"In western Herat, governor Ismail Khan ordered a number of announcements on television and radio about proper Islamic conduct, including instructions for all females to dress in Islamic clothes (taken to mean the burqa or chadori) and not to associate with men in public, and for men to refrain from wearing western clothes. Ismail Khan's troops began harassing women not dressed in the burqa or chadori--a more restrictive version of the hijab worn in neighboring Iran. Herat's police also began arresting unrelated men and women seen together; in several cases, men were taken to Herat's jail and beaten by police troops; women and girls were taken to a hospital, where police ordered doctors to perform forced medical checks to determine if the women and girls had had recent sexual intercourse."
A regional aberration? If only... HRW continues to look at what was going on the Afghan capital, where the president Hamid Karzai himself --an ex-UNOCAL consultant- resides:
"In Kabul, during the loya jirga, several conservative strongmen intimidated delegates, suggesting that if they spoke on Islamic issues or the Koran, they would 'face the consequences'. Sima Simar, a member of the first interim government, was accused of blasphemy, and told to appear in a court to face the charges (later dropped). Through 2002, there were reports of police forces storming wedding parties, insisting that playing music was 'illegal,' and arresting and sometimes beating musicians. Reconstituted Vice and Virtue squads patrolled Kabul, intimidating women without burqas and men wearing Western clothes."
[Incidentally governor Khan only became considered a problem when he "defied the central government and refused to hand over to Kabul most of the tax and customs revenue."]
In both societies, we have two US-backed governments which advocate a specific dress-code for women, to be policed as part of a theocratic social order. Smith is absolutely right to note these cases of systematic state-endorsed violence against women, and the manner in which certain configurations of power here actively justify the legal and physical control of female appearance. It's a shame that she misses out the all-important backdrop.
Note the backdrop: Both configurations of power include, at their helm, the forces of our Anglo-American "liberators", who are purportedly spreading forth democratization across the Muslim world. In the name of "democracy", we're still going around financing fundamentalists because, really, our leaders are not hugely interested in democracy, nor the human rights that our military interventionism consistently obliterates worldwide. They are far more interested in the more important matters of geostrategic and economic interests, particularly in terms of securing access and control over the world's most lucrative supplies of fast-dwindling hydrocarbon (oil, gas, etc.) energies.
The need for that access also explains why the US government, for instance, was happy to provide military and financial sponsorship to the Taliban from 1994 through to 2000, as confirmed in the Congressional testimony of people like Hon. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, former White House Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan. As one jubilant US diplomat remarked rather jubilantly:"The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." Forget whether the Afghans wanted to live with that. That never was, and never has been, the point. The point is protecting UNOCAL, and related vested interests. And clearly still is.
There is, thus, a huge contrast between the decisions and plight of Muslim women in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those here in the USA, UK, or Western Europe. It is condescending and ignorant to attempt to group together Muslim women from these disparate regions into a single homogenous mass who can be defined and encapsulated under the same diagnosis. The fact is that the majority of those Muslim women in the west who wear some form of the veil (with or without facial covering, the vast majority do without), do so because they have made an informed choice to do so. Those who've taken the time to talk to Muslim women about this, rather than pontificate in an ivory tower, have by and large made great progress in bridging the subjective cultural divide. For instance, Mary Walker, who was a producer for the BBC2 series "Living Islam", drastically changed her views of the veil after talking to Muslims in 19 different countries:
"Just as to us the veil represents Muslim oppression, to them miniskirts and plunging necklines represent oppression. They said that men are cheating women in the West. They let us believe we're liberated but enslave us to the male gaze. However much I insist on the right to choose what I wear, I cannot deny that the choice is often dictated by what will make my body more attractive to men. Women cannot separate their identity from their appearance and so we remain trapped in the traditional feminine world, where the rules are written by men.
By choosing to wear the veil, these women were making a conscious decision to define their role in society and their relationship with men. That relationship appeard to be based more on exchange and mutual respect (a respect that was often lacking in the personal relationships I saw in the West), than the master/servant scenario I had anticipated. The Veil to them signified visual confirmation of their religious commitment, in which men and women were united, and for Zeenah and Fatima an even stronger commitment to a political ideal.
