Author: Ophelia Benson

I was going to say more about Juan Cole anyway, because a further point had occurred to me – a further bit of peculiar, evasive rhetoric. So it’s all the more motivating that commenters think I’ve misread him. I don’t think I have – not in the Vincent post. Cole may well be a great source of information in general, but I think this particular post is baaaad.

A little repetition here.

Clueless Americans don’t understand the principle of gender segregation for the most part, and if they do understand it they are horrified by it. But in large swathes of the world, it just is not considered right for a male to be in the company of an unrelated female. It isn’t just a matter of sleeping around, as my wingnut correspondents assume. It is being alone in the company of an unrelated man or woman, and having that be known publicly. Male honor is invested in the protection of the virginity of female relatives…Clueless Americans don’t understand gender segregation, and they don’t understand clan honor as practiced in most Arab societies. We American men aren’t dishonored in particular if our sisters sleep around, though I suppose in high school it can’t be pleasant for a guy to have everyone taunt him that his sister is a slut. But in Arab culture, a brother can’t show his face in public if his sister is known to be a slut.

There is one hell of a lot of bad faith in that passage. Notice the phrase ‘gender segregation,’ for instance. What does that sound like? Oh…maybe a school with separate classes for boys and girls, something like that. At any rate a system that is neutral between the two genders: both are segregated, both are separated, both get on with their lives. But of course that’s not the arrangement he is describing with that anodyne phrase. No. The system in question is one in which women are imprisoned; confined to home, required to ask permission from a male relative in order to leave the house, required to wear a tent when they do go out, while men are not confined to home, not required to ask anyone’s permission to go out, allowed to dress in clothes that don’t impede their movement or suffocate them. In which men are allowed to live generally free lives, to work, to go where they like – except for private houses where women are confined – and women emphatically and comprehensively are not. ‘Gender segregation’ doesn’t really characterize such a system accurately – the phrase gives a misleading impression.

Then notice the unmarked shift he makes. He starts out pretending to be gender-neutral, then suddenly in the fifth sentence, things change. ‘Male honor is invested in the protection of the virginity of female relatives…’ Ah. So it’s not symmetrical after all. It’s not about both genders. Female honor is not invested in the protection of the virginity of male relatives. No, it’s just male honor, and female virginity. But that’s not ‘gender segregation’ then, is it – it’s female segregation. So why did Cole euphemize it? Because…he wants ‘clueless Americans’ to accept it as routine and normal and not a problem? I don’t know. But the point is, euphemize it he did. He also completely failed to mention the fact that plenty of women in those ‘large parts of the world’ that have ‘gender segregation’ hate it and want to be free of it. It’s not just ‘clueless Americans’ who find the segregation and subordination of women repulsive.

And then notice one more shift. ‘But in Arab culture, a brother can’t show his face in public if his sister is known to be a slut.’ He doesn’t use scare quotes on the word, or say ‘thought to be a slut,’ or dissociate himself from the nasty idea in any way. And more than that – all he’s been talking about in this passage is unrelated people of opposite sexes being in each other’s company. So he is apparently accepting the idea that a woman who has been in the company of an unrelated man is a slut. And then (he managed to pack a hell of a lot of nasty stuff in that one brief passage) he appears to endorse the idea that a woman who ‘sleeps around’ (meaning not defined) is a ‘slut’ – while a man is not. Men are people who are shamed if their sisters ‘sleep around’ and are ‘sluts’ while women are people who shame men if they ‘sleep around’ and are ‘sluts.’ Period. It’s all a tad asymmetrical – and just a tiny bit misogynist. Frankly.

The whole system of clans, clan honor, and the investment of male honor in the protection of the chastity of females may be horrific. But it is the norm in much of the world (it operates to some extent in parts of Africa, in South Asia and in Central Asia, as well). Not understanding and respecting it can get you killed when you are out there.

A couple of readers said he was just describing, just giving a warning. That passage looks more like a somewhat neutral warning (although the ‘may be’ is odd, given how often the women end up dead, and how stunted and deprived their lives are in the process of all this aggressive ‘protection’), but given what he said in the first quoted passage and much of the rest of the post, I don’t buy it. I don’t think that is all he was doing. If it is all he was doing, then he did a damn bad job of it.

