The Devil We Don't Know (14 page)

I also know a number of Muslims who are trying to reform Islam by applying Judeo-Christian values to it. For example, they use the expression “I will pray for you,” which is not at all a Muslim one. I never heard Muslims in the Middle East tell one another, “I will pray for you.” Yet in the United States, Muslims are adopting it from Christians, whom they describe as infidels in their prayers. I find that efforts to copy Christianity and Judaism in an attempt to reform Islam are disingenuous and a continuation of Islam's copying from other religions in order to get legitimacy, something that Mohammed tried and failed to do since the inception of Islam, leading Muslims into a cycle of envy and cover-up. As a former Muslim myself, I believe that the job of reforming Islam must be left to true believers in Islam. Apostates' efforts to reform Islam are simply placing bandages on the wounds. I would love to hear the leaders of Al Azhar Islamic University in Cairo declare that it is time to bring back the concept of
ijtihad
(making new laws in sharia to fit the new reality). Centuries ago, it became illegal to change sharia laws based on this concept, but without reestablishing it, there will be little hope for a reformation.

Apostates from Islam can be of great use in America's war on terror, because they do have America's best interests in mind. Former Muslims are fighting for their lives and religious freedom and want to serve the United States, the country that literally saved their lives.

As for Taha Hussein's plea in his poem earlier in the chapter, “O creator of the fighters, tell me, where is the God of the weak?” leads me to ask Allah, where is the God of the physically weaker sex, the women? Who will enlighten Islamic culture with respect to the humanity and dignity of women? How can the Islamic state be just and balanced when its laws oppress half of the population? Could the anger on the Arab streets be partly attributed to the oppression of women? The next chapter will delve into just that topic.

6

Will the Arab Spring Usher In a Feminist Movement?

So far, the Arab Spring has not rejected sharia in its constitution, and that is not good news for the rise of feminism in the Islamic state. In fact, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt have all embraced sharia. During and for a brief time after the Arab Spring, I felt a spark of hope when I heard reports of Saudi Arabian women—albeit only a few—driving on the streets of Saudi cities in defiance of the law and subjecting themselves to severe abuse and punishment. That they were fully covered, except, of course, for their eyes, by their traditional burkas made a striking image. Yet my spark of hope was short-lived.

In response to the question “Where are the Egyptian feminists?” a number of young female college students in Egypt who understand that Islamic sharia is the problem urged a million women to march in Cairo's Tahrir Square. On March 9, about two hundred to three hundred women showed up, another sign that there is no substantial grassroots feminist movement in Egypt or anywhere in the Muslim world. The women were attacked, groped, beaten, and called prostitutes by men in the square. The Islamist women who were present did not support the students. Then the Egyptian military arrested about twenty of the student organizers and subjected them to more beatings and even—as some claim—electric shocks. A senior Egyptian military official admitted that the girls were forced to take virginity tests in order to prove they were not prostitutes, and finally they were all sentenced to one year's probation.

The Arab Spring provided a moment in which the rattled governments of the Middle East opened a window of opportunity for a few brave souls to rise against institutionalized gender segregation and discrimination against Muslim women and to demand equal rights under the law. Unfortunately, however, for serious change to take place, the majority or at least a large presence of Muslim women should have supported their brave sisters in Egypt. That did not happen. As for Saudi Arabia, the law there has not changed, and, again, it was probably because only a few elite women defied the no-female driving laws. If every Saudi woman who can drive had joined her sisters on that same day of defiance, perhaps that law could have been changed.

Change can come about when support for it reaches a grassroots or popular level, and, unfortunately, that did not happen during the Arab Spring. Why is that? How could the female citizens of the most oppressive antiwoman system on the face of the earth fail to take such an opportunity to change their destiny and that of their daughters and granddaughters? The answers to these questions are very complex and part of the larger problem of Islam itself.

Many believe that Islam's treatment of women is gradually undergoing reformation and that it is just a matter of time before Muslim women will wise up, figure out what must be done, and stand together in unity to march for their equality and human rights. That's what happened in the West, so why not in the Middle East?

I wish it were so straightforward, but the situations are not the same. A major difference is that in the West, the Judeo-Christian value system was not accompanied by thousands of pages of Jesus's laws that demanded total submission and obedience from every Christian under penalty of death. Jesus did not tell a husband he could have up to four wives, could keep sexual slaves, or had the right to abandon and beat his rebellious wives. Jesus never called women
toys
,
slaves
, or
deficient in intelligence
and
lacking in religion
.

