The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (5 page)

The distrust of women reaches its apex during the wedding night test: is the Muslim bride a virgin or not? Due to the gender apartheid that banishes women from public life, a Muslim man has no natural way to get to know a woman with whom he might fall in love. His family is therefore entrusted with the choice, as only they would know where to find a genuine virgin. Although the recently wedded pair often don’t even know each other, they nevertheless must have intercourse on their wedding night. Even if the girl doesn’t want to, and her body closes up in fear or disgust, she must. And even if her husband doesn’t want to, either, he must demonstrate that he’s a man and that he can perform. The wedding guests will wait outside until a bloodstained sheet has been displayed. This compulsory coupling is in fact a socially sanctioned rape as well as a blatant denial of the worth of the individual.

A marriage is never simple, but a Muslim marriage begins at the very outset with a sign of mistrust, followed by an act of force. It is in this atmosphere of mistrust and force that the next generation of children is born and brought up.

Many young Muslim women living in Western countries have devised ways to enjoy sex before marriage, while still taking into account their families’ obsession with virginity. For example, they will insert foreign objects into their genitals to accomplish opportune bleeding on the night in question. They also can have their virginity “restored” if they were circumcised and had sex before marriage, a procedure that until recently was entirely reimbursed by the Dutch health insurance system. Upon a marriage proposal, a Somalian woman in Europe can have her vaginal stitches renewed by a Sudanese gynecologist in Italy; a Sudanese can go to a Somalian physician in Italy; their addresses are well known.

After marriage the mistrust of women only intensifies—now that the bride has been deflowered, her husband’s fears take on even greater proportions—he has just punctured his unique means of checking whether his wife has been to bed with another man. The only way of preventing her from cheating on him is to deny her access to the outside world as much as possible. She must have his permission, or his company, for every step she takes outside the door. Supposedly, he has obtained this authority from Allah and from centuries-old traditions. The eleventh-century imam Al-Ghazzali, a scholar widely known among the orthodox, wrote: “The well brought up woman…doesn’t leave the house, except with his definite approval, and then dressed in unattractive old clothes.” And: “She always puts her husband’s rights ahead of her own and that of her family. She is neat and clean and is always prepared to let him enjoy her sexually.”

A good woman obeys her husband and obliges him. According to the Koran, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore, the righteous women are devoutly obedient and guard in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them [first], [next] refuse to share their beds, [and last], chastise them [lightly]…” In accordance with the great and honored Caliph Umar Al-Khattab (whose status, for the Sunnis, almost equals that of the Prophet Muhammad), a woman is given three hundred lashes when four faithful Muslims testify that she has lied. Fortunately, this punishment is stretched out over three days so that the wounds are kept within bounds.

But Muslim women are only human, and from time to time they make up stories. Muslim men are not allowed to make love to a menstruating woman—the Koran says so—and this claim thereby offers excellent protection. A Muslim woman who has no desire to make love, and may become pregnant for the umpteenth time, may tell her husband that she is menstruating, a well-known excuse among Muslim women, comparable to the Western woman’s “headache.” Or, without her husband’s knowledge, she may use contraceptives, if they are available. Some married women have abortions without telling their husbands. All this means that lies are constantly being told about the most intimate matters. It is a survival strategy, but it also becomes a way of living, and when a man discovers that his wife is lying, his suspicions that she is evil are confirmed.

Children experience their mother’s lies on a daily basis. For example, if she admitted that she went out alone, her mother-in-law and her husband would be angry, so she lies. Such deceits and denials become commonplace. Admission would lead to loss of face and possibly violence. In many families, children get no allowance. A boy who steals from the household petty cash and is questioned about it does not admit the deed, for if he does he will certainly be humiliated and verbally abused. If he denies it, his honor is unblemished, and as long as he denies it, his father too can deny it to the outside world. Children learn from their mothers that it pays to lie. If they don’t want to be punished they’ve got to come up with stories.

This “virgins’ cage” has consequences for women, but also for men and children. The virgins’ cage is, in fact, a double cage. Women and girls are locked up in the inner cage, but surrounding this is a larger cage in which the entire Islamic culture has been imprisoned. Caging women in order to guard their virginity leads not only to frustration and violence for the individuals directly involved, but also to socioeconomic backwardness for the entire community. These caged women actually exert a harmful influence on children, especially young boys. Since most women in the Islamic world are excluded from education, and are purposely kept ignorant, when these same women bear and raise children, they can pass on only their limited knowledge, and so perpetrate a vicious cycle of ignorance from generation to generation.

Even first-generation Muslim mothers in the West have no more than elementary education. Many are illiterate and know nothing of the society in which they have to find their way. With any luck, those who immigrated as children will become educated at a later age, but as long as the traditional sexual morality remains their parents’ guiding principle for raising them, their socioeconomic progress will be difficult, if not impossible.

For many Muslims, the sexual morality of Islam has even more-far-reaching consequences. Unable to express openly the hatred they feel toward their husbands, some women direct it against their children. Of course, this does not apply to all women, for many of whom children are a consolation. But the relationship between parents and children almost never resembles what is usual in an individualistic society like the Netherlands.

Of course, violence against women often occurs within Western families, too, but Westerners emphatically repudiate violence, while most Muslim families regard violence against women as something that women themselves provoke because they don’t follow the rules. The family and the social environment do not disapprove of it. They reason that if your husband hits you, it must be because you had it coming to you. Western neighbors, family members, and friends don’t believe that the mistreatment of women is an acceptable educational device.

