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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Geraldine Brooks, an expert on the role of women in Islam, says the "haters of beauty" behind the Miss World riots misrepresent what is a "pro-sexuality" religion.
Dec 4, 2002 | Two weeks ago, a Nigerian fashion writer's throwaway remark -- that Mohammed would have approved of the Miss World pageant and probably would have chosen a wife from among the contestants -- sparked riots that killed 220 people, left thousands homeless and earned the author, Isioma Daniel, a fatwa.
By and large, the West found this imbroglio baffling, and many immediately blamed Islam. But the religion, to those who know it, is anything but strait-laced. Islam produced Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic and poet who wrote verses such as, "When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe." Nowhere in the Koran does it say adulterers should be stoned. Nowhere does it say that women should be completely covered.
In the kaleidoscope that is modern Islam, there are a thousand images of women, says Geraldine Brooks, author of "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women." Turn the prism one way and you get outspoken religious feminists in Iran and the mosque down the street. Turn it another, and you have Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, where women are not even allowed to raise their voices, lest men find it alluring.
Wahhabist religious schools -- funded by Saudi Arabia -- have managed to disseminate extreme Islamist views into developing countries. In this way, Brooks maintains, the Saudis are much to blame for the growing restrictions placed on women in poorer countries around the world.
Nigeria, she says, is no exception. "In Nigeria you have a small group of Islamist extremists who want to impose Islamic states on parts of the country where there are significant Christian minorities who just won't take it," says Brooks. "And so, when you throw a match on that, all the bitterness about other things is being expressed, not just what somebody wrote in a newspaper."
In an interview with Salon, Brooks talks about the rise of what she calls "the haters of beauty" in Islam, and discusses the fragile coexistence in the religion of "pro-sexuality" and a fear of women gaining power.
So, how do you get from Rumi to people chanting "down with beauty"?
Well, I think the best place to start is with Mohammed himself and look at what his attitude was, as far as we can know it, toward women and sex. And it's pretty interesting to me. If you look at Mohammed's life, women were crucial figures in it. His first wife was older and a wealthy woman.
He worked for her, didn't he?
That's right. He used to take camel caravans for her merchant business.
And so she was the first convert to Islam. When he first saw the angel that called out to him, "Recite!" which is the first word of the Koran, he thought he'd lost his mind, and he came crawling to her, it says in the texts of Islam, and threw himself into her lap and said, "Cover me, cover me."
She was the one who convinced him that it was a true vision and that he was a prophet, and gave him the confidence and the means then to preach the word, so she's an incredibly important figure. While she lived she was the only wife he had.
Now, after she dies, he starts taking multiple wives and there's a lot of revelation in the later part of the Koran about women and what women should be doing, and you have to read it very closely with the history to see how a lot of this came out of the conflicts that were occurring in the early Muslim community.
But the upshot of it was that Mohammed starting marrying women for reasons of political alliance with tribes that the Muslims had conquered. One thing he did was marry older widows as an example, because this was now a religion at war and there were a lot of widows and somebody had to provide for them. And so Mohammed, by taking widows into his household, was setting an example that he wanted the rest of the community to follow.
But that makes for a complicated household, as we all know, and it also makes for jealousies and bitterness and people tried to get at him through his wives. The upshot of it was that he had a revelation decreeing that his wives should be secluded and not seen by the rest of the community. So that was a big change, but that wasn't for the majority of women. Other women in the Muslim community went on going into battle and one of them saved his life in a battle after the male warriors had fled, and she was respected for that.
So, you have to look at the roots there, and what you see in 7th century Arabia compared to what the rest of the culture was doing is not bad. Women have a role and they're definitely given the rights and the responsibilities of the faith. But then after Mohammed's death, the caliph Omar, who is a well-known misogynist, and who told Mohammed that he's too soft on his wives, starts to make things much more difficult for women.
If you look in Christian teaching it's like what St. Paul does to women in the early Christian community in terms of lessening their status and taking away their rights and making them somehow "unclean." But actual Islam doesn't have the same kind of hang-ups about sex that Christianity does. Islam is very pro-sexuality. It says: Marry and enjoy your wives. Women are entitled to pleasure in sex.
Mohammed actually has a couple of sayings in the hadith -- which is the sayings of the prophet -- one of which I always liked, about foreplay, which is, "When you go to your wife, do not go to them as birds do, but be slow and delaying." And also there's the time he goes and tells off one of his friends because he's not sleeping with his wife and is practicing celibacy and [Mohammed] says, "That's not part of my way. If you want to follow my way, you have time for praying and time for fasting, but you also have time to make love to your wife."
So it's quite pro-sex, and that's the astonishing thing when you travel around some of the more repressive countries of the Middle East, because in private, within marriage, it's very licentious, it's very Victoria's Secret catalogs and very glamorous and women go to a lot of trouble to be beautiful for their husbands, but that's a very private thing and it mustn't be taken into the public sphere.
