ast
month's dramatic pictures of Afghan women shyly peeking out from
beneath freshly lifted veils set off a torrent of commentary on
the meaning and aims of the war. Although Afghanistan's new rulers
quickly abolished the Taliban's draconian codes of womanly conduct,
some Americans called for a government-imposed program of feminist
reform. Feminists, like Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler,
even tried to spin the war as a crusade against a global "patriarchy."
Meanwhile,
the mainstream press was busy detailing the horrors of the Taliban's
treatment of women, focusing on the veil. "It was like being
in jail," said one Afghan woman of her years under the veil.
But now, proclaimed the New York Times, "the prisoners
have been set free." In a cover story on Muslim women, Time
magazine dubbed the Afghan burka "a body bag for the living."
But the "veil
as body bag" notion is both mistaken and dangerous. There is
no surer way to drive the Islamic world into the arms of the fundamentalists
than to force Western feminism on a newly conquered Muslim country.
It is no coincidence that the two Muslim fundamentalist regimes
of our day Iran and Afghanistan arose in nations that
had systematically attempted to root out traditional Islamic practices
regarding women. (Those efforts were sponsored by the shah in Iran
and the Soviets in Afghanistan.) Instead of being damned as a senseless
outrage, veiling deserves a qualified defense. The practice has
undoubtedly slowed the Muslim world's path to modernity, and that
is a serious problem. But that difficulty would never have arisen
in the first place if veiling hadn't accomplished something important.
Veiling is embraced by millions of Muslim men and women as one of
the keys to their way of life. They are not mistaken.
The conflict
between modernity and the traditional Muslim view of women is one
of the most important causes of this war. The tiresome claim of
the leftist academy that poverty causes terrorism misses the point.
So far from being poor, Muslim fundamentalists tend to come from
a relatively wealthy modernizing class. The terrorists and their
supporters are generally newly urbanized, college-educated professionals
from intact families with rural backgrounds. They are a rising but
frustrated cohort, shut out of power by a more entrenched and Westernized
elite. True, the new fundamentalists often find themselves stymied
by the weak economies of Muslim countries, but as a class they are
relatively well off. Like many revolutions, the Muslim fundamentalist
movement has been spurred by increased income, education, and expectations.
But it is the clash between traditional Middle Eastern family life
and modernity that has decisively pushed so many toward fundamentalism.
And women are at the center of the problem.
Although the
puzzle of "modernity and the Muslim woman" is one of several
keys to this war, the feminist sensibility of the American press
has rendered the connection between terrorism and the Islamic sexual
system all but invisible. The press has been obsessed with the relatively
small number of modernized women in Afghan cities who were indeed
viciously oppressed by the Taliban's infamous policies. Women who
had once been accustomed to Western skirts were not only forced
to cover themselves entirely and forbidden to leave home without
a male relative, they were banned even from making noises with their
shoes as they walked through the streets of the city.
The world has
justly condemned these policies, but this picture of government-imposed
veiling does not accurately describe the situation of most Afghan
women under the Taliban, much less the lives of the many educated
women throughout the Middle East who have enlisted in the Muslim
fundamentalist movement through their decision to don the veil.
Town
and Country
The
Taliban's code of womanly behavior was intentionally directed toward
the cities. The aim was to "purify" those areas of Afghanistan
that had been "corrupted" by modernization. But the Taliban
never bothered to enforce its rules in traditional areas. Actually,
in most Afghan villages, women rarely wear the burka. That's because
villages in Afghanistan are organized into kin-oriented areas, and
the veil needs wearing only when a woman is among men from outside
of her kin group. A rural woman puts on a burka for travel, especially
to cities. Yet just by exiting her home, a woman in a modern city
inevitably mixes with men who are not her kin. That's why the Taliban
prohibited the modernized women of Kabul from so much as stepping
onto the street without a male relative. So the real problem with
the veil in Afghanistan was the Taliban's attempt to impose the
traditional system of veiling on a modernizing city. Yet, remarkable
as it may seem, many modernizing urban women throughout the Middle
East have freely accepted at least a portion of the Taliban's reasoning.
