The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam Read online

  The chairman of the Turkish Muslim organization Milli Görüs said, in the Rotterdam daily, “If Hirsi Ali wants to wage a religious war, that is her business; I have decided not to comment on it [the film].”

  The chairman of the Netherlands Muslim Council responded to Submission: “For the Islamic community this is one step too far. The more orthodox Muslims will certainly not accept this.”

  Driss El Boujoufi of the Union of Moroccan Muslim Organizations in the Netherlands (UMMON) had the following to say: “Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants it to be a competition, and she is looking for opponents. But we’re not playing her game, because as soon as it becomes a contest, you attract spectators, and that is the last thing we want.”

  A spokesperson for the Netherlands Muslim Broadcasting Network says: “Hirsi Ali has a problem with these verses from the Koran. But it is not the Koran that incites men to abuse women, it is the men themselves. She should address them directly and invite them to discuss the matter. Emancipation begins from within. If you attack what people value, you will lose their trust.”

  All these reactions were fairly predictable. It does not matter whether the person commenting has actually seen Submission. It does not matter whether the critical reflections on Islam are expressed in the form of a short film, a text, or something else. These people just want to deny Islam’s biggest weakness: the way in which women are regarded and treated. Leaders of Muslim organizations warn that the Muslim community will not accept the images of women whose bodies have been painted with verses from the Koran. But the fact is that Muslim organizations, and Muslims in general, have for centuries gone along with what actually happens when the message contained in these verses is applied to the bodies of the actresses in Submission: the lashing of “unchaste” women, the systematic mistreatment of “disobedient” women, the rape of married women by permission of Allah, and the ostracizing, or even murder, of girls and women who have become the victims of incest. All this is followed slavishly, thoughtlessly to clear the family name of shame.

  Representatives of Muslim organizations deny the message contained in Submission and also deny the fact that large groups of Muslim women are forced to take refuge in women’s shelters, that many are dumped by their husbands in their country of origin, with all their children and no money. The Department of Justice has actually been stopped from keeping a systematic record of the number of honor killings that occur each year, because sophistic spokespeople for Muslim organizations warn that this would upset the people whose interests they protect. Yet the regional institutes for mental welfare and other mental health care services are aware that many Muslim girls become the victims of incest and forced marriages and are taken away by their fathers to be murdered in the family’s country of origin. Whose interests are being protected by the government here? Murderers are being protected.

  The hidden agenda of the conservative spokespeople of Muslim organizations is the same as the agenda of Muslim schools: Western Muslims want to be free to decide how they treat the female members of their family. These are organized enemies of women, and they endorse the unspoken consensus that prevails in Islamic countries: how women and girls are treated is a private family matter. If any female behavior seems remotely threatening to the family honor, then fathers, brothers, and any other male relatives may intervene as they think fit. Verses in the Koran are used to justify male violence against women, and also to appease the perpetrator’s conscience and that of any witnesses. By exempting the holy text from all criticism, the leaders of Muslim organizations everywhere successfully preserve the system that underlies the oppression of women. And so they perpetuate its practice.

  In fact, the majority of Muslim men do not regard the way they treat women as “oppressive,” “abusive,” or “murderous”; they feel that violence is a fair response to the way women behave. As one Muslim spokesperson said, “Muslim women know the rules. If they choose to overstep the mark, they will be punished,” and “with the exception of some extreme cases, there is little wrong with the position of women in the Islamic world.” Doesn’t that speak volumes?

  Yet Muslims think I place too much emphasis on the negative aspects of Islam. They ask why I do not make a fuss about the intolerance among Christians or Jews and believe that I am more interested in putting Islam in a bad light than in improving the position of women.

  It is true that the Bible and the Talmud also contain passages that reflect hostility toward women. And, yes indeed, there are Christians and Jews who interpret those holy texts in the same literal vein as many Muslims do when studying the Koran. Some of these people are in the grip of a sexual morality that is indistinguishable from that of Shari’a countries like Saudi Arabia. They treat women just as badly, resist all progress, and are intolerant of homosexuals.

  But if these critical Muslims took their comparative analysis a little further, they would discover that the number of “word nazis” in the Christian and Jewish worlds is far smaller than in the Islamic world. The God of the Christians and Jews has been tamed by reasonable people and largely moved to the believer’s private conscience. Nowadays, God is referred to as “love” or as “energy,” and those who believe in Him have done away with the concept of hell. Christianity and Judaism have lost their grip on the individual, although the priests, ministers, and rabbis have not allowed this to happen of their own free will. The prevalence of freedom of conscience, the search for knowledge, and the individual control over human nature in the West were hard-won conquests, all of which began as a battle of words.

