Headscarves and Hymens (14 page)

A friend told me that after surviving a rape in the early decades of the twentieth century in the United States, her mother was subjected to a clitoridectomy in the hospital, to protect her from “becoming sexually out of control.”

I offer those examples not to excuse FGM today—there is no excuse—but to remind readers that various cultures have come up with ways to control women’s sexuality and to “beautify” women’s genitals, and that just as Western cultures moved beyond the mumbo jumbo that once justified medically altering women’s genitals, we in the Middle East and North Africa can (and must) move beyond the cutting of our girls.

Sharing our stories is often the only way we get answers to things we’ve been too scared to ask. Once,
during a conversation about FGM in Egypt that I initiated with a group of women ahead of February 6—the international day of zero tolerance for FGM—a thirty-five-year-old woman asked me a question that was heart-crushing in its simplicity.

“Am I normal? Will I be able to enjoy sex?”

Her cutting was done to her when she was eight at the behest of her grandfather and without the approval or knowledge of her mother, who was not at the house at the time.

I told her that the clitoris was like an iceberg, with the majority of the nerve endings deep in the body and not in the glans. I understood from her question that she was still a virgin and I told her that I hoped when the time came for her to have sex, it would be with a patient man for whom her pleasure was important.

Girls and women are forced to be cultural vectors. Their bodies are the medium upon which culture is engraved, be it through headscarves or cutting. But women are too often barred from authoring the culture that marks them—and only by refusing misogynistic culture can they can become the authors of their own lives. FGM is one of the earliest violations imprinted on the female body, and it is therefore especially harmful.

Reflect on the Dutch Moroccan woman in Amsterdam, the Ethiopian bride and the Kenyan sisters I met in New York City—women’s stories make real what is often too easy to dismiss. These brave young women have
fought their communities and are reforming their cultures. They have refused to be silenced and have insisted that their own choices, their own narratives, matter.

A male editor I once worked with tried to dissuade me from the personal: “Who cares about what happened to you?” The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.

It does.

L
ama did not stand a chance. The five-year-old’s father, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, was a “cleric,” a regular guest on
Muslim television networks despite not being an authorized cleric in Saudi Arabia. He beat Lama with canes, burned her with electrical cables, crushed her skull, and tore off her nails. He also raped her repeatedly, “everywhere,” according to a social worker at the hospital where Lama was admitted. It is impossible to imagine what that little girl’s last few months alive were like, and it is equally unimaginable that her father inflicted all that torture on her because he apparently suspected the five-year-old was no longer a virgin. She was admitted to the hospital on December 25, 2011, and died a few months later.

A Saudi court sentenced al-Ghamdi to eight years in prison and to eight hundred lashes. Of this term, he served only three months before an Islamic judge overturned the sentence, releasing him. Compare this to the verdict of another Saudi court, which gave four young men sentences of between three and ten years in prison and five hundred to two thousand lashes for dancing naked in public, and gave a verdict of three years in jail to human rights lawyers who were convicted of “disrespecting” the judiciary.

Why this lenient sentence for al-Ghamdi? “Blood money” explains it. Lama’s mother accepted a million riyals, roughly $267,000, from her ex-husband as compensation for the next of kin under Islamic law, or Sharia, which is used in lieu of a penal code in Saudi Arabia. By doing so, Lama’s mother, a poor single woman with
no income, waived her right to demand retribution or justice.

It is worth remembering two things, however: “Blood money” for a female victim, according to Sharia, is half the amount given for a male. And even if Lama’s mother had not accepted the money, in Saudi Arabia, where rape and murder are among several crimes punishable by death, a father cannot be executed for murdering his children; nor can husbands be executed for murdering their wives. This is a teaching of Islamic law, the interpretation of which is up to each judge to decide as he passes sentence. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the region that does not have a penal code. Despite the work of activists, including some in the Saudi royal family, justice for Lama’s suffering and murder seems unlikely. It is difficult to think of someone more vulnerable than Lama, or someone as powerless to help her as her mother—ex-wife to a “cleric” who just up and decided to take their daughter for a couple of weeks, after which Lama would never return.

Manal Assi also did not stand a chance. Manal was a thirty-three-year-old teacher in Lebanon whose husband bludgeoned her with a pressure cooker after accusing her of adultery. As she lay dying from his blows, Manal’s husband, Mohammed Nuheili, called her mother and told her, according to the Associated Press, “Come to your daughter, I am going to kill her.”

When Manal’s mother arrived at her daughter’s home,
she pleaded with Nuheili to let her help her, but he insisted, “I will not let her out. I want her to die in front of you.”

Lebanese media reported that neighbors called the police, only to be told they could not interfere in a “family matter.” One neighbor told reporters that Nuheili stood at the door to their apartment threatening to shoot anyone who tried to interfere. According to media reports, for two hours Manal’s husband would not let paramedics enter their home to tend to her. Manal died soon after she was admitted to the hospital. At the time of this writing, Nuheili has been indicted for premeditated murder and is due to stand trial.

