| 14 November 2004 | Sunday | 01 Shawwal 1425 |
Divided states of America
Shadow over European Muslims
Today we shall examine the situation of women in ancient Greece and during early Christianity. The literature I have seen relates for the most part to the upper middle and upper classes. The observations that follow relate to them more than they do to women in the lower classes.
Greek men, including most of their philosophers, held women in low esteem. Plato consigned them to domestic life and duties except in a "utopia" (imagined ideal state). Aristotle believed that inequality between man and woman derived from the law of nature, which had made man superior to woman.
Fathers and husbands were to rule over daughters and wives. Women were not capable of profiting from philosophy or acquiring virtue. They were to obey and stay silent.
In Greek thinking woman had strong emotions but a weak mind. She had to be protected from herself and prevented from hurting others. She must be controlled by a male guardian ("kyrios") such as her father or husband.
She could own personal effects (clothing, jewellery), and she could buy groceries and other small items whose price would not exceed the cost of feeding her family for six days. She could not own real estate or businesses, and she could not make contracts.
Greek girls married soon after reaching puberty (early teens). The kyrios arranged the marriage and provided the dowry, which in upper class families could be substantial. Marriages were made to consolidate and secure property and, secondly, to produce children. Marriage was a transaction and, as in Rome, love had little to do with it. Rich married the rich, poor the poor.
Dowry represented a girl's share of her father's wealth. It consisted largely of money, jewellery, clothes, furniture, and other household effects. In case of divorce, the husband had to return it to the woman's family. A woman did not inherit from her father. If she had no brothers, her father could adopt her husband as his son, who could then inherit.
Either party could initiate divorce proceedings, but it was rare for the woman to take the initiative. Her father could demand her, and her dowry's, return to his home at any time and her husband would have to comply. If and when the divorce went through, the husband got the custody of children who were presumed to be his property.
The married woman was to manage the house and bear legitimate children. She was expected to stay home except for attending funerals and certain religious festivals. A woman seen outside was presumed to be a slave, some kind of a worker, concubine, or prostitute. Raising children, spinning and weaving, and perhaps cooking were her daily routines.
A good woman was not to be seen or heard by strangers. When male guests came to see her husband, she retired to the female quarters of the house. But she was allowed to socialize with other women. A small minority of them could read and write.
Prostitution was permitted. Law limited the price a prostitute, out on the street, could demand. If two men wanted her, they could draw lots but not bid against each other. Then there were the hecteras (call girls and courtesans) who were accomplished in singing, dancing, knowledge of affairs, and the art of conversation.
They did not go much beyond light flirtation and entertained patrons as engaging company. Some of these women became prosperous enough to own their homes and that was where they received and entertained patrons.
Wives were thought to be stupid with whom husbands spent as little time as possible. A man's normal desire for female company was met outside of marriage. A woman's desire for male companionship was not given any thought.
Middle and upper class women routinely covered their heads, and some wore the face veil, when appearing in public. The veil allowed them some freedom of movement, enabling them to do their errands and get together with women friends. But it also symbolized the prevailing male notion that the woman should be both silent and invisible.
Face veiling became fairly common towards the end of the classical period. It became associated with issues of shame, modesty, honour, Greek fear of the woman's sexual pollution, and her subordination to the male.
Jesus preached that man and woman were equal in the sight of the Lord. He set aside several Jewish discriminatory customs. He spoke to women and he taught them, which he, being a man, was not supposed to do.
Quite a few women were included in the inner circle of his companions, for instance, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna among others. While Jewish law allowed the husband to divorce his wife but not the wife to divorce him, Jesus forbade divorce to both.
His inclination to advance the woman to a nearly equal status with man was reversed by the Church fathers in the next several centuries. They went even farther than the ancient Jews to assert that while man was created in God's image, woman had not been. The more militant clergy saw her as a "wrecker," "bringer of evil," "begetter of demons," "friend of the devil," and the "downfall of man."
Man had the right to command and it was the woman's obligation to obey. She was to spin and weave, make bread, clean the house and the barn, tend animals and fowl, and prepare food "to fill the husband's table."
