women actually relate to one another in the real world, in day-to-day life? To what extent are family violence and violence against women unintended consequences of the striving after an unattainable ideal that is meant to secure an agreeable place in the afterlife? Is overpopulation and the rise of sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, in Islamic countries a direct consequence of the existing sexual morality? What about the rise in the number of abortions among Muslims in the West?

Instead of devoting their energy and money to the development of an even larger atomic bomb—as Pakistan and Iran are doing—the Islamic world would be better employed in critically examining its own sexual morality and the suffocating effects of its own cultures and societies, and devising proposals for change.

Scientific and scholarly research are necessary but not sufficient to overcome the cultural challenges in making large groups of people change their position. Almost all books about Islam written by Muslims are educational texts and guides instructing Muslims on how to behave in accordance with the precepts in the Koran and the Hadith, theological studies with little that is creative or new. Alongside these there are novels by Muslims about love, politics, and crime, in which the role of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad are studiously avoided, although the moral undercurrent is that one should observe religious precepts, otherwise things end very badly. Most Islamic soaps, broadcast around the world via satellite, share not only their bad acting but also an adherence to Islamic sexual morality in relationships between the main characters. The message is that if a young man and young woman choose each other out of love they will come to a bad end; if they come together because their families have arranged it, then everything will end well, with a splendid wedding, mounds of gold, and tears of joy.

What Muslim culture needs instead of this pablum, however, are books, soap operas, poetry, and songs that depict what is really happening and that satirize religious precepts, such as those presented in
Customs and Morals in Islam
and
Guide to Islamic Upbringing,
books that have been translated from Arabic into Dutch and distributed in Holland. Satire is a bitter necessity; it has to happen. The book
A Glimpse of Hell,
which tells us what awaits us in the hereafter, could be beautifully parodied in a film. As soon as something like Monty Python’s
The Life of Brian
appears with a Muhammad figure as the main lead, directed by an Arabic Theo van Gogh, the controversial late Dutch filmmaker, we will have taken an enormous step forward. I want to see Muhammad,
with
his nine wives, appear in a film like
Ben-Hur.
Arabic poets often think that they can write much better than Shakespeare. But if this is the case, where is the Islamic
Romeo and Juliet
? And where is the Moroccan Madonna who will sing
Like a Prayer
? Is a director like David Potter, who makes a film in which an Arabic woman’s lipstick ends up on the collar of an Iranian general, even imaginable in the Islamic world?

Steps toward modernization are being taken in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and other countries, but champions of modernization will meet a lot of resistance from those Muslim brothers and sisters who would prefer to spend a few more centuries in the virgins’ cage. Native Westerners themselves have an important task: they must not allow themselves to be tempted to protect the “injured” Muslims. It is in the interest of the Islamic world
and
of the Western world to promote a flourishing culture of self-criticism among Muslims and to support it wherever possible. The Islamic world is in a great crisis that also constitutes a threat to the West, a threat that consists not only of terrorism but also of streams of migration and of the risk that civil wars will break out in the Middle East—the greatest source of oil for the West. Such a threat can only be lessened when the Muslim world reforms itself from the inside, with assistance from the West. A reform of the Islamic world is in the interests of both.

N
obody who has been following the debates since September 11—in the newspapers, on television, and in political arena—can have failed to notice the sharp rise in criticism of Islam throughout the West. The main question people ask is whether Islam in its present form is compatible with the system of constitutional democracy. Should Islam embark on a period of enlightenment and modernization? Does Islam need a Voltaire to call Muslims to break free of superstition, to use their minds and not their emotions, to take note, as he did in the 1800s, that “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.” And, “The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.” Is there an enlightened Muslim man or woman who can stand with Voltaire and say, “To think of virginity as a virtue—and not a barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge—is an infantile superstition”? Where is the biting criticism of Islam from within? Or is it the West that should be listening to the critical voice of Voltaire and examining itself and its commitment to its moral principles? As Thomas L. Friedman has written, Westerners should hold Arabs and Muslims to the same high moral standards as Westerners hold for themselves.

In order to answer the question of compatibility between present-day Islam and Western culture, it makes sense to compare the two worlds.

Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam have not suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They needed a breeding ground, where they could take root and grow, before they were transformed into the very dangerous forms that have confronted us since September 11. This breeding ground is created by the way Islam is taught, day in day out, to Muslims in the Islamic world. No matter how great the diversity within the Muslim community, it is the teaching of Islam, and the way people apply its doctrines to real life, that prepares the ground for the growth of fundamentalism and, ultimately, terrorism.

