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Posted on March 8, 2008

Is Islam Really Stuck in the 12th Century on

Women's Rights?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Before 9/11/01, the media relegated stories about women in Islamic societies to page B27,
below the fold. Ever since 9/12/01, those same stories have screamed from the front pages
in 100-point type. The shift in discourse coincided with the launch of Bush's global "War on
Terror," when various hawks began using the plight of women in Islam to illustrate the
supposed perfidy of our "enemies," and to justify a series of military "interventions" --
invasions -- by Western powers.
In the United States, there's now an almost universally held belief that most women in
Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. But
there's scant empirical evidence to support the claim -- mostly, we're treated to detailed
reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that
just six percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If you ask average
Americans how they came to their beliefs about how badly women suffer in Islamic societies,
most will reply that "everyone knows it."
But I've seen no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the
subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women's
ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to
higher education. In other words, you can use a comparison of women's status in Saudi
Arabia and Sweden to make an intellectually weak argument for Western superiority, but
there's little support for the notion that women living in "traditional" Islamic cultures enjoy a
lower social status than those in orthodox Christian, Jewish or Hindu communities, to name a
few examples. Think of the perfectly backwards Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest
Christian communion in the world. Or consider the country where women may be brutalized
more terribly than in any other, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is 70 percent
Christian and 10 percent Muslim. Or go to Utah, where tens of thousands of Mormon
fundamentalists believe that women are literally the property of their fathers or husbands.
Of course, Mormon fundamentalists are the exception that proves the endless benevolence
and equality of the West, while whatever despicable caricature of justice perpetrated on a
woman by the House of Saud is breathlessly recounted as emblematic of Islamic culture as a
whole.
Comparing the “Muslim world” to the rest of the world poses an intellectual problem — how
does one even look at the role of Islam in a society, specifically, rather than dozens of other
variables that might influence women's outcomes?
I'd expect, for example, the structure of a country's economy to play a far greater role in
determining women's status than the religion of its people. There's quite a bit of research
showing that in service and manufacturing economies -- those of wealthier states -- women
enjoy a great deal of personal freedom and autonomy, civil and political rights and access to
higher education. That's because of the high value of their labor outside the home, in the
workforce. Women earning their own bread out in the working world demand, and require,
full political rights and legal protections. In poorer economies, most of which have large
agricultural sectors and many of which rely on extractive enterprises -- oil, mining, etc. --
women tend to suffer a much lower social status, because their labor is more valuable
coerced and sequestered close to home. That's a structural, rather than a "Clash of
Civilizations" explanation of women's varying outcomes in different countries. It's the latter
view that I find little evidence to support.
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None of this is a defense of Islam, or women's place within it -- I have little love for religion,
any religion, and certainly no desire to defend any religious rites or customs. It's about our
loose definitions of the problem and tendency to idealize the "liberal" West.
March 8 is International Women's Day, and a new global opinion poll was released to mark
the occasion. The results will no doubt come as a surprise to many …
According to a new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 16 nations from around the
world, there is a widespread consensus that it is important for "women to
have full equality of rights," and most say it is very important. This is true in
Muslim countries as well as Western countries.
In nearly all countries, most people perceive that in their lifetime women have
gained greater equality. Nonetheless, large majorities would like their
government and the United Nations to take an active role in preventing
discrimination.
Support for equal rights is robust in all Muslim countries. Large majorities say
it is important in Iran (78%), Azerbaijan (85%), Egypt (90%), Indonesia (91%),
Turkey (91%) and the Palestinian territories (93%).
That's no surprise to me, but I wouldn't have bought into the "Yellow Peril" or "Communist
Menace" narratives of earlier generations either. The U.S. political class did not suddenly
develop an abiding concern for women's equality in a vacuum. Like the promotion of human
rights during the Cold War, there is a geopolitical goal being served. The United States has
been in a state of permanent war since the 1940s -- when not in a "hot" (real) war, we are,
as a society, still under a constant cloud of threat, and our political leaders are all too happy
to advance that narrative as long as it plays well politically. But it's not enough to simply be
under some ill-defined "threat" from ordinary rivals -- that would just be basic geopolitics --
we're in a permanent fight for our very existence from forces that are wholly pernicious and
bent on nothing less than our total destruction.
