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What would Mohammed do?
By Laura McClure
December 4, 2002
Two weeks ago, a Nigerian fashion writer's throwaway remark – that Mohammed
would have approved of the Miss World pageant and probably would have chosen a
wife from among the contestants – sparked riots that killed 220 people, left
thousands homeless and earned the author, Isioma Daniel, a fatwa.
By and large, the West found this imbroglio baffling, and many immediately
blamed Islam. But the religion, to those who know it, is anything but
strait-laced. Islam produced Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic and poet who
wrote verses such as, "When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds
gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your
robe." Nowhere in the Koran does it say adulterers should be stoned. Nowhere
does it say that women should be completely covered.
In the kaleidoscope that is modern Islam, there are a thousand images of women,
says Geraldine Brooks, author of "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of
Islamic Women." Turn the prism one way and you get outspoken religious
feminists in Iran and the mosque down the street. Turn it another, and you have
Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, where women are not even allowed to raise their
voices, lest men find it alluring.
Wahhabist religious schools – funded by Saudi Arabia – have managed to
disseminate extreme Islamist views into developing countries. In this way,
Brooks maintains, the Saudis are much to blame for the growing restrictions
placed on women in poorer countries around the world.
Nigeria, she says, is no exception. "In Nigeria you have a small group of
Islamist extremists who want to impose Islamic states on parts of the country
where there are significant Christian minorities who just won't take it," says
Brooks. "And so, when you throw a match on that, all the bitterness about other
things is being expressed, not just what somebody wrote in a newspaper."
In an interview with Salon, Brooks talks about the rise of what she calls "the
haters of beauty" in Islam, and discusses the fragile coexistence in the
religion of "pro-sexuality" and a fear of women gaining power.
So, how do you get from Rumi to people chanting "down with beauty"?
Well, I think the best place to start is with Mohammed himself and look at what
his attitude was, as far as we can know it, toward women and sex. And it's
pretty interesting to me. If you look at Mohammed's life, women were crucial
figures in it. His first wife was older and a wealthy woman.
He worked for her, didn't he?
That's right. He used to take camel caravans for her merchant business.
And so she was the first convert to Islam. When he first saw the angel that
called out to him, "Recite!" which is the first word of the Koran, he thought
he'd lost his mind, and he came crawling to her, it says in the texts of Islam,
and threw himself into her lap and said, "Cover me, cover me."
She was the one who convinced him that it was a true vision and that he was a
prophet, and gave him the confidence and the means then to preach the word, so
she's an incredibly important figure. While she lived she was the only wife he
had.
Now, after she dies, he starts taking multiple wives and there's a lot of
revelation in the later part of the Koran about women and what women should be
doing, and you have to read it very closely with the history to see how a lot
of this came out of the conflicts that were occurring in the early Muslim
community.
But the upshot of it was that Mohammed starting marrying women for reasons of
political alliance with tribes that the Muslims had conquered. One thing he did
was marry older widows as an example, because this was now a religion at war
and there were a lot of widows and somebody had to provide for them. And so
Mohammed, by taking widows into his household, was setting an example that he
wanted the rest of the community to follow.
But that makes for a complicated household, as we all know, and it also makes
for jealousies and bitterness and people tried to get at him through his wives.
The upshot of it was that he had a revelation decreeing that his wives should
be secluded and not seen by the rest of the community. So that was a big
change, but that wasn't for the majority of women. Other women in the Muslim
community went on going into battle and one of them saved his life in a battle
after the male warriors had fled, and she was respected for that.
So, you have to look at the roots there, and what you see in 7th century Arabia
compared to what the rest of the culture was doing is not bad. Women have a
role and they're definitely given the rights and the responsibilities of the
faith. But then after Mohammed's death, the caliph Omar, who is a well-known
misogynist, and who told Mohammed that he's too soft on his wives, starts to
make things much more difficult for women.
If you look in Christian teaching it's like what St. Paul does to women in the
early Christian community in terms of lessening their status and taking away
their rights and making them somehow "unclean." But actual Islam doesn't have
the same kind of hang-ups about sex that Christianity does. Islam is very
pro-sexuality. It says: Marry and enjoy your wives. Women are entitled to
pleasure in sex.
Mohammed actually has a couple of sayings in the hadith – which is the sayings
of the prophet – one of which I always liked, about foreplay, which is, "When
you go to your wife, do not go to them as birds do, but be slow and delaying."
