Yeah, I'm late. I couldn't think of anything, okay? Anyway, jasona didn't have his column up early so let's just call this slipping in under a rather loose wire.
So I was struck by the intelligent reasonableness of Lictor's column last Friday. Treacherously, he once again proves that steeping in the conservative brainwash of Fox News and the simple fact of living in Texas can't dissolve all rational thought. As regards titties, and the exposure thereof, I'm right there with him.
You know what I mean.
Anyway, it's the other part of his column that really got me thinking. Because, as with the titties, his feelings about the whole women's rights versus Islam issue - as incarnated by the burkha in question - mirror my own. Sort of. Frankly, it would appear that he's actually more tolerant than I am. Call me a child of the Revolution (the French one, that is), but equality is unequivocally higher than adherence to religious doctrine in my mind. And a religion which states that women are second-class and severely restricts their behavior, well, it has something wrong with it.
As an aside, this is one of the things that has recently been pissing me off about the babbling of the reactionary conservatives vis-a-vis Iraq. The angry Bush cultist retort to the world's discomfort as Iraq's government embraces a woman-unfriendly version of Islam is that hey, Iraq's a democracy, they can pick their own rules and isn't great that they are doing so. Now I know that conservativism is the refuge of the simpleton, but come on. Is democracy our highest and only principle? What about the rights of man? The rights of woman?
So anyway. Democracy is great and all, but democracy is not more important than liberty. And if I say that democracy is not more important than liberty, you can guess how I feel about religion vis-a-vis liberty. Being, you know, an agnostic Democrat.
So seeing women in burkhas pisses me off. Now, in some cases, I suspect women wear the damn things because they have to. Because if they don't they will be beaten, at home or in public, or because they will be socially ostracized. And that is, obviously, wrong, and there ought to be laws against it.
Many women, however, wear them because they believe that they are second-class citizens. And that's a thornier issue. Is it wrong to indoctrinate them to believe that they are? And, if so, what can be done about it? What should be done about it? Who has the right to meddle with a culture?
Part of what gets me about the whole issue is that it's not intrinsic to Islam. I'm not an Islamic scholar, but I have studied religion and history and read the Koran and much of the Hadith. And frankly, the Islamic tradition of women as chattel is on very shaky ground. It's not really Islamic at all; it's a continuation of the tribal customs of the people who subsequently converted to Islam.
They do, or did, the same thing in the Christian Mediterranean, you know. On Malta women were supposed to grow old and die without ever leaving the households of their fathers or husbands, except on Sundays to go to church. (Upper class women, who had servants.) And on Sundays they went veiled and in all black.
Women are chattel in these places because they always have been. They were before Mohammed and his armies rode out of Arabia and they were after he conquered wherever it was that their people lived. Islam had little to do with it.
And it doesn't have to, either. Christian and Jewish men shave their faces. The Bible says, in some places, not to. Specifically. A society could be truly Islamic and yet treat women as fully equal to men; the scriptural basis for doing otherwise is no stronger than the JudeoChristian scriptural basis for not shaving.
So it's a cultural thing, and those cultures happen to have embraced Islam and thus now they call it an Islamic thing.
But it's wrong. And saying so is purely, completely my belief. There is no natural law, no recieved divine wisdom, that tells us men and women are fundamentally equal. It's purely a belief. There's no science there either; biologically there are obvious and poweful differences between men and women. No, equality is simply a core part of the Western canon of belief - a belief system stemming from Christianity, I might add.
It's what I was taught and it's what I believe.
So, if we go to an Islamic nation and create laws demanding that women not be treated as second-class citizens, we are imposing our beliefs on them.
And I'm all for it.
So what does that make me?
- Sun Ra