Saudi Arabia is the extreme. Why dwell on the extreme, when it would be just as easy to write about a Muslim country such as Turkey, led by a woman, where one in six judges is a woman, and one in every thirty private companies has a woman manager?
I think it important to look in detail at Saudi Arabia’s grim reality because this is the kind of sterile, segregated world that Hamas in Israel, most mujahedin factions in Afghanistan, many radicals in Egypt and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria are calling for, right now, for their countries and for the entire Islamic world. None of these groups is saying, “Let’s recreate Turkey, and separate church and state.” Instead, what they want is Saudi-style, theocratically enforced repression of women, cloaked in vapid clichés about a woman’s place being the paradise of her home.
In the vast majority of Muslim countries, barriers to women’s employment have fallen so far in the last fifty years that it seems it would be impossible to reerect them, even if hard-line fundamentalist governments one day came to power. But under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.
In Egypt women are everywhere in the work force: in the fields, as they always have been, sowing and planting; and sitting on city sidewalks, selling their produce. But they are also in positions that would have been unthinkable in the first half of the century, when only the poorest and most wretched families subjected their women to the “indignity” of work outside the home. Egyptian women are doctors, filmmakers, politicians, economists, academics, engineers. Mostly they are public servants, cogs in the country’s bloated bureaucracy. Now, it is almost unthinkable that a young Egyptian woman won’t go to work, at least until she marries. Often she will find the man she will marry among her coworkers.
It was President Nasser who made way for women in the government, promising a job to any Egyptian who got a college degree. Now, many an educated, lower-middle-class woman finds work as a muwazzaf, a government employee, typing, filing or otherwise pushing paper six days a week, from about eight in the morning to two in the afternoon. The size of the bureaucracy means that most workers are underemployed, and most, men and women, pass the workday gossiping and sipping endless cups of sugary tea. While the pay is pitiful—less than $40 a month—the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget.
Most of the young, unmarried women I knew enjoyed the freedom of a salary and the challenge of even an undemanding workplace. But my married friends often saw things differently. Often, the job itself was a respite, wedged with great difficulty between hours of backbreaking household labor.
An afternoon I spent with a recently married woman went like this. After commuting for about an hour and a half on a bus so packed that three or four passengers hung out the door with just one foot each on the step, she elbowed her way off at a stop about half a mile from her apartment and stood in line for twenty minutes at a government food store, to get the lower-priced food available there. She hauled the groceries home to a cold-water kitchen with no fridge, and immediately made tea for her husband, who’d arrived home from work and plopped on the sofa to chat with his father and a young nephew. Next she climbed the stairs to the pigeon coops she kept on the roof of the apartment building, fed yesterday’s leftover bread to the birds, then chose the two plumpest and wrung their necks on the spot.
She plucked the birds, gutted and cooked them, boiled cracked wheat and noodles for the stuffing, served the meal to the men, who seemed a bit grumpy to be kept waiting so late to eat; made and served more tea, scoured the cooking pans and plates, swept the ubiquitous Cairo dust from the floors and furniture, scrubbed everyone’s clothes by hand and left them in a bucket to hang out on the roof before she left for work the next morning; set some lentils to soak for the next day’s meal, finally sat down, with some sewing on her lap, at about 9 P.M., only to jump up ten minutes later to make another round of tea for some neighbors who’d popped in. There were only two unusual things about the woman’s situation; she didn’t have other women in the house—a sister-in-law or mother-in-law—to help her with the chores, and she didn’t yet have children to add to her responsibilities.
While women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To women run ragged by the routine of rushing home from work to have a large meal ready for a demanding family, the fundamentalists’ message of women’s place being in the home sometimes has some appeal.
Husbands, too, hear that message. Mostly raised by women who didn’t work outside the home, they are used to a household where their shirts are ironed, the floors swept, the food elaborately prepared and always ready. Now, a young man might meet his bride as a coworker in his office. Before their marriage, he enjoyed the chance to admire her beauty, share a joke and gossip with her. But once she is his wife, he resents the fact that other men in the office have the pleasure of her company. If she is not already veiled, he may begin pressuring her to wear hijab.
When home life with a working wife turns out to be less salubrious than with the nonworking women of his youth, he doesn’t think of lending a hand with the chores, for he has never seen a man do such a thing. Instead, he curses the government for a ruined economy that makes his wife’s salary a necessity. And when he hears an imam or sheik preaching of a woman’s place, and promising better times under an Islamic regime, he eyes the pile of rumpled laundry, the dusty floor and the simple lunch his exhausted wife has slapped together, and wonders whether such a cause might not be worth supporting.
To see what happens if he takes the next step and joins the revolutionaries, it is necessary to look at Iran.
Even when a revolution succeeds, it doesn’t always achieve everything its extremists have envisioned. It is one thing to hold tenaciously, as Saudi Arabia does, to traditions that have existed unchanged for centuries. It is another thing altogether to reimpose such traditions after change has already reshaped a culture.
