Author: Ophelia Benson

Things are humming in the Maghreb. Excellent.

Human rights activists from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania attending a Tunisian seminar last week stressed the need to separate religion from state as “an essential approach to realizing gender equality.” The “Maghreb Women’s March towards Realizing Equality” seminar on November 24th and 25th addressed the marginalisation of the Maghreb woman and the gender gap in each country…Activist Malika Remaoun from Algeria complained about the concessions given to Islamists at the expense of women…Tunisian Balkis Mechri agreed, saying “the battle to realize equality is not only legal, but social as well.” Ourida Chouaki of Algeria, however, warned that secularism in Maghreb societies is mistakenly being perceived as a call to apostasy.

And doubtless also painted and framed and presented as a call to ‘apostasy’ which of course is not just disapproved but forbidden. That’s one hell of an obstacle to get around. Good luck Maghrebians.

Razi pointed out that family law still gives men the right to polygamy, compels the return of women to the matrimonial home and governs child custody…Rejectionists, she maintained, “are using religion as a means to swallow up women’s rights”.

It’s a good wheeze, isn’t it. It’s a capital crime to leave the religion, and the religion is used to forbid women’s rights. Heads I win tails you lose.

Good luck Maghrebians.

Ho hum – a woman says women are equal, male clerics pitch fits.

Zeinab Radwan…announced during a conference on “Citizenship” that “the testimony of a woman is legally equal in weight with a man’s testimony.”…Clerics were swift to condemn Radwan’s statement, as expected. Gamal Qutb, former head of the Fatwa council in Al-Azhar, impugned Radwan’s credibility on Islamic Jurisprudence and warned against tampering with the Shari’a. In his view, it would be insane to continuously alter interpretations of the Quran every time conditions in society human behavior changed.

Oh well quite. Exactly so. It would be stark staring insane to keep on and on and on forever changing interpretations of the Koran simply because conditions changed – what could possibly be madder than that? Because conditions change all the time, society changes, human behavior changes, all those things are fickle as windmills, they’re always whirling up and down and round about, first one thing then another; one minute it’s slavery and hierarchy and violence and the next minute it’s equality and freedom and peace, up down, up down, skirts long, skirts short; it’s all so arbitrary and whimsical and meaningless, there’s no way to choose among them, of course the only thing to do is have one interpretation of one book written fourteen centuries ago and then stick to it like death forever after no matter what. Because who cares if people grow and learn and change, who cares if we gradually collect data and explanations and experience that indicate that some ways of life are better for more people than other ways of life are? A pox on all that; what we want is stability and continuity and certainty and above all predictability – we want to know that women were inferior yesterday and they’re inferior today and they’ll be inferior tomorrow. We want to know where we are. We want to be able to find our way around with our eyes shut because it’s too god damn much trouble to open them.

While being interviewed by Al-Jazeera yesterday, Qutb lashed out at the Western world for “having molded such speakers to serve their interests and who are being guided by the West. Those who live in our midst while representing another culture and regardless of their elevated worldly status are unqualified to speak on religious matters.”

Those who live in our midst while representing another culture – interesting touch – reminiscent of Leon Kass’s ‘All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us’ combined with the convenient genuflection to ‘culture’. Note the contradiction, too – we mustn’t change interpretations of the Koran every time conditions in society change, yet ‘culture’ is a valor-word. On the one hand the timeless and eternal, on the other hand the contingent and situated and mutable. Well that’s clerics for you, any port in a storm.

A comment or attempted explanation on BBC jokes got my curiosity awake.

This still seems to need spelling out for some. In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam. Gibbons was convicted of this crime. Should it be a crime? No. Given that it is a crime, was Gibbons guilty? Again, no: she didn’t insult Islam. Nevertheless, she was convicted of insulting Islam. In saying so I quote no-one, but simply state a fact. Tim Evans was wrongly convicted of murder, not “murder”.

Which is to say that the BBC wasn’t doing anything risible or marked or noteworthy by reporting that

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

The claim seems to be that news organizations don’t use scare quotes on crimes if they are in fact crimes in the state that is in question. ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ so it is not normal practice to put scare quotes on ‘insult Islam’ with reference to Sudan. I thought about that, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t true; so I did a little looking and found something. Then I wished I hadn’t wasted any time looking, because I remembered Turkey’s Article 301 which outlaws ‘insulting Turkishness’ – I know the BBC uses scare quotes on that ‘crime,’ I knew that even before looking it up. ‘Insulting Turkishness’ is decidedly a real crime in Turkey: prosecutions for it are not rare, and the existence of the crime has been a major stumbling block for Turkey’s membership of the EU.

So – behold the Beeb putting scare quotes on a crime even though it is a crime to insult Turkishness in Turkey.

Turkey’s most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with “insulting Turkishness”.

