Headscarves and Hymens (15 page)

Just as Egyptians must turn to a predatory police force to file complaints of abuse, women in Saudi Arabia are dependent on the very same family members who might be their abusers to help them report abuse. It is imperative to continue to condemn Saudi Arabia for refusing to confront this institutionalized misogyny. All this new law does is allow Saudi Arabia to boast that it has anti–domestic abuse legislation on the books—a hollow “accomplishment.”

Human Rights Watch: “Saudi women and migrant domestic workers who report violations such as rape sometimes face counteraccusations of fornication, leaving them open to criminal prosecution. Parents can pursue criminal prosecutions against their dependents on the charge of ‘uquq, or ‘parental disobedience.’ Saudi Arabia needs to abolish such practices if the new law is to be effective.”

Furthermore, as Khaled al-Fakher, secretary general of the government-licensed National Society for Human Rights, told Reuters, one reason domestic violence was rampant in Saudi Arabia was because tribal traditions prevented women from reporting abuse for fear of social stigma. “Women think what the community would say about her if she filed a complaint,” he said.

The same victim shaming also silenced women in Lebanon from speaking out against domestic violence for years. It took seven years of lobbying by the local
NGO KAFA (which means “Enough”) and media coverage of several horrific incidents of domestic violence before the Lebanese parliament finally passed the landmark Protection of Women and Family Members from Domestic Violence draft bill in April 2014—almost a year after Saudi Arabia passed its law.

One difference in the circumstances of each country’s domestic violence bill is quite telling. In Lebanon, to put pressure on lawmakers to finally pass the draft bill, KAFA organized a protest in the capital, Beirut, on International Women’s Day (March 8, 2014) to demand a law to protect women from domestic abuse. The NGO’s call for the march included a moving video plea on YouTube by mothers of several women who had been killed by their abusive husbands. Some of those mothers marched hand in hand at the head of a group of around five thousand, carrying photographs of their daughters. It was one of the largest demonstrations for a social issue in Lebanon. Many of the protesters carried banners accusing judges and forensic experts of falsifying reports on domestic violence deaths. I have not heard of any other such marches against domestic violence in the Arab world.

It is this readiness to speak out—mothers talking openly about what happened to their daughters—that makes women killed as a result of domestic abuse more than just initials in media reports. A reminder of Audre Lorde’s insistence on speaking: “Your silence will not save you.”

Unlike Saudi Arabia, Lebanon has some shelters for women who choose to leave abusive homes. In 2013, KAFA and the Internal Security Forces launched a nationwide billboard campaign encouraging women to report domestic abuse, according to Al Jazeera English. That same year, women’s rights group Resource Center for Gender Equality (ABAAD) opened the first of three halfway houses for women in Lebanon, and in November 2013, KAFA launched a scheme to educate police on how to protect women from domestic violence. According to
The Guardian,
KAFA says it receives more than twenty-six hundred calls to its domestic abuse help line each year. We need exactly such initiatives if our laws are to move beyond “ink on paper.”

Human Rights Watch called Lebanon’s draft law good but incomplete. Among its positive aspects is that it allows women to seek restraining orders against their abusers. But how seriously police will take such an order remains to be seen, considering general police reluctance to interfere in what they consider “family business.”

The most disturbing aspect of Lebanon’s draft anti–domestic violence law is that not only did legislators remove the criminalization of marital rape that KAFA fought so hard to keep in the bill, but worse, the bill introduces the notion of a “marital right to intercourse.”

“This is a very big setback,” KAFA cofounder Ghada Jabbour told
The Guardian.
“They [the politicians considering the bill] felt pressure to re-put in a provision
about marital rape, but what they put in criminalizes the use of threats or force in order to get what they call ‘the marital right.’ The use of force is criminalized anyway by the penal code in Lebanon. This is just playing with words … the use of the ‘marital right’ is a very new and religious concept within our civil law.”

Criminalizing marital rape “could lead to the imprisonment of the man,” Sheikh Ahmad al-Kurdi, a judge in the Sunni religious court, told CNN, “where in reality he is exercising the least of his marital rights.”

In Lebanon, domestic violence cases are typically heard in the religious courts, the judicial authorities that preside over each of the country’s eighteen sects and faith communities under a set of laws known as “personal status laws,” which govern divorce, child custody, and other domestic issues. The priority of those courts is the preservation of the family, not the protection of girls and women from violence.

Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon’s top Sunni authority, and the Higher Shi’a Islamic Council both said they opposed the draft anti–domestic abuse bill on the basis that they believed Islamic law sufficiently protected the status of women and so should remain the basis for governing legal issues related to Muslim families. According to Al Jazeera English, Dar al-Fatwa condemned the draft law in a 2011 statement for “disintegrating Muslim families in Lebanon and preventing children from being raised
according to Islam, in addition to causing a conflict of competences between the concerned civil and Islamic courts.”

Clearly, in Lebanon, a country of Muslims and Christians, conservative lawmakers agreed to the notion that religious authority must have the last word on the domestic sphere. The veneer of liberal social attitudes in Lebanon is deceptive. All eighteen of Lebanon’s personal status laws discriminate against women, in effect trapping them in violent marriages, according to Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa region at Human Rights Watch.

In the first conviction since Lebanon’s parliament passed the draft law, a man was jailed for nine months and fined 20 million Lebanese pounds ($13,258) for a brutal assault on his wife. Nonetheless, the wife, who said her husband beat her every week during their marriage of eighteen months, had to seek a divorce through religious courts, a challenge that a women’s rights activist called a “long battle.”

