As far as a comprehensive look on women living under Islam I have found no better. From the most restrictive (Saudi Arabia) to the most liberal (Egypt) one is presented with a fascinating glimpse of what it must be like to be female and to live in a Middle Eastern world. In Chapter 7 A Queen the author even writes of how an American woman (the former Lisa Halaby now Queen Noor) marries the King of Jordan, converts to Islam then having to face her own challenges adjusting to a slow-to-accept Islamic society. The author also writes of other American women married to Middle Eastern men and living in their respective countries subject to the same type of restrictions other Islamic women have had to face.
Already in the Preface of the book I was shocked to learn that the wearing of the Islamic hijab (the veiled attire) for one of the author's colleague's signified "acceptance of a legal code that valued her testimony at half the worth of a man's, an inheritance system that allowed her half the legacy of her brother, a future domestic life in which her husband could beat her if she disobeyed him, make her share her attentions with three more wives, divorce her at whim and get absolute custody of her children." I could not imagine any intelligent, well educated American woman born and raised in a democratic society ever learning to tolerate such injustice. Betty Mahmoody who later wrote her book
Not Without My Daughter
certainly lived to experience her nightmare "of an American wife who agrees to visit her husband's family in Tehran only to find herself trapped there by Iranian laws that forbid women to leave the country without their husband's permission." Mahmoody's book does indeed "give an unremittingly bleak picture of life in Iran, describing wife beatings, filthy houses and vermin-infested food."
In contrast the author writes in Chapter 5 of a certain Janet from Kansas City who "gradually found herself coming to love many aspects of her life in Iran. She found that Iranians lavished affection on the few Americans who stayed. Some Iranians had warm memories of American teachers or technicians who had helped the country while even those who saw Americans only as rapacious exploiters felt that Janet, by staying, had aligned herself with Iran. Instead of being greeted with hostility, she found herself welcomed everywhere--pushed to the front of food lines, given the best meat and helped in every possible way." Yet at the end of this same chapter the story of Margaret, another American born Islamic wife, is highlighted. Her husband accustomed to going on long business trips to America had, instead of taking her for a visit to her parents, chose to leave her behind to do the chores for his mother and sister: " 'My mom's not too pleased' she said. 'She calls up and says, 'You waiting on his relatives again? ' She knows they're working me to death. She wants me to come home.'" Yet, when asked by the author why she had not taken up her mother's advice and go home for a while Margaret "straightened her hunched shoulders and kneaded the small of her back with a clenched fist. 'I can't' she said "My husband doesn't want me to." It was up to him to sign the papers that would allow her to leave the country." How truly sad a scenario!
Some Islamic countries, however, seemed to have a more open mind when it came to military service. In Chapter 6 Jihad Is For Women Too the author wrote of how the Emirates' president Sheik Zayed's wife, Sheika Fatima, offered the radical solution of recruiting women to deal with the manpower shortage. Hessa al-Khaledi, a friend of the sheika's, and the first woman civil engineer in that country was delegated to solve the problems of recruiting the Emirates' first women soldiers and "reconciling the religous establishment to their existence." A major problem came up with who would train these women. The Emirates only qualified instructors were men and that was unthinkable. "The answer was obvious to anyone who had watched the U.S. military descend on nearby Saudi Arabia. There, U.S. Army women were flying troop transports, maintaining missile batteries, trucking munitions to the front lines, The Emirates asked the U.S. Army if it could spare a few of its senior speciailists whose average length of service was fourteen years. Their commander, Major Janis Karpinski, was already serving in Saudi Arabia." Major Kapinksi, who years later was promoted to Brigadier General Karpinski wrote of this in her book
One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story
.
This is all well in good up until you read Chapter 10 Politics, With and Without a Vote. Out of everything I read in this book the story of what happened to a group of university educated, high achieving women from what Saudis call "good families" was the MOST shocking. The author described how in November 1990 forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, met on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, dismissing their drivers, about a quarter of them slid into the drivers' seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as passengers. A few blocks later members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at the intersections ordering the women out of the drivers' seats. Soon regular police arrived, the women were yelled at that they had committed a religious crime and the police drove the women's cars to police headquarters with the woman in the back. The author goes on: "While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent relgious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violation had occurred, since the women all had international drivers' licenses recognized by Saudi law. The religious representatives found that no moral issues were at stake, since the women were veiled and the Koran says nothing that could be construed as forbidding an act such as driving. The women were released." One would think that when the women who had taken part in the demonstration returned to work the next day at the university they "would have been greeted as heroines by their all-women students. Instead, some found their office doors daubed with graffiti, criticizing them as un-Islamic. Others found their classes boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets...Predictably the womens' phones began ringing off the hook with abusive calls. If their husbands answered, they were told to divorce their whorish wives, or berated for being unable to control them." This was NOT the WORST part of this however. These women ended up being BETRAYED by the ruling family who instead of standing by them on Islamic grounds, proclaiming that what the EXTREMISTS were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, caved to THEIR pressure: "Prince Salman's committee's findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their passports." To add insult to injury a week after the demonstration: "Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstrations as a "stupid act" and said some of the women involved were raised outside Saudi Arabia and "not brought up in an Islamic home." He then read out a new fatwa, or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia's leading sheik Abdul Aziz bin Baz stating that women driving contradicted 'Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens'. If driving hadn't been illegal before, it was now. "
Although some sixteen years old now, this is still an OUTSTANDING book about life for Islamic women in their respective countries. As a Lithuanian-American who was encouraged to seek as much higher education as I could, never treated as property by either my father OR my husband I feel extremely fortunate to be living in the United States free of such restrictions. The Islamic faith does appear to have some real problems in its interpretation and application of the teachings of the Koran. I had previously read Irshad Manji's book
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith
which describes this in great detail. I would highly recommend Manji's book in addition to
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women
.
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