She should submit to her husband's sexual advances without venting her own needs or desires. She should be meek, without any disposition to self-assertion or self-esteem. She must not speak in the church; if she needed information or guidance, she should seek it from her husband at home.
Let us now take a quick look at the practices of head covering and veiling in early Christianity. Jesus said nothing on the subject, and we go to St. Paul for elucidation.
It seems that in Corinthia and some neighbouring Greek regions at the time women went to church with their heads uncovered. In his letters to the Corinthians and Ephesians he enjoined them to cover their heads. His reasoning is somewhat ephemeral, but we shall present it nevertheless.
Man, says St Paul, is the glory of God, while woman is glory of man. Again, "man is not of woman, but woman is of man." She is from man and was created for him. Woman's head is her husband's.
It follows that man is of a higher order. In chapter 5 of his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul wrote: "the Church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be subject to their husbands in all things." A father ruled his family by divine right and those in his house were to obey his commands.
A man bowing down to God with his head covered dishonours his head (that is Christ). He should not cover his head because he is the image and glory of God. A woman who prays with her head bare dishonours her head (that is her husband). It is the same as if her head were shaved which is a disgraceful state.
The early Church fathers saw a woman's head covering as a sign of submission to her husband. St Chrysostom (4th century) thought it was wrong for a woman to try to look like a man.
She did not acquire man's dignity by keeping her head uncovered; she lost her own. It is not entirely clear whether the injunction regarding head covering related only to women's attendance at church or to their appearance in public generally.
Before we come to conclusions we should emphasize the distinction between head covering and face veiling, for the two did not always go together. Woman's status and rights in ancient Egypt were essentially the same as those of man. She did not cover her hair or face.
The Roman man did not treat her as property, and his notion of inferiority and subordination was tempered by the value he placed on home and the institution of marriage. She was expected to be modest and chaste, but the covering of her hair and face was not considered relevant to that object.
In Assyria, ancient Greece, and Judea, by contrast, the idea of woman as property was virulently operative. So was the idea of her inferiority and subordination to man. She was required to cover her hair and, in certain situations, wear a veil.
The main reason for head covering in the teaching of Jesus will have to be left to a learned Catholic theologian. Early Christian thinking did not stress man's property right in woman, but it did regard her as belonging to a lower order, as a seducer of men and a mischief-maker. Head covering was a symbol of her subordination to man in addition to any role it might have had in keeping her modest and chaste.
Face veiling was much less common than head covering. It could have come as an additional measure for safeguarding the woman's chastity by making her invisible and thus warding off improper male attention.
But the veil was more often a symbol of the wearer's higher social status. Women of the lower classes did not wear it. On the other hand, women who were not exactly "respectable" veiled their faces to hide their identity when they were out on an unworthy mission.
I will not assert a causal connection between head covering and veiling, on the one hand, and the notions of woman as property, embodiment of evil, and those of her inferiority and subordination to man on the other. But I cannot ignore the indisputable fact that in the ancient world the two have gone together.
Clouds may not "cause" rain, but there is no rain without them. It has been the same way with the prevalence of unflattering estimates of the woman's worth and the practices of head covering and veiling. Next Sunday we shall explore these same issues with reference to Islam and Muslim women, yesterday and today.
E-Mail: anwarsyed@cox.net.
Divided states of America
Three presidents have received confirmations of a renewed term of office during last fortnight - President George W. Bush of the United States, and flowing from his authority, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
To those who watched the 2004 US presidential election results being collated, it became obvious that the United States remains as divided in the election year 2004 as it had been at the same time four years ago.
As each state gradually revealed its true colours, the map of America resettled into the earlier pattern of a broad swathe of Republican red with fringes of Democrat blue on its East and the West coasts.
In physical terms, the features of modern America remained substantially unchanged - a reddening face with blue ears on either side, one cocked eastwards and the other westwards.
It is perhaps not accidental that the states that voted Democrats are closest to a world across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, or that the message of the party's candidate John Kerry emphasized the need for America not simply to lead the rest of the world but to be a part of it, and to use those ears to listen to it.
It is certainly not accidental that the states that voted for George W. Bush belong to middle America, an America that prefers and now clearly intends to look inwards, to listen only to itself.