And also there's the time he goes and tells off one of his friends because he's
not sleeping with his wife and is practicing celibacy and [Mohammed] says,
"That's not part of my way. If you want to follow my way, you have time for
praying and time for fasting, but you also have time to make love to your
wife."
So it's quite pro-sex, and that's the astonishing thing when you travel around
some of the more repressive countries of the Middle East, because in private,
within marriage, it's very licentious, it's very Victoria's Secret catalogs and
very glamorous and women go to a lot of trouble to be beautiful for their
husbands, but that's a very private thing and it mustn't be taken into the
public sphere.
You write [in "Nine Parts of Desire"] that Islam is one of the few religions to
include sex as one of the rewards of the afterlife.
Well, for men anyway. Although there's been some pretty interesting research on
that passage of the Koran that says the word "virgin" is mistranslated and it
should say "white raisin." Which is going to leave a lot of people very
disappointed.
Oh, absolutely. So when did things start to change?
It starts to change when Islam moves out of 7th century Arabia, it starts to
change with Omar, and then as the religion moves into other cultures that are
repressive of women it almost invariably adopts the repressive customs.
Mesopotamia and the Persians were into the seclusion of elite women. If you
were an aristocrat, you would never go out without being completely covered, if
you went out at all. In fact, in Mesopotamia, if you were a slave you had to go
uncovered, and if you were a slave who covered yourself you would be punished
for doing that, because that was aping your betters. They had this notion that
elite women [should be] secluded women, and that kind of meshed with the idea
that seclusion had been ordained for the prophet's wives. And so it became the
norm that Muslim women were supposed to be secluded to some extent if you could
afford it in the household, or if you couldn't do that, then at least covered.
So that's where that came from, rather than from within the faith itself.
And then, tragically, Islam arrived in Egypt – in the 8th century, I think –
and the hideous custom of genital mutilation for women, which has come down the
Nile from stone age Central Africa and become very much a part of Egyptian
custom, then gets incorporated in Islamic custom. And it doesn't travel
backward into the Arabian Peninsula countries, but as Islam travels forward
into Southeast Asia, that custom goes with it, as if it's part of the teachings
of Islam.
And the stoning of adulterers?
The Koran does not proclaim stonings. You're supposed to shut her up in a room
alone, that's supposed to be the punishment. The stonings – I'm not sure what
the origin of that was. It was certainly in the old Hebrew tradition that you
would stone adulterers, and Mohammed had a lot to do with the Jewish
communities in Arabia, so it may have come into the Islamic practice that way.
But basically, in Islamic law – the sexual part of Islamic law – it's almost
impossible to get a conviction if you're doing it the right way. You have to
have four male witnesses to actual penetration, and you can imagine the number
of times when that would be the case. And if you don't have four witnesses
you're not even supposed to bring the charge, and you can be flogged for
bringing a charge you can't prove. So, the fact that it happens at all is a
distortion, because it's not supposed to.
Basically what progressive Islamic scholars will say is that the prohibition is
there to keep social order, to show that it's important, but the fact that it's
essentially not prosecutable under Islamic law is supposed to be a balance to
this. And also there are so many outs – it's not a death penalty matter if
you're not married; it's only a death penalty matter if you have a legitimate
way of satisfying your sexual needs and you don't take that way and you do this
instead.
But these things aren't widely known, I think, even by people who support the
Islamic scholars in some of the more undeveloped parts of the Muslim world.
It largely sounds like Islam was much more progressive and pro-women several
centuries ago than now.
Well, it depends where you mean, because when you talk about Islam now you're
talking about a billion people, living in every kind of circumstance you can
imagine. So if you talk about Islam in Malaysia, there are women police chiefs
there, and in Indonesia the president is a woman, so where are you talking
about when you say "Islam now"?
We tend to jump immediately to the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, etc., and not the
mosque down the street. Because "Islam now," I can tell you, at the mosque near
where I live has some pretty red-hot women's activists as key figures there. So
it's not a monochrome picture at all.
Sure, but there are a lot of people out there who took one look at the riots in
Nigeria, people being burned alive over a beauty pageant, and said, "This is a
religion that hates women."
I know. It's easy to come to that conclusion. But I think we all have to look
deeper these days and try to understand a bit more.
