Talking from her home in New York’s East Village, she explains why, since the Arab Spring, female genital mutilation is on the rise in Egypt again; how growing up with a mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness enabled her to better comprehend Muslim fundamentalism; and why more understanding between the Islamic world and the West is essential.
You’re right. September 11th does feel in many ways like the start of this whole journey. I hope this doesn’t sound corny, but for me and a lot of Americans my age, September 11th was this moment where the world as we thought we understood it, the adult world which we were so excited to be entering, suddenly seemed to vanish before us.
I was 23. I had spent a year and a bit after I graduated from college working at an English language daily in Hanoi, the Vietnam News. I’d come back to New York and spent a couple of months looking for jobs. Everybody was living with roommates and meeting new people, going out for drinks in the evenings, chatting about all this exciting stuff they're doing. Suddenly all that was gone. One of my Princeton classmates was killed in the Twin Towers. And a compulsion to figure out what had happened to her was what drew me to the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is a complicated country. Your views and freedoms as a woman depend very much on what city you come from and which community within that city. The girls I describe were among the most conservative. They were almost competitively pious with one another. [Laughs] They would attack each other if one of them seemed to be suggesting something that, by Saudi standards, was a bit daring. They particularly attacked a girl they perceived as being too sympathetic to what I represented as a Westerner. But as I got to know them a bit better, I did feel they were challenging the status quo to the extent that it was possible. Most of them studied law, and some of them had had to argue with their families pretty forcefully in order to be allowed to do so. [Discoverhow Saudi women are redefining the boundaries of public life.]
A lot of Saudis would argue that the reason they get young people married very early is because it is important to have an appropriate outlet for those feelings. Courtship, in the way we understand it, doesn't exist. But I met as many happily married Saudi women as I know happily married Western women. So I came to feel agnostic about arranged marriage.
Officially, Islam allows women to choose whom they marry. In Saudi Arabia, the woman gives her assent at what is called the shawfa, which literally means “viewing.” The prospective groom, his father, older brothers, and uncles come to the girl's father's home to propose. It's the first time that a properly brought-up Saudi woman will ever have been seen by a man outside her immediate family. And many of the young women I interviewed told me that it is very difficult for them to say no. At the same time, I kept hearing from women who had become engaged these incredibly romantic narratives built around the couple of minutes that they had seen their future husband for the first time.
When you're reporting on the Arab world, you're mostly talking about crisis journalism: stories of war or political upheavals. Those stories are very important and they're going to continue to dominate our news coverage and our understanding of the region. But I also came to feel that they can have a distorting effect. Everyday life, even in a country in crisis, is often pretty normal. During even the most dramatic moments on Tahrir Square, Egyptians a few blocks away were scarcely aware of what was going on.
So I wanted to show how individual decisions matter: how millions of young women making a slightly braver choice or stretching themselves a bit more or waiting to get married until after finishing their master’s degree—these small gestures have an aggregate effect that can be far-reaching. I thought for a long time that I had this additional sympathy for the position of many of these girls because I was wrestling with many of the same contradictions. But I think it also affected the questions I asked, especially my willingness to keep asking questions when the subject of belief came up.
I think reporters often get very uncomfortable when someone in the Middle East says, “You can't possibly understand what it’s like to wear the hijab.” Many westerners hear this and think, “Oh gosh, I'm not a Muslim, I can't talk about this.” So I think my background gave me the ability to question and try to understand religion, which is crucial. Sometimes I explicitly used my own experiences. If someone said, “It's impossible for you Westerners to understand us, when you're all partying and sleeping with your boyfriends at 13; what do you know of our lives and challenges?” I really pushed back on that.
The literal meaning is chaos. But I've only ever heard it used to refer to sexual temptation. I've spoken to sociologists who argue that this is part of nomadic culture: that, when you are living in a very harsh environment, you have to police your bloodline very carefully.
I'm not a sociologist. But I have rarely seen a book about gender in Islam that doesn't refer to this idea. I think Muhammad's later teachings, or later revelations, which came at the time when he had many wives himself, are much harder on women. I'm not a Koranic scholar and I've not done the primary source work that allows me to speak about this with a great deal of confidence, but a number of writers have described how, as a much older man with a number of younger wives and concubines he was struggling to control, that this was when these revelations restricting women started to come.
Today, there's a lot of dispute about the degree to which you can reform Islam. Some Muslims, especially in the West, are now saying, let's look at these teachings in their context, and not take them quite so literally. They would not say they encourage it. But they effectively protect men who kill their daughters, if they use honor as an excuse. Zahra was a young teenage girl from northeastern Syria who was kidnapped and raped. When her family discovered this, they set about trying to figure out how they could kill her to “wash away the shame” to their family honor.
Because she was raped, Zahra was interviewed by the police, who realized that her family was going to kill her because she was no longer a virgin. So they put her in a prison for juvenile delinquents for her protection. This is the only place they could put her, as independent shelters for women do not exist. But her family managed to get her sprung from that prison/shelter, by convincing the administrators they were going to marry her to a cousin. A month after the marriage, she was murdered by her brother, a brother she had previously been very close to and loved enormously. He went unpunished.
This just horrified me. So I went and talked to the administrators at the shelter and the girls at the shelter. I was basically told that no girl ever expects it: that even girls whose families had openly threatened to kill them or made attempts on their lives can't believe that the fathers and brothers they love so dearly could turn on them like this—even though they grow up in a society where young women whose honor has been “tarnished” constantly disappear.
Unfortunately yes, though I want to note that we're talking just about Egypt. The context in each country is very different. But in Egypt, laws with which the Mubarak government was strongly associated—a kind of nationalized feminism—were blamed on Hosni Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, who is half-British. As a result, she's not considered fully Egyptian. Many Egyptians say, “She doesn't understand Egyptian society and she influenced him [Mubarak] to make laws that we Egyptians are not comfortable with, like better custody rights for women.”
These laws benefitting women are referred to as “Suzanne's Law,” which is a term of derision. So, despite the fact that female and male protesters were in Tahrir Square together, there is a feeling that we're finally going to get rid of these “foreign” policies. Unfortunately, one of these is FGM [Female Genital Mutilation], which was banned under Mubarak. Since the Arab spring, there has seen a resurgence, though, which shows the paradoxical effects of progress.
I think it depends on whose standards of free and equal you're talking about. It also depends which society you're talking about. I think for this to be universally true there is going to have to be a bit more willingness on the part of Islamic scholars and Western governments to engage on issues of religious law. We have such a strong tradition of separating church and state, which I think is a good thing. But I do think we have to find ways to seriously engage with some of the more conservative religious scholars.
But I also tried very carefully in this book to write something that might help young men and women in the region ask more questions and feel more sympathy with where we're coming from, as Westerners.
_________________
Reference:
Worrall, Simon. 2016. “How Muslim Women Are Challenging the Status Quo”. National Geographic News. Posted: January 31, 2016. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160131-islam-muslim-arab-women-ngbooktalk/
No comments:
Post a Comment