The Koran assigns great importance to values such as trust, truthfulness, and learning. Yet in just the few examples I have recounted above we can see how things actually stand in daily Islamic life—it is a dismal state of affairs. Mistrust is everywhere, and lies rule.

In order to put Islam’s strict sexual morality into perspective, we need to examine and analyze its practical consequences. Relations between the sexes have to be described objectively and critically. Then, on the basis of the resulting data, proposals must be made for changing the way in which men and women relate to each other.

The United Nations reports suggest that the systematic gathering of knowledge is not valued in the Arabic-Islamic countries. According to the Koran, the faithful must ceaselessly strive after knowledge, but the Koran also states that Allah is all-knowing and that the Koran is the source of all knowledge. It is impossible to reconcile these two positions. For Muslim children the study of biology and history can be very confusing. After all, history begins in a time before the Koran begins, and the theory of evolution contradicts the creation story in the Koran. Most mullahs advise Muslims who are confounded by this contradictory state of affairs that, when the Koran speaks of the “search for knowledge,” it means that a Muslim must keep on reading the Koran until, as a result of this dedicated reading, gateways to knowledge open by themselves.

The values of the Koran are essentially unattainable for any human being. A great tension exists between the inhumanly strict demands that Islam makes on the faithful and what they are able to live up to. Young men or women may want to meet the demand to remain virgins until marriage, but their hormones give them inclinations and thoughts that conflict with that demand and are therefore considered sinful. Along with the realization that the strict prescriptions of the Koran cannot be put into practice come doubts. Yet one is not allowed to doubt either the Koran or the Sunna (a collection of traditions about the life of Muhammad). After all, Muhammad’s life was exemplary. Doubt is immediately punishable, if not by the social environment, then by Allah. But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questioning, human beings can’t acquire knowledge. Consequently, even ardent followers of Islam find themselves in a precarious dilemma.

Because of this inner impasse, Muslim women and men often become confused; a community that lives according to the prescriptions of Muhammad and the Koran inevitably becomes pathological in its fears of contradictions, in its anger at inner and outside questioning, and in its frustrations at never being able to fulfill the ideals that they are taught to live up to. But many Muslims refuse to attribute responsibility for their misery to their own community or to the sexual morality imposed by their religion. Instead, they blame Allah, the Devil, or other external sources such as the Jews, Americans, or colonialism. Muslims don’t recognize that, in fact, the pursuit of a life based on their own Holy Book is the most significant source of their unhappiness.

A large number of Muslims, however, do manage to cope through denial. They say,
I’m absolutely not going to ask my wife whether she is a virgin. I don’t care. I’ll leave that to Allah.
And that way they survive.

T
O BREAK OUT
of the cage in which Muslims are imprisoned and in which they’ve imprisoned their women, they must start to practice self-criticism and test the moral values they derive from the Koran. The 15 million Muslims who live in the West are in the best position to do this because of civil rights and liberties, with freedom of expression not the least among them. A Muslim in Europe who closely examines the foundations of his faith does not have to fear a prison sentence or, as in the Arabic-Islamic countries, the death penalty. Ni Putes Ni Soumises (“Neither whores nor submissives”), the group of Muslim women in France that is protesting against gang rapes committed by fellow Muslims, is an example of a group making use of their freedom of expression. The leader of this group, Samira Bellil, was herself a victim of gang rape. A comparable protest is virtually impossible in any Islamic country. Another example is the pamphlet “Off with the Veil!” by the Iranian Chahdortt Djavann. In Iran, where wearing the veil is obligatory, this pamphlet would never even have been published. Several other writers and thinkers with Islamic backgrounds are also taking advantage of Western liberties, for example, the novelist Hafid Bouazza and the philosopher Afshin Ellian, who both work in the Netherlands. Maybe one day their work will be translated into Arabic and Persian, but for now it is banned in most Islamic countries. Perhaps the writer who has best identified the problems within the Muslim world is the philosopher Ibn Warraq, of Pakistani origin, author of
Why I Am Not a Muslim.
That this courageous man writes under a pseudonym shows that even in the West he does not feel safe.

Muslims who live in the West have easier access to information, and particularly the long tradition of religious criticism in the West. They can gather knowledge from not only libraries and in universities, but also from other people, and they can start to take a critical look at their own faith.

Self-criticism for Muslims is possible in the West, because the West, primarily the United States, is waging war on Islamic terrorism. Paradoxically, the attacks of September 11 have led to an enormous fascination with Islam. This fascination—which admittedly stems in part from an instinct for self-preservation—gives Muslims in the West an unusual opportunity to escape from their psychological cage.

In spite of these favorable circumstances, however, many Western Muslims are still more strongly influenced by conservative Islamic thought than by the ideas of sociologist Fatima Mernissi, for instance, the author of
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society,
and a scientist who has been influenced by Western thought. Of course, I recognize that not all 15 million Muslims are ready to adopt a critical standpoint with respect to the Prophet, and that some of them will resort to threats and intimidation, perhaps even taking the law into their own hands and committing murder. But I do find it startling that many women still strongly resist change, for example, by demonstratively wearing the
hijab.
Many women say that they didn’t wear a
hijab
in Turkey but started doing so after their arrival in the Netherlands. This reactionary attitude has a disheartening effect on progressive European Muslims.