Since the 1920s, Iran’s Pahlavi rulers had tried to Westernize their nation, sometimes by force, scrapping thousands of years of traditional separation of men and women. By the time the Iranian revolutionaries threw out the shah in 1979, there were male hairstylists for women, male tailors fitting women’s gowns, male teachers in girls’ classrooms.
The extremists set out to end all that, telling male gynecologists that they should find another area of medicine, attempting to install curtains to divide university lecture halls into male and female sections, and banning male barbers from touching female heads.
Apart from the barbers, very little of it worked. What the extremists hadn’t realized was that, when it came to sex segregation, Khomeini wasn’t entirely with them. Khomeini, always a literalist, read the words of the Koran and the hadith and didn’t extrapolate from them. When he read that the prophet’s wives were to remain in their houses, he took that to mean the prophet’s wives, and only the prophet’s wives. Other Muslim women had roles to play outside their houses, and he encouraged them. From the beginning he encouraged women to come into the streets to demonstrate and praised their role as revolutionaries, fighting in the streets side by side with the men.
To him, the rules were clear: unrelated men and women mustn’t be alone together; they mustn’t touch each other, except in medical situations; and women must wear hijab. Obviously, since hairdressers touched their clients and saw them out of hijab, there would be no more male staff in salons serving women. The same went for gym instructors whose students worked out in athletic gear, and reporters who covered women’s activities where hijab wasn’t worn.
But that didn’t mean that such activities should cease. What happened instead was a sudden flowering of job opportunities for women. The prohibition on men and women being alone created a demand for women driving instructors. In the media, the need for women to cover certain women’s sports and other segregated events opened jobs for
producers, directors, reporters and sound recordists.
Since the hadith made it clear that the prophet had approved of women tending men’s war wounds, there was to be no segregation when it came to medicine. But since the new Islamic atmosphere made many women prefer to be seen by women doctors, there was an upsurge in demand for more women’s places in medical school. Nurse-midwives saw their status rise. While schools were quickly segregated to protect the impressionable young, the idea of curtaining off university classrooms was abandoned in most places. Since the universities were to be thoroughly Islamic, with admission requiring a reference from the would-be student’s local mosque, there was no need to physically separate these devout youngsters, who automatically separated themselves. In lectures, men sat on one side of the room, women on the other. Only the placement of the professor’s podium posed problems. In some lecture rooms, builders bolted it to the floor on the men’s side of the room, on the obsolete premise that professors were all male. That left the growing number of women professors standing on the women’s side for the sake of the new proprieties, but having nowhere to rest their notes.
At the university in the southern city of Awaz, I met a young student who had benefited from the postrevolutionary changes. She was studying medicine, living in a dormitory far from her extremely religious rural family. Her parents, she said, would never have permitted her to go to university under the shah, or to live away from home, or to work in a hospital. But now they saw the universities and the hospitals as part of the Islamic system, and therefore safe places for their daughter. Away from home, she had the freedom to meet men, albeit in very controlled circumstances, and had recently found the one she wanted to marry. Her parents, to her astonishment, had accepted her choice, making her the first woman in her family’s history to marry for love.
In the theocratic Iranian government women have risen to the ranks of deputy ministers, and at each election Rafsanjani has called on voters to return more women to the Parliament. In business, I met a woman running a valve factory and another heading a trucking company. Nasi Ravandoost, who ran the factory, said she had no problems getting on with her business inside Iran. “My problems are all created outside,” she said. Traveling to buy parts was often complicated by embargoes and visa obstacles. The woman who ran the trucking concern said that success was a matter of common sense and tact, just as it was in business anywhere. “Obviously, I don’t go into the Transport Ministry wearing this,” she said, fingering the floral silk outfit she’d worn to an evening party in North Tehran.
By now, women have so solidified their place in postrevolution-ary society that some of them are outspokenly criticizing it. At the offices of the satirical magazine Golagha, some of the sharpest political cartoons are penned by a woman. But even more tellingly, in the fall 1991 issue of the Iranian Journal for International Affairs, Iran’s showpiece foreign policy publication, an assistant professor of anthropology named Fatemeh Givechian wrote a paper that criticized the lingering remnants of the policy of sex segregation.
“No doubt,” she wrote, the policy led to “more awareness of one’s own gender, but not necessarily any increase in one’s knowledge of the opposite gender. Sex segregation to this extent is not natural…. There will emerge a dual society of male and female stranger to one another and unaware of each other’s anxieties.”
Chapter 10
POLITICS, WITH AND WITHOUT A VOTE
“Say, O God, possessor of all sovereignty, you give sovereignty to whom you wish and take sovereignty from whom you wish.”
THE KORAN
CHAPTER OF THE FAMILY OF IMRAN
A year after the Gulf War, in the mountains and valleys of Iraqi Kurdistan, the lines of women seemed to stretch forever. Spring sunbeams glinted on sparkling dresses of silver and gold. They had worn their best, because this was a day of celebration. For the first time in their lives, the women of Kurdistan were lining up to vote for their own representatives.
A year earlier, during the Kurdish uprising that followed the end of the war, I had seen similar sparkling, bright-colored dresses torn and discarded in a dusty pile by a door to a prefab hut on the grounds of an Iraqi prison. A stained mattress lay inside the hut.