Allen Esterson has pointed out to me some interesting letters in the Independent lately. On Wednesday for instance, this one from Dr Shaaz Mahboob, among others:

Most secular Muslims are not members of any of the leading religious groups, nor do they follow religion with strict enough vigour which would allow them to be considered for membership of any of the leading so-called Muslim representative groups such as Muslim Council of Britain or its affiliates. Secular Islam in Britain is feeling marginalised. Without adequate platforms it is being ignored by both the media and the Government.
All that MCB and other hard-line Islamic organisations are doing is taking advantage of the lack of leadership from within the secular majority of Muslims. They tend to “Islamicise” every single issue that is faced by ordinary Muslims, thereby diverting the attention from the real core social issues. The latter include failed integration, due to self-imposed segregation by community elders hell-bent on maintaining the cultural customs that they brought with them at the time of migration to Britain. Other problems are purely economic, such as unemployment and obstacles faced by Muslim women joining mainstream careers.
For successful integration of both Muslims and Islam into the British society, the voice of modern, moderate and secular Muslims needs to be heard and brought into the mainstream.

And today this from Raza Griffiths along with several more:

As someone from a Muslim background, I find the Muslim Council of Britain’s defence of its right to promote its illiberal views by reference to freedom of speech somewhat disingenuous. Not very long ago many of its members openly supported the murder of Salman Rushdie because he had criticised Islam. The vast majority of Muslims who are moderate now need to move beyond the MCB, which is bringing Islam into disrepute and exacerbating the negative stereotypes that Muslims have to endure.

Keep at it, epistolarists. Keep chipping away at the stupid idea that all Muslims and people from a Muslim background share the ‘illiberal views’ of the MCB. It might sink in some day.

I haven’t read Juan Cole before. The snippets I’ve seen here and there that other people have quoted didn’t appeal. But I saw this astonishing item at Drink-soaked Trot Popinjays, so I thought I’d pass it on.

Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

Errr. If her ‘clan’ thought she was ‘shaming’ them…then they might have decided to ‘end’ it. End it. By which he means, murder them; by which he means, shoot both of them multiple times. Well, yeah, I suppose that is one way to ‘end’ something. I suppose if someone stands too close to you at the bus stop, you can ‘end’ it by killing her. But in all fairness, that’s not what is usually meant by ‘ending’ an affair. Not to mention the fact that there wasn’t an affair anyway. Cole appears to have read the Telegraph article he linked to very sloppily. It doesn’t say they were having an affair, or that they were ‘romantically involved,’ and it says several things to indicate that there is a lot of room for doubt that they were – such as the fact that Vincent was planning to marry his interpreter for visa purposes, and that his wife was aware of that. The popinjays link to a site that posts a letter Vincent’s wife wrote to Cole. It makes for warm reading.

But even apart from that – the rest of it is staggering all on its own. ‘In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men.’ Excuse me? Protect? By killing them? That’s ‘protection’? He himself acknowledges (without apparently noticing that he’s done so) the nature of the protection in the very next sentence – ‘Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her.’ What’s the deal, here? Did it take him so long to compose and type the 33 words between ‘protect’ and ‘kill’ that he forgot he’d said the first by the time he got to the second? Or is he just stupid. Or is he worse than that, is he so intent on making ‘honor’ killing sound vaguely acceptable that – that he can write a piece of dreck like that.

Update. He’s even worse than I thought. He wrote a follow-up post in reaction to Lisa Ramaci-Vincent’s reply to him. (But he calls her ‘Mrs Vincent’ – which is obnoxious, to put it mildly, since she signed herself Lisa Ramaci-Vincent. Why does Cole get to decide what her name is? Why does he get to correct her on her own name? More concern for male honor?) It’s enough to put me off me dinner.

Clueless Americans don’t understand the principle of gender segregation for the most part, and if they do understand it they are horrified by it. But in large swathes of the world, it just is not considered right for a male to be in the company of an unrelated female. It isn’t just a matter of sleeping around, as my wingnut correspondents assume. It is being alone in the company of an unrelated man or woman, and having that be known publicly. Male honor is invested in the protection of the virginity of female relatives, and a conviction that something improper may have occurred would be enough in some instances to cause a vendetta. It is not just a Muslim thing. Many Orthodox Jews and Middle Eastern and Balkan Christians feel the same way.

Clueless Americans don’t understand gender segregation, and they don’t understand clan honor as practiced in most Arab societies. We American men aren’t dishonored in particular if our sisters sleep around, though I suppose in high school it can’t be pleasant for a guy to have everyone taunt him that his sister is a slut. But in Arab culture, a brother can’t show his face in public if his sister is known to be a slut.