I think a place to start is with Islam in America and to get to know our own
Muslim community a lot better than we do, because the interesting thing is that
we don't usually see Islam in a democracy. We see Islam in all kinds of
tyrannies and despotic countries and we think that that's the face of the
faith.
In the United States, it's the first time there's been a significant Muslim
population really feeling part of a democracy. I guess you could say in
England, but because of the way English society is more closed to outsiders and
immigrants, it's going to take more generations there than here.
But if you go to an American mosque, in most cases you'll find an incredibly
multicultural scene; you'll find people who have origins in all corners of the
globe. And actually, nowadays a Muslim in America is more than twice as likely
to be African-American as they are to be Arab in origin. So it's pretty
interesting place.
Because people have come from all kinds of cultural traditions, they have to
practice a religion that they can all agree on, and you find that these
extremes are very quickly brushed away in the need to get back to the essence
of the faith. There's an overemphasis, I think, on the fact that women have to
be the responsible ones in terms of containing their behavior so that society
doesn't disintegrate into this orgy of sexuality that the Saudi Arabians
particularly fear.
Why do you think there's so much fear, especially there?
Well, that comes out of the Bedouin Arab notion that male honor is dependent on
female behavior. This is something that's mixed up with Islam but it's not of
Islam, it's from the desert culture. And the idea is that your honor depends on
the women of your name – your sisters, your mothers, your daughters – not your
wife, interestingly, she's her father's and brother's problem. So if there's a
hint of a suggestion that they're misbehaving sexually, you're cooked, man, and
the only thing you can do about it is get rid of them. Kill them, to get your
honor back. There's nothing else you can do.
Tell me about Wahhabism.
It's the most distorted view of Islam. It's really joyless. It's so austere
that it denies any kind of human pleasure – no music, no beauty. They really
are the haters of beauty. So austere that when you bury somebody in Saudi
Arabia you mustn't even mark the grave. So a graveyard in Saudi Arabia is just
a fenced area of sand, with no markers whatsoever. And the austerity extends to
men as well. It's total asceticism, really. Life as a complete restriction. And
I don't think that any sensible reading of Islamic texts can bring you to that
conclusion, because Mohammed was a really warm man and a passionate man who
really loved his wives and made no bones about it. He was not some kind of
person who preached that life should have no pleasure in it.
How did it get so distorted?
I guess Abdul Wahab must have been one of these charismatic preachers, like Jim
Jones, who can lead people to act against their own interests and against their
own rational thought. And then, of course, he had a lot of followers and they
helped the first king of Saudi Arabia to the throne, and the quid pro quo for
that was that the kingdom had to follow his teachings.
In these countries where you have stonings, these really extreme practices, why
do you think that occurs? Why are women considered so threatening in those
areas?
I don't know why in those areas and not other areas. I didn't go to Afghanistan
under the Taliban so my only experience with this really is in Saudi Arabia.
Iran, even though there are lot of restrictions on women, there weren't
anywhere near as many as there were in Saudi Arabia. I really can't answer that
question of why in one place and not another, except to look back at the
cultural history and what was the situation for women in pre-Islamic times and
try to draw some conclusions from that.
Do you think a situation like what happened in Nigeria is possibly a reaction
to the Western sexualization of entertainment?
No. I mean, Africa is pretty sexual too – we didn't invent this. No, I think
Nigeria's own culture is pretty hot sexually and I think you have there a lot
of intercommunal tensions. You have a place that's been incredibly misgoverned,
that's had to put up with some unbelievably corrupt and cruel military regimes,
and there's not a great sense of Nigeria – Nigeria as a place, Nigeria as a
nationality. It tends to be very much this tribal group and that tribal group,
and Christians vs. Muslims, us vs. them. And I think it's that lack of cohesion
that makes any explosion likely to flare up a whole round of other
intercommunal tensions.
By the way, did you find the remark [in the Nigerian newspaper] blasphemous?
That Mohammed would have married ... it's not for me to say what's blasphemous
to a Muslim. I think it was probably pushing the argument too far; I haven't
read the whole article. The fact is, Mohammed did appreciate female beauty;
there's no doubt about that. Some of his wives were supposedly very
remarkable-looking women. Whether he would have wanted to marry somebody who
was displaying that beauty in public would probably be the tricky issue.