So were my notions of oppression in the form of the veil disqualified? If my definition of equality was free will then I could no longer define that oppression as a symptom of Islam. The women had all excercised their right to choose. To some extent, they were freer than me -- I had less control over my destiny. I could no longer point at them and say they were oppressed and I was not. My life was influenced by male approval as theirs -- but the element of choice had been taken out of mine. Their situations and their arguments had, after all, served to highlight shortcomings in my view of my own liberty."
It is this sort of self-reflection and analysis, as well as the previous deep-political critique, that was unfortunately completely missing from Joan Smith's Independent on Sunday piece. When Smith finally got round to the subject of Muslim women veiling in the UK, her comment was, typically, to portray the convictions and perceptions of Muslim women themselves as utterly irrelevant, and not worth any consideration at all:
"Muslim women in this country may be telling the truth when they say they are covering their hair and faces out of choice, but that doesn't mean they haven't been influenced by relatives and male clerics."
In one sentence, she dismisses the free decisions of millions of Muslim women as not even worth the freedom required to make them. These people must be oppressed! They must be coerced! The implication is that Muslim women are incapable of making their own choices and decisions, incapable of rational reflection, suffering from some sort of deep-seated inferiority, stupidity and/or vulnerability inherent to their peculiar Muslim psyche, requiring people like Jack Straw to stand up, take charge, and pressurize such women to change their backward ways. And immense socio-political pressure it is, whether or not it has been a legally-codified.
And of course, there is the wider issue of the alleged linkage between veiling and failed community relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. The fact remains that it is quite absurd to suggest that the phenomenon of parallel communities and so on has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that some women cover their faces. Straw's statement to this effect is a pathetic deflection away from policies of institutionalized racism and social segregation routinely deployed by local authorities under both the Tories and New Labour, including during Straw's tenure as Home Secretary.
Want to know why British Muslim Asians in areas like Blackburn and Bradford are separated off into impoverished ghettoised communities? Well, I wrote about this as a researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, when I was doing a report on the Oldham riots. We found that institutional racism condoned by Oldham Borough Council was at the root of the underlying causative processes behind the rioting. Unemployment was twice as high for blacks and Asians, compared to whites. In particular, at 38 per cent, the unemployment rate for people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic origin is nearly five times that of white people. Housing conditions are also grim. Thirteen per cent of Oldham's housing stock is "statutorily unfit for human habitation and a further 28% are in serious disrepair". Areas with houses in such condition are predominantly inhabited by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Here is a relevant quote from my IHRC report (also available here) on the direct role of the local authority in manufacturing and consolidating these ethnically-defined parallel communities:
A regional aberration? If only... HRW continues to look at what was going on the Afghan capital, where the president Hamid Karzai himself --an ex-UNOCAL consultant- resides:
"In Kabul, during the loya jirga, several conservative strongmen intimidated delegates, suggesting that if they spoke on Islamic issues or the Koran, they would 'face the consequences'. Sima Simar, a member of the first interim government, was accused of blasphemy, and told to appear in a court to face the charges (later dropped). Through 2002, there were reports of police forces storming wedding parties, insisting that playing music was 'illegal,' and arresting and sometimes beating musicians. Reconstituted Vice and Virtue squads patrolled Kabul, intimidating women without burqas and men wearing Western clothes."
[Incidentally governor Khan only became considered a problem when he "defied the central government and refused to hand over to Kabul most of the tax and customs revenue."]
Note the backdrop: Both configurations of power include, at their helm, the forces of our Anglo-American "liberators", who are purportedly spreading forth democratization across the Muslim world. In the name of "democracy", we're still going around financing fundamentalists because, really, our leaders are not hugely interested in democracy, nor the human rights that our military interventionism consistently obliterates worldwide. They are far more interested in the more important matters of geostrategic and economic interests, particularly in terms of securing access and control over the world's most lucrative supplies of fast-dwindling hydrocarbon (oil, gas, etc.) energies.
The need for that access also explains why the US government, for instance, was happy to provide military and financial sponsorship to the Taliban from 1994 through to 2000, as confirmed in the Congressional testimony of people like Hon. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, former White House Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan. As one jubilant US diplomat remarked rather jubilantly:"The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." Forget whether the Afghans wanted to live with that. That never was, and never has been, the point. The point is protecting UNOCAL, and related vested interests. And clearly still is.
