Saudi Women with sexy eyes may forced to cover even them up, if the Saudi government pass a new resolution.

Too sexy for my niqab

Spokesman of the Ha’eal district, Sheikh Motlab al-Nabet said the committee has the right to stop a women whose eyes seem “tempting” and order her to cover them immediately.

Saudi women are already forced to wear a loose black dress and to cover their hair and in some areas, their face, while in public or face fines or sometimes worse, including public lashings.

The announcement came days after the Saudi newspaper al-Watan reported that a Saudi man was admitted to a hospital after a fight with a member of the committee when he ordered his wife to cover her eyes. The husband was then stabbed twice in the hand.

And secondly, Saudi clerics who have had it up to here with women’s rights have declares that women will become lesbians and prostitutes if they drive.

Lacking any other form of transportation, Shaima Jastaniya drove to the hospital earlier this year before being arrested by Saudi police. While she was initially sentenced to a brutal whipping, the Saudi king pardoned her after a global outcry. But a local court recently informed Jastaniya that her sentencing will stand. While Jastaniya appeals that verdict, many fear ultraconservative clerics within the Saudi government want to make her an example.

Some Saudi men believe that allowing women to drive will lead to prostitution, pornography, divorce, and homosexuality. The highest Saudi religious council and conservative professors at King Fahd University have stated that granting women the right to drive will mean there will be no more female virgins in the country. Saudi Arabia is the only country that doesn’t allow female drivers.

I shouldn’t think it will be long before British “progressive feminists” such as Madeleine Bunting and Germaine Greer will be cheering the Saudi shura on in the Guardian on the grounds that opposing the oppression of Saudi women is ‘racist and Islamophobic’.

These protests began after Mohamed Bou’aziz, an unemployed university graduate in the town of Sidi Bouzid, attempted to burn himself to death on December 17 when the produce he sold on the street to earn a living was confiscated. (He later died of his injuries.)

How could Mr. Bou’aziz know what the implications of his desperate act would be in just one month’s time? His sacrifice inspired huge demonstrations that spread across the North African country, organized in part through resourceful use of Twitter and Facebook. These were met with brutality by the security forces, a grim reality that simply provoked more protest. Unarmed demonstrators were regularly teargassed. Many were arrested. As many as 70-80 people were shot or beaten to death. But the protesters marched on.

This largely peaceful, democratic revolution (on the side of the opposition at least) was not led by or inspired by the fundamentalist movements that have tried to claim the oppositional space in many Arab and North African contexts in recent years. It was instead, by all accounts, a largely secular appeal for real political reform and for social justice. As reflected in today’s front page of the Paris daily Liberation (above; credit), women, many unveiled, were increasingly visible in the protest marches.

One can hope that today’s initial victory of North African people power will serve as an example of what is possible in other countries in the region. This is what Noam Chomsky has called the threat of a good example. One dictator brought down by popular revolt – no dictator is safe now.

Hope is a powerful, incandescent force. Hope in the political realm has been a rare commodity of late in this part of the world. Bou’aziz’s revolution may have brought that back. But, just as the power of hope should not be underestimated, neither should the danger of hopes unfulfilled.

It is unclear exactly what the future holds for Tunisia now.

Mohammed al-Ghannouchi, the Prime Minister who has also been in power since 1999, has taken over as President since the departure of ousted President Ben Ali, whom Saudi Arabia “‘welcomed.’” A state of emergency was declared, with soldiers guarding public buildings, tanks on the streets of Tunis, and prohibitions on public meetings.

The government must respond to the grievances that first provoked these events – creating jobs, meeting human needs, fostering equality of all kinds, enabling freedom of expression and association, institutionalizing real social democracy – rather than simply engaging in window dressing that preserves the Tunisian system with a different figurehead. The international community, and the U.S. government, should support this process.
The biggest external impact of events in Tunisia could come in neighboring Algeria, which I visited twice last fall, and which witnessed scattered, sporadic émeutes – riots – throughout 2010. The country has just experienced a week of widespread, intensive youth protests that seem to have been the result of a similar long-simmering anger over high unemployment, corruption, economic disparities and la hogra, the arrogance with which officials often treat ordinary people. (photo credit) However, the immediate catalyst was likely the sharp increase in the price of staples like cooking oil and sugar at the beginning of the year. See this useful discussion of the possible causes by journalist Chawki Amari writing in El Watan, one of Algeria’s leading daily newspapers.

Some have suggested that the initial disturbances may have been provoked – perhaps by private interests that control the sugar and oil markets and were unhappy over government regulatory action in this arena. It is hard to say. However, even if this were the case, legitimate popular anger clearly took over from there. Some – only some – of the recent protests turned violent with young rioters throwing stones at police and passing cars, burning tires and looting shops.

Unfortunately, the avenues for peaceful protest are stifled in Algeria due to the continuing imposition of a state of emergency since 1992.

For example, following the week’s protests, last Sunday, January 9, a civic group called the Intercommunal Association of Aïn Benian-Staoueli tried to hold a peaceful gathering in the coastal town of Staoueli about 20 kilometers outside of Algiers. Their efforts were forcefully thwarted by “preventive” arrests. Algerian writer and journalist Mustapha Benfodil, who was attempting to cover the event, was among those arrested. He later recounted his experiences in El Watan, offering an eyewitness account of la hogra in action. As he notes, those picked up by the police that day were suspected of the rather kafka-esque offense of “attempted peaceful gathering.” (They have since been released – though across the country many young protestors remain in jail.)

For Algeria’s democratic opposition, the current challenge is to find a way to translate this month’s explosion of youthful anger into positive political change, and to maximize the jolt of energy from events in next door Tunisia. According to Benfodil, the former task requires the mobilization of civil society, trade unions, academics, the middle class, NGOs and others, “if they truly want to transform this impetuous winter into a democratic spring…”

A Muslim woman living in Europe talks of her experiences with markers of Islam and her reasons for affiliating herself with Muslimness alongside equally powerful reasons for distancing herself from its overt expressions in the public sphere.

This was still a world before 9/11, and my article generated a lengthy, if unclear, counter-response in the Telegraph on the folly of my position – the writer, a prominent academic, assumed that this position was one of supporting the practice of veiling. My mother, reading both articles, made a perspicacious comment: that, having witnessed first hand the abuses of the pir system in a rural Bengali Muslim ashraf household, she could not understand what the fuss was all about: the burqa was, in her opinion, firmly a practice that degraded and entrapped women within patriarchy’s collusion with religion. Educated as a doctor in Calcutta, and married into what would be called a “highly progressive” Muslim family in which, for three generations, there had not been a veil in sight, she found it absurd that any woman would want to regress in this manner, especially if she had had the benefits of education.

1992-2010: Personal Experiments with Muslimness
Looking back to that moment a decade later, when the burqa ban in France brought the issue of women’s veiling back on the Liberal agenda, I am struck by two things. First, the ease with which one could open oneself to misunderstanding and rebuke from the Indian left if as a self-identified Muslim woman, I chose to analyse the choices other Muslim women were making in local and global spheres, rather than take overt sides. This would be even more so, if I chose to interrogate the responses of the so-called Indian “mainstream” to images of the veiled woman. Second, I realise how much more clearly I understand today my mother’s position and how much I appreciate being the legatee of the Nehruvian secularism that she was a beneficiary of and that my parents found the most congenial dogma to raise a family in post-Partition India. This benefit of hindsight has been enabled by a change, however, cosmetic, in the ideologies emanating from those that rule at the Indian Centre: through the 1990s and the 2000s, I had found myself, as a secularised Indian Muslim, thrown into epistemological and philosophical confusion about how I felt about markers of “Islam”.