The inherent flaw in any democratic process of selection, such as the one in the United States, is that there can be only one victor, no matter how fractured or equivocal his mandate may be.
Once victory has been conceded, the authority of the victor is absolute and binding on all, including those who opposed him. It no longer matters whether Kerry secured 48 per cent of the popular vote or garnered 55 million votes.
After 100 million voters had spoken, it was the modest voice of Ohio state that decided who would lead America. As a consequence, George W. Bush is the next US president, the president of a Divided States of America, and a divided state of the world.
Bush's victory contains multiple layers of significance. Domestically, he has been given a resounding endorsement of his controversial rightist policies that could be described as Christian fundamentalist.
Outside America, he has been authorized to intervene anywhere in the world, whenever and wherever he perceives US interests need protection. He has been given a strengthened licence to wage his war against terror, a crusade in which the enemy remains amorphous and the casualties all too tangible, as innocent Afghani and Iraqi civilians die for their country without understanding why they have to fight at all.
On a personal level, President George W. Bush has wiped away the smear of his father's defeat in 1992 at the grubby hands of Saddam Hussein. Now that he has Saddam Hussein in his hand, he has nothing to fear from any number of Osama bin Ladens in the bush.
For Bush's acolytes, Presidents Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf, one Bush in the hand is worth any number of airborne Kerrys. Following his re-election, they can look forward to the continuity of a patronage that has supported them and will continue to do so as long as their personal interests coincide with those of the United States.
Of the two, President Musharraf is the more vulnerable, and not just physically. Musharraf's vulnerability is more from the democratic example that has been demonstrated on either side of his borders, in his geo-political geography the equivalent of the Pacific and the Atlantic.
It must be one of the miracles of the 21st century that a country as shell-shocked as Afghanistan, after years of suppression under the Taliban, despite a barren drought in education that lasted almost a generation, and with abysmal levels of adult male and female literacy, should boast a turnout of eight million voters. They cast their votes from an electorate that encroached across soft borders into Pakistan and Iran.
It is a tribute to the managerial skills of Hamid Karzai that he was able, after only two years in power, to hold elections and then obtain 55.4 per cent of the votes cast. Miracles can happen, and nowadays the modern Lourdes is not a grotto in France but a war-torn Afghanistan.
In India, on Musharraf's right, the general election resulted in the defeat of the incumbent BJP. The Indian system showed that it could hold an election that could muster, as peacefully as the passions of subcontinentals will permit, a community of voters (387 million) more numerous than the entire population of the United States (293 million).
To understand the magnitude of this achievement, one needs to remind oneself that the total number of registered voters in Afghanistan was less than those who voted this year in the Indian state of Haryana, and that the total number of votes cast in the Bush/Kerry elections (113.7 million) was slightly more than all those cast in Uttar Pradesh.
Interestingly, another parallel is that the minimum number of seats needed to secure victory in the US elections is 270, and in India 272. On such slender margins does the fate of the world hang.With the season of elections in Afghanistan and India having passed, can an electoral spring in Pakistan be far behind?
For the moment, President Musharraf's concern would appear to be more with ensuring that the Indian Kashmir exercises its right of self-determination than that a Pakistani electorate does its own. The Jammu and Kashmir question remains Pakistan's tryst with 1947 - distant in time, distant in space and distant in fulfilment.
When President Musharraf applies his telescope closer home, he does so to a Nelsonian eye. His domestic form of peg-leg democracy hobbles on the solitary leg of the acquiescent Pakistan Muslim League, accompanied but not balanced by the wooden National Assembly.
He needs the counter-weight of an opposition to give his assembly plausibility. And the only party that would seem to be able to provide this at the national level would be Pakistan People's Party, with its absentee head Benazir Bhutto.
Sagacity has not been a forte of the PPP, nor probity. What it does possess is an explicable durability that its opponents, the army and ISI have not been able to erase.
Supporters of Ms Benazir Bhutto must lament as she does the inaccessibility of her vote bank in Pakistan and her bank accounts in Switzerland. With the death of her mentor, the avuncular Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, she must be re-assessing her own position, and that might explain her readiness to negotiate her husband's release from prison and her own escape from exile.
