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Jewish World Review August 5, 2005 / 29 Tammuz, 5765 Democracy where Iraqi women are ‘half free’, isn't democracy By Froma Harrop
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Lincoln said our government could not endure "half slave and
half free." The same can be said about most democracies, including ones we
hope to establish in the Muslim world. In these countries, the unfree half
is not slaves, but women.
It would be a remarkable thing if our removal of Saddam Hussein
led to an actual loss of rights for Iraqi women. But that seems a distinct
possibility. The latest draft of the Iraq constitution would let religious
authorities curtail rights Iraqi women have enjoyed since 1959. Saddam
oppressed everyone, but women were still freer under his secular thumb than
under the clerical tyrannies of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Not a lot of Americans seem to care about this, which is why
Steven Vincent deserves a special tribute. Vincent was the American
journalist abducted and shot dead this week in Basra. A firm believer in the
rightness of the war, he was a rarity in his vocal defense of Iraqi women.
His articles appeared in The Christian Science Monitor and The National
Review
"I'm feeling isolated in my neo-con feminism," Vincent once
wrote. Americans on the right, he said, maintain "a reflexive opposition to
feminism." And he feared that the White House might ultimately wink at a
loss of women's equality if that would score points with the Shi'a clergy,
whose followers make up 65 percent of Iraq's population.
Many on the left, meanwhile, follow a brand of multiculturalism
that puts women's dignity a distant second to men's insecurities. That
mindset holds that if Muslim men want to encase their women in the hijab —
the head-to-toe covering that reveals only the face and hands — well, we
should not interfere with their culture.
This Western blindness to women's plight in Muslim countries
goes back centuries. In his book about the decline of Islam, "What Went
Wrong?" Princeton historian Bernard Lewis wrote: "The powers of Europe, so
solicitous on behalf of Christians and slaves, remained unmoved by the
condition of the female population of the (Ottoman) Empire, though it was no
doubt known to them, at least in its more picturesque aspects ..."
So the hijab, literally "curtain," is not some cultural oddity,
but part of a bigger civilizational problem. And many bright people in the
West don't get it. Just three years ago, Saudi religious police let 15 girls
burn to death in a school rather than have them emerge without their veils.
You'd think that event alone would have turned the veil into a toxic symbol
in Western eyes.
But when a public school near London later tried to ban the
hijab in class, a British court stopped it. The lawyer defending the total
body covering was Cherie Booth, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Protests by Iraqi women and American pressure led writers of the
new Iraqi constitution to soften some of its more oppressive aspects. But
the new version still lets clerics control women's lives. Its big concession
was permitting each family choose which Islamic sect's laws their women must
follow. Women need civic rights that no mullah can withdraw.
Iraq's female half is already going downhill fast. Iraqi women
were once among the best educated in the Mideast. Now, 35 percent of Iraq's
girls are dropping out of school. Women used to confidently walk Baghdad's
streets without head covering. Now, male bullies feel free to humiliate any
female whose hair is showing.
Installing a democracy in Iraq was always an iffy proposition.
But this dream of creating a shining example in the Arab heartland will come
to dust if it leaves women in worse shape than before. It won't even do much
for the men.
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© 2005 Creators Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||||||
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