The writer Leon de Winter, best known for his argument that a third World War is going on between the West and terrorists, points to a number of bad practices that take place in some Islamic countries. Although I do not share his opinion of a third World War, his description of the Islamic world is surprisingly accurate. For a start, de Winter gives an excellent description of the ideology that fueled the terrorists of September 11 and their followers. Their religious ideological framework consists of “strength and weakness, dominance and humiliation, eternity and transience, clarity and obscurity,” and they justify their actions and attribute them to divine justice.

From my own experience, I can confirm that the Islamic world is divided according to a strict hierarchy. Allah is almighty, and man is His slave and must obey His laws. Those who believe what is written in the Koran, who believe in Allah and accept Muhammad as His prophet, are superior to other religious peoples. Practicing Muslims are “tribes of the Scriptures” and are also superior to those whose beliefs have lapsed and to nonbelievers. Men come before women, and children must obey their parents. People who break these rules must be humiliated or murdered in the name of God.

Life on earth is temporary. It offers believers a chance to prove their fear of God through the strict observation of their duties to Him, which will earn them a place in heaven. Nonbelievers merely serve as examples of how not to lead your life.
Halal
(that which is permitted) and
haram
(that which is forbidden) are the two central concepts underlying everyday life. They apply to all Muslims, anywhere in the world, and affect all areas of life. Fixed rules describe exactly how to think, feel, and act, and what to avoid and apply equally to the private and public domains of Muslim life. The
Shari’a,
or Islamic law, comes before any law or rule instituted by people. And it is every Muslim’s duty to follow the
Shari’a
as strictly as possible. Fundamentalists take advantage of this expectation by pointing out, again and again, that moderate Muslims do not live their lives according to Islamic doctrine.

From our early years, we Muslims learn all this from our parents, in the mosques and the madrassas (schools for the study of Koran, which have become in many countries schools for fundamentalist Islamists). In addition, Muslims in Europe and the United States receive special tuition through the writings of people like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whom some regard as a moderate Muslim theologian and a suitable discussion partner for the West. Actually, al-Qaradawi’s views are far from moderate. In his book
The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam
—aimed exclusively at Western Muslims—he writes that the Islamic community has a duty to acquire military skills so that it will be ready to defend itself against the enemies of God and safeguard the honor of Islam. According to al-Qaradawi, Muslims who fail to do this are committing a severe sin. A little further on in the book he mentions that all laws drawn up by people are inadequate and incomplete, since the legislators have restricted themselves to material matters only, neglecting the demands of religion and morality. It is difficult for a non-Muslim to grasp how severely this statement undermines the democratic process of legislation in the eyes of “Westernized” Muslim readers.

De Winter aptly describes the practical experience of Islam as a daily drama in which “rows of saints, ghosts, angels, and little demons play significant supporting parts. The conservative Muslim thus accepts that his enemies may have supernatural powers with which to hatch plots, and, of course, the average Muslim does not know how to deal with such powers.” In this context de Winter quotes the Israeli professor Emmanuel Sivan, who conducted a study of fundamentalism: “A world inhabited by ghosts, the spirits of the dead, and
jinn
(invisible creatures), some evil and some good; a world besieged by the magic of a seducing Satan and his demons, where holy men and angels, and if necessary miracles, free the believer; a world in which communication with the dead (in particular of one’s own family) is an everyday occurrence, and where the presence of the supernatural is regarded as an almost tangible reality.”

As a Muslim I recognize these descriptions. All over the world Muslims are brought up with similar beliefs in the supernatural. Everything in day-to-day life is geared toward the existence of a hereafter. It’s a short step from these beliefs to the belief that we earn a place in paradise through martyrdom, a mind-set far removed from reason. It would be very interesting to examine to what extent superstition and the lack of common sense in the practice of Islam is linked to the wide appeal of Bin Laden’s ideology among Muslims. He appeals to the colorful fantasies and dreams of Muslims who do not want to take responsibility for their own state and for their own deeds, those who shift blame for their country’s and their own problems onto outside “authorities”—onto the West, onto the United States.

Many madrassas imbue their pupils with an irrational hatred of Jews and an aversion to nonbelievers, a message that is also frequently repeated in the mosques. Jews are consistently portrayed as the instigators of evil in books, on cassette tapes, and by the media. I myself experienced how insidious the effects of years of this indoctrination can be: the first time I saw a Jew with my own eyes, I was surprised to find a human being of flesh and blood.

