A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (35 page)

The politics of the body had even more deadly consequences in those areas of Africa, Asia and the Middle East where the influence of the West had been felt since the nineteenth century. But paradoxically, it was frequently because of the West’s attempt to impose more progressive and liberal values that challenged indigenous practices. In the wake of the Second World War, opposition to colonialism began to mount. Often, that opposition took the form of defending customs and traditions that the colonialists attacked. Unfortunately, these were frequently customs that were injurious to women or that expressed indigenous misogynistic beliefs. Britain’s efforts to prohibit sati, or widow burning, in India had created intense hostility to its rule (see
Chapter 6
). In the 1950s, in Kenya, the British government’s attempt to ban the tribal practice of clitoridectomy led to a rise in support for the anti-colonial movement known as the Mau Mau. Independence was achieved in 1962, and the practice of female genital mutilation continues.

It does so too in Egypt where it was condemned at a UN conference on Population Control held in Cairo in September 1994 as a violation of the basic human right to bodily integrity. After two little girls bled to death following botched clitoridectomies in 1996, President Mubarak’s government banned it. But popular support for mutilating girls remains strong. ‘Am I supposed to stand around while my daughter chases men?’ Said Ibrahim, a farmer, was quoted as saying. ‘So what if some infidel doctor says it is unhealthy? Does that make it true? I would have circumcised my daughter even if they passed a death sentence against it. You know what honour is in Egypt. If a woman is more passive it is in her interest, it is in her father’s interest, and in her husband’s interest.’
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A seventeen-year-old teenager agreed. ‘Banning it would make women wild like those in America,’ he was reported as saying.
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It is estimated that between 80 per cent and 97 per cent of girls have undergone some form of genital mutilation in Egypt. About 100,000,000 women worldwide have suffered the procedure, and 2,000,000 more undergo it each year, including 40,000 in immigrant communities in the United States, according to the Egyptian feminist Nawal Assaad.
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However, the most momentous opposition to Western influence manifested itself in the Middle East in opposition to governmental efforts to outlaw the Islamic practice of veiling women.

Misogyny is rarely noticed as a historical catalyst, yet it has played a sometimes profound role in helping to determine the course human affairs would take. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the long and bloody sequence of events that led to the September 11 attacks on the United States began forty years earlier in a college in Afghanistan when an angry male student hurled acid in the face of a young woman student because she was not wearing the veil. His name was Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, and he would go on to help foment a rebellion against Afghanistan’s reforming government that would first draw the Soviets and eventually the Americans into a brutal war against Moslem fundamentalists in which the US is engaged to this day.

From the nineteenth century onwards, when Western influence on the Arab world began to challenge Moslem customs, the practice of veiling women has been at the centre of a contentious debate involving Westerners, Islamic reformers, Islamic nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists. It has frequently provoked revolution, violence and bloodshed. The West in its drive to dominate and control Arab nations held up veiling as proof of the backwardness and inherent inferiority of Islamic cultures. In response, those who fought against the colonial powers often seized on the custom as fundamental to the preservation of a Moslem identity as it confronted the overwhelming political, economic and cultural might of the West. Meanwhile, women, whose welfare and status was supposedly at the heart of this battle, were ordered to veil or unveil at the dictate of whichever tendency had achieved hegemony. The West’s concern for their treatment has usually not been allowed to interfere with the more important goal of domination.

And always behind this and other arguments looms the question of Islam’s inherent misogyny. It would indeed be a miracle if a religion so closely related as Islam is to both Christianity and Judaism did not exhibit powerful misogynistic tendencies. Islam after all accepts the Biblical tradition as one of divine revelation, including its misogynistic stories about women. The Fall of Man myth is as important in Islam as it is in Judaism and Christianity as the key to explaining woman’s lower status.

While early Islam accorded women some rights that were
denied them under Christianity, such as the right to inherit property, Mohammed (570–632) adopted other practices including polygamy, seclusion and veiling, that adversely affected how women were viewed and treated. In the years following the death of Mohammed, as Arab armies swept as conquerors into the Middle East and North Africa, women were removed from public life, segregation was instituted during prayers and stoning introduced as a punishment for adultery. At the same time, Islamic civilization was reaching a peak of intellectual, scientific and artistic splendour. It preserved the learning of the Ancient World and transmitted it back to the barbarians who had triumphed in the West after the fall of Rome. Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer and translator of the Arabic erotic masterpiece,
The Perfumed Garden,
described Baghdad, which stood at the heart of this culture, as ‘the centre of human civilization, which was then confined to Greece and Arabia, and the metropolis of an empire exceeding in extent the widest limits of Rome . . . essentially a city of pleasure, a Paris of the ninth century.’
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As in the
Kamasutra
of India (see
Chapter 6
), woman in
The Perfumed Garden
is celebrated for the beauty of her sexuality, and the book, like the earlier Indian and Chinese works on eroticism, is a guide to achieving sexual satisfaction for both men and women. ‘Praise be given to God,’ it begins, ‘who has placed man’s greatest pleasure in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyment to woman.’
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This unashamed and explicit recognition of woman’s sexuality puts Islam, erotically speaking, closer to the Eastern tradition than to Christianity, with its consistent repression of the body.

