The Enemy At Home (23 page)

In order to assess Islamic society, we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism. This problem is illustrated by Under-secretary of State Karen Hughes’s visit to Saudi Arabia in September 2005. Speaking before a carefully screened group of upper-middle-class Saudi women, the kind of women who would normally be sympathetic to America, Hughes introduced herself as a “working mom” and proceeded to enlighten the Saudis about ways in which they were being oppressed by Islam. “I believe women should be free and equal participants in society,” Hughes said. “I feel that as an American woman, my ability to drive is an important part of my freedom.” Many American women, Hughes added, “can’t imagine not being able to drive ourselves to work.”
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To her amazement, Hughes felt a wave of derision and hostility from the audience. She subsequently discovered that the women didn’t feel oppressed by Saudi driving laws because, like other well-to-do women in non-Western societies, most of them had drivers. Thus they were no more outraged than affluent American women would be if they were informed that they were denied the privilege of taking out the garbage or mowing their own lawns. Moreover, these Saudi women were not attracted by Hughes’s “working mom” model because they did not perceive work outside the home to be a form of liberation. What is the joy of going to work and being ordered around by a boss when you can stay home and order around the domestic servants? The attitude of the Saudi women was much like that of the Russian women who, after the fall of communism, declared their freedom as one of
not
having to work.

When we take off the ethnocentric sunglasses, we see that in its structure of authority, the Muslim family is patriarchal, as the Western family once was. Many of the practices that are perceived in the West as “discrimination” are simply the consequence of a system that assigns different social roles to men and women. Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “Islam sees the role of the two sexes as complementary…. The role of women is seen primarily but not necessarily exclusively as preserving the family and bringing up the children, and that of men as protecting the family and providing economically for it…. Although usually the Muslim male dominates in economic and social activity outside the home, it is the wife who reigns completely in the home, where the husband is like a guest.”
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There is nothing “Islamic” about this. It is not even “religious.” It is the way that all traditional cultures conceive family relationships. I am not a Muslim, and I grew up in India in a society like this. I can testify from personal experience that traditional systems of this sort do not breed passive, submissive women. My two grandmothers were both tyrants who ruled over their husbands. Patriarchy doesn’t make women less powerful—it merely diverts their power to the domain of the household.

Practices like arranged marriage and even polygamy are also not distinctively Islamic. They too are characteristic of patriarchal cultures.
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Even today marriages are frequently arranged throughout the non-Western world, as they used to be in Europe as well. We know from the Bible that in ancient Israel men had multiple wives as well as concubines. More recently in America, polygamy was permitted and practiced by the Mormons. Islam allows polygamy but limits the number of wives to four. Some Americans may be surprised to learn that the practice of polygamy is quite rare in the Muslim world. The reason is that Islam places strict conditions on it. The Prophet Muhammad insisted that a Muslim man must treat his wives equally in inheritance, in attention, and even in conjugal favors. The vast majority of Muslim men have decided it is easier and less expensive to have only one wife.

The veil, too, is not a custom native to Islam. The practice of veiling was common in ancient Judaism and early Christianity. The Muslims adopted the custom from the Persian and Byzantine societies. The term
hijab
means “hide” or “conceal,” and the Koran instructs women to “lower their gaze and guard their modesty” so as to “display their beauty only to their husbands.” But the Koran does not demand the veil nor does it provide specific guidelines. The Taliban required the full-body covering, or burqa, but most Muslim countries are content with the headscarf. Defenders of the Muslim dress code, like Masoumeh Ebtekar, the first woman to serve as a vice president of Iran, argue that “modest dress is to the benefit of women, not something imposed by men. The point is to avoid one sex being exploited by the other.” Oddly, some Islamic radicals argue that the veil makes it possible for Muslim women to pursue careers and enter public life while escaping the unwanted attention of men. Western visitors are often startled to discover that even in Islamic regimes like today’s Iran, many women run their own businesses and hold prominent positions in law, universities, and government. When the Muslim woman is veiled, Hassan Turabi contends, “she is considered a human being, not an object of pleasure or an erotic image.”
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There is, of course, no excuse for the abuses of patriarchy and traditional Islamic teaching that occur far too commonly in the Muslim world. The most abominable are the “honor killings.” These are not unique to the Muslim world, but that is where they are most common today. Female circumcision too is not an Islamic practice; it is an African custom, and not surprisingly we find it in Muslim North Africa. Another practice that cannot be condoned is that of child marriage. Since the Khomeini revolution, the marriage age for girls in Iran was lowered from eighteen to nine, and then raised to thirteen. The notion of forty-year-old men marrying fourteen-year-old girls is deplorable, even taking cultural differences into account.

