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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
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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 ..."
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To Lewis, one of the things that went wrong was the subjection
of women. This deprived Muslim societies of half their brainpower. And it
left their children under the guidance of ignorant caretakers. Lewis
believes that until Muslim societies accept some Western notion of gender
equality, they will never catch up.
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.
Some clerics in Iraq are demanding a return to sharia, or
Islamic law. Sharia permits polygamy and lets men divorce their wives by
simple repudiation. It deprives women of the right to travel or choose their
husbands and could put them all under the hijab.
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.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Froma Harrop is a columnist for The Providence Journal. Comment by clicking here.
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