How and on what terms she will consider a re-entry into the political atmosphere remains a matter of conjecture. What is clear is that those politicos residing outside Pakistan and those living within realize that too much is simmering and has been left unattended for too long.
The rumblings of discontent amongst the Balochs, the situation in Wana, the elephantine dominance of Punjab over the other provinces, the half-complete devolution, the explosion in our population, the lamentable deterioration in our educational standards, and the need to have a representative and accountable government are the growing concern of every Pakistani.
The Afghans have converted themselves from a monarchy into a cobbled democracy. The Indians have transformed themselves from three hundred monarchies into a nation. We are still struggling to keep our four divided provinces together in one federation.
Perhaps we should look not to our political left or to our right, but to what happens on our left and on our right. Democracy is more often than not the first step towards unity.
Shadow over European Muslims
The killing last week of controversial Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh by a suspected member of an Islamic extremist group - followed by a spate of alleged retaliatory attacks on Muslim targets across the Netherlands - is another damaging blow to relations between Europe's 15 million Muslim immigrants and host societies.
The outpouring of Islamophobic sentiments following van Gogh's murder reflects a harsh new reality in a country once known for its tolerance and openness. "The Netherlands is a nation where people ought to want to meet one another, where cultures meet each other," Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said on Dutch television after last week's tragic events.
The outburst of racial and religious tensions in the Netherlands is also prompting serious concern in the rest of Europe: governments across the 25-nation European Union fear that the bloody events in a country with a legendary reputation for accepting diversity may be the beginning of a new and more violent phase in already tense relations between their own Muslim minorities and mainstream European society, sharpening the focus on European Muslims and their problems of integration, radicalization and marginalization.
Clearly, while many European politicians speak of their determination to avoid a clash of civilizations with Islam, 9/11 and the Madrid railway bombings of March this year have made ordinary Europeans increasingly wary of their Muslim co-citizens.
Muslims in the Netherlands have condemned van Gogh's murder and argue that the entire Muslim community cannot be blamed for the acts of a few extremists. But for many in the Netherlands, this is not a valid argument. A majority of the Dutch view van Gogh's murder as an attack on free speech and say it reflects the Muslims' failure to espouse European values.
But van Gogh's slaying and the Islamophobia it has triggered is not just an assault on freedom of expression. It has major implications on future relations between Muslims and host European communities.
It highlights the vulnerability of Muslims in Europe and EU governments' clear failure to integrate their immigrant population from North Africa, Turkey and South Asia - many of whom have been in Europe for more than 40 decades but still live on the margins of society.
The dangers of rising Islamophobia in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe are very real. A recent poll conducted by Dutch TV showed that 47 per cent of all people in the Netherlands now feel less tolerant of Muslims since last week's murder.
Fires have been set at mosques, and a centre that aids immigrants, many of them Muslim, has been vandalized. The latest incident came earlier this week when a pre-dawn explosion in the southern Dutch town of Eindhoven wrecked the front door of an Islamic elementary school and shattered windows in nearby homes. No one was injured.
Once liberal commentators now want Muslim hard liners to be thrown out of the country, even if they have Dutch passports, and are also demanding greater surveillance of the wider Islamic community. Some 900,000 Muslims - mostly of Moroccan and Turkish origin - out of a total population of 16 million live in the Netherlands.
The increasing divide between Muslims and the host society has been accompanied by a continuing radicalization of Muslims and fears that global terror networks, including Al Qaeda, are successfully recruiting disaffected young Muslim men across the EU.
Van Gogh's killer has been identified as 26-year-old Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan. Another five alleged Islamic radicals are in custody in connection with the death. All face charges of forming a terrorist conspiracy to murder van Gogh.
One key challenge facing EU governments is to crack down on extremism without further inflaming inter-community and inter-religious tensions. Critics argue that the Dutch government has so far failed to do so.
The centre-right coalition in power has put immigration near the top of its agenda and, echoing public opinion, insists that community relations will be eased if immigrants integrate better. But many argue that Dutch government policies have made immigration an even more explosive issue.