That's become a central aspect of American political culture. We had a seamless transition
from World War II to Cold War to Drug War to War on Terror, and in every instance, the
unadulterated evil of our opponents has been a consistent theme, as has been our ability to
turn a blind eye to the same offenses when perpetrated by the United States or our allies.
And now our existential enemies are the spooky brown people of the Muslim world, with
their frightening and alien habits and supposed tendency towards "Islamofascism." The
problem with that storyline is clear: the Western, predominantly Christian world has far more
economic and political influence than the "Muslim world" -- much of which escaped the yoke
of colonialism just in the past 50-75 years -- and, more significantly, it has hundreds of
thousands of troops on the soil of several predominantly Muslim countries, whereas the
reverse does not obtain. In other words, the "threat" of an Islamic takeover of the West is as
realistic as the threat of my sweet grandmother beating the Hell out of Mike Tyson.
Enter the endless -- and relatively recent -- fascination with the plight of women in Islamic
societies. The complete perfidy of Islam -- its supposed backwardness, slavish
fundamentalism, brutality against the weak and, especially, expansionist tendencies -- is
necessary for (and perfectly suited to) the global war-on-whatever narrative, and therefore, I
suggest, worthy of special scrutiny.
Consider for a moment the "Islam is stuck in the 12th century" narrative so popular now in
the mainstream discourse -- a narrative for which women's civic participation is deemed a
vital benchmark. The problem isn't that Islam is being described unfairly, the problem lies
with the implication that the "West" made so much progress in the 13th century. The truth is
that universal suffrage came to Iran in 1979, five years before women in Liechtenstein got
the vote. It came to Bahrain in 2002, 12 years after the Swiss Supreme Court ordered the
stubborn Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden to accept women's suffrage. Portuguese women
got the vote in 1976, Swiss women in 1971 -- both in my lifetime -- and in my baby-boomer
mother's lifetime, women in Italy, Belgium and Japan first got the franchise.
As far as women's political participation goes, parts of the Muslim world -- no, it's not
monolithic -- are a few decades, not centuries, behind parts of the West. Is there evidence
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that the Islamic world is "stuck"? Not at all; in this young century, suffrage has been
extended to women in Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. Active women's rights movements
exist in every country on the planet; women were never given rights anywhere without a
fight.
And when comparing apples and apples -- among economically developed Western
democracies -- the United States has very little standing to criticize anyone else about the
status of women. We rank 71st in the world in terms of the proportion of women serving in
our legislature, with just 16 percent. That's significantly worse not only than the European
countries, it's also a poorer showing than Sudan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and
Uzbekistan.
According to the Wall Street Journal, women with similar experience and qualifications earn
16 percent less than their male counterparts worldwide; in the United States, the gender
"earnings gap" is 22 percent. A study by researchers at the University of California found
that women occupied only 11 percent of the seats on corporate boards in the oh-so-
progressive state of California and held about one in 12 executive jobs. And, as I've written
before, while the American economy has seen enormous benefits from large numbers of
women entering the work force, our corporate culture has done far less than just about
every other country -- including supposedly "backward" states -- to adapt to today's work
force:
According to Harvard's Project on Global Working Families, the United States
is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn't mandate some
form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those
five was Australia's, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid
leave. That puts the United States -- the wealthiest nation on the planet -- in
the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
So you may have come a long way, Western Baby, but you're not there yet, or even close.
The bottom line here is that increasing women's civic, political and economic participation is
a good fight, and an incredibly significant one. Focusing primarily on the status of women in
Islamic countries to rid ourselves of the stigma of our own inequalities or to justify Western
hegemony over the rest of the world is not.
A correction was made to this article after publication.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer