The paradox of the Muslim feminist
by George Jonas
National Post
June 23, 2010
The clash of civilizations wears the mask of the battle of the sexes. Reading atrocity stories about the Taliban's treatment of women on the front pages, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's reminiscences of growing up a Muslim girl in the back, it's hard not to think of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan as the expeditionary force of the Women's Movement.
Given this ambiance, it's surprising to hear a well-informed speaker tell the European Parliament that Turkish women are "some of the most militant, and spearhead the effort to Islamicize Turkey today." Hmm. Why would women spearhead the resurrection of a theocratic state that, whatever it may do for men, only rolls things back to the Dark Ages for women? Why would the sophisticated women of Turkey, who can become prime ministers if they like (and have), spearhead a system that doesn't let their Saudi sisters drive a car? It sounds counterintuitive.
All the same, one doesn't dismiss an observation made by Efraim Halevy, former head of the Mossad, Israel's sage intelligence agency (call it sagency to save a syllable.) Halevy, who headed Mossad between 1998 and 2002, is a scholarly spook whose memoir, Man in the Shadows, tells fascinating tales about his region without telling any tales out of school.
Scholarly spooks, unlike spooky scholars, know what they're talking about; the question with Halevy is whether he wants to talk about what he knows. His observation doesn't sound like disinformation. If Mossad wanted to sell Europe a bill of goods about Turkey's re-Islamicization, women being in the vanguard wouldn't be it. Quite the opposite, re-Islamicization being foisted on Turkey's reluctant womenfolk by a reactionary patriarchy would lend itself to political hay-making far more readily.
Some examples support Halevy's assessment. In 1999, for instance, a newly elected deputy by the name of Merve Kavakci was denied a seat in Turkey's National Assembly because she insisted on wearing her headscarf, a religious symbol that, like the fez, had long been banned in secularized Turkey from governmental and educational institutions. Considering that a state based on the faith whose symbol Ms. Kavakci wanted to wear may not have let her serve as a deputy, her request seemed incongruous. But congruity has never been a requirement in human affairs.
Of course, there's more to Islam -- or patriarchy -- than atrocity stories. The caliphate was a functioning society with its own power-sharing arrangements, in which the public realm was a male preserve, while women ruled the private realm, the home and the family, often autocratically. The ranking female -- oldest wife, mother-in-law, family matriarch -- needed no empowerment; she ruled within her jurisdiction, not only over the women or children of the household, but the titular male head as well. Folklore in my native Hungary under Turkish bondage (1541-1686) held that the harem belonged to the Sultan but the choice of wife he was to sleep with each night belonged to his mother.
When the Turkish Porte went into decline, some patriotic "young Turks" thought the reason was its traditional, stick-in-the-mud religion, Islam. In 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his followers secularized "the sick man of Europe," and turned it into the Republic of Turkey, changing, maybe only incidentally but fundamentally, the status of its women.
Was it an improvement? No doubt, although opening doors from private to public realms benefits many women only marginally. The status and security that accrue to them in patriarchal societies inside the home is rarely matched by the world outside. Like most men, women end up in menial jobs. Reigning wives or mothers-in-law inside the home don't become prime ministers outside, but seamstresses and grocery clerks. It isn't just that emancipation isn't necessarily a good deal: It isn't necessarily emancipation.
Last week I asked Halevy to elaborate on his European speech. His answers are intriguing.
Muslim women manifest emancipation by saying no to secularity where men are secular, and to religiosity, where they're religious. When a Muslim society already embraces secularism, as Atatürk's Turkey or the Shah's Iran, women "wear their hijab as a symbol of their personal emancipation."
"Many of the women of Turkey have turned to a more fundamentalist approach to Islam as a means of women empowerment," Halevy says. When Iran's Islamic Revolution began, "the women of Iran teamed up with the Ayatollahs led by exiled Khomeini and spearheaded the demonstrations that led to the downfall of the Shah."
The paradox doesn't escape Halevy. Women's quest for emancipation and empowerment induces them to embrace fundamentalists who would deprive them of both, albeit gradually. "Only after the exile of the Shah did the Ayatollahs turn on the women, their erstwhile strategic ally."
How does this augur for the future? The ex-spy chief won't hazard a guess.
"Today the women of Tehran are a strategic threat to the regime," he replies. "Will the women of Turkey also feel it necessary to change direction? Who can fathom the innermost spirit of the Muslim woman of the 21st century? Will anybody bet one way or another?"
Not this writer. I'm folding.