During that period, I became a barometer that responded to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) aggressions by becoming a defender of practices and beliefs that were otherwise alien to me. Searching for ways to protect myself psychologically from daily polemical assaults on people like me – secular, middle class Indians who happened to be Muslims – I tried even to import practices of a Muslim habitus into my daily life – experimenting with fasting, praying namaaz, and reading the Qur’an every morning. But the truth was that, without food and coffee, I could not teach; I could not remember the motions of the wazu without reading my mother’s notes on the matter; and I found I would rather spend early mornings writing 500 words than struggle through Arabic script. I knew what those practices meant, but no one had forced them on me in childhood and as an adult I could not import them into my lifestyle willy-nilly. Close to veritable despair, I found anchor in a sense of humour, in the shared confusions felt by other Indian Muslim friends, and in the powerful spiritual energies of Sufi music and shrines, especially Ajmer, that called to me and somehow transmitted what the qawwals termed sukoon (peace of mind).

I still remember the day when my late father telephoned from Calcutta to tell me triumphantly that the BJP had lost the national elections. As we rejoiced together in some disbelief (I had gone to bed in Manchester listening to the NDTV psephologists prognosticating the BJP’s victory), I felt a burden physically slipping away from me. No longer, I realised in a flash, would I have to respond defensively to the BJP’s Hindutva agenda that had been pushing me ideologically into an ever-tighter corner. I emerged through that period when the BJP government went out of power, able to regain a sense of self again, of being strict about the principles of Nehruvian secularism that had shaped me as an individual and that, although old-fashioned, I realise I hold dear to me and are, paradoxically, akin to a religious affiliation. Now that the question of the veil has once more taken the global centre stage, I feel able to stare the issue squarely in the face and say with conviction, “I do not support the practice of full face covering, call it burqa or niqab, particularly when it comes in the form of a black, shapeless garment (however luxurious its material may be) and the extent of my distaste is such that I find myself fine with the French government’s ban on it.”

Cultural Relativism vs Humanism
This position is relatively rare amongst my friends, colleagues and acquaintances, whether in India, south Asia at large, or Europe. Indeed, it opened up a bizarre situation where I, of Muslim heritage, was expressing my lack of sympathy for those crying hoarse about the French ban, while colleagues with no such connections but with self-declared liberal affiliations all but rebuked me for my stance. What is this liberalism that goes about supporting the right of women to cover completely their faces and wander around beshrouded in shapeless black garments? Such is the topsy-turvy, post-postmodern, post-postcolonial world we live in, where Left and Right have totally interchanged positions that one might intuitively associate with them. Caught in the quagmire of argumentation, we inadvertently support stances we would normally distance ourselves from. We do not like the reactionary shades the French call for “laicité” seems to have taken on, and so we argue against their banning of the burqa, just as we might have rejected the idea of a uniform civil code when it was the BJP that called for it.
As a Muslim woman living in Europe, I experience powerful reasons for affiliating myself with Muslimness alongside equally powerful reasons for distancing myself from its overt expressions in the public sphere. The former arise from that grey zone where “religion” and “culture” intermingle. I feel a strange, almost romantic affinity with those who know what words like wazu and sehri imply, but a similar feeling resurges when I am in the company of someone who knows what a kofta or a dolma is. By that token, I feel that affinity with anyone belonging, say, to a one-time Ottomanised cultural sphere, such as my Bulgarian friend who knows what a shelwar is, and knows that I know too. The more I work through this instinctive affiliation, the more strongly I realise that what I am responding to is historical membership of an Islamicate heritage that was shaped by and shaped the forces of modernity. The kofta becomes a version of a Masonic handshake. On the other hand, the roots of my disaffiliation to veils of any kind, or to dietary restrictions imposed by religion, lie in the fact that my strongest ideological affiliations are to principles of secularism, socialism, and humanism.

This realisation has helped me arrive at a situation of no compromise over some fundamental issues that include veiling practices, although I can tolerate the headscarf (for reasons I explain below). I admit I may seem full of contradictions as I try to work my way through a mesh of local, global and national politics that once again draws sustenance through the Muslim woman’s veiling practices. It is only superficially paradoxical, however, that I feel strongly the need to retain for myself the label of “Muslim” precisely while being as far away from any kind of head covering as can be: ironically, those who want to seek out the “moderate Muslim” do not seem to want to acknowledge that in the existence of such a strange creature, a self-declared Muslim woman who has no truck with veiling practices, may lie that Holy Grail they are so fervently searching.

An Anti-Veiling Rationale
But there is another reason why I cling to the label “Muslim”. Attached to the adjectives “Indian” and “Bengali”, it encapsulates for me a political, ideological and affective heritage that is no less than a specific trajectory of south Asian modernity. This is my inheritance, and the very rejection of the burqa and niqab that I feel able to articulate is predicated on it. It is no contradiction to my mind, that along with the Sufi music of Ajmer and Nizamuddin Aulia, and the Baul music of Bengal, I appreciate the local vernacular practices of my Bengali Muslim world where grandmothers, mother, aunts and even I can discreetly draw the end of a sari across the head if occasion calls for it – which can range from visiting a graveyard to protecting oneself from the sun’s rays – and equally seamlessly let it drop once the moment is over. This was the very spirit celebrated (and its disappearance mourned) in Sabiha Sumar’s fine film Khamosh Pani, through the juxtaposition, in particular, of two distinct scenes.

The first was a wedding scene where men and women singing traditional songs were separated by a flimsy and translucent curtain that, at the height of merriment, was playfully breached; the second was one where young men of the village sought earnestly to erect a brick wall around the girls’ school to protect the “modesty” of their female counterparts. Separating the two scenes is the gradual radicalisation of those youth by Islamic fundamentalist preachers from Lahore (the film retrospectively explores the Islamicisation of Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq). It is no coincidence that those Muslim women whose views on veiling resonate most closely with mine are from Bangladesh and Pakistan as well as India (rather than second or third generation Europeans). The visual contrast between the flexibility of the curtain and the rigidity of the brick wall is the same that distinguishes the flexibility of the pallu/aanchol and the rigidity of the burqa and niqab, which renders problematic even the basic act of eating in public.

At the heart of my objections to this practice, is, finally, a very simple matter – the intrinsic humanism of conducting person-to-person contact by allowing your interlocutor to see your face. Whether we like it or not, those of us conducting this conversation about full veiling move in a modernised public sphere, at the basis of which is the assumption that we speak to each other, face to face. This is not merely an aspect of humanism but an aesthetics of the face, where aesthetics stands not for elite privilege but is akin to rasa – the ability to enjoy and savour life in heightened form, to adorn and to express oneself. The amassing of sequins and encrustations of embroidery on a burqa renders it not a whit more aesthetic to me, but rather makes it more sinister, more counter-aesthetic in this fundamental sense that I am proposing. This is a practice that signals to me sullen joylessness, a declaration of shutting out the world.

How to Spot the Moderate Muslim
This interpretation also furnishes me with the reason why I do not condemn the headscarf (though I do not like it): it does not necessarily breach my framework of humanism and a rasa-driven aesthetics. It can also explain why I can find unreasonable the French government’s ban on the turban, which does not obscure the face of the wearer and in whose colour-coordinated care I locate a true note of rasa. I appreciate that Sarkozy’s government is driven by bigotry and arrogance, and that expounding freely about the anti-humanism of full veiling can easily be misinterpreted as support of that bigotry and arrogance. But on balance, the dangers of keeping quiet about one’s objections to full veiling cedes ground to the forces within Islam that have been attempting to seize control over what “Islam” can and must mean. The biggest problem is that the liberal, leftist position all over the world seems determined to accept their definitions, while hunting high and low for where the moderate Muslim might lurk, and for ways to coax him or her out of hiding.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir (a.j.kabir@leeds.ac.uk) teaches at the School of English, University of Leeds, UK.

