Authors: Sally Armstrong
Fourteen girls died in the fire. More than fifty were injured. The news leaped into cyberspace and quickly moved around the world. The story made headlines in the Saudi newspapers for days. The vice and virtue squad of Saudi Arabia was thrashed in editorials in leading newspapers, which asked what sort of barbarism was at work when innocent girls were forbidden to escape from a burning building. Saudi Arabia is a discreet place when it comes to its draconian rules for women and girls. The religious police are almost always safe from criticism. When Saudi princes sit down with presidents and prime ministers to discuss oil
revenue, no one brings up the lives of Saudi girls and women. But this time the royal family could not hide behind the veil of silence.
Hanny Megally, the executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch at the time, said, “Women and girls may have died unnecessarily because of extreme interpretations of the Islamic dress code. State authorities with direct and indirect responsibility for this tragedy must be held accountable.”
There was action—not justice, but action. An inquiry was launched by the Saudi government. Prince Naif, minister of the interior, promised that those responsible for the deaths of the girls would be held accountable. The vice and virtue squad was given a public dressing-down. So was the General Presidency for Girls’ Education. The cleric in charge of the school was fired and the school was taken over by the ministry of education. As it turns out, the Saudi people didn’t like the fact that girls’ schools were controlled by the conservative religious establishment, and they had tried before to bring the schools into the public realm. This time they succeeded.
However, in an about-face, Prince Naif refused to blame the Mutawa’een for the deaths of the girls. He claimed that the deaths hadn’t happened because the girls hadn’t been allowed to flee the fire but because of the stampede to escape. He acknowledged the presence of the Mutawa’een and said that they went there to prevent “mistreatment” of the girls. But he asserted that they hadn’t interfered with the rescue efforts and only arrived after everyone had left the building. Eyewitnesses begged to differ.
The inquiry reported its conclusion on March 25, 2002: the fire was caused by a stray cigarette; the religious educational authorities responsible for the school had neglected the safety of the
pupils; the clerics had ignored warnings about overcrowding that had led to the fatal stampede. Allegations that the Mutawa’een had prevented the girls from fleeing were dismissed.
In the wake of the report, the International Secretariat of Amnesty International issued a statement:
Amnesty International is gravely concerned at reports that 14 girls have lost their lives and dozens of others were injured following a fire at their school in Mecca on 11 March 2002 after the religious police (Mutawa’een) prevented them from escaping from the fire because they were not wearing headscarves and their male relatives were not there to receive them. The religious police are also reported to have prevented rescuers from entering the school because they were males and therefore not permitted to mix with females.
If these reports are true, this is a tragic illustration of how gender discrimination can have lethal consequences. When state policies on segregation of sexes are implemented at the expense of human life, urgent steps are needed at the highest level. Policies and practises through which the lives of women and girls are devalued must be changed.… Saudi Arabia must take urgent measures to end all forms of discrimination against women in accordance with CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, to which Saudi Arabia is a state party.
As appalling as this story is, it is not a singular example of the blatant abuse of the rights of women and girls. The oldest atrocity, the one invariably mentioned in association with Islam, dates back to the pre-Islamic era called jahiliyah, the time of ignorance
before Muhammad. That travesty is honour killing. Arab men of the time thought they should bury their infant daughters alive to avoid the possibility that they would grow up to dishonour the family. The Prophet moved to eradicate that practice.
Infant girls were killed in other parts of the world because they were seen as worthless. In ancient Greece, after a baby was born, the wife would show the infant to her husband. If he decided to keep the baby, it would live. If he refused, the baby would be abandoned to die of hunger or exposure to the elements.
The practice was also prevalent in ancient Rome. An interpretation of a letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 BCE, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was viewed: “I am still in Alexandria.… if (good fortune to you!) you give birth, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.”
So where did these ideas—that baby girls are worthless, that women can bring shame to the family—come from? Many presume the oppression of women began with the holy texts. While every one of them—the Bible, the Torah and the Quran—is patriarchal and contains passages that denigrate women, they also represent some of the earliest records of women’s lives and offer clues as to their treatment. Even before recorded history, we know that societies were either matriarchal or patriarchal, so at least in some places women were leaders. Modern scholars of the New Testament claim that women had leadership roles during the first thirty or forty years of Christianity. In the early days of the Roman Empire, women (presuming they survived birth, given that infanticide wasn’t outlawed until 374 CE) could own property, their own businesses and run their own households, but those rights were stripped from them in 381 CE, when the Roman Empire became Christian.
As male leaders took over, they reinforced the scriptures of the Old Testament that basically suggested that the ills of humanity derive from women. Christians, Jews and Muslims all look to the Old Testament as the original document. Judaism came first in about 900 BCE, then about a thousand years later Christianity developed, followed in 600 CE by Islam. So these three world religions are rooted in scriptures that denigrate women. Despite the endless scholarly debates by rabbis, priests and Islamic religious leaders about what the holy texts say and don’t say, most agree that in the Bible, the Torah and the Quran, women are not blessed with equal rights. For example, the Old Testament says in Ecclesiastics 30:3, “The birth of a daughter is a loss.” Ecclesiastics 26: 10–11: “Keep a strict watch on her shameless eye; do not be surprised if she disgraces you.”
The Old Testament also serves up the Adam and Eve story featuring the snake and the apple. Depending on the religious analysis of that story and the modernization of the text, women have borne the taint of Eve in churches, synagogues and mosques ever since.