Manal’s two daughters say their father beat their mother for years, once to the point of breaking her nose. Like Lama’s father, Manal’s husband had a second wife, who lived in the same building as Manal, which adds a bitter irony to Nuheili’s claim that his wife was seeing another man. Whether you are five or thirty-three, whether it’s your father or your husband, men can abuse and kill you and justify it by blaming you for bringing the violence and viciousness upon yourself. As I discussed in a previous chapter, regimes and mobs try hard to push women out of public space and back into the home for their own “safety,” knowing full well that, for many women, home can be an even more dangerous place.

Domestic violence is a global scourge and is obviously not a problem exclusively in the Middle East and North
Africa. For too long, women around the world were beaten and killed with little or no protection. But while many nations have made great strides in combating domestic violence, women remain shockingly unprotected throughout the Arab world, due to that same toxic combination of conservative culture, religion, and politics.

Both Lama and Manal were killed before their respective countries had a law criminalizing domestic violence. Yes, both Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, countries that many would place at the opposite ends of the women’s rights spectrum, essentially gave men free rein to abuse girls and women and suffer no consequences. For the Arab world, this is not at all unusual.

Only Jordan, Mauritania, and Tunisia have laws that specifically address domestic violence, though these are seldom brought into use. Morocco has an anti–domestic violence law that has waited for years to be passed by parliament. As mentioned earlier, Egypt’s penal code allows a man to beat his wife with “good intention.” The Iraqi penal code sentences men who kill their wives to serve a maximum of three years in prison rather than life. In Sudan, a strict interpretation of Islam allows domestic abuse, and the law in the United Arab Emirates allows a man to “discipline” his wife and daughters as long as he leaves no marks.

Societal attitudes toward domestic violence are just as forgiving of the violence as regional laws. Many women expect to be beaten, according to the 2008 Egypt
Demographic and Health Survey, which found that 40 percent of women considered beatings justified discipline for a “wrongdoing” such as burning dinner, going out without permission, or withholding sex. Turn on an Arabic-language drama or film, many of which are produced in Egypt, and such views are reflected in the physical abuse against women that is a staple of almost every production.

My father once shared with me a telling anecdote: He and my mother were watching a scholar of Islam whom they respected take viewer questions during a call-in television show. A woman phoned in to tell the scholar that she was still in love with her husband of eleven years and she listed what she said were his virtues. “But he beats me,” she said. “What should I do?” The scholar told the woman that if she listed the “pros and cons” of being with her husband, it was clear the good outweighed the bad. The clincher: “What do you do that makes him beat you?”

My father told me that he and my mother were disgusted by the scholar’s victim blaming and the fact that he did not say a word chastising the husband for beating his wife. “He never asked the husband, ‘Why do you beat her?’ and didn’t mention at all that the Prophet never beat a woman,” my father told me.

In the 2005 Egypt Demographic and Health Survey, 47 percent of women who are or who had ever been married reported being victims of physical violence. In
Tunisia, a 2012 survey showed that 47.2 percent of women had been subjected to physical violence in the home. Over 40 percent of women polled in Lebanon said they had suffered from physical abuse, a third reported sexual abuse, nearly two-thirds were victims of verbal abuse, and 19 percent said they had experienced emotional abuse. The researchers behind the Lebanese survey, conducted at American University of Beirut Medical Center, spoke about their respondents’ attitude toward abuse: “Many abused women are totally resigned to their situation and decide to stay in an abusive relationship because of the fear of losing their children, the need to conform to social expectations, the lack of financial independence, the lack of family support, and the duty to obey their spouses.”

Alongside those reasons, many women stay in abusive situations simply because they have nowhere else to go. The majority of countries in the region do not have shelters for girls and women who want to escape violent homes. Even if they wanted to flee, for girls and women especially, it is a huge taboo to leave home under any circumstances. The majority of young men and women in the region live with their parents until they marry.

Recent attempts to criminalize and discourage domestic violence in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon highlight the disparity between the two countries, and the fact that laws
alone cannot change a societal problem. In August 2013 the Saudi Arabian cabinet passed a draft law criminalizing domestic abuse. The unprecedented “Protection from Abuse” law sets down a prison sentence of up to one year and up to 50,000 riyals ($13,300) in fines for those found guilty of committing psychological or physical abuse.

The law was passed four months after a local charity, the King Khalid Foundation, launched a first-of-its-kind campaign to raise awareness about violence against women. The campaign’s poster, which was widely circulated on social media, featured a woman in a face veil, with just her eyes showing, one of which was blackened. The caption under the image read “Some Things Can’t Be Covered—Fighting Women’s Abuse Together.”

Some local activists praised the passing of the law as a sign that the kingdom was finally taking violence against women seriously—and violence against not just female family members but also domestic workers, who are sometimes brutalized by their employers. As the Reuters news agency pointed out, before the law, “domestic violence against women, children or domestic workers was treated under a general penal code based on Islamic sharia law. Judges were left to decide according to their understanding of sharia codes, which were seen as permitting mild application of violence against ‘disobedient’ wives and generally treated domestic violence as a private matter.”

Yet Human Rights Watch criticized the law for not detailing “specific enforcement mechanisms to ensure prompt investigations of abuse allegations or prosecution of those who commit abuses.”

“Saudi Arabia has finally banned domestic abuse, but has yet to say which agencies will police the new law. Without effective mechanisms to punish domestic abuse, this law is merely ink on paper,” said Joe Stork, HRW’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The Saudi enshrinement of male privilege further mitigates any good the law can provide for women. According to HRW: