Earlier this month, Jill wrote on the reduction of women’s rights in Iraq and generated a massive comment thread between those who believe that the only women we have to worry about are those who come from conservative families. Because all women will be controlled by their families. As someone who regularly blames the patriarchy*, this isn’t a particularly settling option.
NPR’s Morning Edition featured the largest Iraqi feminist group that is actively, dangerously working against the implementation of Shari’ah. This political position is enough to warrant death, but the spokeswoman for the group rightly contends that the threat of death is better than living as a “slave.” Do listen for more details on how the implementation of Shari’ah will affect women’s right from a more credible source than I.
In the meantime, Patricia at Whirled View notes how Americans are weakening women’s rights with the War on Terra:
[T]wo 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.
Patricia, an international affairs specialist, further explains why the bases of the new Constitution are particularly sticky. She details a precendence that was set during her initial entry into Foreign Service:
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.
Read the whole thing.
And quickly, before I am accused of being a Saddam-lover and America-hater, I must say that as the facts stand, neither Hussein or the proposed constitution are desirable. A more desirable third option is one in which all citizens of the country are given full rights and autonomy under the law. As Americans, we have the influence to make that wish a reality.