| 07 November 2004 | Sunday | 23 Ramazan 1425 |
What Bush can do to salvage Iraq
Who will be the next Arafat?
The veiling of women, covering of their hair, and the related matter of their status in society have been subjects of intense debate in recent years. I have been reading on the subject, and it seems to me that it might be instructive, and give us a larger perspective, if we looked at women in the ancient world.
Let us first visit Egypt of some 1,500 hundred years before the Greek invasion (third century BC). Contrary to initial expectation, we find that the Egyptian woman had nearly the same legal and economic rights and privileges that the man in the same class had.
Woman could own, buy, sell, lease, inherit, receive as gift, and manage private property without needing the intermediate agency of a male relative or designee. The property in question could consist of real estate, movable goods, money, business, slaves, and livestock. She could conclude agreements, make settlements, execute testaments, testify in court as a witness, appear as a contracting party in marriage or divorce proceedings, sue and be sued at law. She could lend and borrow.
Any property that she owned before marriage remained hers. In the event of divorce, she took one third of the assets she or her husband had acquired during their marriage ("community property"). In addition, she could receive such compensation as had been stipulated in the marriage contract. She inherited one third of the community property upon her husband's death. The latter could make a will during his lifetime, assigning all of his property to his wife to the exclusion of their children and other relatives.
Only a very small number of women entered the professions or worked as administrators, judges, and scribes. But they were free to go about in public places, and lower class women worked in the fields and workshops. They felt reasonably secure outside the home. Ramesses III is said to have boasted: "I enabled the woman of Egypt to go her own way ... where she wanted, without any person assaulting her on the road."
The woman of ancient Egypt did not wear the veil, and she was not required to cover her head.
Woman's role and status in ancient Rome were complex because the actual practice varied from the law and conventional wisdom. She was presumed to be congenitally weak, unstable, and frivolous. Roman law placed her under the total control of her father or grandfather (head of the family) and later, in a certain type of marriage, under that of her husband. The patriarch could punish his children, even order them killed, for dishonourable conduct.
Nevertheless, the woman remained the owner of the dowry and other gifts she had received at the time of her wedding. She could inherit property from her parents, husband, and other relatives. But she could buy and sell, and make other transactions, only with the consent of the head of her family or, in his absence, through a male agent of her choice.
Marriages were made to combine estates, property, political influence and to produce children to inherit the same. The idea of love as a reason for marriage was foreign to the thinking of upper class men and women. The larger the number of children, especially sons, born to a woman the greater the honour the society accorded her.
Either party could initiate divorce proceedings, and even a ground as simple as incompatibility would be adequate. If a man divorced his wife for reasons other than immoral conduct, particularly adultery, he must give her one half of his property. But not if she was the one to have sought the divorce, and in that event she also lost the custody of children to him.
In actual practice, the man in ancient Rome placed a high value on marriage, family, and home and this attitude made for a better treatment of women. Segregation of women had never been the Roman way. They could go out in public, attend meetings, listen to speakers, and dine with male guests. But it is true also that their comings and goings were watched for signs of sexual laxity, intemperance, or extravagant display.
It became common for upper class women to learn to read and write. Familiarity with known books and ability to discuss politics became signs of high status and accomplishment for them. They regarded work as something that slaves and servants did. Thus, they did not take jobs, and they were barred from holding public office. But wives in political families were often able to give their husbands the benefit of their shrewd reading of the current politics scene. Women in the royal palace and other high places resorted to political intrigue.
Roman women gave a lot of attention to their hair. Many of them dyed it, and wore it in many different styles held in place by jeweled clips and pins. Some of them also put on wigs to make their hair look thicker or longer. Upper class girls wore a flame-coloured veil at their wedding. Other women wore a headscarf sometimes to protect their hair when they went out on a windy way. But normally, the woman of ancient Rome did not cover her head, and she did not wear a veil.
We now move back to Babylonia (2500 BC-1750BC) and Assyria (900 BC-600 BC). The cardinal facts about the woman in these civilizations are, first, that she was treated as the property of her father or husband and, second, that she was regarded as an agency for producing children, hopefully, boys. Fathers sold their daughters to prospective husbands for a price.
Infertility on her part was a ground for divorce. If, having borne some children, she wanted to exercise birth control, her husband was allowed to drown her to death. He was free to visit prostitutes or take concubines, but his wife would be put to death if she committed adultery. Sex out of wedlock on the part of an unmarried girl was unacceptable because the resulting loss of virginity reduced her value.
The "Middle Assyrian Law-40," a modified version of the Code of Hammurabi (a famous Sumerian king), allowed a husband to divorce his wife without giving reasons and simply by saying: "thou are not my wife." But if she disowned him, she could be drowned. "Thou shall throw that woman into the water," said the Code, who was an adulteress, poor housekeeper, or one who belittled her husband.
On the positive side, it may be noted that under certain limitations women could inherit, own, and bequeath property. A few upper class women did rise to be elders, judges, and scribes.
The Babylonian aristocracy and gentry confined their women to their quarters. If and when they must go out, they had to be accompanied by eunuchs (male slaves who had been castrated). In Assyria MAL-40 required all women belonging to the propertied class ("respectable women") to cover their heads when they were out on the street and to wear a veil if they were out alone, unaccompanied by a male relative. A concubine ("secondary wife"), accompanying her mistress ("primary wife"), must also veil herself. Prostitutes, harlots, and slave girls were strictly forbidden to cover their heads or to wear veils.
Woman in ancient Israel was similarly handicapped. Hebrew scriptures and theology had it that she was inferior and subordinate to man and, second, that she belonged to him as property. The 10th commandment, for instance, forbade believers to covet their neighbour's property, including his home, women, slaves, and cattle. A father could sell his daughter away as a slave. A man paid a bride price to the father of the girl he proposed to marry, and she passed into his ownership upon marriage. She did not inherit from her father if he had one or more sons. If he died without any children at all, his property went to his brothers but his sisters got nothing. A woman could own property, but if her husband became bankrupt, she would be sold into slavery along with him to discharge his debts.
The idea of woman as property necessarily requited her virginity before marriage. Every groom insisted that his bride be virgin - otherwise the men of the village could stone her to death in front of her father's house. Adultery invited the death penalty because it was a violation of someone's property rights.The law allowed Jewish men to take multiple wives and, in addition, have any number of concubines (if they could afford them). A woman could not divorce her husband under any circumstances, but he could divorce her simply by sending her a written note to that effect. Her main duty was to give birth to children, preferably boys. Failure to make babies brought her disgrace and censure.
A Jewish woman could not testify in court. While a man's vow was binding, hers could be annulled by her father or husband. She deserved subordination and strict scrutiny of her conduct because, left to herself, she would be a seducer of men and maker of mischief. "No wickedness comes anywhere near the wickedness of woman.... Sin began with her and thanks to her we all must die." (Old Testament, Ecclesiasticus)
It is not surprising then that women in ancient Israel stayed home for the most part. They were not to talk with strangers. When they must go out, they were to cover their heads and those from upper class families were also expected to wear a face veil. In the latter case, the veil became a symbol of the woman's superior social status. Prostitutes were forbidden to veil themselves.
Next Sunday we shall explore a few more ancient societies and formulate conclusions concerning the nexus between the woman's status and her veiling in antiquity.
E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net
What Bush can do to salvage Iraq
As George Bush said in his victory speech, "a new term is a new opportunity." Unfortunately, it will begin with the same old wretched problem of Iraq.
I hope the president will take time to ponder the Iraq conundrum anew, now that he has won the freedom to craft a true strategy rather than a slogan.
His "stay the course" rhetoric may have energized the Republican base, but it didn't answer the question of the typical soldier on the ground: How do we win this thing, and, if we can't, how do we get out?
The irony is that Bush can make bold decisions about Iraq now in a way that a victorious John Kerry could not have done. It's the Nixon-to-China phenomenon. Bush doesn't have to prove he's tough on Iraq. His only obligation is to do what makes sense. But what is that, exactly?
Iraq has become a Catch-22: The definition of victory is a stable Iraqi government that can maintain security without depending on U.S. troops. But a viable Iraqi government, again almost by definition, will be one that can claim it ended the U.S. occupation and restored Iraq's dignity and independence. Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, is caught in this double bind.
The more he depends on U.S. help, the less legitimate he appears in Iraqi eyes. For that reason, Allawi has been pushing to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces - especially two armoured divisions he thinks are crucial. I'm told the Iraqi leader was so upset about this issue that when Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad last month, Allawi briefly suggested he might not run in January's elections.
After a strong start last summer, Allawi knows he is losing the confidence of Iraqis. In a poll completed a month ago, the percentage of Iraqis who said the interim government was effective had fallen to 43 percent, compared with 63 percent in July. A frustrated Allawi sent a letter to Bush in October complaining that the training of Iraqi forces wouldn't be completed until well after the elections scheduled in late January, "which is simply too late," according to excerpts published in the New Yorker.