Kurdish women had been brought to this place, stripped naked and raped. For some, the rape had been part of the regime of torture they experienced as political prisoners. Others had been raped as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands. The idea was to break the spirit of the men by destroying their honor through the violation of the bodies of their women. The procedure was so routine that the bureaucrats of the prison had made up an index card for one of the employees, a Mr. Aziz Saleh Ahmad. Neatly and methodically, in the bottom left-hand corner, it listed his profession, Fighter in the Popular Army, and his “Activity,” Violation of Women’s Honor. Aziz Saleh Ahmad was, in other words, employed as a rapist at the prison. Saddam Hussein had called his campaign against the Kurds the Anfal, after a chapter of the Koran which speaks of the spoils of holy war. It was hard to imagine a more perverse appropriation of religion.
For most of their lives, this had been the meaning of politics for the women of Kurdistan: a dangerous and possibly deadly activity that led to places like the stained mattress, or the airless, feces-smeared cells tunneled through the earth beneath it. To me, it seemed like a miracle that the meaning had changed, in one short year, to something so different as lines of smiling women, lining up to vote. Even more surprising were the names of the women on the ballot.
The road to political power is full of obstacles for women in most Muslim societies. In countries such as Kuwait, women have yet to win the right to vote, much less govern. And even where the system is supposedly open to women, claiming a place in it often means standing up to abuse and the threat of physical violence. In Jordan’s 1993 election, one woman candidate had to fight for the right to even speak at a rally, because Muslim extremists objected to the sound of a female voice at a mixed gathering.
In 1994, women led three Muslim countries. Yet often their place at the top has little effect on the lives of women at the bottom. As Tansu Ciller turned her attention to remaking Turkey’s economy, young Turkish women caught socializing with men in rural areas were being forced to undergo “Virginity checks” at local police stations. As Bangladesh’s Begum Khaleda Zia became the first Muslim woman head of state to address the U. N. General Assembly in 1993, extremists were using death threats to attempt to silence a Bangladeshi woman writer who criticized aspects of Islam. In her first term in office, Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto let stand rape laws that punished the victim as a “fornicator” and let the rapist go free. On her return to power in 1993, it seemed that she might do better, promising to set up all-women police stations and appoint women judges.
Part of the difficulty for women leaders in Muslim countries is that their own position is often so tenuous and the risk of a backlash always a threat. In Turkey, signs of resentment of Ciller’s sex surfaced at a conference in August 1993 for former Prime Minister Mesyut Yilmaz when delegates began chanting “Mesyut koltuga, Tansu mutfaga [Mesyut back to power and Tansu back to the kitchen].”
Muslim women politicians tend to be a special breed. On election day in Kurdistan in May 1992, one woman candidate, Hero Ahmed, didn’t wear a sparkling dress. She wore the same earth-toned baggy pants and sashed shirt she’d worn since 1979, when she went to the mountains to join the Pesh Merga, the Kurdish guerrillas whose name means We Who Face Death. During her twelve years in the mountains Hero, a psychologist, learned to use an assault rifle and an antiaircraft gun. But mostly she shot film. Her most famous clip shows clouds of gas rising over the village of Yak Sammer in 1988—one of the few pieces of film known to exist of an Iraqi poison gas attack.
On election day, women stood in line all day to vote for her. Some, illiterate, had never held a pen before. At the end of the count, seven women, including Hero, had been elected to the hundred-and-five-seat Parliament. r />
What happened next followed a pattern that has repeated itself in almost every Islamic state where women have won a political voice. Almost always, women politicians try to reform the inequitable personal status laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody and property. In Kurdistan, the women parliamentarians began to campaign for reform of laws based on sharia that deprived them of equal rights with men. Among their demands: outlawing polygamy, except in the case of a woman’s mental illness, and changing inheritance laws so that daughters receive an equal share of a parent’s estate, instead of half the share allotted to sons.
Hero thought the Parliament would probably pass the anti-polygamy law. In the Koran, polygamy is presented as an option for men, not as a requirement. In seventh-century Arabian society, there had been no restriction on how many wives a man could take. The Koran, in stipulating four as a maximum, was setting limits, not giving license. A close reading of the text suggests that monogamy is preferred. “If you shall not be able to deal justly, [take] only one” the Koran says, then later states: “You are never able to be fair and just between women even if that is your ardent desire.”
The issue of polygamy is analogous to that of slavery, which was gradually banned in Islamic countries. Saudi Arabia was among the last to legislate against it in 1962, when the government bought the freedom of all the slaves in the kingdom at three times the going rate. As with polygamy, the wording of the Koran permits, but discourages, slavery. Muhammad’s sunnah included the freeing of many of his war-captive slaves. Because freeing slaves is extolled as the act of a good Muslim, most Muslims now accept that conditions have changed enough since the seventh century to allow them to legislate against a practice that the prophet probably would have chosen to ban outright, if his own times had allowed. Polygamy is already on the decline throughout the Islamic world, and many Muslim scholars see no religious obstacle to a legal ban on the practice.