  Most women born in what were originally Jewish-Christian states can safely go out in the streets on their own, have equal access to education, reap the rewards of their labor, and choose with whom they want to share their lives. They are in charge of their sexual needs, the decision to get pregnant, and the number of children they want. Most of the women of Jewish or Christian descent are free to travel around the world, buy a house of their own, and have their own possessions. Not all of them, but the majority. Only a tiny fraction of the women in Muslim families can do any of these things. They have virtually no right of self-determination.

  Jews and Christians have achieved this in the West by criticizing their holy texts, by ridiculing things that are said in the Bible and Talmud, and pointing out that many of these things are wrong. The ancient texts have survived, but our ideas about how the sexes should relate to each other have moved on. When Jews and Christians discovered the power of words and images, they used them to shine a light onto their belief and culture, to find inconsistencies, to stop harmful practices, and to promote merciful, humane ones. Time after time, those who wanted to preserve the status quo complained that the texts, images, and behavior of their critics were “hurtful,” “sinful,” and “radical.” For centuries the church encouraged the faithful to ignore its critics. It held inquisitions. It ignored priests who behaved immorally and illegally until the people would not allow it anymore. The same must happen in Islam. The people who truly love the beauty of their faith must act to stamp out the ugliness.

  The history of the West is the search for enlightenment through self-reflection. This is the source of its democratic practices and its power. I have borrowed my strategy of criticizing Islam from the Jewish-Christian insurrection against the absolutism of religious faith. I made in this context. How effective my controversial strategy can be will be known to anyone familiar with the struggle between the churches of the West. As I say, I am an optimist.

  Sixteen

  Portrait of a Heroine

  as a Young Woman

  One of my current heroines is Samira Ahmed, a twenty-four-year-old girlishly pretty woman with large, brown, doelike eyes, dark, curly hair, and a smile that seduces even the gloomiest of faces to lighten up and smile back. Besides her good nature, she is also inquisitive and has a strong will to be her own person. Born to a family who left Morocco in the early 1980s and settled in the Netherlands, she is one of ten children.

  I
n the summer of 2005, I attended her graduation ceremony at a training college in Amsterdam. Samira received a diploma for pedagogy and a record 10 score (the highest score possible) for her thesis.

  This is the celebratory side of Samira’s story, for there is also a tragic side. When I arrived for Samira’s graduation I was received like all the other guests in a reception area just outside of the auditorium where the ceremony was to take place. I noticed the happy class, a total of thirty-five students, gathered in clusters around coffee stands. Family and friends accompanied them, chatting, carrying gifts and flowers wrapped in cellophane. Proud fathers and mothers, flushed siblings teasing their red-faced brothers and sisters, boyfriends and girlfriends happy just to be there to witness an achiever in the family.

  On Samira’s stand none of her family showed up: no brother, no sister, no cousin, no nephew, no niece.

  Two years earlier, Samira had had to sneak away from home because she wanted to live in a students’ house like her Dutch friends Sara and Marloes. At home she had shared a bedroom with some of her siblings and had no privacy at all. Every move she made in the house was monitored by her mother and sisters; outside the house her brothers kept watch. They all wanted to make sure that under no circumstances would she become Westernized.

  Samira had endured terrible physical and psychological violence at home. Her family always had a pretext to question her, go through her stuff, and forbid her from setting foot outside the house. She was beaten frequently. There were rumors in her community that she had a Dutch boyfriend. The beatings at home became harsher. Samira could bear it no longer and left. Soon afterward, in the summer of 2003, she got in touch with me. I went with her to the police to file a complaint against her brothers, who had threatened to murder her. According to them, Samira’s death was the only way to avenge the shame she brought upon the family for leaving their parents’ house. The police said they could do nothing to help her except file the complaint. They said there were thousands of other women like her and it was not the police’s duty to intervene in family matters.

  Ever since she left, Samira has been in hiding, moving from house to house and depending on the kindness of strangers. Mostly she is brave and faces life with a powerful optimism. Samira reads her textbooks, does her homework, and turns her papers in on time. She accepts invitations to student parties from Sara and Marloes and makes an effort to enjoy herself. Sometimes, however, she has a sad, drawn look on her face that betrays her worries. Once in a while she just weeps and confides that she wishes her life were different, perhaps more like the lives of her Dutch friends.

  Today, however, on her graduation day, she is glowing, clutching her diploma and returning the kisses of her friends. Her worries are far from over, though. She has no money; she has to find a job, and with her Moroccan name that will be far from easy in the Netherlands; she has to find another new place to live; she lives in an unending fear of being discovered by her brothers and slaughtered by them. This is no joke, for in just two police regions in Holland (The Hague area and the southern section of the province of South Holland) eleven Muslim girls were killed by their own families between October 2004 and May 2005 for “offenses” similar to those committed by Samira.