Why should a woman who has been beaten weekly and whose husband is finally held accountable still struggle to free herself? Let’s take a closer look at the patriarch’s laws, or what are known as personal status laws, the minefield of misogyny and injustice that governs marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance in the Muslim world. The laws that govern family life are
decided by the interpretation of your religion, but you can be sure of one thing: they guarantee that men and their interests are always paramount.

The legal codes of most countries in the region have been “modernized” in the last century, either through laws imposed by colonial rule or through a move away from religiously based legislation and toward secular laws. For example, even when a country’s constitution states—as many in the region do—that Sharia is one of the sources from which law is drawn, none of them, with the exception of Saudi Arabia’s, allow for the amputation of hands as a punishment for theft, although Sharia stipulates such a punishment.

Why is it acceptable to move beyond Sharia when it comes to theft but impossible to do so when it comes to women’s rights in the family? The simple answer: personal status laws are the area where religious and conservative men shore up their control of women’s lives.

Such tenacious insistence on keeping women bound by ancient codes is not specific to Islam. In predominantly Muslim countries, where several religions are practiced, everyone is subject to the same laws except in the case of family laws, which are dictated by one’s religion or sect. In Egypt, for example, Christians are subject to canonical law when it comes to marriage and divorce, child custody, and so on, while Muslims must follow Egypt’s interpretation of Islam. In the absence of a civil law governing such family issues, what ends up
happening is that women and children are subject to ideas that were first formulated centuries ago. A woman’s religion or sect might be different, but her subjugation to laws that favor men is the same.

Take the example of the United Arab Emirates, as described by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH):

The Personal Status Code also ensures that women inherit half the amount that men inherit, and makes it much easier for a man to obtain a divorce—according to the FIDH report, women who leave their husbands can be required by law to return. This, combined with age-related child custody, creates an emotional terrorism that keeps wives in abusive marriages.

Depending on which Islamic school of thought a country follows, personal status laws stipulate that a woman needs the permission of a male guardian to marry, even if she is a widow or divorcée. (The Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, followed by the UAE, makes such a stipulation.) Two recent cases documented by the UAE-based newspaper
The National
highlight the infantilization of women that this law engenders.

A fifty-one-year-old Emirati divorcée told
The National
that she was considering traveling to another country rather than taking her twenty-six-year-old son to court to obtain his approval of her remarriage. The second case was even more surreal—that of a forty-year-old whose eleven-year-old son would become the arbiter
of her remarriage once he reached the age of puberty. “This law is a disgrace. I’m a grown woman and should be allowed to make my own decisions,” she said.

Nonetheless, two male lawyers that the newspaper interviewed insisted that the guardianship system was in the best interest of the women. One, Dr. Shakir Al Marzouqi, a legal consultant in the UAE, actually went so far as to say “men know better”: “In the bigger picture it is the men who know more and a woman’s father, brother, or son cares for her interest more than her own self.”

Fortunately, a female lawyer made clear to
The National
just how open to abuse the guardianship system is. Aisha al-Tenajii, a legal consultant, told
The National
that the legal office where she worked had been involved in numerous cases of legal guardians preventing a woman from getting married for questionable reasons, including because the prospective bridegroom was from a “family considered unequal in social status” or was not a UAE national.

But even with this knowledge, al-Tenajii would not say that the guardianship system should be scrapped altogether as unfair and infantilizing to women. Rather, she suggested that after a certain age, a woman should be allowed to marry without the approval of a guardian: “We are not asking for it to be removed. After all, there should be some regulation, but not like in the case of the
51-year-old woman. After the age of 25, for example, a woman who was previously married should not require a guardian to remarry.”

We are so socialized in our oppression that even in the face of injustice, we know to stay within the lines. Instead of a bold demand for the removal of a system that keeps women forever at the whim of male guardians, even their adolescent sons, women meekly suggest reform.

One law in the UAE takes this absurdity further, by making women the property not only of their sons, but of their babies! According to a law passed in 2014, a mother’s breasts are her child’s property. A clause that is part of the child’s rights laws makes it mandatory for a mother to breastfeed her child for two years, opening the way for husbands to sue their wives if they don’t breastfeed for the stipulated time. This in a country that gives mothers just one month of maternity leave and where existing regulations ordering offices to provide nurseries so that working mothers can breastfeed have never been enforced.

A member—male, of course—of the UAE’s Federal National Council, which passed the law, said that it aimed to make breastfeeding “a duty and not an option” for able mothers. The council suggested that wet-nurses be provided for children whose mothers had died or could not feed them, but it did not say who should pay for these wet-nurses.

With a few exceptions, these provisions are very similar to their counterparts in other countries in the region. Put crudely, marriage ensures that a woman, after a childhood and youth of obedience to her father, shifts that obedience to her husband, for whom she becomes a baby maker and wet-nurse to his children (for the children essentially belong to the father).

Women’s rights groups in several countries have fought for years to mitigate the discrimination of personal status laws. After a decades-long battle by feminists in Egypt, parliament in 2000 ratified the “Khul procedure,” in which a woman who wants a divorce must renounce her financial rights under the marriage contract. But in Egypt today it is apparent that only affluent women can afford to renounce such rights to obtain a divorce. Poor women have little recourse to leave abusive marriages, and yet the personal status laws that allow such injustices to continue are treated as if they were a religious revelation in and of themselves, untouchable and unrelated to the lives of the women they harm.