The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (8 page)

Not surprisingly, many of the laws laid down by the Koran put the social peace of the group first, within which there is a high degree of social control. Many of these laws are related to the honor of a man, his family, or his clan. The opposite of honor is disgrace, so a man is as passionate about guarding his honor as he is about avoiding shame and disgrace. Lies and evasion play an important part in this culture of honor and shame; ignoring or simply denying what has really happened is normal. The tribal culture has a strongly developed sense of mistrust, not only of outsiders, but also of the members of one’s own family or clan.

RISE AND FALL OF ISLAM

Islam united ignorant Arabic tribes that had been deeply immersed in anarchy into a world civilization. In the seventh century, Muslims conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa and began to move into the Iberian Peninsula. Nothing seemed to stop the new faith from spreading. During the rise of Islam, the only other civilization of a comparable standard and size was China. But Bernard Lewis distinguishes the Chinese civilization from Islam because it was restricted to a single region and one racial group. The Muslims created a multiethnic, multiracial, and universal world civilization. Yet today, compared with the Christian West, the Muslim world has become poor, weak, fractious, and ignorant.

According to Lewis, the question “What went wrong?” is commonly tackled from either a secular or sociopsychological point of view. Secularists put the role of religion in Islamic society at the center of the discussion and argue that the West’s economic and cultural primacy is the result of the separation of church and state and of the institution of a civil society that follows secular legislation. The others, especially feminists, focus on sexism and the inferior position of women in Islamic society. Not only do these problems deprive the Islamic world of half their population’s talents and energy, they disadvantage their own children by leaving them in the care of illiterate, downtrodden mothers.

“The products of such an education…are likely to grow up arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society,” says Lewis. Indeed a growing number of Muslims claim the answer to “What went wrong?” is that they have been struck by evil because of their neglect of the divine inheritance of Islam. This all too simple response is fatal to further economic development because it means a return to a largely imaginary past as occurred in the Iranian Revolution and in other fundamentalist movements and regimes in Muslim countries. In comparison, the secular system of democracy offers more opportunities. Some historical thinkers, Lewis among them, are optimistic about Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish Republic. Others, including Pryce-Jones, are less optimistic about the extent to which secularism and other Western developments are (or can be) truly understood by people who are used to living in a tribal society.

Lewis’s position is unambiguous. The subtitle of his book,
The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East,
is revealing. The people who abandoned Islamic civilization have not fully experienced the intrusive, painful but ultimately liberating process of modernization as their neighbors and rivals in the Christian West have. Lewis warns that a downward spiral of hatred and resentment, anger and self-pity, poverty and oppression can result from rejecting modernity, but he hopes that Muslims will use their talents and energy to achieve a common goal, so that one day Islamic nations may become an important civilization again.

In this respect Lewis is more optimistic than Pryce-Jones. Lewis demands that Muslims relinquish their most substantial values, the things they pass on to their children including the patriarchal family structure and the mind-set that is obsessed with honor and group self-image. But, as Pryce-Jones says, these are the very characteristics that define the tribe, precisely the attributes that make it such a tightly closed community. These tribal values, and the sense of identity that accompanies them, are so deeply ingrained that the people have become blind to their disastrous long-term effects. The total acceptance of these values is perpetuated by the endlessly repeated processes, that legitimized premodern concepts with texts from the Koran. The ideas and traditions of Muhammad’s tribal society are adopted straight into the industrial and urban society of today, without any consideration for their historical context.

The historian Karen Armstrong believes that in the past Muslims have successfully demonstrated they can separate reason from religion. After all, Muslims once had great philosophers and created a world civilization. She feels that the problem is not so much rooted in Muslims themselves, and their religion, as in the West’s attitude toward Muslim countries. Imperialism and the supremacy of the United States as a trading power have deprived Muslims of the opportunity to come to grips with their own problems.

Lewis is more skeptical. He agrees that from the nineteenth century onward the British and French came to dominate the Islamic people both politically and economically. This brought about some fundamental cultural changes, such as the migration to cities in the twentieth century. Neither does he dispute that this development transformed the lives of Muslims, in both a positive and a negative sense. He acknowledges that the Americans have strategic interests to protect in the region (securing the stability of their oil supply). Yet, according to Lewis, none of this is the real cause of the lack of progress in Islamic countries. Rather, these are the consequences, just as the Mongolian invasion during the thirteenth century was possible only because the Islamic empire was suffering from internal weakness at the time.

Both Lewis and Pryce-Jones believe that the main reason for the decline lies in the inability of Muslims to set up democratic institutions that safeguard the right to individual freedom, put the relative values of scientific knowledge and religious wisdom into perspective (scientific research is often brought to a halt when it is perceived as a threat to religious dogmas), and undo the social and psychological consequences of the subjugation of women. They do not say in so many words that Islam as a religion is at the root of the tragic situation in large parts of the Islamic world, but their analysis does point to the fact that the dominance of religious practice in the Muslim world (among orthodox followers and fundamentalists) forms a serious obstacle to social progress and emancipation for all Muslims.

In July 2002 the United Nations Development Program published the
Arab Human Development Report,
an analytical survey of the average life expectancy, the level of education, and the standard of life of the inhabitants of twenty-two Islamic countries. The report confirms the theory put forward by Pryce-Jones and Lewis: deep-rooted institutional shortcomings stand in the way of human development. According to the report, the region is plagued by “three key deficits that can be considered defining features”:

 

a lack of freedom

 

 

disempowerment of women

 

 

a lack of capabilities or knowledge.

 

THE FATE OF THE PEOPLE

How do people live in this kind of premodern lack of development? The “mass triangle” represents their response. There is also a “power” or “elite triangle,” which will be explained in a moment. Reality, of course, is more complex; categories overlap.