Egypt's War Against Women

Just occasionally the Guardian's CiF comes up with the goods. Here's Baher Ibrahim on Egypt's growing retreat into Islamic conservatism:

Walk into any bookstore or newsstand selling books on religion. Almost all the books are about women, such as how to be a good wife or how to please your husband or how to cook tasty food for your husband. There is an entire field called "women's fatwas" that goes to unbelievable lengths to debate the legality of praying and fasting during menstruation and pregnancy, the dos and don'ts of sex and proper Islamic attire for respectable women.

All over the streets, university campuses and on public transportation, there are posters depicting what women should and should not wear, with a big red X on anything other than a loose-fitting jilbab. Some female professors in Alexandria University's faculty of medicine have gone so far as to refuse to admit girls wearing trousers to oral exams.

Any conversation with a taxi driver is bound to turn to how "all women are whores these days" and how they're "tempting us with their bodies". Sermons for men at mosques encourage them to teach "our women" the proper behavior of a Muslim woman, relentlessly reminding men of the alleged hadith of Prophet Muhammad that the greatest fitna (assumed to mean temptation) of the Muslim ummah is that of women.

Comments

[Martin Adamson]

What's good about the taxi driver quote is that it reminds us, (or tells us in the case of the Guardian readers) that the islamic theological justification for women covering their bodies has nothing to do with protecting women at all. It is entirely to prevent MEN from committing the sin of lust. The whole Guardianista defence of the hijab etc is therefore based on an utterly false premise.

[Noga]

Adamson's point reminded me of a short tale we read in grade 6 in English class. It goes like this:

It was the time before shoes. There was a king who fell in love with a princess. Since she lived in a far away land it took some time for her to arrive at his court. He was so impatient to embrace her when he saw her alight from the carriage that he ran towards her. As he did so, he stabbed his big toe on a small sharp pebble. In order to prevent such atrocity from happening again, he ordered his advisors to find a solution. They conferred and decided that they had two options: either get rid of all the pebbles in the kingdom, or cover the entire ground with leather.

A young man who heard about the king's predicament came along to offer a solution. He went to the king and slipped on his feet a strange object made of leather. What is this? puzzled the king.

It is a shoe, explained the young entrepreneur, s-h-o-e. It covers your feet with leather so that you don't have to cover all the kingdom's surface in leather. It will protect your feet from treacherous pebbles.

You can draw your own conclusion as to which of the three solutions offered in this tale makes the better sense, in terms of feasibility, cost and efficiency. And how it compares with the need of Muslim men to keep their women under wraps so that they can go on walking barefooted without the risk of stepping on sharp pebbles...

[clazy]

Milton said it beautifully: We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force. God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence.

[DaninVan]

You'd think with having to resort to their imaginations, muzzie menfolk would as a result be a lot more creative.