These educated women have actually taken up the veil and
along with it, Muslim fundamentalism. To see why, it is necessary
to understand what makes traditional Muslim women veil in the first
place.
Life in the
Muslim Middle East has long revolved around family and tribe. In
fact, that's what a tribe is your family in its most extended
form. For much of Middle Eastern history, tribal networks of kin
functioned as governments in miniature. In the absence of state
power, it was the kin group that protected an individual from attack,
secured his wealth, and performed a thousand other functions. No
one could flourish whose kin group was not strong, respected, and
unified.
In the modern
Middle East, networks of kin are still the foundation of wealth,
security, and personal happiness. That, in a sense, is the problem.
As we've seen in Afghanistan, loyalty to kin and tribe cuts against
the authority of the state. And the corrupt dictatorships that rule
much of the Muslim Middle East often function themselves more like
self-interested kin groups than as rulers who take the interests
of the nation as a whole as their own. That, in turn, gives the
populace little reason to turn from the proven support of kin and
tribe, and trust instead in the state.
So from earliest
youth, a Middle Eastern Muslim learns that his welfare and happiness
are bound up in the strength and reputation of his family. If, for
example, a child shows a special aptitude in school, his siblings
might willingly sacrifice their personal chances for advancement
simply to support his education. Yet once that child becomes a professional,
his income will help to support his siblings, while his prestige
will enhance their marriage prospects.
The "family"
to which a Muslim Middle Easterner is loyal, however, is not like
our family. It is a "patrilineage" a group of brothers
and other male relatives, descended from a line of men that can
ultimately be traced back to the founder of a particular tribe.
Traditionally, lineage brothers will live near one another and will
share the family's property. This willingness of a "band of
brothers" to pool their labor and wealth is the key to the
strength of the lineage.
But the centrality
of men to the Muslim kinship system sets up a problem. The women
who marry into a lineage pose a serious threat to the unity of the
band of brothers. If a husband's tie to his wife should become more
important than his solidarity with his brothers, the couple might
take their share of the property and leave the larger group, thus
weakening the strength of the lineage.
There is a
solution to this problem, however a solution that marks out
the kinship system of the Muslim Middle East as unique in the world.
In the Middle East, the preferred form of marriage is between a
man and his cousin (his father's brother's daughter). Cousin marriage
solves the problem of lineage solidarity. If, instead of marrying
a woman from a strange lineage, a man marries his cousin, then his
wife will not be an alien, but a trusted member of his own kin group.
Not only will this reduce a man's likelihood of being pulled away
from his brothers by his wife, a woman of the lineage is less likely
to be divorced by her husband, and more likely to be protected by
her own extended kin in case of a rupture in the marriage. Somewhere
around a third of all marriages in the Muslim Middle East are between
members of the same lineage, and in some places the figure can reach
as high as 80 percent. It is this system of "patrilateral parallel
cousin marriage" that ex plains the persistence of veiling,
even in the face of modernity.
By veiling,
women are shielded from the possibility of a dishonoring premarital
affair. But above all, when Muslim women veil, they are saving themselves
for marriage to the men of their own kin group. In an important
sense, this need to protect family honor and preserve oneself for
an advantageous marriage to a man of the lineage is a key to the
rise of Islamic revivalism.
Covering
Up
Most people think of the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s as
the beginning of the contemporary Muslim fundamentalist movement,
but it was in Egypt in the mid 1970s that modern Islamic fundamentalism
really took off. The movement was started by students men
and women at Egyptian universities who spontaneously adopted
a code of Islamic decorum in mixed company. In keeping with that
code, and despite government attempts to forbid it, Egyptian college
women began to don the veil. The practice soon spread (and along
with it, the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism) to legions of educated
working women in Egypt's cities.
