A Battle in the War on Ethnocentricity

I wasn't originally going to post this. I transcribed it for a friend of mine, and sent it by email - but by the time I had finished I realized I had spent the better part of two hours typing it up and that it was also 2000 words. I also haven't had anything else to post, as I have been digging my life out of the Orientation hole while getting school rolling. So here it is.

Once again, it's an excerpt from Holy War, by Karen Armstrong (pp 338-343). A couple of things that I will say is that first, it was written in 1988, and plenty of things have gone downhill since then. Second, even the best idealistic movements can get out of hand and grow into something far from their roots (witness the french revolution).

People who come from the Christian tradition assume that the segregation of the sexes and the assumption of concealing dress in both Judaism and Islam springs from a hatred of sex, because Christianity ha been very negative about human sexuality throughout history, as I have shown at length elsewhere. Despite the official teaching that sex and marriage were part of God’s plan, a neurotic hatred of sex grew up that was quite distinct from the doctrine and which meant that marriage was regarded as a distinctly inferior Christian vocation and that sex was a disgusting, unholy activity. The hatred of sex survived the Reformation and Luther brought it firmly in to the Protestant tradition. This distrust and fear of sex is unique among the major religions of the world and there is nothing like it in either Judaism or Islam. Judaism has always stressed the holiness of married, family life, which is why it punishes adultery so severely. Perhaps the Jewish attitude to sexuality can be best understood by considering briefly the commandments that forbid a man and a wife to have intercourse while the woman is menstruating and for seven days afterward, when she takes a ritual bath. This "purification”, as the Hebrew word is translated in English, suggests that the woman is dirty or “unclean”, but in fact this is not so. There is a strong rabbinical tradition that says that the period of abstinence is required in order that the couple will enjoy sex more afterward and that the man does not take his wife for granted as a sex object: “Because a man may become overly familiar with his wife, and thus repelled by her, the Torah said that she should be a niddah [sexually unavailable] for seven days [after menses] so that she will be as beloved to him [afterward] as on the day of her marriage” (Niddah 31b) Before going to the synagogue on Yom Kippur or one of the major festivals, a man is told to take a ritual bath, not because he is unclean, but in order to be more holy for the holy time during the service. Similarly menstrual blood is not dirty or a defilement, but after a period of separation a woman “purifies” herself to make herself more holy for what happens next: sexual relations with her husband. The idea that sex could be holy in this way is quite foreign to the Christian world view.

It is also true, as I have said earlier, that Islam has a very positive attitude to sexuality. The Prophet himself seems to have been a highly sexed and passionate man, who saw no value at all in celibacy and is said to have decreed that there was to be no “monkery” in Islam. Yet in the West we tend today to think that Islam is a sexually repressive religion, because “we” are trying to free ourselves from the repressions of Christianity. The barbaric proactive by some Muslims of clitoridectomy encourage this belief. In the last century this disfiguring operation was performed on English Christian girls, with the approval of society, but it was performed for quite different reasons. A Muslim may insist that his daughter have the operation because he owns her and is afraid that her normal sexual urge might lead her to wander off with other men before she is given to a husband. It comes from a primitive impulse that seems to be common in many societies. It made some Crusaders lock their wives into extremely painful and dangerous chastity belts while they were in the holy land. In Victorian London, however, the girl usually had the operation because she had been found masturbating and enjoying her sexuality, which would have horrified her parents because they were terrified of sex. The practice has not been upheld by a majority of either Muslims or Christians and it must be condemned for whatever reason it is performed. But the difference is important. Clitoridectomy was originally an African, not an Islamic custom: it is certainly not laid down in the Koran, any more than it is in the Gospels. On the contrary, Mohammad is said to have told Muslim men that they have a positive duty to satisfy their wives sexually; some rabbis told the Jews the same. This is quite contrary to the spirit of the Fathers of the Church, who told Christians that if a man enjoyed sleeping with his wife too much he was committing fornication.

The second thing that distresses Western people is that, at a time when the progressive West was promoting the ideal of the equality of the sexes, some Jews and Muslims today seem to be retreating to the old inequalities. It must be said that no religion in the world as far as I know has in practice been very good news for the position of women. Religions have until recently been male affairs like most other institutions. But people from the Christian tradition rather enjoy saying that Judaism and Islam are particularly repressive of their women. Again, this needs qualification. Judaism is a religion that proclaims the holiness of things by separating them. The Torah separates Sabbath from the rest of the week, milk from meat, and Jews from Gentiles. The “holiness” of the land of Israel should probably be considered in this context; it is partly for this reason that the goyim are forbidden in the Torah to live there. The Torah also separates men from women; in Orthodox synagogues men and women sit separately and men and women have different religious duties. As one would expect, the women’s duty centers on the home and the husband’s on prayer and study. The Bible and the Halakah teach that women are blessed by God, but each morning in the synagogue a Jew must thank God for not making him a Gentile, and slave, or a woman. Jewish feminists, who want to preserve the ancient traditions, will argue that the Torah is not wrong to encourage a separation of the roles of men and women because this way it preserves and celebrates the holiness or identity of the sexes as different and distinct. But they still argue that Halakah must be developed so that women are no longer forced to take an inferior position in the community.