The fashion police, at least, have already arrived, a decade early and without any help from Islamists. But rather than forcing women to wear the burqa or niqab, their job is to force them not to. Earlier this month Italian police in the northern city of Novara fined a Tunisian immigrant, Amel Marmouri, €500 for being veiled in a post office. Belgian police are likely to be doing the same after the Brussels parliament outlawed the burqa. France expects to pass a similar law by the autumn. Holland could follow suit. The Spanish city of Lleida has forbidden the burqa in public buildings; the Minister of Labour and Immigration Celestino Corbacho has hinted at a national ban. In Canada, the Quebec government has drafted an anti-burqa law. Australian politicians are demanding one too.

The rhetoric accompanying the bans has been as gushing as the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Jean-Francois Copé, leader of the majority UNP party in French National Assembly, has talked of ‘a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity’. For the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, the bans are nothing less than a ‘defence of the Enlightenment’. According to Celestino Corbacho without a burqa ban it would not be possible to protect ‘the values of our society’.

There is certainly something medieval about the burqa and the niqab. The idea that in the 21st century women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief is both troubling and astonishing. Yet, there is also something surreal about the way that this piece of cloth has been turned into a battleground for Western values and about the idea that the burqa poses some kind of existential threat to the West.

The campaign against the burqa is particularly puzzling when in reality so few women choose to wear it. The sight of a burqa in Paris or Brussels is almost as rare as a glimpse of a bikini in Riyadh or Karachi. France has a Muslim population of 5 million. Its government estimates that fewer than 2000 women wear a niqab or burqa. (The original survey, conducted by DCRI, the French secret service, came up with the oddly precise figure of 367; that was so low that the Interior Ministry told the DCRI to count again.) In Holland some 500 women in a Muslim population of one million do so, in Denmark the estimate is fewer than 200 out of 170,000 Muslims.

So why, at a time when Europe is beset by so many fundamental economic and social problems, have legislators become so obsessed by this piece of cloth? There are three main kinds of arguments against the burqa: practical, political and existential.

The burqa, Jean-Francois Copé has suggested, ‘poses a serious safety problem at a time when security cameras play an important role in the protection of public order’. Many worry that the burqa would allow terrorists to evade airport security or provide the perfect camouflage for bank robbers. Others fret that wearing the burqa makes it difficult to perform certain jobs, particularly those that require face-to-face contact with clients or the public – doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers.

There are clearly practical problems that come with wearing the burqa. It is, after all, a piece of clothing designed for feudal life, not the modern world. Practical problems, however, can usually be solved on a case-by-case basis without the need for national soul searching or draconian legislation. Airports already require veiled women to reveal their features when passing through security. Police have no problem demanding to see faces when checking ID cards. And if banks insist that people should not wear bulky clothing, so be it. But that is very different from the state imposing an outright ban on such clothes.

If wearing a burqa is incompatible with the needs of particular jobs, then those particular employers – hospitals, schools, shops even- can legitimately demand that employees not be clad from head to foot. But again, one can impose dress codes for certain jobs without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don’t have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job either.

The practical arguments for a ban on the burqa are weak and shallow. More profound is the political case. The burqa, proponents of a ban argue, undermines gender equality and makes social integration impossible. It is, Bernard-Henri Lévy has written, ‘not a dress, it’s a message, one that clearly communicates the subjugation, subservience, the crushing and the defeat of women.’

The burqa is certainly demeaning to women, and often used to enchain them. Many other practices and rituals that Western societies tolerate are, however, also degrading. Orthodox Jewish women must shave their heads and wear a wig when they marry. The Catholic Church forbids women priests. Many Protestant evangelical churches insist that wives must ‘obey’ their husbands and that the role of women is to breed new evangelicals. Nobody seriously suggests that Jewish marriage rituals be banned or that the Catholic church be forced to accept gender equality or that evangelical wives be saved by state legislation from being baby factories.

A liberal society accepts that individuals should be free to make choices that may not be in their own interests and that, to liberal eyes, demean them. This applies even to particularly distasteful expressions of degradation, such as the wearing of the burqa.

What of the suggestion that women are forced to wear the burqa, and so need protection from the law? It is true that in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes.

If women are forced to do something against their will, the law already protects them in democratic countries. But what evidence exists, suggests that in Europe most burqa-clad women do not act from a sense of compulsion. According to the DCRI report in France, the majority of women wearing the burqa do so voluntarily, largely as an expression of identity and as an act of provocation. A second French report by the information authority, the SGDI, came to similar conclusions. Burqa wearers, it suggested, sought to ‘provoke society, or one’s family’, and saw it as a ‘badge of militancy’, and of ‘Salafist origins’. The burqa ban will only deepen the sense of alienation out which the desire for such provocation emerges.

The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.

What of the impact of the burqa on social integration? The veil has been rightly described as ‘ghetto walls that a person wears’. It often inhibits normal social interaction – that, after all, is its very purpose – and may preclude those who wear it from integrating into society. But given that virtually no Muslim woman actually wears the burqa, it can hardly be held responsible for creating a sense of social separation.

The real significance of the burqa is that it has become a symbol of the anxieties that have come to beset Western nations. What does it mean to be French? Or British? Or Swedish? Most Western nations have undergone a crisis of identity as both traditional values, and trust in the institutions in which those values were invested, have become eroded. Unable to define clearly the ideas and values that characterize the nation, still less to win people to those ideas and values, politicians have taken the easy step of railing against symbols of ‘alienness’. In this sense the burqa bans are similar to the prohibition imposed last year by the Italian city of Lucca on kebab shops ‘to protect our culinary tradition’ or to the decree by the mayor Rome that schools can no longer serve couscous or Chinese fried rice but only ‘regional cuisine dishes’. They are attempts to define ‘Western values’ or the republican tradition by showing what such values or traditions are not at a time when politicians find it increasingly difficult to express what they are.

And this takes us to the existential argument against the burqa. ‘This is not about the burqa’, Bernard-Henri Lévy claims. ‘It’s about Voltaire. What is at stake is the Enlightenment of yesterday and today, and the heritage of both, no less sacred than that of the three monotheisms. A step backwards, just one, on this front would give the nod, all fanaticism, all the true thoughts of hatred and violence.’

The idea that the entire weight of the Enlightenment tradition should rest on banning a piece of cloth worn by a few hundred women shows how absurd has become the debate about the burqa. Certainly, it is important to defend liberal social values, the secular society and the heritage of the Enlightenment. But we cannot do so by promoting illiberal policies, stigmatizing immigrants, or banning symbols of ‘otherness’. The very values that Lévy believes are undermined by the burqa demand that we oppose any attempt by the state to ban it.

“Do Anglicans, even moderates, really think of G!D as a sexless being? I was under the impression that most moderate religious people still think of G!D as male. People could use the singular ‘they’ and refer to a ‘parent’ if they were really that bothered.”

i think she could with some justice aim this question at judaism, but it is, nonetheless, a bit of an old chestnut. the best way i can answer it is that in the same way that we deal with anthropomorphism in the text: G!D Isn’t male any more than G!D Has a “hand”, or a “back”, G!D Forbid. when the Text speaks in these terms, it is only to be understood as the way *we* understand the interaction, not the *actual reality* – hence, when we speak of G!D as “Father” or “King”, these are merely the interactions and relevant relationships that are being described, not the Ultimate Reality of the Divine. by the same token, a number of incredibly important Divine Names and interaction/relationships are *female*, such as “E-L ShaDaY”, which comes from the word ShaDaYiM (breasts) and “Ha-RaHaMaN”, which comes the word ReHeM (womb), not to mention the considerable symbology of the Divine Feminine in kabbalah around the SheKhiNaH (Divine Presence) and “Matronit” and the male-female interrelationships actually *within* the G!DHead. one might also mention the idea that the “community of israel” is synonymous with G!D’s “bride” on some level, so that would require one of us to be “male” and the other “female” in that particular situation.

“And then there’s Jesus – no-one could lead themselves to believe he was genderless. Judaism has Moses, Islam has Mohammed – all these prophets are male. How does a person get around that one?”

perhaps by mentioning the seven major jewish prophetesses, sarah, miriam, deborah, hannah, abigail, huldah and esther – (talmudic reference: BT megillah 14a)? according to the great authority rashi, rebecca, rachel and leah should also be included.

a more serious criticism, i believe, is the following:

“If one accepts and follows traditions without question purely on the basis that they are traditions, this leaves the door wide open for all kinds of nasty things. In general, it silences and disables those who disagree with the traditions and would like to do things differently. It’s those ‘harmless’ traditions which can make people feel stifled and like there’s only one right way to do things. At the very least, they discourage creativity, critical thinking and independence.”

this is certainly a position with which we at the spittoon can identify – certainly within judaism (and, i and others would argue, within islam as well) the idea that there is One True Way Of Doing Stuff is a corrosive and oppressive idea not borne out by a truly insightful examination of the texts involved. however, the accompanying analysis is flawed:

“One can usually assess how harmless a tradition is by examining what the penalties are, if any, of not following it. In your example, I would imagine that a Jewish/Muslim pork-eater would face many negative reactions from their community, plus residual religious guilt, and that this is probably the real reason why they ‘like following the tradition’.”

now, this might be a perfectly adequate summary of how the uneducated “feel” about the law in question, in fact, the penalty in halakhah is the indication of exactly how important the principle incurring the penalty is in the first place. in fact, halakhically, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, a comparatively light penalty compared to breaking shabbat, which is a stoning offence. now, before you get all bent out of shape on how unpleasant it is to get lashed, you’d have to also consider the standard of evidence, which required five further tests before the lashes could be administered:

1. the pork-eating in question would have to be done in front of two kosher witnesses (many, many difficulties in establishing what one of these looks like)
2. the two witnesses would need to have absolutely no discrepancy in their statements.
3. the pork-eater would have to receive a warning from the witnesses that by so doing, he would incur a penalty of lashes.
4. the pork-eater would have to respond that he had understood the warning and the penalty, reiterating precisely what they both were.
5. the eating would then have to occur within 3 seconds of this response.

incidentally, to be binding, the verdict would also have to be handed down by a properly constituted and duly authorised religious court – and there hasn’t been such a court for approximately 1500 years, but considering the re-establishment of such courts is a religious duty, i personally would prefer to rely on the other safeguards. even so, i hope you can see from the standard required that anyone who actually meets it is clearly out to make a point. oh, and, incidentally, if you ran away before the verdict was carried out, you couldn’t be re-arrested. in such a case, the negative feeling from your community is likely to be the only sanction.

another interesting challenge is made here:

“To what extent, for a religious person, is their holy book really their holy book, if they disregard most of its teachings (or haven’t even read it all the way through)?”

for jews, as we were born into a covenantal relationship, we are as subject to it as to the laws of the country we were born into. the same obtains with UK law. presumably amy’s not suggesting that i’m not obliged to follow the regulations of her majesty’s revenue collectors despite the fact that i may never have read them or heard of their provisions? by the same token:

“To align oneself with a movement, an organisation, that one disagrees with at least in part, knowing that in doing so you are giving it power – numbers at least, and in many cases, money too?”

i am not sure how this is different from being a citizen of a country whose policies you may or may not agree with – you’ve still got to pay your taxes.

as part of this discussion, i analysed deuteronomy 22:29 in its context. this provoked a number of further responses including:

“Regarding the Deuteronomy verse (22:29), it says that ’she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her’ – humbled? That’s rather chilling, no? Is that a mistranslation too?”

not only that, but it is also misrepresenting what the text says, which is ‘AiNah” – “forced”, but not in a *physically* violent way, as in verse 25, more in such a way as to give her no choice but to marry him. i would say that this represents bringing about a marriage by “putting the woman in a compromising position”; if you know pride and prejudice, it’s what wickham does to lydia bennet to get money out of the family; he has to be bribed to marry her. the Torah is trying here to prevent the woman becoming unmarriageable; there is nothing to say that she can’t *then* divorce *him* (after betrothal and before final marriage), thus retaining her autonomy and a hefty divorce payout; it is just that *he* is forever prevented from divorcing *her*, not the other way around. i would understand this verse as a face-saving exercise.

amy then goes on to say:

“Regardless of whether rape occurred or it was ‘just sex’, isn’t it a bit sexist to generally suggest that it’s okay to buy a woman in this way?”

now, i’m not sure you can really project your attitude back to the bronze age as if human values and relationships have always been the same; i mean, that is the same sort of point of view that would reduce shakespeare’s “merchant of venice” to simple antisemitism. the initial audience of the Torah (as opposed to G!D) wouldn’t really understand what you’re getting at here. the thing is, you aren’t “buying a woman”; you’re contracting for procreative services, as it were, which can only be done by ensuring exclusivity on the woman’s part. the woman must enter into the contract without coercion and of her own free will and can exit it at her discretion on virtually any grounds (including bad breath) and is, for the duration of the contracted marriage, entitled to a statutory level of maintenance (and alimony), clothing, housing and sexual satisfaction, breach of which by the husband is, needless to say, grounds for divorce. this quite simply was revolutionary within the context in which the Torah was given; not only in that the woman had to agree, but that she maintained her rights, her property and right of cancellation. in fact, it compares positively to modern civil law in most respects – most people agree that merely falling in love is a rather worse basis for marriage than shared values and clear responsibilities on both sides! both sides contribute assets – the wife’s contribution is *not* a dowry, but her reproductive capabilities, hence:

“(Following your interpretation, it’s a bit like having to pay for something you broke in a shop – fair enough if it’s a vase, but a person? Why does having sex make you a broken person?)”

well, it doesn’t, nor is this implied, although permit me to observe, tongue-in-cheek, that most of us would pay more for new underpants than for second-hand. the statutory levels, in any case, are nominal – in reality, these would in the past have been negotiated, in the case of a woman who had emancipated herself from her father (or previous husband by divorce or widowhood) possibly by the woman herself. and there’s more:

“If God is a supremely knowledgeable being, with ultimate powers, and is perfectly good and moral, why couldn’t he send a clear message – even in the bronze age – that women are people, not property?”

the same reason that G!D also didn’t send the clear message “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” – it wouldn’t have made sense at the time, only now. the clarity would in fact have been precisely the opposite.