Oddly, these
willing wearers of the veil were precisely the sort of educated
career women on whom the Taliban would ruthlessly force the burka.
The difference was that these women, unlike those who later fell
victim to the Taliban, had free access to education and modern careers.
They put on the veil precisely as a way of enjoying these modern
innovations without also endangering their marriage prospects,
or their family's honor, in the new, mixed-sex environment.
The last three
decades have seen a tremendous increase in the number of Egyptians
receiving an education. Many of these young people are fresh from
villages, where the traditional marriage system is still strong.
These are the grown children whose parents, uncles, brothers, and
sisters sacrificed to make them into professionals. By veiling,
they are fulfilling their end of the bargain; they are promising
not to destroy by a shameful affair, or by marriage to a
stranger the honor or prosperity of their families. Of course,
not all Muslim women are young or waiting to marry relatives, but
the preferred marriage pattern shapes a wider ethos. Some modernized
office workers decide to veil only after they marry, to reduce jealousy,
and protect the honor of their husbands and families.
The veil was
never the nightmare American feminists make it out to be. In a world
where satisfaction in life is predicated on the honor, strength,
and unity of the kin group, the veil makes sense. Although the oppressive
impositions of the Taliban have rightly been abolished, the United
States ought not to be in the business of browbeating Muslim women
out of their veils, much less reforming the Middle Eastern kinship
system. Instead, we need to encourage the separation of traditional
Muslim family practices from the political ideology of Islamic fundamentalism.
By far the best way to do this is to roundly defeat the fundamentalists
on the battlefield.
Once military
and political failure has broken fundamentalism's appeal as an ideology,
traditional family practices will be free to gradually adapt to
modernity. Modernizing Egyptian women may still veil, but if they
drop the theocratic fundamentalist baggage, that will be enough.
Can we really get modernizing Muslim women who veil to drop their
support for fundamentalist theocrats? It won't be easy, but nothing
is more likely to produce a disastrous backlash against the United
States than the conviction that an American victory will lead to
a feminist-directed assault against veiling and the family. And
many Muslim women in rural areas veil without being followers of
the fundamentalist theocrats.
When the United
States governed Japan after World War II, we forcibly reconstructed
the country as a democracy, without being so foolish as to seriously
challenge its traditional family or sexual system. That system has
remained far more "traditional" than our own, yet today
Japanese family and sex roles (for better, and for worse) are slowly
changing and adapting to modernity. With luck, the pattern will
someday repeat itself in the Middle East.
Muslim fundamentalists
have turned on America as a convenient scapegoat for the agonies
and contradictions of modernization in their own society. Yet distorted
and unjust though it is, their logic contains a kernel of truth.
The Western movies, television shows, and other media that now reach
the Middle East tell of a world in which premarital sex and love-marriages
are the norm a world in which the extended family counts
for little, and the lineage for nothing. This is what most alarms
Muslim traditionalists. Western family norms may someday gain a
foothold in the Middle East, but historically, family change lags
behind and adapts to changes in political and economic life. So
it is to the economic and political spheres that we ought to apply
our pressure.
The veiling
question cuts across conventional political lines. The Left, of
course, is split between feminists and multiculturalists: The former
camp says, "Such practices as veiling are impermissible, for
anyone"; the latter camp says, "Well, this is what they
do, and who are we to object?" But conservatives are divided
as well. Conservatives are eager to spread Western values across
the globe, and when it comes to democracy and the free market, they
have a point. But the conservative "realist" tradition
in foreign policy warns against endangering ourselves through attempts
to remake the world in our image.
Burke's conservatism
is the model here. Burke was a critic of the excesses of British
rule in India, and he also favored American independence when few
of his fellows did. Burke was never the die-hard opponent of reform
he's often made out to be, but he did respect the wisdom embodied
in custom. Burke believed that gradual change from within
the framework of custom was the best policy, not only for
England, but also for the nations England ruled. When it comes to
veiling, Burke's policy should be our policy.
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