  AS A SPOKESPERSON for immigrants in Dutch society, I regularly advocate the emancipation of immigrant women. In my mind, there are three categories of Muslim women in Dutch society. I suspect that this distinction applies to other European Union countries with large Muslim populations as well.

  First, there are girls like Samira—strong-willed, intelligent, and willing to take a chance on shaping their individual futures along a path they choose for themselves. They face many obstacles as they try to assimilate in Western society and some may lose their lives trying to attain their dreams.

  Second, there are girls and women who are very dependent and attached to their families but who cleverly forge a way to lead a double life. Instead of confronting their families and arguing about their adherence to custom and religion, these girls use a more tactful approach. When with family (in the broadest sense of the word, which also includes their community), they put on their headscarves and at home obey every whim of their parents and menfolk. Outside the home, however, they lead the life of an average Western woman: they have a job, dress fashionably, have a boyfriend, drink alcohol, attend cocktail parties, and even manage to travel away from home for a while.

  The third group are the utterly vulnerable. Some of these girls are imported as brides or domestic workers from the country of origin of the immigrants with whom they come to live. Some are daughters of the more conservative families. These girls are removed from school once they attain puberty and locked up at home. Their families get away with this form of modern slavery because the authorities rarely take notice of these young women. The girls have often been brought up to be absolutely obedient; they perform household chores without question. Their individual wills have been bent to the servitude taught at their parents’ house and put into practice in their husbands’ homes or the homes of the people who import and enslave them. They can hardly read or write. When they marry, they generally bear as many children as their individual fertility allows. When they miscarry, most of them view this as God’s will, not as a lack of proper health care, which they are usually prevented from seeking because of their families’ religious reasons.

  When a woman in this subjugated state is violently abused by husband, brother, or father, she considers it a result of her own wrongdoing. In response, she promises to behave better in the future. Some abused women may be tempted to rebel by running away or informing the authorities when their life becomes too painful. Those who act on such a temptation are likely to be killed by their own family or husband, or end up in prostitution or in the women’s shelters. Some who have shown signs of rebellion are lured back to their country of origin by parents or husbands and simply dumped there, abandoned, disowned, with or without children, and with no financial resources or people to help them.

  For a while now I have been asserting that the most effective way for European Union governments to deal with their Muslim minorities is to empower the Muslim women living within their borders. No one has offered a convincing argument against this position, but no one outside my own party seems to want to make the first step to help these women. The best tool for empowering these women is education. Yet the education systems of some European Union countries are going through a crisis of neglect, particularly with regard to immigrant children. We are now paying the price of mixing education with ideology. However, let me stick to the important subject of freeing women from the shackles of superstitious belief and tribal custom.

  The biggest obstacle that hinders Muslim women from leading dignified, free lives is violence—physical, mental, and sexual—committed by their close families. Here is only a sample of some of the violence perpetrated on girls and women from Islamic cultures:

  Four-year-old girls have their genitals mutilated: some of them so badly that they die of infections; others are traumatized for life from the experience and will later suffer recurrent infections of their reproductive and urinary systems.

  Teenage girls are removed from school by force and kept inside the house to stop their schooling, stifle their thinking, and suffocate their will.

  Victims of incest and sexual abuse are beaten, deported, or killed to prevent them from filing complaints.

  Some pregnant victims of incest or abuse are forced to have abortions by their fathers, older brothers, or uncles in order to keep the family honor from being stained. In this era of DNA testing, the girls could demonstrate that they have been abused. Yet instead of punishing the abusers, the family treats the daughter as if she had dishonored the family.

  Girls and women who protest their maltreatment are beaten by their parents in order to kill their spirits and reduce them to a lifelong servitude that amounts to slavery.

  Many girls and women who can’t bear to suffer anymore take the
ir own lives or develop numerous kinds of psychological ailments, including nervous breakdown and psychosis. They are literally driven mad.

  A Muslim girl in Europe runs more of a risk than girls of other faiths of being forced into marriage by her parents with a stranger. In such a marriage—which, since it is forced, by definition starts with rape—she conceives child after child. She is an enslaved womb. Many of her children will grow up in a household with parents who are neither bound by love nor interested in the well-being of their children. The daughters will go through life as subjugated as their mothers and the sons become—in Europe—dropouts from school, attracted to pastimes that can vary from loitering in the streets to drug abuse to radical Islamic fundamentalism.

  European policy makers have not yet understood the huge potential of liberating Muslim women. They are squandering the single best opportunity they have to make Muslim integration a success within one generation.

  Morally, governments need to eradicate violence against women in Europe. This would make clear to fundamentalists that Europeans take their constitutions seriously. Now, most abusers simply think that Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and hypocritical, since Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they’re told it’s in the name of freedom of religion.