But it would not be the first time that such recognition as well as respect for learning and the arts coexisted alongside intellectual, spiritual and social contempt for women. From
the eighth century onwards, the word for ‘woman’ became synonymous with the word for ‘slave’. However, Islam absorbed many local customs and traditions as it expanded, so that scholars argue that it is difficult to isolate misogynistic or discriminatory practices that are specific to Islamic cultures. For instance, polygamy, veiling and seclusion were long-established features of the higher echelons of Byzantine society.
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The Islamic medieval theologian Ghazali (1058–1111) expressed the same familiar misogyny as his Christian and Jewish counterparts when he stated: ‘It is a fact that all the trials, misfortunes, and woes which befall men come from women.’ He lists the eighteen punishments women must suffer as a result of Eve’s disobedience. Among them are menstruation, childbirth, and pregnancy. But he is careful to go beyond the biological to include in the list purely social customs deeply prejudicial to women, such as ‘not having control over her own person . . . her liability to be divorced and inability to divorce . . . its being lawful for a man to have four wives, but for a woman to have [only] one husband . . . the fact that she must stay secluded in the house . . . the fact that she must keep her head covered inside the house . . . that two women’s testimony [has to be] set against the testimony of one man . . . the fact that she must not go out of the house unless accompanied by a near relative.’
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By making a social custom an expression of the will of God, Ghazali gives it the power of religious sanction. Some but not all of these customs have been traced back to Mohammed. But Ghazali represents a conservative consolidation of Islamic thinking about women. One leading Arabic historian can name only one major Moslem scholar, Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), as being sympathetic to women, and calls him ‘probably unique’.
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With the decline of Arab power, and the growing penetration of the Middle
East by Europe and then the United States, such practices – or ‘punishments’ as Ghazali has it – represented the lowly status and cruel treatment of Middle Eastern women. They became part of the propaganda war that was and is being waged between the West and its Islamic opponents

Contradictions, inconsistencies and at times downright duplicity have ever been a part of the West’s engagement with Moslem nations. The British, who occupied Egypt in 1882 condemned veiling as part of the backwardness from which they were trying to rescue Egyptians, yet at the same time cut funding for education for girls.
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Efforts at economic reform in Iran in 1951 fell victim to Cold War rivalries when the CIA and Britain orchestrated a coup that restored dictatorial power to the Shah. Egypt gained independence from Britain in 1953 after a political uprising in which women played a prominent role. It brought President Gamel Abdel Nasser (1918–70) to power. In 1956, he granted a limited form of suffrage to women. The same year, the British, French and Israelis invaded Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Though he became increasingly dictatorial, Nasser remained a figure of popular esteem because he was viewed as someone who stood up to Western aggression. The opposite was true of the Shah of Iran. After 1951, Islamic fundamentalists saw his modernizing programme, which included banning the veil, as a sell-out to the Western powers. This provoked a huge demonstration of women in Tehran in 1979 demanding the right to wear the veil. The same year, the Islamic revolution in Iran put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power. He imposed severe restrictions on women, removing them from public life as he pursued his aim of reversing the gains made under the Shah’s reign. The new laws included a punishment of seventy-four lashes for defying the new dress code requiring them to be veiled at all times when in public. They reduced Iranian women to ‘the
status of privatized sex-objects required to be at the disposal of their husbands at all times’.
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Women accused of violating the restrictions were exposed to male violence and gangs of fundamentalists attacked them in the street if they were judged inadequately covered. The legal system was overhauled and became a codified misogyny. Women judges were dismissed, and evidence from women witnesses was not allowed unless corroborated by men. Women were barred from attending law school. The marriageable age for a girl was dropped from eighteen to thirteen. Since the Ayatollah was an enemy of the United States, his conduct towards women was held up as an example of the barbarism of Islam and proof of the need for a strong Western deterrent in the Middle East, while it was conveniently forgotten that the West’s complicity in supporting the Shah’s dictatorship against its democratic opponents was at least partly to blame for the Islamic backlash.

Further east, in Pakistan, a similar reaction to Westernization was under way. In 1980, under the dictatorship of General Zia ul-Huq, veiling was enforced. Women were declared to be ‘the root and cause of corruption’ and working women were especially condemned for being responsible for a collapse in morality and the disintegration of the family. The new regime wanted them retired and pensioned off.
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The pronouncements have a familiar ring, echoing the propaganda of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s in its drive to force women back to their ‘proper’ sphere of domestic imprisonment. An Islamic adviser to the government advocated that women ‘should never leave the confines of their homes except in an emergency’. The state came close to abolishing rape as a crime when its expert on Islamic law argued that while women are visible in the public sphere, no man should be punished for rape. In other words, it is understandable if a man seeing a woman in public is overcome
with lust and rapes her since she has no business being seen outside her home in the first place. If rape did occur, then a woman needed four male witnesses before she could bring a case to court. Women’s testimony and that of non-Moslems are not admissible. The misogynistic bias of the court is blatant, since it has to be supposed that any woman who brings a rape charge must have been outside the control of her male guardian when attacked, which immediately puts her behaviour in a suspicious light.

Though the harsh government of General Zia is over, its misogynistic legacy lives on. In May 2002, a twenty-six-year-old woman was sentenced to death by stoning after she had brought a charge of rape against her brother-in-law. Zafran Bibi, who gave birth to a baby girl while her husband was in jail, told the court that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by his brother Jamal Khan either on the hillside behind her home in the remote mountain country of Pakistan, near the Afghan border, or in her farm when she was alone. Applying Islamic law, the judge said:

The lady stated before this court that, yes, she had committed sexual intercourse, but with the brother of her husband. This left no option to the court but to impose the highest penalty.
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Mr Khan walked free without being charged. Human rights workers said that even if the death penalty was annulled, Ms Bibi faced a term of between ten and fifteen years’ imprisonment for having illegal sex.