There is, thus, a huge contrast between the decisions and plight of Muslim women in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those here in the USA, UK, or Western Europe. It is condescending and ignorant to attempt to group together Muslim women from these disparate regions into a single homogenous mass who can be defined and encapsulated under the same diagnosis. The fact is that the majority of those Muslim women in the west who wear some form of the veil (with or without facial covering, the vast majority do without), do so because they have made an informed choice to do so. Those who've taken the time to talk to Muslim women about this, rather than pontificate in an ivory tower, have by and large made great progress in bridging the subjective cultural divide. For instance, Mary Walker, who was a producer for the BBC2 series "Living Islam", drastically changed her views of the veil after talking to Muslims in 19 different countries:
"Just as to us the veil represents Muslim oppression, to them miniskirts and plunging necklines represent oppression. They said that men are cheating women in the West. They let us believe we're liberated but enslave us to the male gaze. However much I insist on the right to choose what I wear, I cannot deny that the choice is often dictated by what will make my body more attractive to men. Women cannot separate their identity from their appearance and so we remain trapped in the traditional feminine world, where the rules are written by men.
By choosing to wear the veil, these women were making a conscious decision to define their role in society and their relationship with men. That relationship appeard to be based more on exchange and mutual respect (a respect that was often lacking in the personal relationships I saw in the West), than the master/servant scenario I had anticipated. The Veil to them signified visual confirmation of their religious commitment, in which men and women were united, and for Zeenah and Fatima an even stronger commitment to a political ideal.
So were my notions of oppression in the form of the veil disqualified? If my definition of equality was free will then I could no longer define that oppression as a symptom of Islam. The women had all excercised their right to choose. To some extent, they were freer than me -- I had less control over my destiny. I could no longer point at them and say they were oppressed and I was not. My life was influenced by male approval as theirs -- but the element of choice had been taken out of mine. Their situations and their arguments had, after all, served to highlight shortcomings in my view of my own liberty."
It is this sort of self-reflection and analysis, as well as the previous deep-political critique, that was unfortunately completely missing from Joan Smith's Independent on Sunday piece. When Smith finally got round to the subject of Muslim women veiling in the UK, her comment was, typically, to portray the convictions and perceptions of Muslim women themselves as utterly irrelevant, and not worth any consideration at all:
"Muslim women in this country may be telling the truth when they say they are covering their hair and faces out of choice, but that doesn't mean they haven't been influenced by relatives and male clerics."
In one sentence, she dismisses the free decisions of millions of Muslim women as not even worth the freedom required to make them. These people must be oppressed! They must be coerced! The implication is that Muslim women are incapable of making their own choices and decisions, incapable of rational reflection, suffering from some sort of deep-seated inferiority, stupidity and/or vulnerability inherent to their peculiar Muslim psyche, requiring people like Jack Straw to stand up, take charge, and pressurize such women to change their backward ways. And immense socio-political pressure it is, whether or not it has been a legally-codified.
And of course, there is the wider issue of the alleged linkage between veiling and failed community relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. The fact remains that it is quite absurd to suggest that the phenomenon of parallel communities and so on has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that some women cover their faces. Straw's statement to this effect is a pathetic deflection away from policies of institutionalized racism and social segregation routinely deployed by local authorities under both the Tories and New Labour, including during Straw's tenure as Home Secretary.
Want to know why British Muslim Asians in areas like Blackburn and Bradford are separated off into impoverished ghettoised communities? Well, I wrote about this as a researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, when I was doing a report on the Oldham riots. We found that institutional racism condoned by Oldham Borough Council was at the root of the underlying causative processes behind the rioting. Unemployment was twice as high for blacks and Asians, compared to whites. In particular, at 38 per cent, the unemployment rate for people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic origin is nearly five times that of white people. Housing conditions are also grim. Thirteen per cent of Oldham's housing stock is "statutorily unfit for human habitation and a further 28% are in serious disrepair". Areas with houses in such condition are predominantly inhabited by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Here is a relevant quote from my IHRC report (also available here) on the direct role of the local authority in manufacturing and consolidating these ethnically-defined parallel communities:
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