By PLS
During the otherwise odious Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq women enjoyed equal rights with men. They had full access to education and professional employment. They could walk safely on the streets in unrestrictive modern clothing, if they so chose. They could count on receiving all available health care services; prudery born of religion did not compromise women’s right to examination, treatment or surgery by competent male as well as female physicians.
Now, two years after the people of Iraq were “liberated” from the dictator, women in Southern Iraq are being hounded by Shiite vice squads modeled after the religious sadists in post-revolution Iran and in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Even medically-indicated x-rays of females have become controversial!
More to be dreaded in the long run are efforts to deny women full equality under the constitution that is being written for a “free” and “democratic” Iraq. The crux for women is defining the role Islam is to be assigned in shaping legislation. Also critical is determining the extent to which women’s personal status will be governed by conservative interpretations of Muslim family law. We’re talking about marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance here. We’re talking old fashioned, undiluted patriarchy masquerading as piety.
The dirty little secret is that there is no such thing as a single authoritative approach to Muslim family law. It varies from group to group (Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Wahabi, Bohra, Hanafi, Hanbali, salafi, secularist, etc., etc., depending on how you cut the cake) and even within groups. Americans confronted by the question of what is “Christian” and by the recent debate over the status of the Ten Commandments vis-à-vis American law may begin to appreciate the complexity of the situation.
So conservative Iraqi clerics of one Muslim sect or another are attempting to control the constitution-writing process, and Iraqi women’s groups are protesting. They are marching. They are speaking and writing. They are demanding equal rights.
Since the transfer of sovereignty, American forces are no longer in full control of the political process (not that they ever quite were), but the U.S. retains considerable influence. Are we doing enough to ensure women do not lose the rights they had under Saddam? It’s hard to tell. But there’s a precedent that’s worth looking at.
When I first joined the Foreign Service, Afghanistan was a Soviet client state, which did not make American policy makers happy. However, I’d spent considerable time in South Asia, so I had mixed feelings about the situation. I used to annoy my male colleagues by pointing out that women were better off, by far, under the Communist-supported regime, than they had been under undiluted tribal law. In fact, one Soviet-encouraged policy which did as much as anything to trigger the revolt that grew into the Taliban movement the U.S. supported in those pre 9/11 days was Kabul’s insistence on universal education. That means education for girls. All girls.
Western men have long admired the so-called rugged individuality of Afghan males, while somehow failing to register the hellish life of the wives, sisters and daughters traded, beaten and murdered at whim by those manly men. Uneducated women are relatively easy to control. They have no idea that things are better elsewhere. But it’s not so easy to abuse educated females. The bad old days are numbered when girls start going to school and university.
The world rightly deplored the Taliban’s treatment of women. Laura Bush campaigned for the women’s vote in America by criticizing Taliban treatment of women in Afghanistan, implying that an enlightened Bush administration would be a force for improving women’s lot there and elsewhere. But social change doesn’t happen fast or on the cheap. It turned out that the Bush administration was more interested in cutting taxes and toppling Saddam Hussein than in securing the rights of women in Afghanistan.
Afghan women celebrated a brief kind of Prague spring after the defeat of the Taliban. Then the backlash began. Life for women in Kabul remains somewhat civilized under the Karzai regime; elsewhere, clerics, tribal leaders and male family members are pretty much free to do what they will to women again.
Now, I fear, an even sadder regression is occurring in Iraq, where women had gained many more rights. Is American officialdom in Iraq standing up for women as strongly as they might or should? Democracy, it too often seems, is only for men in the here and now. Women are expected to wait, to be patient, to be understanding--again and again and again.
I hope that the leaders of the huge American mission in Baghdad (and their Bush administration bosses in Washington) do not imagine that violence against the West will cease if the U.S. “respects Islam” by throwing more Muslim women to the misogynist dogs.