Islam’s gender crisis

A LEADING Muslim cleric's recent sermon, translated this week, blaming women for inviting rape through their choice of clothes and make-up, brings to a head in Australia the titanic collision between conservative Islam and modernity.

Whether this collision can be reconciled is one of the key issues for the West today. The issue is far bigger than Australian Mufti Sheik Taj Din al-Halali's preoccupation with rapes cases involving Muslim men.

One of its bloodiest offspring was the ritual murder in Amsterdam two years ago of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker killed by a Muslim fanatic for his role in Submission, the short film he made with anti-Muslim activist and then Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

A savage critique of Islam's attitude to women, the film included quotations from the Koran projected on to naked female bodies.

Ironically, as Ian Buruma points out in his new volume on the brutal murder and the limits of tolerance it demarked, The Netherlands was one of the countries where the Enlightenment began three centuries ago. The slaying turned the secular, free-thinking nation upside down and prompted a ferocious worldwide debate about multiculturalism and cultural relativism.

The immutable word of God, expressed through the Koran, is that "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one superior to the other."

"Good women," it continues, "are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then, if they obey you, take no further action against them." (Koran 4: 34).

Misogynistic philosophy is hardly original. In Greek mythology, woman was manufactured by the gods and sent to earth as punishment after Prometheus gave mankind fire, the spark of civilisation.

St Paul makes clear in the Christian Bible that as the first sinners, women are not permitted "to teach or to have authority over men", but are "to keep silent".

For women reared in the secular West, these sentiments are deeply confronting.

St Paul's admonition is taken seriously today only by the minority in the Christian faith obsessed by the question of women's ordination.

When it comes to fundamentalist Islam, it's a different story: a trail of violence against women can be sheeted home to twisted misinterpretations of centuries-old Islamic texts. In her account of Islamic women across the Middle East, Nine Parts of Desire, Geraldine Brooks notes that one in five Muslim girls lives in a community where some form of female genital mutilation is religiously sanctioned. Yet in the Koran (4:119) it is only Satan who talks about commanding a change to "Allah's creation".

The silence of most Western feminists on the issue of Islam-sanctioned violence is one of the most shaming aspects of the present debate.

In contrast, Hirsi Ali, now living in the US and planning a new film on Islam, has called Islam an expression of desert male culture and the prophet Mohammed a pervert and a pedophile for counting a nine-year-old among his wives. Growing up in a strict Muslim household, Hirsi Ali was taught that non-Muslims were immoral and obscene, "their girls and women whores".

Hilali's comments demonstrate that as the violence comes closer to home, Western feminists' silence must become harder to maintain.

Shock waves reportedly pulsed through Germany last year after the honour killings of eight young Turkish women. The women had reportedly refused the husbands their families had chosen for them or had sought sexual partners outside their religion.

The scandal intensified after a school principal, shocked that his Turkish pupils insisted of one of the victims that "the whore got what she deserved", went to the national press.

Last year, Australians had a bitter taste of what shocked Germany when MSK, already serving time for gang-raping girls in Sydney, mounted the defence in a second case that his Muslim upbringing in the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan led him to believe he had the right to rape girls he considered promiscuous.

Expert evidence given to the trial described the NWFP as the "most fiercely Muslim" part of Pakistan and one where men's authority over women is "encapsulated in the honour code".

A NSW Supreme Court judge rejected MSK's defence that his culture made him do it, but his father, a doctor, said after MSK's first conviction in 2003: "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."

If they do, the results can be fatal. Honour killings in many parts of Pakistan are sanctioned by tribal and customary law. A woman who transgresses this code in the NWFP, according to the expert evidence, "would be punished by being physically disfigured or killed by her father or brothers to retrieve family honour".

Figures presented to Pakistan's Senate two years ago show the extent of violence in that country where 2774 women died in reported honour killings between 1998 and 2003.