With all of its imperfections, the early Christian church never imposed a Christian state that forced citizens to comply with Jesus's lifestyle. Christianity did not have a holy law that condemns to death any Christian who leaves Christianity or reject its laws. Very simply, Western feminists were not confronted with the many dead ends that the Muslim feminist confronts. Compared to Muslims, Western feminists had it much easier, because the core of the Western value system allowed their emancipation. Many Western feminists might disagree with my assessment, but I have arrived at this perspective from personal experience, having lived the first half of my life in the Muslim world and the second half in the West.

There are some who believe that the defeat of sharia and the reformation of Islam will come at the hands of its most oppressed group—the women. That seems to be a logical conclusion, but I disagree that Muslim women can do it alone. One cannot expect the prisoner to be in charge of her own release when the guards of her prison are often Muslim women themselves.

For centuries, Muslim women have molded their lives to adapt to sharia and its prison, which has resulted in many having grown comfortable hiding behind their burqas. In many cases, they have created a warped mechanism of coping with a system that treats them as juveniles who need the permission of male family members to travel, to tell them whom they can befriend, and even whom to marry. When Muslim women open the Islamic scriptures, they read that women have half of the value of men, are deficient in intelligence and religion, and are not to be trusted or entrusted with too much responsibility. For instance, Sharia prohibits a woman from becoming a head of state or a judge. Her testimony in court is half the value of a man, and the explanation is that she is forgetful and needs someone else to remind her. Muslim scriptures state that women are slaves, possessions, and toys to their husbands and even that women are like dogs in distracting a man. For Muslim women to rise up against what Islamic holy books and laws condemned them to be, they must criticize sharia, which is an act of apostasy in itself. Expecting Muslim women to be behind the reformation of Islam and sharia is like asking slaves to end their own slavery without the approval of their masters or asking prisoners to get out of prison without the guards opening the doors.

Some people point to me and other former Muslim women who speak out as evidence that there will be reform in Islam. Yet women such as Wafa Sultan, an outspoken American author of Syrian origin, and Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Dutch author and feminist, along with myself and others, have given up on reform after years of failing to reconcile our basic human rights, freedom, and dignity as women with the religion we were born into. The fundamental tenets of Islam are built on the submission of all Muslims, especially women. It is thus impossible to give women and even men their human rights without discrediting Islam itself or leaving a watered-down version of the religion and stripping it of its tenets of sharia, jihad, and an ambition to rule the world. To do that will end Islam, and Muslims know it. That was the conclusion that we and many other former Muslims have reached. The reason we are having some impact is less because we are women and more because we are apostates who have openly pointed at the cause of the problem, which is Islamic tyranny.

Many Western thinkers, sociologists, and analysts are baffled by how entire cultures have developed societal institutions based on the sadistic oppression of others. In Muslim cultures, this has risen to a whole new level, where misogynist cultures have managed to camouflage their cruel oppression of women in a religious package as a commandment from Allah. Violent ideologies, such as the Islamic jihad doctrine, are terrified of granting people basic human rights, especially women, because a healthy woman produces a healthy family whose members will eventually reject aggression and unnecessary violence. Women are the cornerstone in civilizing and taming male aggression, which would undermine what Islam is all about. In that sense, the freedom of women strikes at the heart of Islam and the jihad culture, and that is why feminism and Islam can never reconcile.

This does not mean there are no brave and strong women in Muslim society. To the contrary, the brutality of Islam has produced some of the sharpest, most aggressive, and persistent women in the world. Yet Islamic feminists have incredible obstacles to overcome, the most important of which are accusations of apostasy if they criticize sharia. That is one reason they find it extremely hard to develop a grassroots movement and bring on board a majority of the population. A Muslim woman's inferior status in Islamic society is too deep and is intertwined with all Islamic institutions. For Muslim women to simply revolt against this inferior status would be regarded as an act of subversion that is antiman, antifamily, antireligion, antigovernment and, worst of all, anti-Allah himself.

Women who defy sharia or try to change it are harshly attacked and silenced, and they end up withdrawing from the scene altogether or even leaving their own countries. Ghada Jamshir, a human rights activist and a feminist from Bahrain, who spoke out against female child marriage, was the victim of a government-imposed media blackout and was forbidden to write, give interviews, or talk to the media. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi had to leave Egypt after a radical demanded that her arm and leg be amputated, according to sharia. Even the influential Jihan Sadat, while her husband, Anwar Sadat, was in office, was silenced by Al Azhar Islamic University when she attempted to advocate some mild women's rights reforms.