The locus of the Iraqi Catch-22 is the city of Fallujah. In addition to being the centre of the anti-American insurgency, it's a symbol of Sunni Muslims' resistance to what they fear will be future domination by Iraq's Shia majority. Fallujah may be the decisive battle of the war, but it's an especially delicate one.
An American-led "victory" that razes the city could further alienate the Sunnis and poison the chances for political reconciliation. That's why Allawi wants the armoured units so badly - so that Iraqi tanks can lead the way into Fallujah and make it look less like an American operation.
U.S. Marines, joined by about 4,000 Iraqi troops, are poised to attack the city. U.S. commanders in Baghdad believe the troops are ready to roll, but the attack isn't likely until after Ramadan ends in about 10 days. Allawi and the Americans will probably make a last effort at negotiation; they know military victory in Fallujah might come at the cost of political defeat.
So what's the right course now in Iraq? As is so often the case in the Middle East, the trick is riding two horses at once. America must keep faith with the Shia majority, which rightly expects to play a decisive role after decades of oppression. But at the same time, the United States must reassure Sunnis that they have a place in the new Iraq.
Allawi and his American advisers sensibly have been reaching out to Sunni leaders; Jordan, with U.S. support, will be hosting a quiet gathering of Iraqi Sunnis next week. The Sunnis may account for only 20 percent of the population, but if they aren't included in writing Iraq's new constitution, the violence will continue.
Thus administration officials should give up their hope that they can rely on Iraq's other two ethnic groups, the Kurds and Shias, to make January's elections a success.
The key to stability is regaining the support of Iraq's silent majority - the long-suffering, secular-minded Sunnis and Shias referred to by some U.S. and British intelligence analysts as the POIs, which is short for "pissed-off Iraqis." These POIs are angry at American occupation, and they want it to end. So here's my recommendation for President Bush: He should announce that when a new Iraqi government is elected, he is prepared to negotiate the terms and timetable of American withdrawal. If handled wisely, that approach would be an American victory, and an Iraqi victory, as well.-Dawn/Washington Post Service
Who will be the next Arafat?
There comes a moment when every man's obituary appears on his face. Suddenly the hero of a hundred battles is suffused with a childlike helplessness, and his hand clutches for support from a friend, unsure whether this will be the last gesture.
It is a moment of truth beyond denial. It is the face of a man who has seen the approach of the angel of death, and knows that there are no answers, there is no negotiation, there is only submission to the will of God.
It was such a face that a genuine hero of our times, Yasser Arafat, presented to television when cameras glimpsed him on Thursday, October 28. May God grant Arafat a much longer life, but his days as the commander in chief of the Palestinian resistance are over.
No man can be a hero all his life, unless that life is a short one. Arafat was a hero in spasms, and stubbornly human the rest of the time, wandering through error, calculation and miscalculation. Tragedy was the inevitable fate of this refugee who never found any refuge, not even in the compound where Israel kept him imprisoned to humiliate as and when it suited some passing policy of Ariel Sharon.
What was Arafat thinking about on that Thursday? That his life had been, as Shakespeare discovered in another context, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? The sound and the fury took him to the centre of the world stage, where he played more than one part even as the cast of characters around him kept changing. But because that part ended on the margins, did it also mean that his life signified nothing? That would be too harsh, perhaps. If nothing else, then Yasser Arafat embodied a national dream.
The flaw was that it became a dream without a horizon. Or to put it another way, reality always fell short of the dream, and he repeatedly was unable to accept this reality. The horizon was always beyond reach because he had trained himself to distrust what was within reach. Any trained negotiator, or any head of government, would have permitted space for pragmatism, for there are no perfect solutions. The Sadat-Begin pact was not perfect but it has anchored the peace in the region. The Assads of Syria have not, and cannot, forego their claim on the Golan Heights, but they have not gone to war over that claim for 35 years.
Arafat also persuaded his people that acceptance of anything less than the ideal was betrayal of the idea of Palestine, even though in the last six decades that ideal itself has shrunk repeatedly with time and defeat - defeat on the formal battlefield and defeat on the official diplomatic table. Yes, the spirit is undefeated, and heroically so. But the spirit has its limitations unless you are indifferent to time.
There is always solace in the romance of the spirit. I wonder what images flit through Arafat's mind as he wanders through levels of consciousness. Leila Khaled in 1971? The young woman who hijacked a plane and became an icon? (Where is she? How transient is heroism...) The radical urges of George Habash who tried to wrest the movement away from Arafat? The moments of opportunity that were lost between the lawns of the White House and the recesses of Camp David?