But it’s the New Testament that seals the social destiny of women in Christianity. For example, the sentiment “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord” is included not just once but three times in three different books (Colossians 3:18, 1 Peter 3:1 and Ephesians 5:22). Paul’s letter to the Corinthians says, “It is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14: 34–35). Timothy 2:8 says, “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”
The Quran and Torah have similarly discriminatory injunctions that forbid women to inherit or to own property. The tone is
also noteworthy. This passage from the Talmud, for instance, is derisive in the extreme; you can practically hear the contempt: “How can a woman have anything; whatever is hers belongs to her husband. What is his is his and what is hers is also his” (Sanhedrin, 71a; Gittin, 62a).
Once religion took a male-dominated stand, it nurtured the oppression of women. Augustine of Hippo, who would become St. Augustine, said, “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve, the temptress that we must beware of in any woman. I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.”
In twelfth-century Baghdad, the home of Islam, women were doctors and owned businesses. What’s more, Islam was the only religion of the time that allowed people to practise any other religion, and its leader, the prophet Muhammad, had a working wife. So why do so many of today’s mullahs and imams interpret the Quran in ways that oppress women such as allowing the beating of a woman or claiming that her voice carries half the weight of a man’s in court or that the father is the legal and only guardian of children? The Quran was written one hundred years after the prophet died; its suras and hadiths (the interpretation of the prophet’s words) reflect the times more than the holy man.
By the mid-thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was teaching Christians that women were defective men, that they were imperfect in body and soul. In his
Summa Theologiae
, the unfinished work he wrote as the sacred doctrine of the church, he asserts, “The inferiority of women lies not just in bodily strength but in the force of her intellect.” He was influenced by Aristotle’s reproductive biology, which claimed that women were born of
defective sperm. The Canon Laws that followed laid out church rules and specified that women could not be witnesses in disputes or criminal proceedings; they could not practice law or medicine or hold public office; and that they suffered from the same disability of intellect as children and imbeciles. Those laws would stick to women the way barnacles attach themselves to ships until the late 1900s.
Both Catholic and Protestant women felt the weight of the church and the edicts of men like Aquinas, and after him Martin Luther, who said, “A woman should stay at home.” A woman’s life was at the disposal of men and became embedded in the power of men. Her husband or father could deny her, beat her, even kill her; she was not a human being with rights, she was chattel. The institution of marriage was included in coverture, a legal doctrine that declared that a wife’s rights were subsumed in those of her husband. Sir William Blackstone, known as “the codifier” because he wrote commentaries that refined the laws in England in the 1780s—the same Blackstone who created the “rule of thumb,” which decreed that the width of the switch used to beat a wife or a child could be no wider than a man’s thumb—penned the principles of coverture: a husband and wife were one person under the law, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, or keep money for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, she was required to surrender her wages to her husband. In certain cases, a woman did not have individual legal liability for her misdeeds, since it was legally assumed that she was acting under the orders of her husband; generally, a husband and wife were not allowed to testify either for or against each other.
It was brilliant social commentators such as Charles Dickens who began to poke holes in religious laws and lay bare the consequences of both church and state decrees. In
Oliver Twist
, when Mr. Bumble is informed that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction,” Dickens coined a famous phrase with Mr. Bumble’s reply: “If the law supposes that … the law is a ass—a idiot.”
The practice by which a woman adopts her husband’s name as her own (i.e., when Mary Smith marries John Thompson she becomes Mrs. John Thompson) is another example of coverture, and another sample of the way that laws that privileged men still cling to women’s lives. Mary Eberts says, “The doctrine of coverture is the source of many injustices [now] done away with: i.e., the right of the husband to control the wife’s property and her earnings; the exclusive right of the father to child custody; the incapacity of the wife to testify against her husband in court; etcetera. Women and their allies have been fighting these laws since the l780s.”
The church, whether Catholic or Protestant, had always been quick to denounce women who dared to express intelligent thought and analysis. For most of its history, women largely responded to canon law not by attacking it but by delivering their views as mystic pronouncements, as had Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) and Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). Many scholars suggest that this metaphysical response to the church’s views about women led to accusations of witchcraft—that women must be dealing with the Devil if they were speaking against the doctrines of the church. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women accused of practicing witchcraft were found guilty of consulting evil spirits and were burned alive in fires lit on hills so the entire village could watch.
The religious scholar Kim Murray of Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, says that there was a plausible explanation for the rise in the execution of women as witches. A collection of world events had come together like a catalyst for economic and social change: the discovery of the new world, the finding of precious metals, the development of agriculture to feature crops that could be overwintered, plows that could open up the soil to create greater yields and improved animal husbandry. All of it was good news and led to increased prosperity, food abundance and a birth rate that grew dramatically. But, says Murray, these changes also led to a Devil’s brew of reaction when crops failed or were diseased. “And that’s when people seeking to placate divinity in the face of disaster flock to the churches. There needed to be a scapegoat; that dubious distinction went to women.” He points to two defining incidents. The first was a weather event known as the Little Ice Age, which struck Northern Europe between 1540 and 1660; during those years it was five to seven degrees cooler than it had been, and crops failed dramatically. The second event was an outbreak of ergot poisoning that occurred throughout Europe and in the American colonies, as well. “There’s a fungus associated with grain called ergot,” Murray explains. “It invariably turns up during a bad crop year. If consumed, it causes two things: spontaneous abortions and hallucinations. Women who suffered ergot poisoning were accused of intentionally aborting babies and conduct that was seen as demonic, so they were burned alive at the stake.”