Rape is even more common. In one of the most celebrated rape cases in recent years Mukhtaran Mai, a young illiterate peasant woman from the Punjab, was gang-raped in 2002 as punishment for the alleged sexual activity of her 12-year-old brother. Mai's case came to international attention after she took the step of taking her grievance to court. Pakistan's Hudood laws, introduced in 1980, make this nearly impossible. They mean that if a woman is raped a conviction requires four adult male witnesses or the rapist's confession. If sex is held to be consensual, the woman can be prosecuted for adultery and imprisoned or stoned to death. Plans to amend the Hudood laws to make it easier to punish rapists remain stalled in the Islamabad parliament because of opposition from ultra-conservative Islamic parties.

Born in Egypt in 1941, Hilali in the 1960s joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme Islamist political organisation that claims to be non-violent but that has spawned terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida through breakaway members. The possible influence of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood member whose 1966 hanging and "strategic martyrdom" was central to the founding of modern Islamism, in fermenting the Australian Mufti's attitude to women cannot be ignored.

In a 12,000-word essay written for a British newspaper, author Martin Amis describes Sayyid's "traumatic incident with a drunken, semi-naked woman" crossing the Atlantic from Alexandria to the US to study in 1949, a journey he details in his encyclopedic commentary, Shade of the Koran. Hospitalised in wanton New York, a nurse, complete with "thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs" and a "provocative laugh", regaled Sayyid, according to Amis, with her wish list of endowments for the ideal lover. Sayyid later developed the incident "into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women".

After six months breathing in lustful air at the State College of Education in Greeley, Colorado, Sayyid's fantasies of devilish Western women had infantalised him.

Recalling a church-hop in Greeley, he writes: "A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh."

The same infantilised fears are part of what drove Mohammed Atta to fly a passenger aircraft into the World Trade Centre on the clear morning of September 11, 2001, at least in Amis's fictionalised account.

The Last Hours of Mohammed Atta was first aired in April in New Yorker magazine and published this month with his novella House of Meetings in a new volume.

As he prepares to slit the soft throat of the air stewardess on American Flight 11, the Egyptian-born Atta in Amis's fiction strengthens his resolve by recalling an altercation that took place on a flight the previous year between 15 or 16 white-robed Muslims who had left their seats and crowded into the aisle to pray.

After the men ignored the imprecations of a flight steward and threats of the pilot to return to Dubai, "she" appeared.

"Here was the dark female in her most swinishly luxurious form: tall, long-necked with hair like a billboard for a chocolate sundae, and all that flesh, damp and glowing as if from a fever or even lust."

She bellowed: "Vamos, carriba, c--!" (Let's get going, c--!).

Witnessing the scene, Atta "would never forget the face of the stewardess - the face of cloudless entitlement - and how badly he had wanted to hurt it."

Like Sayyid, Bali bomber Amrozi became possessed by perverted fantasies about Western women in 1991 when he found work in Malaysia as part of a road gang building a highway for an Australian construction company. His Australian workmates shared with Amrozi their tales of hedonistic holidays in Bali and the drinking, chasing girls, prostitutes, drug taking, skimpy outfits and atheism involved.

In June 2003 Amrozi told Bali's Denpasar District Court that he was motivated to attack Westerners after learning of their decadent behaviour. The temptations of Bali's nightclubs meant "people have abandoned their religion". He lambasted foreigners for "free sex", failing to cover "their private parts" and having a bad influence on the morality of the young. A month ago alleged terror leader Abu Bakar Bashir echoed Amrozi when he was reported saying television shows featuring scantily clad women were more harmful than the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202.

Despite the hatred of Western women clear in al-Hilali's comments, many scholars argue that Islam is compatible with Western ideologies, says the Australian National University's Amin Saikal, director of the Centre of Arab and Islamic Studies. "You can see a very liberal interpretation of Islam which justifies Western values and is compatible with Western ideologies," Saikal says.

This must be the view of innumerable moderate Muslims who have protested against the Mufti's words.