My own image of Arafat is at least partly mythical: trapped in Beirut with his depleted fighting force, forsaken if not forgotten, surrounded, down to his last bullet and last namaz but still possessed of that vibrant gleam in eyes that shone through folds of tired and tense flesh. In that depth of despair he found the courage and resolve of a man of destiny. Tragically, that destiny eluded him.
There are also real memories: of him striding across the stage to shake hands with "my sister" Indira Gandhi (he was much shorter than her) during a Non-Aligned Movement conference in Delhi, his trademark revolver buckled on to his belt; of an interview in which he repeated his standard formula - blame Israel and praise his hosts (in this case an ever-sympathetic Indian government as long as it was led by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi; the sympathy waned with the arrival of P.V. Narasimha Rao, and became formal during the Vajpayee era). Arafat tried his best never to bite the hand that fed him, although he did not always succeed. Some of that feed, particularly from his Arab brothers, was heavily barbed with septic wire.
Curiously, Arafat's last investment among his brothers was in Saddam Hussein. The second Iraq war has erased memories of the first, but emotions, intense in depth but limited in range, ran high on the streets in 1991 as well for Saddam did manage to rouse anti-American sentiment. But his cause was palpably indefensible. He had invaded and occupied an independent country. Unlike in the present crisis, Iraq was aggressor, not a victim. The Arab countries of the region were formidable in their unity against Saddam.
Arafat could have been more discreet, but he actually seemed to believe that Saddam could confront and succeed against a more powerful alliance than the one that defeated the Axis powers in the Second World War. He did not have the compulsions of King Hussein of Jordan, who had his trade with Iraq to protect. At the very least Arafat could have been a moderate. But he stuck his neck out. As miscalculations go this was in a class of its own.
But mistakes do not diminish the legitimacy of a cause, and the Palestinian movement remains the world's most visible struggle against oppression and injustice. That was one reason why he did not have to pay any price for his stand in 1991. In a surprising turn of events, Arafat actually found a friend in the White House after 1992. No American president is going to damage Washington's relationship with Tel Aviv, at least in our lifetime, but Bill Clinton was as close to an ally that the Palestinians are going to get in the United States.
The last Democratic president before Clinton, Jimmy Carter, had to sack a charismatic ambassador to the United Nations for nothing more than making contact with a PLO official. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, went on record to say that Palestinians would get a state. After he left office Clinton said repeatedly that the biggest failure of his presidency was his inability to persuade Arafat to sign the accord with Ehud Barak.
The reasons vary depending on whom you talk to. Did Arafat lose a nation because he made the two per cent he could not get as important as the 98 per cent he was offered? Were there powerful players in the Middle East who leaned on Arafat to ensure that the agreement was sabotaged? Bill Clinton, who had no particular need to be prejudiced after he left office, told me over a long conversation in Delhi that the differences had narrowed down to the comparatively insignificant, and even contentious issues like control of water sources were on the point of resolution.
Then? Clinton's conclusion was as clean as a surgical wound. Arafat did not sign the agreement, he said, because he could not reconcile himself to peace. Was this the hubris, the fatal flaw? Or is there some anger in Clinton's judgment? Perhaps. And yet a man of Clinton's maturity and experience would not have reached such a conclusion if he did not have genuine cause to think so.
Whatever the real reason the consequences are obvious: the rise of Ariel Sharon, the isolation of Arafat, the terrible price paid by innocents, an increasing sense of stagnant hopelessness in the region, and, finally, the laughing indifference with which Sharon and Shimon Peres treated the news that Arafat was on his deathbed. They had already killed Sheikh Yasin. They may not have killed Arafat, although Sharon threatened often enough to do so, but they had reduced him to insignificance.
Does this end the Arab-Israel war of 1967? Egypt and Jordan have made peace. Syria is in limbo. The Palestinian resistance after 1967 was led by Arafat, and the more militant strain that traced a line between the Marxist Habash and the Islamic Sheikh Yasin. This generation has fought its battles. But the battle itself is not over, and it will not be until there is an independent Palestine state at peace with an Israel that wants peace.
We do not yet know the name of the next Yasser Arafat, but we do know that there will be one, for the idea of Palestine will never be short of either a flag or a flag-bearer. If the world is wise the next Arafat will not be forced to wear a gun in his belt as part of his workday clothes. We are in a time of flux, in a twilight that has lost the sun but not found the stars. As the poet said, one world is dead and the other is waiting to be born.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.