The guy’s a piece of work.

Secularism, secularism, secularism. I’m tempted to get a bunch of t shirts made with ‘Secularism’ bannered across the front and back.

The prospects for secularism in Iraq are not looking very good. Actually they’re looking terrible.

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a centralised and largely secular state. Now, if the Shia religious parties get their way, it will be a decentralised state with a pronounced Islamic identity. The draft of the new constitution describes Islam as “a main source” of legislation and stipulates that no law may contradict Islamic principles.

Great. There go women’s rights, for a start.

In many ways, Iraq is already dramatically different from the place it was just a few years ago. Mixed marriages between Sunni and Shia, once taken for granted, are becoming problematic. In many parts of the country, women dare not walk bare-headed in the street. And reports from parts of the lawless north-west paint a grim picture of Taleban-style rule by radical Sunni militants.

Peachy. Communalism and terrorized women. Heaven on earth, the shining city on the hill.

MCB Watch has an excellent article on Panorama, Mawdudi and Selective Quoting, which includes a long quotation from Mawdudi’s Islamic Law and Constitution:

Islamic State is Universal and All Embracing
A state of this sort cannot evidently restrict the scope of its activities. Its approach is universal and all-embracing. Its sphere of activity is coextensive with the whole of human life. It seeks to mould every aspect of life and activity in consonance with its moral norms and programme of social reform. In such a state no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private…The excellent balance and moderation that characterise the Islamic system of government and the precise distinctions made in it between right and wrong elicit from all men of honesty and intelligence the admiration and the admission that such a balanced system could not have been framed by anyone but the Omniscient and All-Wise God.

Well exactly. This is why people loathe and fear ‘a state of this sort’ – because it pries into every corner of people’s lives and then beats the crap out of them or extorts bribes (or both) if it doesn’t like what it finds. Marjane Satrapie illustrates this in Perseopolis. People used binoculars to peer into other people’s windows and then report them for having parties, dancing, playing music, playing cards. Not to mention of course the notorious constant supervision of every tiny detail of women’s dress, down to the individual hair showing. Nothing is personal, nothing is private. Spiffy. Let’s all live in an ant farm.

It is clear from a careful consideration of the Qur’an and the Sunnah that the state in Islam is based on an ideology and its objective is to establish that ideology…It is a dictate of this very nature of the Islamic State that such a state should be run only by those who believe in the ideology on which it is based and in the Divine Law which it is assigned to administer. The administrators of the Islamic State must be those whose whole life is devoted to the observance and enforcement of this Law…Islam does not recognise any geographical, linguistic or colour bars in this respect. It puts forward its code of guidance and the scheme of its reform before all men. Whoever accepts this programme, no matter to what race, nation or country he may belong, can join the community that runs the Islamic State.

Notice something missing from that lovely egalitarian list of things Islam ‘does not recognise’? Yeah – gender. Whoever accepts this programme can join the community that runs the Islamic State – except, of course, women. Because they are the ones being run, not the ones participating in the running. That is part of the very ‘ideology’ in question.

I prefer Amos Oz’s view of things. Of the settlers, for instance:

They have their own dream. The first stage is the “whole land of Israel,” filled wall-to-wall with Jews-only towns. True, Palestinians and Thai workers can come in to do the dirty work, but no more. The second stage is to transform Israel into a halachic state, a country ruled by Jewish religious law. Elections, the Knesset, the government and the courts may continue to function, but settler rabbis will decide just what issues are appropriate for these bodies to decide, and what issues are too “holy” and important to be left to the people and their elected officials. In their dream world, there is no place for secular Israel: Its culture is not culture, its values are not values, its opinions are not opinions.

Sounds like that South Carolinian utopia we heard about recently.

But we non-religious Israelis also have a dream. We want to live in an enlightened, open and just country, not in some messianic, rabbinic monarchy, and not in the whole land of Israel. We came here to be a free people in our own land. To be a free people means each person is entitled to choose which parts of Jewish tradition are important to him, and which to leave behind. It means to have the freedom to run our country according to our free will, rather than rabbinic dictates…For more than 30 years, the settlers’ dream has choked the dream of free Israelis. The dream of the whole land of Israel and a messianic kingship drains daily the hope of being a people free to build a just society.

Dreams can be nightmares…

This is the border without which we will have no state and without which there is no freedom, no society, nothing but fiery zealousness, messianic-hysterical extremism, and complete destruction…

Fiery zealousness – make it go away. Patrol that border.