“What stopped him from telling these citizens in no uncertain terms that it’s okay for women to have sex, they don’t have to be virgins until they’re married, and it’s not right to buy and sell them?”

the fact that this wasn’t a student dorm at berkeley, it was bronze age canaan – and if you hopped behind a bush with someone, you’d be liable to end up with your throat slit, or sold into slavery, thus precipitating a blood feud; it wasn’t like there was a police force and cctv; this was the wild fecking west! people took what they could get and, like it or not, if a woman didn’t have protection from a father, guardian or husband, she might be fair game, unless she stayed within the protection of the law. to be honest, this feels somewhat anachronistic reasoning, based on a very different axiomatic substructure, as the following statement identifies:

“I find it quite convenient that you’re explaining away misogyny as mistranslation, and contradictions as just not knowing the ‘right’ context of the verses in question. You seem to be taking it as your a priori assumption that there can’t possibly be any real inconsistency in the texts, there can’t possibly be any real misogyny. Why not? Why can’t there be?”

the answer to this is that if, axiomatically, one believes, as i do, that the Torah is a Divine document, any inconsistency in the texts is there to teach us something and the basis of traditional methodologies is the ability to identify the root cause of the inconsistency in order to illustrate the teaching point concerned. this has certainly been our approach as long as we can remember -and, more to the point, this is documented quite a long way back. secondly, in the conception we have of G!D it would make no more sense for G!D to Be a “misogynist” than it would for G!D to have a “hand”, or to “be angry”; these things are simply expressions of how we experience what we interpret out of the text. we believe that G!D Expects us to behave with respect and compassion to each other, not to systematically disadvantage half the human race. now, obviously, if you have different assumptions, then these might include a priori that any statement in the Torah reflects bronze age sensibility and capability in terms of gender relations, science and critical reasoning and therefore there can’t possibly be any real lessons to be learned from it. on this i suspect i might have to differ from you, seeing as how our culture is based almost entirely on this document and in most respects is generally considered to have produced major leaders in each field who are also committed to some of the same assumptions about the document. this is not to say that they are all going to agree with each other all the time:

“Why is your ‘methodology’ necessarily going to result in a clear, unequivocal message?”

because it is based on a clear set of assumptions and underpinned by a unified philosophical structure – i’m not saying that this necessitates clarity and unequivocable messaging in all cases, because it doesn’t, but in the case of this particular verse, it clearly precludes certain interpretations such as “G!D Is a misogynist” as nonsensical. there are some other pertinent questions that obtain:

“On what do you base your faith in it?”

on the fact that this way of doing things has preserved the sole remaining diaspora culture of the ancient world through several millennia of unremitting and occasionally genocidal hostility. in other words, it works.

“How do you know that the eventual interpretation is right, in any case?”

the principle we test it against is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2) but we *also* preserve minority opinions (BT bava metzia 59b) in case eventually they become majority.

“What do you check it against?”

it’s peer-reviewed. all jewish law has been aggressively picked apart, analysed, defended or amended on this basis. that is what the talmud documents.

“Then you say that two contradictory positions can both be the word of the ‘living god’? How is that even possible – how can a creator of the universe not make his mind up?”

of course – but “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:10), so we are told we have to work it out for ourselves, on the authority of the Torah itself, so the majority opinion came down on one side at that time. G!D may well Have an opinion, but in the famous talmudic debate of the “oven of achnai” (the reference given above) the majority decision was to say “bugger off, G!D, this is a human decision now, You Said so in the Torah”.

“Not be 100% clear about his message? Do you not find it slightly odd that all this interpretation is necessary?”

no, we find it incredibly empowering that we are being treated like grown-ups responsible for our own actions, not children with no sense of right or wrong.

“Why doesn’t God reiterate his message and clear things up? Hasn’t he got the power to do this?”

well, yes, obviously, but during the “oven of achnai” debate, the position of the majority was “we do not make legal decisions on the basis of Divine Voices from Heaven”.

we still haven’t quite got to the bottom of the equality debate here, however:

“When I talk about a sense of equality, I am talking about equality between men and women – e.g. what is it that leads you to know that stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin is wrong? Would you only know that it’s wrong if you’d read all the scriptures? Or would you know that it’s wrong based on your own empathy and reasoning? I would argue the latter, seeing as I know it’s wrong, and I haven’t read all the scriptures or engaged in textual interpretation.”

i would argue that the case that you are basing it on your own “empathy and reasoning” alone is not a strong argument. nobody grows up in a vacuum. you have these attitudes because you developed them, based on your upbringing. i would argue that you *have* been influenced indirectly by them because they have influenced the society you grew up in. i can even point to the bit of Torah that it comes from: “you shall love the stranger [person who is different from yourself] for you were strangers in egypt” (leviticus 19:34) nor am i saying that my own reasoning is inoperative – obviously, i needed to use it to apply the verse to this situation, similarly the sages needed to apply it in order to get the relevant safeguards in place to prevent it happening unless it really, really, really, REALLY applied. if you’re going to do something as drastic as stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin, you’d better be really sure that’s what the text says – and that what the text says applies to this EXACT situation.

“This is what I’m talking about. A religious person reads such a horrendous verse, thinks ‘That can’t be right’ and proceeds to delve more deeply into the scriptures to find some way of justifying it.”

i don’t really understand why this should be so wrong – it is the way the Torah does thought experiments; under what circumstances might such a penalty apply? what might justify it in *practice*? are you sure? are you really, really sure? what principle is being upheld? that’s not the same as “justifying” it – you can’t be “justifying” it if you end up effectively prohibiting it, which was the actual effect – but then again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know the proper context for Torah, which is as the written component of jewish law, not as a copy of “gender relations for dummies”, which is how it is so often abused by literalist protestants and bible-bashers in particular.

“I doubt that a person starts reading scriptures and then concludes ‘Well whaddaya know? Stoning women is immoral!’”

i agree – and so do the sages! although there are more morally complex issues in the Torah than this one.

amy is also good enough to address a criticism i make of her that she is generalising about religious people:

“Sure, not all religious people follow their religion in exactly the same way, but they do believe in a god/gods, and their holy texts do mean something to them. These are the two aspects of religion that I critique in my piece, and they appear to me to be pretty universal among the faithful. The rest is a critique of the arguments used by religious feminists to defend the misogyny in their holy texts, and examples of religiously-inspired misogyny. What is it that I’m generalising about? What is it exactly that you object to?”

well, i suppose what i object to is the implication that religious feminists are “defending misogyny”, because as i have attempted to show, i don’t think the misogyny is there either in intent or in application – except by people who really don’t understand either the text concerned, or who don’t follow an acceptable standard of textual interpretation. i accept that it *could* result in misogyny, because it *has* – but human beings do get things wrong from time to time and Torah is not easy.

anyway, i hope this is not too irrelevant and that there are enough interesting nuggets here for the conversation to continue here; certainly i would encourage people to take a look at the original piece.

****

I’ve been thinking about feminism, human rights, and the left and want to explore some of the ideas I laid out in a blog in February called “Underlying Philosophical Differences,” which discussed Gita Sahgal’s struggle with Amnesty. I kept asking myself why I cared so much. I have never even been a member of Amnesty; why should Gita’s struggle resonate so deeply? I have come to realize that her struggle mirrors my own political journey.

I became a movement activist initially because of the war in Vietnam. I wanted to end US imperialism and racism, and bring about social justice for all. Though I had a sense of women’s oppression from childhood and became active in the women’s liberation movement as soon as I made contact with it, I continued to identify as a left wing person and to raise women’s issues within that context.

This approach didn’t work very well. The men of my generation were never very happy about the women’s movement and, in the 70s, as much of the student movement turned Marxist, they began to see us mainly as a constituency group, useful as a source of recruits but not worthy of respect as an autonomous movement. Most leaders of Marxist groups did their best to dampen or stamp out any feminist sparks within their own organizations. And, while women in these organizations tried to struggle, the ideological basis of Marxism offered no way to do so.

The assumption underlying Marxism—and almost everything else in the history of political thought—is that the experience of men is the rule and the experience of women is an exception to the rule. The primary categories of Marxism are the class and the nation. Women, who are half of every class and nation, are thus submerged and invisible except in terms of their activity in the class or national struggle. Our needs as women are assumed to be taken care of by the liberation of our class or nation. In movements that subsume women in group identities, we have no philosophical basis to argue from when we are accused of being divisive or diverting attention from the main struggle.

