Should Conservatives Push To Liberate Muslim Women?
By Richard Davis (09/02/04)
If you were visiting Iran the past two weeks and turned on Mullah TV to watch the Olympics, you probably thought it was pretty much an all-male affair. Coverage of women’s events was a little skimpy, as it was in other Muslim countries, ostensibly because the coverage of the females themselves was a little skimpy. The reason probably had as much to do with gender apartheid as clothing, however. Not since 1960 have so few Muslim women been permitted to enter the games. Iran sent just one, and she was required to compete in a full-body covering (hijab). Let’s hope she wasn’t a swimmer.
The Olympics were a microcosm of this clash of civilizations of ours, revealing both the rising influence of hard-core Islamic fundamentalism and the inability of the West to moderate itself. Once again, the American conservative finds himself in the middle, this time between the hijab and the bikini--closer to the bikini, no doubt, but in the middle nonetheless.
To many Muslim men, and to virtually all of their clerics, scantily clad Olympians represent not just another graphic reminder of the West’s moral dissipation, but also a direct challenge to their own authority, even their manhood. Keeping women under wraps has become their obsession. The scarf and veil represent both female submission and Islamic political solidarity, which is why Iraqi terrorists kidnapped two French journalists and demanded France rescind its ban on the headscarf in public schools.
Covered women are also symbols of fear. Three years after their liberation from the Taliban, women in Afghanistan remain shrouded in burkhas, a colorful reminder that primitive male violence rules Islamic culture from top to bottom. (Which isn’t to say that Muslim women aren’t complicit in the state of Islamic culture, or that they will embrace secularization. They’re not innocent victims so much as victimized collaborators.)
Misogyny isn’t confined to the Taliban. Time magazine ran a chilling story in a recent edition on honor killings in Iraq (females are always the victims). It described virginity-testing rooms where a female, her legs spread apart by stirrups, is inspected by three male doctors whose verdict can mean life or death. Last week in Iran a 16-year-old girl was hung in a public square for “acts incompatible with chastity.” Her male co-defendant received 100 lashes and was set free.
In Saudi Arabia, restrictions on women are so repugnant it’s hard to believe they exist in the modern world. But they do. It was just two years ago that 15 school girls were forced back into a burning building to their deaths rather than be allowed to escape improperly clothed. (At least they had been permitted to attend school. Fifty percent of Arab women are illiterate.)
It doesn’t stop there. This is a culture of female circumcisions, stoning for adultery (women only), sanctioned wife-beating, child brides (Ayatollah Khomeini took a 10 year old to his bed), disfigurement, forced marriages (often to family members), polygamous males and grossly unequal female social and legal rights. The list could go on, including restrictions on competing in sports of any kind.
In a recent column Daniel Pipes wrote that the Islamic preoccupation with “containing female sexuality” lies behind the “entire Muslim social structure.” The anxiety that women might “break loose of their restrictions and bring perdition to the community” constitutes a “key reason for Islam’s trauma in the modern era,” Pipes wrote.
In short, Muslim men, especially Arabs, suffer a form of castration anxiety en masse, a mortal phobia that Western encroachment will liberate their females and upend centuries-old male domination. That reason, as much as any other, underlies their hatred for the West and their support for Islamic fundamentalism and terror.
Unfortunately, the plight of women under Islam receives only occasional notice from Washington or the press, despite the obvious connection between Islamic extremism and female oppression and the effectiveness of the Islamists to capitalize on the issue. Washington doesn’t want to provoke the males, and the press doesn’t want to provoke the politically correct.
Our liberals, who fancy Muslims as fellow travelers in their multicultural campaign against the West, are content to ignore the mistreatment of women in Islam-- the enemy of my enemy, etc. Our women say nothing, surprisingly (and a little bewilderingly). Our feminists are busy fighting the good fight to get rich women onto men’s golf courses. And what does the war on terror have to do with keeping abortion legal anyway?
So should conservatives, mostly men, proceed unilaterally to champion women’s rights? The answer is simple: Even if we weren’t at war with this mindset it would be the right thing to do. The fact that we are at war makes it inexcusable that we don’t do more.
Understandably, some conservatives can feel conflicted. When Muslims look at America--aided by the prurient eyes of Hollywood and Western TV--they see a culture adrift in sexual excess: pornography, promiscuity, adultery, prostitution, premarital sex, out-of-wedlock childbirth, rampant divorce, public carnality, abortion, spreading homosexuality, feminism, dysfunctional and disintegrated families, etc.
We in the West see more than that, but we see that too, and a conservative might be tempted to imagine he has common cause with the Muslim. He would be making a fatal mistake. The Islamic view is self-serving and myopic. Muslims in the West are decidedly not conservatives. They’re anti-conservatives. They have no respect for Western history and tradition and no desire to see Western culture perpetuated (except as it might affect their financial situations). Islam eventually and invariably attacks the cultures it enters and, when strong enough, destroys them. That is the nature of totalitarian ideologies, and that is the history of Islam. Prepare to learn more about it in the years ahead thanks to our suicidal immigration policies.
(For the record, Muslims aren’t liberals either, despite their mutual dislike of Christianity and the West and their seeming support for liberal causes and candidates such as John Kerry. Muslims universally respond to liberals and Western liberalism, cultural and political, with disgust, rejection and violence--unless it serves their purpose to respond otherwise for the time being.)
The Islamic control of public sexuality is not a reflection of that culture’s psychological health. Just the opposite. Muslim culture has devolved into a morass of socio-pathologies--shame, cultural humiliation, persecution anxieties, inferiority complexes, insecurity, anti-Semitism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc. That is what is inciting male aggression. The Koran is simply providing doctrinal support.
Which isn’t unusual. All religions have immortalized centuries-old male pathologies in scripture and then used the scripture to excuse the pathologies in the present. Of the major faiths, however, Islam is the most blatantly chauvinistic and most fundamentalist, which is why Islamic cultures are so out of balance (and out of date).
Women who are genuinely empowered politically and socially could provide the psychological and social counterweight Islam desperately needs. They’ve endured their own private Talibans and Wahhabis for centuries and might be receptive to change. Many undoubtedly recognize that the advance of male extremism signals a worsening of their already bad lot. (Still, expect resistance. As we learned in Iraq, a familiar hell is preferable to a stranger’s liberation.)
The Bush Administration’s go-slow approach toward women’s rights is only strengthening the hand of the fundamentalists, and it’s not assuaging the vitriol of the males. It’s foolish and dangerous to defer to pathologies. Moreover, the men are going to hate us no matter what we do. Hate is their rallying cry and refuge. We won’t escape the consequences of that hatred unless we’re willing to confront it directly. Transforming it, however, has to be done from within.
This clash with Islamic culture is not so much a political war as a psycho-cultural war with political consequences. The Muslim male psyche, twisted by fear, impotency and Koranic hubris, is the real enemy. The West should engage it head-on by moving the female question to the forefront in all dealings with Muslims. We in the media should do the same.
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