women in islam

today we had a very interesting lecture by a very accomplished female scholar named Dr. Samira Khaleldeh on the status of women in islam. now, i'm definitely a cultural relativist insofar as i understand that my personal feminism is a result of my priveleged american upbringing; i don't really believe in international human rights laws because i think they are based on a uniquely western perspective, and that imposing these sets of and values globally is essentially moral imperialism.

so most of what dr. khalaldeh said i could get behind, or at least understand. she believed that the islam that most people were practicing was not true/pure islam; that pure islam fiercely protected the rights of all humans, men and women. that the religion gives women the right to life, education, participation in public life, divorce, and economic independence. and all this is true. shariah law is not true islam; rather, it is based on cultural and political values. she said that women nowadays do not understand their rights and do not do a good enough job fighting for them, and that they should not wait for a "savior" (the west) to bring them these rights.

when she opened up the floor for questions, i raised my hand. i told her that i believed this to be true, but that the potential obstacle i see in this perspective is that this society (as others, american included) is still very much dominated by men. and that perhaps educating women about their rights within islam was not enough; that men needed to reach this understanding too. i asked her if there were efforts to bring awareness to men of women's god-given rights. she said yes, but did not provide me with any concrete examples.

she said some things about women's dress that i found i couldn't reconcile. i have no problem with veiling. i think that women have many and varied reasons for veiling, and that few of these reasons have anything to do with outside pressures (obviously the exception is countries under shariah law). the veil has, detrimentally, become a symbol of progress of a society. it is unfortunate that this has become critics' focus; it puts the burden of progress on women's bodies, which is dangerous and unforgivable.
dr. khaleldeh quoted 2 verses in the qur'an that instruct women to dress modestly, covering their bodies except for their face and hands so that they would not attract the gaze of men. she said however, that men were only required to cover themselves from the waist to the knees.
i asked her why. this seems to deny that women, like men, have sexual desires and covet men's bodies just as men covet women's. she said yes, this is true: women aren't subject to sexual desire. in islamic culture, men are virile, and their sexual appetite is greater than women's. but the evidence she used to support this claim was cultural, not scientific. obviously women have biological sexual desires. this is scientific, not cultural, fact. her evidence was, firstly, that men in islam take multiple wives. i have a hard time believing that she herself thought this was a legimate argument. as scholarly as she is, she should know that polygamy was born out of necessity; that during wartime, the shortage in men gave rise to polygamy so that the community might sustain the population. her second piece of evidence was advertising; that advertising shows many images of sexualized women to attract men to their product, but that you rarely see images of half-naked men in advertising. i don't feel i need to explain how laughable that justification is.

all in all, i thought it was an interesting lecture, and i was glad to hear the perspective of a self-proclaimed muslim feminist, and, for that matter, a veiled and deeply pious muslim feminist. she defied many of the stereotypes that i think many people have in america of muslim women. but still, i found myself unable to understand some of her opinons, especially regarding the sexual desires (or lack thereof) of women. while i fully respect the ideals of modesty that exist in this society, i think that denying women their sexuality can lead to dangerous imbalances in sexual relationships/marriages, with women viewed as the object of men's sexual fulfilment. perhaps the view that women aren't sexually desirous results from that fact that sexual education in schools is virtually non-existent in jordan.

i'm not necessarily shocked by this fact, but i am concerned about it's repercussions. here, it is very important for men that they marry virgins. but the converse is not necessarily true. as such, prostitution is actually a big problem in jordan, with many women arriving from russia, romania, and ukraine and working in sex trade. with the lack of sex education in jordan, i wonder if men are contracting STDs from prostitutes and passing them onto their future wives. this is something that would be worth investigating in an ISP (the independent study project that we work on for a month at the end of the semester), if it weren't such an obstacle getting people to open up about sex, which is still quite a taboo topic of conversation.

there are no easy answers, but being here has provided me with a greater perspective into the lives of modern women in jordan. every day i view them with more and more respect as they support their families (really though, men here seem to be utterly helpless, getting taken care of by their mothers until they get married and then are taken care of by their wives. if they were on their own, i'm confident that most of them would starve to death) and keep them together like glue, manage jobs and an education, and earn respect from others not just with their bodies but with their minds. and they do it all with a bit of sass and plenty of good humor.