In a Marxist organization, the main way to bring up women’s issues is in terms of male chauvinist attitudes—a framework that does not even address structural problems. And a battle around attitudes is hard to fight because it always comes down to personal issues.

Despite these problems, women have been part of leftwing movements for centuries, devoting themselves to social justice and trying to find ways to work for women’s liberation in that context, rather than all leaving to become feminists. This is because feminist movements have so often focused only on what women need, often in a narrow way, ignoring other social problems, rather than working on what women need in the context of broader social problems and in collaboration with other movements.   (For more on this, see my articles on US Movement History and Strategy in this website.)

Only in the late 20th century, when masses of women all over the world became literate and politically aware, did it become possible to develop a new approach that integrates women’s issues with a broad, radical social analysis. Today we understand that women’s struggle is part of every other struggle, and must be a fundamental motor in any movement for democracy and social transformation. This means that women must have an equal voice on matters of basic strategy and war and peace—not as tokens but because we bring indispensable knowledge to the table.

It is no accident that the global women’s movement has expressed this vision using the language of human rights rather than the traditional language of either feminism or the left. This is because human rights begin with the rights of the individual, not of any group. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every individual has a right to housing, food, health care, education, and freedom from torture and fear, as well as all the civil and political rights Americans are brought up to value. The goal of these principles is to create the social conditions necessary for the full development of each individual. This is as radical as the vision of the Communist Manifestoof a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

With a philosophy that makes the rights of every individual equal to those of every other individual, and sees these rights as both universal and indivisible—meaning you can’t divide the economic rights from the political ones—women have a basis from which to argue against subordinating our rights to those of another group, or to traditional cultural norms, economic needs, religion, or the nation.

But to say that a human rights analysis provides women with this basis does not mean that the existing human rights movement always acts as if the rights of women were as important as those of men. Far from it. The controversy currently going on between Amnesty and Gita Sahgal shows that the problems women have had on the left exist in the human rights movement as well. But because human rights ideology is based on the rights of the individual, we have more of a place to stand within the human rights movement than we ever did arguing about women’s issues within the left.

This is an interview from Spiegel-Online, of the German-Turkish writer Seyran Ates. She discusses her new book, which describes the necessity of a sexual revolution in the Islamic world, the recent integration debate in Germany and the arrogance of German women’s rights activists.

Seyran Ates

SPIEGEL: Ms. Ates, in your controversial new book, you call for a sexual revolution in the Islamic world.

Ates: You don’t know how necessary that is.

SPIEGEL: But what exactly do you mean by a sexual revolution?

Ates: My use of the term is based on Wilhelm Reich and his book about the sexual revolution. I believe that the Islamic world must grapple with the consequences of rigid sexual morals, not unlike the way, as he describes, the Soviet Union dealt with its own circumstances. It must pursue the path of change, just as any totalitarian system must do when it wants to become a democratic society. Part of the process is that sexuality has to be recognized as something that every individual determines for himself or herself. Institutions like moral and religious police must be abolished. People who have sex before marriage cannot be punished or ostracized by society. Parents must be confronted with the question of why they do not allow their 16-year-old daughter to have a boyfriend, while their sons can brag about how many girlfriends they have. Sex education must be taught in the classroom. Parents shouldn’t have to do it, but they should accept it when the schools do it. Young and old people who are already living a self-determined sexuality in the Islamic world have to be more confident and make their voices heard.

SPIEGEL: Where do you see signs that the time has come for such a development?

Ates: Many young people have sex before marriage, and many aren’t even great believers in the institution of marriage. Just look at these young people. They are burning up with passion. They have such a lust for life, and yet they are so inhibited. People in the Middle East are poets, writing poetry from morning to night, and what do they write poetry about? About desire. The little boy in the street does it, and so do the construction worker and the academic. They are all writing poetry about the same subject, the subject that is suppressed more than anything else.

SPIEGEL: You mention people in the Middle East, but there are Muslims all over the world. The world’s largest Islamic country is Indonesia, an Asian country. In fact, it’s impossible to refer to Muslims as a uniform group.

Ates: I think it is possible. There is a strong cultural connection among the world’s Muslims: religion. I find that it’s a wonderful religion, but the cultural interpretation of this religion has led to sexual repression. It wasn’t terribly different in the West not very long ago. But I don’t want to make a blanket judgment and treat all Germans and Muslims the same.

SPIEGEL: It’s also difficult to pass judgment about a community that may not be all that homogeneous. Thilo Sarrazin, a board member at the Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank), came under fire recently when he complained about German Muslims, particularly in Berlin. Was he right?

Ates: I believe that Mr. Sarrazin’s remarks were to the point and correct. We have serious problems in our multicultural society. Mr. Sarrazin isn’t the first to have brought them up.

SPIEGEL: In other words, he was completely in the right?

Ates: No, it’s more complicated than that. Mr. Sarrazin is a German, and when a high-profile German publicly refers to Turks having no “productive function,” there is great potential for misinterpretation. I know Turks on the street who say things like that, but they’re allowed to. Mr. Sarrazin isn’t — no matter how good the rest of his article was, and regardless of whether everyone who is so upset about it now actually read it. But we Muslims have to lead these discussions, because they are about us.

SPIEGEL: Okay, then tell us what you’ve experienced. You were one of those supposedly typical girls, living with your parents in Berlin and being kept away from love.

Ates: Sex was not discussed in my family. And steps were taken to ensure that I had as little contact with boys as possible. Naturally, I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. None of it was actually said. They didn’t sit down and say: Dear daughter, you are a girl, and that’s why you can’t have a boyfriend, because we don’t want you to sleep with a man before marriage. Or: Dear daughter, you have a hymen, and we have to make sure that that hymen remains intact until your wedding. The entire system is designed so that everyone is given unspoken instructions on what to do — or rather, what not to do.

SPIEGEL: Why is the hymen so important?

Ates: Because it was capital, capital between my legs.

SPIEGEL: How do Muslim parents manage to enforce this obedience you describe? Many German parents can’t even get their children to carry their plates from the table to the dishwasher.

Ates: German parents have forgotten how much they can rely on their children’s affection. Children are loyal. From the moment they are born, they grow into a system from which they want acceptance, love and acknowledgment. Many German Turks severely isolate themselves from the world around them. That too creates a sense of community.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, in your book you describe a world that is internally divided in several ways. You argue that there is a double standard, a discrepancy between the façade and the inner life.

Ates: Yes, that’s the way I see it. I conducted interviews for my book. Many young people I interviewed complained that they could only have anal sex, because of the hymen. The parents suspect and know about it, and yet they do not release their children from their absurd demands. If that isn’t a double standard, what is?

Part 2:

SPIEGEL: In German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s film “Against the Wall,” there is a scene in which two Turkish men are sitting there, playing a board game. One of them says: Should we go to the whorehouse? The other one says: Don’t you have any of your own women to fuck? Then the first man smashes a bottle, holds it up to the second man’s throat and says: Never mention the word fucking again when you talk about our women. Do you think that’s a realistic scene?

Ates: Yes. The men in the cafés talk about their sexual escapades, but never about those with their own wives. The wife is sacrosanct. Married couples told me that sexuality in marriage has been more or less reduced to a perfunctory act.

SPIEGEL: Why do you believe that this differs from many marriages in other cultures?

Ates: It doesn’t necessarily have to be different, but the point is a completely different one. Many Muslims don’t even allow themselves to think about what exactly sexuality means in their marriages. It’s simply accepted that the men have their fun in brothels.

SPIEGEL: German husbands also frequent brothels.