The fact that Article 301 exists does not prevent the BBC from putting scare quotes on the crime that Article 301 forbids. Therefore there is nothing automatically or necessarily or ethically or journalistically preventing the BBC from putting the same scare quotes on ‘insulting Islam’ when reporting on Gillian Gibbons. It chose not to; I chose to point that out; I fail to see that there’s anything obviously unreasonable about that. Why would it not be of interest to notice what an influential news medium chooses to hold at arm’s length and what it doesn’t? Why would it not be of interest to notice the ways the BBC frames various issues? It’s supposed to be a good thing to be media literate, isn’t it? Isn’t noticing things like subtle cues and unobtrusively coded language and careful wording part of the whole project of figuring out how media outlets shape the way we think?

Sure it is. It could still be the case that I did a crap job of it, of course, but I don’t think the ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ argument shows that.

The Beeb really is hilarious sometimes. In its report on Gillian Gibbons’s story it puts ‘ordeal’ in quotation marks but leaves ‘insulting Islam’ free of them. So we get

A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her “ordeal”, after returning to the UK. Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

You have to admit – that really is funny.

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.

The article is one of a series of sensational, lurid and horrifying pieces that the Times has printed over the past decade or so covering the topic, all giving one-sided and uncritical expression to a representation of the practice that has been constructed and widely circulated by feminist and First World human rights activist groups.

Horrors. Feminists and human rights activist groups have ‘constructed’ a representation of FGM that portrays it as a drastic mutilation imposed on female children as a way to control women by chopping off most of their genitalia. How imperialist, how colonialist, how elitist, how cosmopolitan, how wicked. Of course mutilation of girl children is a fine thing as long as it’s done six thousand miles away.

If you read and believe those statements or most of the other things you find written about “FGM” in the popular press (which, for the most part, are recapitulations of the advocacy literature) then you must conclude that Africa is indeed a “Dark Continent”, where for hundreds, if not thousands of years, African parents have been murdering and maiming their daughters and depriving them of the capacity for a sexual response. You must believe that African parents (mothers and fathers) are either (a) monsters (“mutilators” of their children) or (b) fools (who are incredibly ignorant of the health consequences of their own child rearing practices and the best interests of their children); or (c) prisoners of a insufferably dangerous tradition that they themselves would like to escape, if only they could find a way out, or else (d) that African women are weak and passive and live under the patriarchal thumb of cruel, loathsome or barbaric African men.

In short, you must be a racist. Is that clear? Do you understand? Is the implied threat unmistakable enough? If you think FGM is mutilation then you think Africans are monsters, stupid, trapped, and passive. In order not to think that you have to understand and accept and believe that FGM is PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT for the people who already think it is perfectly all right, just as footbinding was perfectly all right for the people who thought that was perfectly all right.

[A]t least two things have changed since the 1920s and 1930s in Africa: anesthesia is more available, and the “civilizing” missionary efforts of militant Protestants have been supplemented and even supported by the evangelical interventions of global feminists and human rights activists…[I]t is time for a new more tolerant neo-liberal global discourse to be developed concerning unfamiliar or “alien’” body modification practices around the world. One of the central human rights claims of this new “tolerance promoting” (or at least “sufferance promoting”) neo-liberal discourse might be the following: that an offense to the culturally shaped tastes and sensibilities of cosmopolitan elites or the citizens of rich and powerful societies (whether they are Christian missionaries or secular humanist human rights activists) is not sufficient reason to eradicate someone else’s valued way of life.

‘Cosmopolitan elites’ is interesting – I wonder if Shweder is aware of how Nazi that particular formula is. If he is aware, it seems incredibly bizarre that he uses it as a weapon. But more to the point: it’s interesting that he thinks having or not having sheared off external genitalia is a mere matter of culturally shaped tastes and sensibilities – rather as if non-fans of FGM were campaigning for the people of Somalia and Egypt to eat more sushi.

I am going to argue that the emerging rules of the cultural correctness game have been fixed by the “First World” and deserve to be critiqued…I am going to suggest that these “First World” governments and activist organizations (who, ironically, often frame their campaigns in a discourse of human rights) have actually acted in violation of several human rights, including rights to self-determination and rights to family privacy…

Family privacy – yes – that is indeed where things get tricky. Let’s look at ‘rights to family privacy’ for a second. Do they include rights for male members to beat or whip or lash female members? Do they include rights of sexual access for all males to all females? Do they include rights to deny medical treatment? Rights to force children to marry people of the parents’ choosing no matter how repugnant? Rights to give young daughters to much older men to pay a gambling debt? Rights to give daughters to other tribes to settle disputes or compensate for a crime? Rights to kill daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, aunts who disobey male relatives?

He goes on to say more reasonable things about rights and the difficulty of grounding them, but the first half of the piece is riddled with unpleasant innuendo.