De Winter writes that the current anger felt by many Muslims—which has given rise to strong anti-American sentiments and speculations about plots—does not merely have its roots in the socioeconomic poverty of Muslims relative to Christians and Jews. “The anger also comes from an irrational and conservative religious experience, in which Satan is alive.” I would like to take de Winter’s argument further and emphasize that this kind of religious experience is common not only among radical Muslims and fundamentalists, but also among ordinary Muslims. The difference is that the fanatics do not stop at hatred and are prepared to commit acts of terror.

All Muslims learn to regard our life on earth as an investment in the hereafter by obeying God’s will and His laws. The values of the community—honor and submission—are of much greater importance than the individual’s autonomy. Religion is not considered a tool with which the individual can add meaning to his life or not use at all. It is an absolute. The individual is expected to accept his religion and to devote himself to God in accordance with the literal meaning of the word
Islam:
submission to God’s will.

Many who grow up and live with Islamic traditions, and who are susceptible to fundamentalism and radicalism, tend to be passive in life and to be guided by a sense of fatalism. A practicing Muslim who tries to become an integrated member of Western society is in a difficult position. A Muslim immigrant in the West is confronted with a world turned upside down.

Unlike Islamic society, the West places much emphasis on the individual’s independence and personal responsibility, and on the necessity of investing in this life. Education and employment, rather than piety, are a measure of success. Western societies are not dominated by one single ideology, but have several ideologies that exist alongside one another. In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God’s holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life. Relationships between people and their interactions are governed by laws and rules, which were drawn up by people, not divine forces, and can be changed, adapted, or replaced by new ones. All people are the same in the face of the law, even those whose lifestyles differ from that of the majority. Women have equal opportunities under the law (although in reality this is not always so). Homosexuality is not a sin to be punished with death, nor is it considered a threat to the survival of mankind, but seen as a form of love, normal like that between heterosexuals. Moreover, love and sex are not restricted to marriage, but can be enjoyed between two people by mutual consent. Democracy provides the freedom to avoid or plan a pregnancy and ways to protect against sexually transmitted diseases.

In the West, Muslims can see that Jews are not monsters who are hostile to Islam, who want to be at war with them, destroy their hope, and spread fear, but ordinary people with a shocking history of their own in Europe—the Holocaust. In the West, prosperity and misfortune are not the products of God’s will, but of human action. Society can be shaped; you can influence your surroundings. And the hereafter is of little consequence. Anyone who wishes to believe in it should decide so for himself, but no official or state involvement is necessary or required. Many things that are forbidden in Islam are appreciated in Western societies, while in the West many Muslim duties are dismissed and thought to be backward.

Very few Muslims are actually capable of looking at their faith critically. Critical minds like those of Afshin Ellian in the Netherlands and Salman Rushdie in England are exceptions. Instead of self-criticism, we are offered a series of denials, or a list of external factors, and plots, that are the “true causes” of everything that has gone wrong in the Muslim world. Muslims are defensive, even to criticism of Islamists responsible for 9/11. And many Western thinkers and politicians exacerbate this Muslim tendency to avoid internal reflection by themselves avoiding looking at Islam. They lean back complacently and opine: “Oh, well, it was like that with us once. The Church governed the West in the Dark Ages. Don’t worry, all will be fine with Islam in the end.” They do not know what they’re talking about.

Present-day Islam is not compatible with the expectations of Western states. Islam is in need of enlightenment. Islamic societies still wrestle with the problems of the Dark Ages (prejudice, restricted thought, superstition) that strapped Christian societies before the Reformation and the Age of Reason questioned central tenets. But it is unlikely that this movement will rise up from within the Islamic world. Writers, academics, and journalists who voice their criticism are forced to take refuge in the West. Their works are banned in their own country.

What, then, can Westerners do? At an international level, leaders such as Blair and Bush must stop saying that Islam is being held hostage by a terrorist minority. They are wrong. Islam is being held hostage by itself. It would be more useful if they confronted Saudi Arabia with the fact that its repressive regime, its demographic pressure, and its biased religious education system have created a breeding ground for extremists. Almost five years after 9/11, they have been addressed to only a small extent.

In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, the native white majority can help the Islamic minority by not trivializing the seriousness of the present crisis in Islam. By addressing absolutist attitudes toward the Koran and the infallibility of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims in the West can learn from the questions and criticisms that have been put to Islam since September 11. More pressure should be put on minorities to become fully integrated into local and state cultures. Democracies should foster the voices of dissent and sponsor Muslim dissidents in the West, so that the one-sided, stultifying religious rhetoric to which millions of Muslims are subjected every day has a counterpoint.