Ates: But they certainly don’t make such a point of letting their wives know about it. Turkish men who frequent brothels don’t necessarily discuss it directly with their wives, but it’s often very clear that that is the case, and that the women are expected to accept it.

SPIEGEL: This hidden passion you describe — if you think it’s so powerful, why doesn’t it prevail over religion?

Ates: Conservative forces have a lot of political power in the Islamic world. They have power and control over half the population, namely the women. They spread fear and they use violence. Making sexuality taboo enables them to isolate themselves from the West, which, of course, is a monster and is to blame for all the bad things in this world. Our religion, they say, helps to keep us from being taken over by the West. We are the better ones, the authentic ones. This mentality makes it possible to avoid even mentioning one’s own failure.

SPIEGEL: Is the West a valid role model for sexual revolution?

Ates: I just want to point out a natural path to freedom. All people want to be free. That isn’t something the West invented.

SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the treatment of pornography and violence in the West?

Ates: We have attained a self-determined sexuality in the West that I would like to see in the rest of the world. Of course, there are always excesses: child pornography, prostitution as a flat-rate service, sexuality that happens too early and is devoid of emotion. I’m not saying that everything works perfectly in the West. I believe that we Muslims can also mirror the West, and that we can all ask ourselves what went well, what went wrong, and why.

SPIEGEL: You claim that because many Muslim children are supposedly afraid to challenge authority at home, they are more likely to characterize female German teachers as sluts.

Ates: There is so much condescension and so little recognition, love, affection and encouragement of children. They have to vent their anger at some point.

SPIEGEL: Muhammad had a dozen wives. Is he a role model?

Ates: When an Arab man needs a justification for having several wives, he says: It was the same with Muhammad.

SPIEGEL: Christian men don’t have that excuse.

Ates: No, but it’s a shame that Christians worship such an asexual man. Muslims are in a better position, in that respect, but this need of the man to have several women, legitimized by Muhammad, has led to a hidden and extreme sexualizing of Islam.

SPIEGEL: You call for a revolution, but doesn’t that take a lot of time?

Ates: Look at the student uprisings here in Germany. Something happened, and suddenly young people took to the streets. We saw the same thing in Iran after the election: The young people were prepared to protest. We now have this one opportunity to drive up the boiling point, using all the democratic and political means at our disposal.

SPIEGEL: But there is one thing you can’t change: The lack of simultaneity between the West and parts of Islamic societies in terms of cultural development.

Ates: That’s the big problem we have: the acceptance of this lack of simultaneity in religion and culture. If we could at least acknowledge its existence. They’ve come a lot further at universities in Turkey than the protagonists in the integration debate here in Germany have.

SPIEGEL: What troubles you about that?

Ates: Particularly here in Germany, there are some very deep archaic self-images — including those among leftist German feminist women — of the whites who behave like big sisters. It’s very arrogant. These women rail against the Catholic Church and its rigid sexual morals, but they insist that we tolerate Turkish women wearing the headscarf, because they believe that this enables the women to preserve their culture. But as far as I’m concerned, this headscarf is nothing but an expression of oppression and inhibition, and of the fact that the men would prefer to hide the women.

SPIEGEL: Do you believe in God?

Ates: I believe in God.

SPIEGEL: Did you fast during Ramadan?

Ates: I do not fast during Ramadan.

SPIEGEL: Do you pray five times a day?

Ates: I pray, but not five times a day.

SPIEGEL: Do you go to the mosque?

Ates: I don’t go to a mosque, because there are no mosques that appeal to me. One of my latest ideas is to establish a free, progressive mosque.

SPIEGEL: With a female imam?

Ates: Exactly, with a female imam and with equal access to all parts of the mosque for men and women. There must be an end to the presence of conservative Muslims, who want to reserve Islam for a specific group. We liberal Muslims don’t want the separations among Shiites, Sunnis and Alawites. We want to participate jointly in a contemporary interpretation of Islam.

SPIEGEL: How does your God feel about sex?

Ates: My God is very open about sex, having created me as a person for whom it’s important. Of course, my conviction that God exists is also based on personal experiences. When I was 21, in my third semester of studying law, I was shot in a counseling center for women from Turkey. I lost a lot of blood and had a near-death experience. It was as if I was having a dialogue with a higher power and was given the chance to decide whether I wanted to leave this world or return to it. I never saw religion exclusively as something negative.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, you have come a long way from the things that once influenced you. Your new book was almost titled: “I’ll Fuck Whoever I Want.” Were your parents aware of this?

Ates: No, and I’m very happy now that the publishing house stepped in, because my book is completely serious. “I’ll fuck whoever I want” was the sentence Hatun Sürücü, a Turkish girl from Berlin, said to her brother before he murdered her, and that’s how I came up with the idea to use it as my title. My parents, by the way, have come a long way. They respect my life today, even the fact that I’m a single mother. They love their grandchild. My father now says that he can’t imagine a Turkish man who could put up with me. He understands what I’ve accomplished. I once said to my father: You know, having a child and wanting a man doesn’t seem to work, so maybe I’ll end up with a woman, after all. He said: You know, I was thinking the same thing myself.

SPIEGEL: How were your parents able to get that far?

Ates: Out of love for me. And because they did not refuse to accept the influences of the West and the modern world. My parents were farmers, with almost no education at all. They came to Germany to offer their children a future and to improve their own economic situation. At first, the needs of their children played no role in the way we were raised. But my mother learned how to read and write at 50. They have since returned to Turkey, where they now live in a house with a garden and view of the sea. They have 13 grandchildren. And they allow us, their five children, to live the way we please. They are proud that we all have a profession. My parents’ dreams came true because they were willing to grow.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Ates, we thank you for this interview.

[This entry comes with a trigger warning for mention of rape and abuse involving young girls. It's also possibly the angriest post I've ever written.]

****

Thanks to a new book, ‘The Lolita Effect’, and a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the ‘sexualisation of young girls’ is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.

All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress – or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.

Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex. Whilst young boys are acknowledged as having and acting upon sexual desire from a young age, the notion of young girls being sexual is still shocking – but it’s also exciting. From the pages of playboy to music videos to porn, girlhood is sexualised and undeveloped female bodies fetishised as the ultimate in naughty fantasy. This trend has been going on for decades, and yet when real little girls do what they’re told to do and play sexy, the hollow hypocrisy of the commentariat is deafening.

M.G Durham, author of ‘The Lolita Effect’, has a novel solution: why not actually tell little girls that it’s okay to enjoy sex? In Carol Midgley’s review of ‘The Lolita Effect’, she notes that ‘some believe that shielding girls from sex for as long as possible — preaching the abstinence message and the pregnancy/STD/victimhood perils of sex — is the only way [to counteract The Lolita Effect]. Durham disagrees. Girls do not need “rescuing” from sex, she says. Merely the media’s one-dimensional, profit-driven version of it, which is based purely on male fantasies without a nod to female needs or desires.

‘Rather, girls should be encouraged that it is their right to enjoy it, thus reclaiming their sexuality from a culture that increasingly positions them as passive, objectified sex kittens who are not encouraged to actually want sex or get any pleasure from it yet are mandated to be desirable to males — to look up for it but not, of course, act on it, for that would be sluttish.’

This fantastically sensible suggestion has not stopped the book being promoted in the press with straplines such as Lost Youth!. Nobody, moreover, has yet thought of asking young women and girls themselves what they want. What a silly idea: everyone knows that young girls are merely ciphers for the steamy fantasies of artists, advertisers and pop psions: they have no personalities of their own, and no agency to speak of. They are told what to want, and they’ll damn well like it; they are the embodiment of patriarchal desire, and as such their own desires are irrelevant.

