105 Women and the public space

I grew up in the fifties and was an adolescent in the sixties. My idea was that the world was standard ‘normal’ and that I was crazy. Because how was it otherwise possible that my reality did not correspond with how it should be? As a girl/woman I was supposed to have the same access to the ‘world’ as my male counterparts, but in reality that was not true. Public space was one example. Women filled the public space at will but in reality men dictated how women experienced their sojourn there. Men set the rules and behaved accordingly: self-serving. If women didn’t like how men behaved and complained about it, men were quick to tell them it was their fault. While walking her dog my mother was sexually assaulted by a boy of about thirteen. She went to the police. The police laughed at her and said she must have fantasized the incident. She was in the menopause for sure and would have ‘liked’ the attentions of a youth. As I wrote before it was a relief when in the sixties I started to travel in Muslim countries. There the dividing line between male and female space was clear. I didn’t mind to be condemned a perennial trespasser as a western woman in Muslim lands. It was better than unknowingly crossing boundaries that weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. It was only after I had read ‘The Feminine Mystique’ by Betty Friedan in my twenties that I realized that it was not me who was crazy it was the world I had to live in. Fatima Mernissi one of the most important Muslim feminists has made the definition of the boundaries set for women, the ‘Hudud’, and its hysterical enforcement by men the subject of her studies. In ‘Dreams of Trespass, tales of a Harem childhood’ she describes the source of her fascination: growing up in the strict confines of an urban Harem in Morocco.

104 Muslim women strike out

After The Koran, the life of Mohammed and the Hadith I went on to some Muslim philosophers, historians and the like. It was interesting stuff, but it couldn’t hold my interest till I got to the Islamic Feminists. Now that was something to get excited about. I’ve reached adulthood during the second feminist wave in the seventies. The feminism of the white, secular, educated middle classes some people called it and I think it was true. Although it didn’t feel that way when I was living it. This feministic wave petered out after some offending laws were changed and the ‘military industrial complex’ got hold of it, to express it brutally. Feminism became a dirty word once again. However it caught on in unlikely places and in different guises: with women of colour and with religiously inclined women. Ever since Modernism struck the Islamic World there have been women speaking out on misogyny in Islamic society. Among them were Nawal Al Saadawi from Egypt and Fatima Mernissi from Morocco. In the eighties with the hardening attitudes towards Islam and the heightening confusion and identity crisis within the male dominated Islamic World Muslim women also became stirred up. They wanted change but they wanted it on their own terms. They knew as no other that Islam has little to do with modern western thought. That said: they abandoned any notion that western feminism could help them. They felt they needed to go back to the essence of Islam to be able to make the leap forward. In academe they were initially supported by similar movements among Jewish and Christian women. But soon enough they were out on their own as Amina Wadud calls it fighting ‘Inside the Gender Jihad’.

103 Mohammed and women

In ‘Religion: a discovery in comics’ Dutch graphic artist and theologian Margreet de Heer compares the ‘men’ behind the five biggest world religions for their women friendly reputation. Is it really a surprise Mohammed wins hands down? And him being a ‘child molester’ according to Geert Wilders. Reading about his life and accounts in the Hadith he loved the company of women. His first wife Khadija was not only considerably older than he, she was also his employer and socially and financially superior to him. He could have resented this. Instead he let himself be tutored. They seem to have had a happy marriage. They had six children. Three girls survived to adulthood. Fatima became the best known. When Mohammed started to get revelations, he was afraid and unsure. He didn’t turn to other men for advice but to his wife. She was very supportive and so became the first Muslim. After Khadija’s death and Mohammed’s subsequent move from Mecca to Medina at the request of his mother’s people his life changed completely. There were only a few people who followed him to Medina. Among them were Abu Bakr and his small daughter Aisha. Aisha was the first child born in a Muslim household. It was fitting that she became his new wife and yes: she was only 9 when they married. In Medina he became a statesman and a warrior. His other marriages reflect that. There are many stories in the Hadith about Mohammed and his wives and the women among his companions. They are often rather funny. At least that’s my opinion. Some Muslims might find it blasphemy. In their eyes he is ‘perfect’, but I see him as a man who sometimes is bumbling and tries to get out without scratch. Mohammed also liked to have sex and cared that his women were equally happy and satisfied. And yes, he had also concubines. Mohammed was strictly Hetero and that wasn’t very common at the time. His position on women must have been so strong that it has survived all misogynist interpretations by the men who collected testimonials for the Hadith.

100 What’s going on?

After my breakfast reading of the Koran was completed I was reeling. Although one professes to be open to the unexpected and wants to be surprised one really wants to be confirmed what one always thought one knew. What I had learned from reading the Koran was something I did not expect at all. Okay, I was never negative towards Islam and I didn’t share Geert Wilders’ prediction of ‘our culture’ loosing out against a normative, violent and invasive religion. Had I read a different Koran from the one he (or rather his Koran advisor Hans Jansen) portrayed in his short film ‘Fitna’? Or had poor N.J. Dawood the Jewish Arabist from Bagdad been so enamoured with ‘his’ Koran that his willingness ‘to increase the understanding and pleasure for the uninitiated’ had won it over a straightforward translation? Had I been blinded by my ‘Lesbian Feminist’ viewpoint, my historical interpretation and my intra-textual endeavours? I had expected writings that would confirm what I had seen everywhere in the Islamic world. I had taken for granted that the Koran would be a Divine acknowledgement of male superiority over women and allocate a subservient role to women in all things starting with religion. After careful reconsideration I came to the conclusion that I had been too fanciful in reading the text. I should have done less ‘reading’ between the lines and setting it in a historical context. Some subconscious sympathy for the vilified religion had coloured my judgement, I was sure. I resorted to Wikipedia again and found that there were extensive writings about the man through whom the Koran had been channelled: the Prophet Mohammed. I set myself to find out more about the man Geert Wilders characterizes as a child-molester and a pig.

99 The emancipation of women

The biggest surprise I got from my reading of the Koran at the breakfast table was how emancipatory and revolutionary the text is. Early in my reading I discovered that I could not read the text as a monolithic timeless structure. I constantly had 7th century Middle Eastern society in my head with Christian Byzantium as main trendsetter together with Coptic Egypt coloured by Hellenism and African Christian Ethiopia who were surrounding hungrily frisky heathen Arab tribes. I saw the riches of Syria and the decadence of Byzantine overlords. Reading the Koran text I also got a vivid picture of how the 7th century Arab tribes treated their women worse than their beloved camels. How they buried infant girls alive if there wasn’t enough food to go around or if they deemed there were too many of them. How orphans were robbed of their dead father’s property. How males preferred each other to females whom they abused and neglected. How group rape of innocent travellers was their idea of hospitality. How mercy, compassion and solidarity with the unfortunates wasn’t on the agenda. How greed, violence and exploitation reigned. Through The Act Of Recitation, Allah urged any man who would listen to change their ways and become decent, God fearing and considerate. Men were in particular urged to do good by women, girls and orphans. Allah let it be known through his Messenger Mohammed that women were equal to men in everything except in child making and rearing. In the historical setting of 7th century Arabia this was so revolutionary it was neigh impossible to demand. The obvious strategy for immediate change was taking one privilege or custom from men and granting them another lesser damaging thing. That’s why the Koran is directed equally to men and women in all things spiritual, ‘intellectual’ and communal while talking to men solely when it is about daily life, the treatment of others and acceptable behaviour. Or so I understood as a female and Lesbian reader.