Islamists admit that the attacks against feminists are conducted partly to make an example of them for any woman who dares to follow in their footsteps. In 2008, a popular twenty-five-year-old Saudi feminist blogger who used her real name, Hadeel Alhodaif, was rumored to have been murdered by the Saudi authorities, charges that are denied. The Saudi authorities had earlier arrested and detained Alhodaif without issuing any charges. She later fell into a coma, was taken to the hospital, and died there, but there was no report on what caused the coma.

Another huge obstacle that Muslim feminists face is the difficulty in connecting and reaching out to other women, especially the poorer and less-educated majority. Isolation in their homes, distrust of strangers, and social taboos are major factors in Islamic gender-segregated societies that restrain women's relationships, even with one another, and prevent them from organizing, especially for feminist causes. One qualification of being a good Muslim woman is that she stay in her home. Her husband will often object to her befriending activist women, and this also draws criticism from other family members and society because it is regarded as rebelliousness against Islam. Many Middle Eastern Muslim husbands hand-pick their wives' friends and often limit the women's communications only to family members.

When I was a child, I remember hearing a conversation between my mother and some other women at our house, when one of the women burst into tears, complaining about how her husband, a well-to-do doctor, forbade her to have anything to do with a woman who had been her best friend since childhood school days because of rumors that she was a feminist who wore bathing suits on the beach. The two old friends sometimes met in secret like criminals. The frightened woman said she had to be careful, because if her husband found out that she was still seeing her girlfriend, he could lock her in the house or even divorce her. What is horrifying in these situations is that society is on the side of the husbands. Often these husbands receive calls from people—women and men—reporting that their wives are being disobedient. This happened with two women my mother knew, and the whole situation ended up as a family disaster.

When I visited Egypt in 2001, I dared to wear a one-piece bathing suit with a towel wrapped around my waist at a Mediterranean beach west of Alexandria. The educated wife of a doctor in the group I was with, who was covered from head to toe, went out of her way to be rude to me. Clearly, it was because I was in a bathing suit. When my American-born daughter asked me, “What is wrong with this woman?” my answer to her later that day was, “The reason, sweetheart, is something you will never believe, because you were born and raised in America.” In this case, it was a Muslim woman and not an Islamist man who tried to shame me because I was not covered up on the beach.

The only feminism allowed in Islam is that of the militant Muslim woman wearing her Islamic garb with pride and promoting sharia, the very law that oppresses her. The only way for a Muslim woman to gain respect, power, and dignity is through compliance and submission to Islam. In other words, she can earn her dignity and pride by accepting her bondage.

I have great respect for the few Arab women's rights activists who don't give up and who do what they do while living in the Middle East. They must choose their words very carefully and never openly challenge sharia. To avoid being accused of apostasy, they blame women's oppression on the misinterpretation and misunderstanding of Islam. This might help them get some cosmetic issues improved, such as, hopefully, allowing women to drive in Saudi Arabia, but with this strategy, which I can understand, they cannot change actual laws that discriminate against women. The laws are stupefying to Westerners: women receive half of the inheritance of men; women have no freedom of movement or travel; polygamy and pleasure marriages are allowed for men; divorce can occur only at the behest of men; a woman's testimony in court is given only half of the value of a man's; child marriage is allowed for girls; community property is not permitted between husband and wife; the husband is given automatic custody of the children after age seven in the case of divorce; no alimony is given to women after a divorce; a woman who is raped is required to provide four male witnesses; wife beating is permissible under the law; a husband is forgiven for killing an adulterous wife; the honor killing of women and girls is permitted; and, in some Muslim countries, the circumcision of women is allowed.

Because of blasphemy and apostasy laws that forbid anyone to speak against or criticize Islam and sharia, feminists end up dancing around the issues without hitting the bull's eye or getting concrete results. I probably would be doing the same thing myself if I were still living in the Middle East. That is the problem Islamic feminists must grapple with today.

So it comes as no surprise to see Arab women blaming the oppression of women on ignorance of the true and tolerant Islam. Former Kuwaiti parliamentary candidate Aisha Al-Rashid said, “The early Muslims were more fair and just than the Muslims of the twenty-first century. We live in the modern Era of Ignorance, I'm sad to say.”
1
She is an example of Middle Eastern feminists who must blame anything but sharia, the Hadith,
sunnah
, or the Koran.