In the West people are particularly wedded to the idea that Muslims oppress their women by divine command. But in fact Mohammad’s first converts were women, who found the religion liberating. The Koran gives women divorce rights and inheritance rights, which are not the same as those of men, but which women in the enlightened West would not receive for over a thousand years. In the early Muslim community Mohammad’s wives were very powerful people, and after his death were consulted about religious matters, particularly Aisha, his favourite wife. There is nothing about the veiling or separation of women in the Koran; this practice did not creep into Islam until the third or fourth generation after the Prophet and it has been suggested that it came from Christian Byzantium, which had always treated its women in this way. Certainly a Muslim feels he “owns” his wife, but many Western men would feel the same. The Koran and the hadith both tell men to love their wives tenderly and live with them happily (see, for example, Koran 30:22).

The return to traditional values in Judaism and in Islam today in the Middle East has been for different reasons. In Israel it has been inspired by the desire to establish a strictly religious identity and is just a part of a general return to minute observance of the Torah. Religious women who now cover their heads will also forbid their children to watch television, because of the prohibition of images in Judaism. In Sadat’s Egypt, however, the young people of the jama’at islamiyya who returned to Islamic dress and the segregation of the sexes had a rather different reason. The Muslim student unions were encouraging their members to improve their lot by their own practical efforts instead of waiting for the government to help them, as the Koran enjoined. Egyptian universities are not like their counterparts in Europe and America. They can be heartless, mechanical factories. In Arabic they are called “universities of large numbers” and there is indeed vast overcrowding. Students attending the compulsory lectures would often have to sit two or three to a seat. Only a few lucky people in the front rows would be able to follow a demonstration on a blackboard and if the loudspeakers broke down almost nobody could hear a word that was said. Because success in the examination meant regurgitating these lectures accurately, lecture manuals had to be bought at some cost and learned by heart. There was little intellectual freedom. The students who achieved the best grades when they graduated from high school were automatically placed in one of the “elite” subjects like engineering, medicine or pharmacology. If a bright student wanted to study literature or law, which were not elite subjects, he would have to accept the fact that he would be studying with inferior teachers or classmates and that his chance of success after university was even more remote that it was already. This was a relic of the Nasser period; it was modeled in the Soviet system and was designed to produce a nation of technicians, not scholars. In addition to these other difficulties for the students, there was great overcrowding in the dormitories, which made studying impossible in the evenings, and the students would be transported from these inhumanely huge student blocks on hideously overcrowded buses.

The success of the jama’at islamiyya was that its members addressed these problems effectively and practically, as good Muslims should. They used to hold revision sessions in the mosques before examinations, where students could study in peace quiet, and they issued cheap versions of the lecture manuals. Above all they tackled a particularly distressing aspect of the overcrowding. Because young Egyptians could not afford to marry until very late and because the sexual revolution that happened in the West during the 1960s did not spread to Third World countries, one of the great problems of Sadat’s Egypt was sexual frustration among the young. For young men and women to sit crammed together on the same seat during lectures or jammed together on buses was clearly intolerable for both. Women found themselves harassed by desperate young men, who found they could not stand this tantalizing promiscuity. In these extremely different circumstances, the message of the Islamic segregation of the sexes was music to the ears of many of these strained young people. Women would find themselves freed from unwelcome attentions in the chador and it seemed to make good sense for men and women to live and study apart.

But, given that Islam values sex so highly, why did these young people not use contraception? Why did the women not go on the pill? Some certainly did, but the members of the jama’at islamiyya felt that this was an unacceptable practice. Contraception and the permissive society were Western products and therefore unacceptable for most of the young people, who, with good reason, felt that the West was not their friend. But it was not simply a negative rejection. These Egyptians wanted to keep their own family and social traditions, which would be undermined by this Western way of life. Muslims in the Middle East were not as enamoured as Westerners were of this Western “freedom”. The way sex was used to sell products and was trivialized and commercialized seemed to denigrate an important value. Iranians also had rejected the triviality of the Great Satan and had expressed their separation from it by reverting to their own traditional dress. In the case of women, Egyptians felt that Western clothes were not always liberating. They can reduce a woman's dignity by making her a mere sex object and it is undeniably true that, while we are rightly proud of the freedom and respect that we have begun to give women in Western countries, this liberation has not halted that Western habit of enslaving and exploiting women through a heartless advertisement and sex industry that pays very little attention to human dignity. Many Western feminists would agree with this.

Clothes are, of course, extremely important in expressing one’s identity and it is interesting that in Israel, Egypt, and Iran the assumption of a different costume has naturally symbolized the assertion of a new self. Similarly the relations between men and women could be said to express most clearly the values of a society, so that it is natural when one society feels threatened by another that one of the first signs of a desire to resist this foreign coercion should center on issues of sexual morality and the position of women. Yet the extreme measures to which Muslim men and women have been willing to go to express their distance from the Western point of view is very disturbing to us. This entire rejection of our way of life seems unbalanced because our way of handling the relations between men and women is very crucial to our sense of self. No society has as yet found a really satisfactory solution to these problems. In Western countries we have tended to swing from a period of sexual freedom to and extreme sexual repression. This phenomenon, which is unique to Western society, shows that we tend to be particularly sensitive on this issue and to have ambiguous views. This may make us more stridently convinced that our current way is the “only” way for managing these matters. We should not condemn Muslim people for choosing to go their own way, rather than to follow us in our confusion.