Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (25 page)

The reform program of a leader who makes this kind of analysis of his nation’s problems is very simple: box women in and ban wine!

Curtailing women’s freedom to move about, thus immobilizing half of the
umma,
far from being a negative, fits in comfortably with any Muslim sovereign’s reform measures. This theory of crisis and crisis solutions constantly recurs in Muslim history in the Muslim West and in the East. According to al-Murakushi, one of the most brilliant historians of the thirteenth century, women’s emergence into the streets and onto the political scene destroyed the powerful Berber dynasty of the Almoravids, whose western empire extended from Spain to North Africa. Al-Murakushi depicts the last sovereign of the dynasty as powerless before the rising tide of religious opponents, who proposed like the fundamentalists of today that the state adopt a policy of conformity and unity. They were called
al-muwahhidin
(those who unify). Animosity toward women was a key part of their propaganda. Al-Murakushi summarizes the crisis thus:

The Almoravids, who were from the Sahara, where nomadic life still gives women a prominent role in the survival of the group, had a more respectful attitude toward women. These Almoravid women, like Zainab, the wife of Yusif Ibn Tashfin, the founder of the dynasty, played an important part in politics.

Seven centuries later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the extraordinary writer Ahmad Amin, author of the trilogy
Fajr al- Islam
(Dawn of Islam),
Duha al-Islam
(Morning of Islam), and
Zuhr al-Islam
(High Noon of Islam), a monumental attempt to synthesize fifteen hundred years of history, repeats the same refrain, maintaining that time and again women have been the gravediggers of dynasties: from the moment they became visible in society, the dynasty and Muslim order foundered. The fundamentalist opposition movements that extol the veil are reactivating this age-old connection.

It is these centuries of misogyny, cultivated as tradition in the corridors of caliphal despotism, that Muslim women are now challenging. They are compelling the faithful, baffled by the cosmic changes that assail them from every direction, to do what just three decades ago was considered utterly farcical: to regard women as equals. They are demanding the renunciation of the ideal of the homogeneous city, carefully divided into two hierarchical spaces, where only one sex manages politics and monopolizes decision making. The emergence of women means the emergence of the stranger within the city. It means a painful but necessary learning process for the majority in a society where
al-hisn,
“the citadel,” which supervises and controls, is still the law.
Al-muhsana
is one of the legal terms for a married woman; she is protected by her marriage, which is like a
hisn.
The civil codes reproduce in every article the picture of a family in the image of the caliphal palace, where
ta
^c
a
is required and the will of the leader overrides that of all others.

The battle of the 1990s will be a battle over the civil codes, which women challenge as contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and which the authoritarian states defend as sacred. By propelling women out of the house into the streets through education and paid work, modernity has perverted the ideal homogeneous city, pushing it into dangerous territory where unmasked, irreverent women speak an unknown language. The equality they demand, say the supporters of caliphal, despotic Islam, is a foreign, imported idea. These women are traitors, allies of the West and its philosophies, like the Mu
^c
tazila and rationalists of yesteryear who tried to import Greek ideas.

Women have been, are, and will continue to be the targets of intimidation and violence, whether from regimes in power or opposition movements that hark back to the past. It happened in Pakistan in the 1980s; it is still going on in Iran; and today, at the beginning of the 1990s, it is happening in Algeria. Tomorrow the same thing can happen elsewhere. The reason is simple: women are the only ones who publicly assert their right to self-affirmation as individuals, and not just through words but also through actions (e.g., unveiling and going out).
⁹
Today they constitute one of the most dynamic components of the developing civil society. Although up to the present they are still politically unorganized, they have succeeded in infiltrating one of the citadels which was long forbidden to them: formal education. Education, with high school and university diplomas, is women’s new acquisition. Until now all that women were taught to do, from housework to carpet weaving, was devalued and poorly paid.

One thing that the West, always fascinated by the veiled woman,
¹⁰
knows little of and the imams know only too well, is that women are certainly no longer cooped up in harems, nor are they veiled and silent. They have massively infiltrated forbidden territory, notably the universities. If in Iran the imams keep close watch on women, it is because women constituted 19 percent of the teaching staff of universities in 1986, while the rate in West Germany for the same year was 17 percent.
¹¹
There is no other explanation for the fact that one of the first acts of Imam Khomeini as chief of state in 1980 was to promulgate the law on the
hi jab,
making the veil obligatory for women who worked in government institutions.
¹²
The relentless battle of the fundamentalists, whether in the government or the opposition, doesn’t target just any woman. One precise category is aimed at: middle-class women who have had access to education and valorizing salaried jobs. The enemy to be fought is not the female proletariat, the women wearing the traditional djellaba, who are worn out by long bus trips (which they often must take at night in order to be on time) to and from work, and who are underpaid and without union protection. This proletariat interests neither the opposition forces nor the regimes based on the sacred. Their obsession is with the woman who enjoys and exercises all the visible privileges of her modernity: she is bareheaded, with windblown hair, she drives a car, and she has identity papers and a passport in her own name in her handbag. The woman who is so disturbing is not she who is content just to be listed on the family register, who allows her husband to vote for her; rather, it is she who has gained legitimate access to the university and, from the height of her new academic
minbar
(mosque pulpit), preaches, writes, educates, and protests. It is she who is the target of the fundamentalists, from the most princely to the most popular.

It was women like this who organized the Women’s Action Forum and went into the streets to agitate against the military regime of Zia al-Haq in Pakistan. It was university women like these who surged into the streets in front of the presidential palace in Algiers to demand democracy. They were the first to unmask the despotism behind the socialism of the FLN (National Liberation Front), which under the burnous of chivalry was posing as “revolutionary fighter.” Proletarian women may not be participating in such protests, but their burdens are heavier to bear, what with their many children and the lack of child-care facilities, as well as the long waiting lines for buses. They come along when they can, but it is certainly not they who constitute the leaders. In both cases, that of Pakistan and Algeria, women went into the streets in the last decade to challenge the
shari
^c
a
as administered by officialdom, risking being condemned as infidels. And in both cases the leaders of the movements are none other than university graduates who in 1984 were already more than 25 percent of the teachers in higher education in Pakistan and 24 percent in Algeria.
¹³

To understand the intensity of today’s violent feelings against the desire of women to liberate themselves, we must recall the keenness with which women threw themselves into education, like drowning persons into an unhoped-for lifeboat. In less than two generations, since the Second World War, they have laid siege to the academic world. The modern university has been more welcoming and less hostile to women. Recognition should be given to the crucial role played by progressive intellectuals, who were the first to help and support them. Contrary to what one might think, the progressive Arab man has always seen the problem of his relationship to women as central to his desire for change; in Morocco the men of the Left were women’s accomplices and confidants in their struggle. Thanks to them, things began to change and the university became a place of hope. For women of my generation higher education was regarded not as a luxury, but as a chance for survival and escape from the widespread contempt for women that characterized the traditional ordering of society a few decades ago. In the 1960s women could neither engage in business nor launch political careers. Only the university and education provided a legitimate way out of mediocrity. Women did not study to be nurses or nurse’s aides; subordinate jobs re-created the domestic scene. Therefore the aim was medical school. In 1987 50 percent of all medical students in Tunisia were women, 37 percent in Syria, and 30 percent in Algeria.
¹⁴

The rapidity of change in intersex relations was dizzying if we take access to the university as the index. In Japan, that other traditional and very conservative society, despite the push into the scientific and technological domain after World War II, by 1987 only 10 percent of university professors were women. Even in Egypt, where the virulent fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood is equaled only by the agitation of Egyptian feminists, it was 28 percent in 1986, higher than in the United States (24 percent in 1980) and France (23 percent in 1987).
¹⁵

Fundamentalism was born in Egypt at the same time as feminism, and the two have never ceased to exist side by side. For a North African like me, whose mother was illiterate, attending conferences in Egypt is always a renewed surprise: the heroines of feminism are not young things in miniskirts. They are women the age of grandmothers, gray-haired and with quavering voices, but whose remarks are full of vitriol. The Ikhwan al-Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood, came into being in the years 1928 to 1936. At that same time, the Egyptian feminist Huda Sha
^c
rawi was between 1923 and 1947 (the date of her death) the leader of one of the most radical feminist movements in the world, even by today’s standards, a movement that asserted respect for the individual as its basic article of faith.
¹⁶
In 1920 Egyptian women had already created an important section within the Wafd party and had gained the support of a significant segment of public opinion.

The animosity of the fundamentalists toward feminists in the Arab world is due to the fact that there are two groups that have profited from modern education: men from the countryside and lower classes, and city women of the middle and upper classes. These two groups make up the new middle class that was created in recent decades through free state education. Conflict between the two is natural; it is one of the new forms of class struggle that has developed in the very dynamic Arab world. The interests of these two groups are different, and it is to be expected that each struggles to impose its world vision. The problem is that the fundamentalists act with the complicity of the state, while women struggle alone, with no protection even from the divine—for the fundamentalists claim a monopoly on speaking in the name of God. What we are seeing today is a claim by women to their right to God and the historical tradition. This takes various forms. There are women who are active within the fundamentalist movements and those who work on a reinterpretation of the Muslim heritage as a necessary ingredient of our modernity. Our liberation will come through a rereading of our past and a reappropriation of all that has structured our civilization. The mosque and the Koran belong to women as much as do the heavenly bodies. We have a right to all of that, to all its riches for constructing our modern identity.

Reducing women fundamentalists to obedient bystanders is to badly misunderstand the dynamics of the religious protest movement. We have seen the importance of concepts like
haqq
(right) and
^c
adl
(justice). Even if at the beginning women recruits were there to be manipulated, in many Muslim countries today—for instance, Iran and Algeria—we see the emergence of a virulent feminist leadership within the fundamentalist parties. We don’t have to fall victim to stereotyping. We must remain vigilant and keep open, analytical minds, as have the Iranian sociologist Nayereh Tohidi and the whole group of women experts who recently attended the conference “Identity, Politics, and Women.” Their conclusion was that even within the ranks of the fundamentalists, feminist challenge is emerging and causing surprises.
¹⁷