A Dutch government minister, Rita Verdonk, has outlined plans to improve knowledge of the Dutch language among immigrants and to repatriate up to 26,000 failed asylum-seekers.
A speech made by Verdonk after the murder of van Gogh last week was described as "Hitlerian" by one immigrant group. Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister, Gerrit Zalm, said the Dutch cabinet had declared war on Islamic extremists.
Even the handling of the murder inquiry has proved politically controversial with the Amsterdam chief public prosecutor criticizing Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner for releasing the text of the letters left with van Gogh's body. One contains a direct threat to Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch MP who has renounced Islam and helped make van Gogh's film, and mentions two other politicians: the Liberal parliamentary leader, Jozias van Aartsen, and the Amsterdam mayor, Job Cohen.
The publication of the letters was hardly calculated to calm tensions, say critics. Van Aartsen later claimed that the Netherlands was in the grip of a jihad and urged increased surveillance of potential Muslim extremists.
Events in the Netherlands also underline a growing rift between a secular Europe which espouses progressive values on issues like abortion and gay marriages and a religious minority seeking to cling on to a more conservative view of the world.
While Muslim unease with Europe's secularism is most often in the news, Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian politician whose bid to become EU commissioner was torpedoed after he described homosexuality as a sin, claims that he is the target of an anti-Catholic hate campaign.
Rather than retreat, Buttiglione says he intends to lead a "battle for the freedom of Christians" against what he calls the "creeping totalitarianism" in Europe that stifles anyone who does not share the beliefs of the majority.
At a debate entitled "The trial of the Catholic witch" in Milan's Teatro Nuovo last week, Buttiglione said what happened to him in the EU was "a gift from God", which he hoped would force debate over the religious discrimination in "politically correct Europe".
He said he had received thousands of letters of support from sympathizers across Europe and from Muslim and Jewish leaders in Italy. "You can't have a political community without a conscience and without values," he said, inspired by the role of the Christian vote in the US election. Otherwise, he said, Europe would soon be saying: "Because you are a Catholic you cannot be a university professor or a school teacher."
The increasingly hostile divide between immigrants and the host society comes at a time when the EU is - for the first time in many years - actively seeking to recruit foreign workers to compensate for its labour shortages and ageing populations.
EU leaders meeting in Brussels last week underlined that the bloc wanted to allow legal immigration and said the European Commission must draw up a new action plan on admission rules for foreign workers. But commentators warn that allowing in more Muslim immigrants without ensuring the integration of those who are already in Europe is a recipe for disaster.
EU governments have in fact been slow in combating Islamophobia and increasingly have taken up the agenda of far-right groups opposed to immigrants and Islam. Emotions against Muslim immigrants have been on the rise in the Netherlands for several years.
Pim Fortuyn, a populist right-wing, anti-immigration politician, was murdered - by a fellow Dutchman - in 2002 but his message of distrust and antagonism towards Muslims remains rife in the country.
Significantly, Fortuyn's views were condemned by the liberal media but the slaying of van Gogh has now changed the situation. The leading liberal Amsterdam newspaper, The Telegraaf, has led the charge against Muslims with demands for a very public crackdown on "extremist Muslim fanatics in order to assuage the fear of citizens and to warn the fanatics that they must not cross over the boundaries."
The paper said that international cash transfers must be more tightly controlled; magazines and papers which include incitement should be suppressed; unsuitable mosques should be shut down, and imams who encourage illegal acts should be thrown out of the country. "This should also apply to extremists who have dual nationality. They have no business here," the paper underlined.
Volkskrant, published in The Hague, declared that while Muslims might be infuriated by van Gogh's film, they should have taken the film-maker to court rather than engaging in acts of violence. It said: "Muslims will have to learn that, in a democracy, religion, too, is open to criticism - this applies to Islam no less than to Christianity."
While watching events in the Netherlands closely, other EU governments have so far been reluctant to make any direct comparison with the situation of their own Muslim minorities. In France, Nicholas Sarkozy, the former interior minister who has become a political rival of President Jacques Chirac, has said that it is too late to raise the issue of Islam's compatibility with European values.