Because the hadith of how he got a couple of his wives after the battle, when
the Muslim army had proven victorious, he would go and throw his cloak over the
women that he wanted to take for a wife, and that was the sign to all his
troops that she was the prophet's. But, of course, he also, famously, sent home
a woman who didn't want to be married to him, so he never, as far as we know,
forced his attentions on anybody.
I think that at the bottom of it, the distinction is between the public world
and the private world. And the huge difference between the West and orthodox
Islam is that orthodox Islam says "private is private, and you in the West have
lost your way. You don't know what's private anymore, you use your daughters'
bodies to sell cars, and this is not a good thing." And a lot of feminists
would agree with them.
There are so many contradictions between what the Koran says and these places
where you get a completely different interpretation. It's baffling.
I know. I think that's what happens when a religion falls into the hands of
misguided teachers. The thing that makes me optimistic is in Iran, after the
revolution, women who would never have been able to have a public life under
the Shah because their families would have seen it as a godless system, were
allowed to get educated. In fact it was required, and literacy shot up into the
high 90 percent for women.
Now you see the younger generation coming up – they are very self-confident,
and they can't be challenged Islamically, they know their stuff. They've read
the Koran, they've won prizes for reciting it, and so you have these women who
are respected teachers who say, "This isn't what it says, and here's what it
does say, and this is an Islamic state so you have to live by what it says."
They've managed to actually change a lot just through doing that, and nobody
can really argue with it because it's not some secular politician trying to
pass a law. They don't have to pass a law, because it's written in the Koran.
So they've managed to achieve a lot in Iran, in terms of getting a better deal
for women legally. And I think that women's literacy has been the key to that.
And also the fact that in Iran women do have a public voice. It doesn't exclude
them from the public sphere.
It seems like there's more extremism now than there was 50 years ago. Is that
an accurate assessment?
Yes, and I think that the oil wells have fed a lot of that, because the Saudis
have funded so many religious schools in the poor world that preach this kind
of really diabolical brand of Wahhabite Islam. I think they have to take a huge
share of responsibility for the growth of extremism. Not all of it, certainly,
that would be ridiculous to say, but they've certainly fanned the flames. And
the fact that most Islamic countries are unfortunately so badly governed and so
repressively governed.
You write in "Nine Parts of Desire" that in poor countries, places where the
men feel they're not in control, that the first thing they do is start to
control the women.
Yes. If you have an Islamic revolution, think about it. Getting rid of bank
interests, that's really going to screw up the economy, that's hard to do. It's
Islamically correct to do it, to get rid of interests on loans, but much easier
to order women to wear a head scarf, and then everybody looks at a picture of
your country and it looks very Islamic. That's an easy thing to do, so that's
why getting the women veiled is one of the first tactics of the Islamists.
How do these issues get resolved?
Well, I don't think we've seen any of them get resolved. But I'm hoping that
the American Muslim community will have a louder voice in the Middle Eastern
region. For example, there's a really good magazine that comes out of Seattle
called Sisters, and that gets translated into Arabic and sent back to the
Middle East and so forth and it's teaching a much more tolerant form of Islam.
It's actually pointing out to women what their rights are in Islamic teaching,
and it's very well done and very scholarly and accessible and all those good
things. So I think that as the American Muslim community grows in confidence
that will be one impetus for change.
I think there is a lot of potential in the kind of Islamic feminism that the
Iranian women pioneered – in terms of quite religious women trying to do
reformation work on the religion as it's understood in their country, to the
betterment of women. Apart from that it's pretty hard to be optimistic these
days. It's going to be a long grind.
What I don't think works very well is Western feminists wagging their finger in
the faces of Arab monarchs. I just don't think that's effective. I think it has
to come from within Islam, and I think that the best thing Western feminists
can do is to support Muslim women and listen to them. And if they say, "It's
important to us that our daughters have the right to wear a head scarf to
school without being teased about it," then try to figure out a way of having a
bit of consciousness raising for our kids in school so that they don't tease
girls about that, and then try and see the benefit for ourselves of having a
range of approaches to teenage sexuality available for our own daughters.
A lot of us don't have a problem that our daughters might be in school with
somebody who's wearing a bare midriff and a bellybutton ring and has 10
boyfriends, but we do have a problem that she's in a class with a girl who
wears a head scarf and doesn't date. Now that's pretty cockeyed to me, because
it seems you would want her to be able to make her way with a whole lot of
options in front of her.
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