Curiously, I don’t remember myself and my schoolmates morphing into vain, vacant sex-dollies between the ages of twelve and seventeen. As far as I recall, we were all people then, no matter how many parts of our growing selves were stamped down, stretched out, primped, polished, squeezed into shape or mercilessly stifled, and with any luck we’re all still people now*. I do, however, remember being judged relentlessly on the way I looked, and being miserable because of it. I remember how my body and desires and the bodies and desires of every young woman I knew were ruthlessly policed, and how that process informed my feminism.

Now, this is the point where you might want to go and get yourself a strong drink or roll a fag**, because I’m about to talk about my childhood.

Like many people, I was emphatically not a Little Lolita. I was a pug ugly kid. No, really. I had braces, a scowl, an awful haircut and enough acne that I wouldn’t have been surprised to be approached to be the new face of Pizza Hut. I often went out in unwashed clothes and forgot to brush my hair, which grew long and straggly. I used to look with envy at the same girls the papers are currently lambasting, the girls with boyfriends and the beginnings of breasts to fit in their push-up bras, the girls with highlights and lipgloss who strutted through the schoolyard in the shortest skirts they could get away with. Those were the girls who got attention and respect – from our peers and from the adults. Every magazine and advertisment I saw, every programme I watched, every message I got from parents and my peer group and the few friends I had told me that my selfhood was irrelevant because I was not beautiful, that my life would be immeasurably better if I looked more like those girls. I am reliably informed by my teenage sisters that the message has not changed in the past six years: if you’re a girl and you’re not sexy, you may as well go and lie down in a skip right now, because you’re worthless and nobody will ever love you.

Note that I said sexy, not sexual. We were expected to look sexually available at all times – but if we actually were sexually available, we quickly developed reputations as slags. None of the effort we put into our appearance and behaviour was actually meant to result in any actual sex for us, because that was dirty and dangerous. We were supposed to look good, not feel good.

When sex started to be something that my classmates did together, the language at breaktime was all about what so-and-so had let Chris F. Studly do to her. Had she let him see her tits? Had she let him finger her? Had she let him put his penis in her mouth? All of it was – and still is – about what boys are allowed to do to you.

Which was doubly confusing, because at the time I was not only too shy and ugly to get a shag, I was crashingly horny nearly all the damn time. Nobody ever told me that would happen. The girls we were meant to look up to dressed for sex but didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about it – whereas I would have given my train-tracked eye-teeth for five solitary minutes of fucking. Sexualisation was never my problem. The problem – for all of us, whether we were pretty and popular or library-dwelling trolls – was that looking sexy was a game you had to win, whereas sex itself was forbidden. More than that: sex was dangerous.

You see, we were surrounded by rape. Not just rape as an airy warning, something that meant that you shouldn’t walk down Eastern Road in the dark or catch night-buses on your own, but rape as a real, tangible thing, that had happened to people we knew. In year 9, after a school disco, one of my classmates claimed to have been raped by the class stud in the nearby park. Both she and the boy were immediately expelled. I still remember vividly how, in that same term, a girl broke down in a Maths lesson because she had been raped as a child by her stepfather. Eventually, after being caught sexually engaging with her boyfriend on school premises, she was suspended too. Not only did rape happen to some of us, if you were unlucky enough to be one of the ones it happened to, you faced punishment and moral judgement. God forbid you actually engaged in consensual sex – that was even worse.

This wasn’t the case for the boys, of course, who could shag around to their hearts’ content, and frequently did, without having any moral judgements attached to them. Their bodies and developing desires weren’t policed by their peers and their parents as ours were, their sexuality was not taboo. Biologically, of course, this is more than illogical: whilst many men do not experience sexual feelings until puberty, women and girls are in theory capable of sexual pleasure and orgasm from early infancy, not that they are old enough to understand what that means. Whilst boys’ first experience of heterosexual sexuality tends, these days, to be visual – catching a peek of a dirty magazine or simply being assaulted by a naked female body on a billboard – many girls’ first experience of sexuality is of a parent telling them not to fiddle in their knickers without ever explaining why it’s dirty, bad and wrong.

It’s a trend that has held true for decades: the ‘sexualisation’ of young boys does not raise many eyebrows these days. Who cares if young lads watch porn from the age of thirteen, internalise the messages of pornography and violent rap music? Whilst young girls’ sexuality is forbidden in any form apart from sartorial pantomime, young boys’ sexuality is encouraged in almost any form (as long as it’s a heterosexual form), with violence and the dehumanisation of women part of the language of schoolboy culture from an early age.

This is not entirely young boys’ fault. The men I know today are largely mature, understanding and decent. But when I think of the fear I felt of young men as a child, when I think of the way they sexually terrorised me, my female classmates and each other, I cannot help but get angry that this is so roundly ignored. When I read statistics that tell me that one in three teenage girls has been sexually abused by a partner, they seem ludicrous at first – and then memory kicks in.

Sitting in a physics lesson, aged fourteen, I suddenly feel something hard, cold and sharp poking up under my skirt, prodding into the seat of my knickers. I jump, and turn around. The boy sitting behind me, Aidan his name is, is shoving a half-metre metal ruler into the fabric covering my anus. My expression as I turn makes him laugh. He withdraws the ruler, and the boys sitting either side of him echo him when he starts to yell at me, ‘do you love it? Do you love it? Do you love it?’

Not knowing what he means, and not wanting to make an even worse mistake, I shrug. Aidan is triumphant. ‘Penny loves it up the bum!’ he squeals. ‘Penny loves it u-up the bum!’. Everyone laughs. The teacher swoops in, and shushes them, and glares at me. What have I done to encourage them?

The author of the Lolita effect is absolutely right to point out that what I needed back then, what young women desperately need, is more, not less, honest sexuality. Little girls are already sexual – but instead of teaching them about sex, we teach them to fear it, just as the rest of society fears female sexuality. We teach them to become objects for others’ enjoyment, rather than acknowledging that they themselves are capable of positive sexual agency. These days, young girls learn that sexuality is simultaneously shameful, dangerous, and the only sure way of gaining attention and popularity. We culturally castrate young girls before they’re into training bras, and then the Polanski defenders, the critics of Little Lolitas, our parents, our teachers, our peers, tell us that little girls are all immoral because we’re so clearly begging for it.

It makes me want to smash things. It makes me want to smash things like my sexuality has been smashed – into a thousand painful little pieces. These days, I’m a feminist. I understand that I have sexual agency, I understand that my body is not shameful, I know it’s okay to like sex, I know that that doesn’t mean I’m a slut or a slag or that I deserve punishment or to be treated like an object. I know that logically, but the damage has already been done, to me and to millions of others. I want us to stop talking about young girls as if they were not people. I want us to acknowledge a range of female experience. I want young girls to be allowed to be sexual without being taught victimhood, and taught that victimhood is all we deserve.

Above all, I want people to stop being so bloody frightened of young girls’ sexuality, and the promise of positive, equal sexual experience that it entails. The sexuality of young girls is not there for the enjoyment or artistic appreciation of men, it’s not an excuse to rape us and hurt us and shame us and punish us, it does not make us wicked, or manipulative, or slags. Young girls are people – not Little Lolitas, not tiny shameless sluts or else hopeless sad cases, we are all people, and we all have a right to healthy sexuality. Instead, we are offered a selection of ways to be victims, a smorgasbord of sexual shame and self-denial. I call time on this hypocrisy – right now.

*Although I just bet Sarah Williams is still a pen-stealing bastard, knowwhatI’msaying.

**people reading across the pond: I’m not advocating the gentle rotation of queer people as a relaxation aid, this is a piece of British smoking terminology. Don’t you just love this weird fucking language?