Although polygamy allows men multiple avenues to meet their sexual needs, some Muslim men have found an alternative means to find gratification when they travel away from home or go on pilgrimages. The practice is called
sigheh
(in Farsi) or
mut’a
(in Arabic), and it refers to “temporary marriage,” which is permitted in Shia Islam but forbidden in Sunni Islam. Under the rules of
sigheh,
men can pay a bride price and contract marriage for a specified time. The original justification for temporary marriage was that Muslim men needed marital companionship when they went off to war and were away from their families for years at a time. Whatever the original rationale, temporary marriage has been subject to widespread abuse in contemporary Iran. Some of the worst abusers are the mullahs. The traveling clergymen pick up women, pay them a small sum, and then contract to marry them for a few days or even a few hours. Here marriage becomes a disguise for prostitution. One Western journalist spoke to a woman in the holy city of Qom who takes an average of three temporary husbands a day.
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While some radical Muslims defend honor killings, child marriage, and temporary marriage, most traditional Muslims will condemn these practices as violations of their moral code. Responding to a question about honor killing, the Muslim site islamonline.net cites numerous Islamic authorities unequivocally condemning the practice.
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It is important, however, to recognize what traditional Muslims are condemning. Traditional Muslims are outraged by honor killings, but they do not adopt the viewpoint of some American liberals who ridicule the concept of chastity and consider family honor to be a dubious notion not worth defending. Many traditional Muslims look with revulsion at the sight in their countries of young girls attached to men old enough to be their fathers—just as they would find such a sight revolting in the West. Most Shia Muslims disdain temporary marriage as a form of prostitution no different from that found in Las Vegas or Amsterdam’s red light district. In short, Muslims condemn abuses of marriage not to demonstrate the deficiencies of traditional marriage, but in the name of traditional marriage.

Given their strong belief in the traditional family, many Muslims are convinced that women’s liberation and sexual liberation, of the kind promoted by the cultural left, would be a disaster for their society. They contend that these foreign forms of “liberation” would undermine their religion, overturn their moral beliefs, and destroy their traditional families. In believing these things, of course, the Muslims are absolutely correct.

THE LIBERAL ASSAULT
against family values in traditional cultures is typically conducted in the name of universal rights. Groups like Amnesty International and Planned Parenthood International invoke the universal right to sexual autonomy, the right to practice birth control, the right to abortion, the right to bear children out of wedlock, the right to no-fault divorce, the right of mothers to have careers, the right of children against corporal punishment, the right to social recognition for homosexuals, and the right to gay marriage. But these are not universal rights, and in some respect they are not rights at all. You can look in vain for them in the universal rights doctrines of the founding philosophers of liberalism, such as Locke and Montesquieu. You will not find them enumerated in the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. They are entirely absent from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified by the United Nations, which instead affirms that “the family is the natural and fundamental unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.”
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True, some of these rights are claimed—or at least artfully implied—in the documents of recent international conferences, such as the Cairo population conference or the Beijing women’s conference. But it is the cultural left that put them there. To say that they are not universally accepted would be an under-statement. It would be more accurate to say that, outside the West, these rights are almost universally rejected. For the cultural left, rights are a tactical weapon that is used in the moral crusade against the patriarchal family.

It is important to recognize that the cultural left does not view itself as “antifamily.” It views itself as profamily. That is why many liberals are so deaf to heartfelt protests from the Muslim world. “We accept the basic framework of democracy and you keep pushing us,” complains Salah Abd al-Karim, an opposition leader in Egypt. “Americans are promoting free sex, homosexuality, things which go to the very roots of human society and are not even accepted by everyone in America. For God’s sake, what are you trying to do to us?”
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The liberal answer is, in effect, “We are trying to produce in your society the wonderful progress we have achieved with the family in the West.”

To understand what liberals have accomplished, we need to reconsider the great revolution in family life that has occurred in United States. According to feminist historian Stephanie Coontz, marriage has changed more in America in the past few decades than it has during the previous three thousand years.
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As late as 1960, the traditional family was the unquestioned norm and the predominant reality in America. The divorce rate was 5 percent. Illegitimacy was rare. Virtually all children lived in two-parent households. The vast majority of mothers stayed home to look after their children. How did this change, and why does the cultural left think of the change as “progress”?

What’s new in America is not single parenthood, divorce, working mothers, homosexuality, or abortion. What’s new is how widespread these things have become. Even more novel is the concept that these are good things that should be defended and in some cases even encouraged. These changes reflect the triumph of liberal morality, the morality of the “inner self.”

There was plenty of single parenthood in colonial America. But it was seen as a tragedy, resulting mainly from the death of a parent due to disease or the travails of childbearing. There was a fair amount of divorce in America from the founding through the 1950s. But divorce was widely regarded as a violation of a solemn oath and a sign of personal failure. Many couples having marital problems tried to keep the family together, at least until the children were grown and independent. Women have worked since the days of the first settlers, but for most of American history mothers worked mainly out of necessity. Millions of American women took full-time jobs during World War II to help with the war effort, but most of them went back to full-time homemaking when the war ended. Homosexuality has existed longer than the republic, but it has generally been considered deviant, a form of behavior that may be permitted but should not be publicly sanctioned or encouraged. Abortion, even when available, has traditionally been regarded as a wrong that should be socially discouraged and prudentially regulated by law.

But according to liberal morality, these traditional wrongs become expressions of autonomy and self-fulfillment. Now you hear people say things like, “I feel called to leave my marriage. My life would be wasted if I stayed.” Today many couples refuse to preserve their marriages for the children’s sake. They defiantly say, “How can my children be happy if I am not happy?” Author Barbara Dafoe Whitehead calls this “expressive divorce,” divorce as a form of spiritual and personal growth.
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Today many American mothers work, not because they have to, but because they want to. Many mothers choose to have a career because it is more self-fulfilling than the life of a full-time mom. The same is true of people who bear children out of wedlock. “I want to have children, and why should I let the fact that I’m not married stop me?” Homosexuality is no longer a mere sexual proclivity but something like an ideology. The homosexual declares his identity through his sexual preference, proclaiming, in the words of Yale law professor Kenji Yoshino, “the freedom to be who I am.”
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And when the fetus gets in the way of a pregnant woman’s plans for her life, even abortion becomes a mode of self-fulfillment. “I simply don’t feel ready to have a child. This pregnancy is really going to mess up my life.”