Headscarves and Hymens (16 page)

When the role and the use of religion in the continued oppression and abuse of girls and women is starkly presented, I often hear from my fellow Muslims: “But this isn’t the fault of Islam. It is the fault of Muslims who abuse religion.” Then they usually launch into how perfect everything would be if we practiced “the proper Islam.” Never mind that the clerics in Lebanon who opposed the anti–domestic violence bill fully believed they
were advocating for a “proper Islam,” and had the weight of the establishment on their side. We are in denial if we do not honestly reckon with the role of religion in maintaining the patriarch’s rule at home, including how the men of religion help him to uphold his rule. The “proper Islam” defense serves only the rule of the patriarch. Our best chance for pushing back against such idealized notions is to offer examples from the lived realities of girls and women. Those who insist on holding on to the ideal will remind us over and over again that the Prophet’s last sermon emphasized love and respect for women. But has that teaching made its way into personal status laws?

I learned the importance of the term
lived realities
in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the launch of Musawah (the Arabic word for “equality”), a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. Bringing together activists and scholars of Islam who promote a progressive interpretation of the religion, Musawah focuses much of its work on personal status laws. The scholars who belong to Musawah (women and men) have long advocated a progressive reinterpretation of Islam to mitigate the injustices I list in this chapter.

I am most interested in the female scholars, inside and outside Musawah, who have struggled for years to wrest the power of interpretation from men. For example, I learned of a South African scholar—who does not work with Musawah but whose religious circle focuses on challenging religiously fueled misogyny—whose students
have crossed out from their copies of the Qur’an a verse that has been interpreted to allow men to beat “disobedient” wives. For many, this alteration of a sacred text is tantamount to blasphemy. In another case, an Iranian American woman has issued the first English translation of the Qur’an by a woman and has handled that verse by providing what she believes are alternative meanings to the word that is taken to mean “to beat.” Others say that regardless of the original meaning of the verse, the fact that Muhammad never beat a woman should be taken as an example, and the concepts of justice and mercy articulated in the Qur’an should take precedence over one verse allowing corporal punishment for “disobedient” wives.

Amina Wadud, a mentor and personal hero of mine, puts it simply when she asks, “God is just—do these interpretations uphold that spirit of justice?”

I am tempted at times to say that any woman who chooses to get married in our part of the world, knowing the personal status laws that work against her well-being and that of her future daughters, must be insane or a masochist. Yet that would be to forget that, for economic and social reasons, the choice to reject marriage is not available to most women. Whether it is for the economic support a husband provides or the ability to have socially sanctioned sex without risking the wrath of the god of
virginity, marriage is not going anywhere. News articles have occasionally trumpeted an emerging class of young, hypereducated women who make more money than their male counterparts and who don’t “need” a husband for the reasons their mothers or grandmothers did, but they remain a minority, cushioned by privilege that is unavailable to most women in the region. It is a form of denial to act shocked that “even educated” women cave in to and perpetuate patriarchal values. Even worse, it negates the right of women who have not been fortunate enough to receive an education to demand a life that is free of the injustice of misogyny. Every woman in our region deserves equality and respect.

To choose to rebel, to disobey, comes at a great cost (not least social) that not everybody is able to pay. To be ostracized by one’s family in a society that places so much emphasis on social ties is a terrible and dangerous thing. In our culture, marriage and motherhood are deified, raised up as the ultimate female experience. But for what? When a mother’s breasts are being regulated for the sake of the child, and yet the mother herself hardly has any safeguards to protect her, what is she but an incubator for offspring and breasts for their sustenance?

She is also vagina on demand. Tunisia and Mauritania are the only countries in the region that have a law against marital rape, though these are rarely enforced due to loopholes that allow charges to be dropped if the victim withdraws her case.

Attitudes toward rape across the Arab world are abysmal. The stigma (and often the law) is much harsher on the woman than on the rapist. Women often keep quiet rather than risk arousing blame or humiliation, or being raped again at a police station. In some cases, they risk being killed by a relative to rid the family of shame. Precise statistics are unavailable—in part because rape victims can themselves be prosecuted under
zina,
the area of Islamic law governing unlawful sexual intercourse. Victim services in most countries are provided by NGOs rather than the state, according to a 2010 report by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

In Libya, under the forty-two years of the Qaddafi regime, women accused of violating “moral codes” were locked up in “social rehabilitation” centers. The only way for women and girls to leave those centers was if a male relative took them into custody or if the women married. Human Rights Watch said most of those women went to the centers against their will, and those who went of their own volition did so because Libya had no shelters for survivors of violence.

Other countries turn rape into wedlock by allowing rapists to escape conviction by marrying their victims. Some of the countries in the region had such legislation introduced during colonial times by their occupiers. An article in the Moroccan penal code was based on a similar measure in France, which was repealed in 1994.
Morocco was a protectorate of France until 1956. Amina Filali and Amina Tamiri were two Moroccan teenagers (both sixteen, although some reports put Tamiri at twelve) forced to marry the men who’d raped them. Filali committed suicide in 2012; Tamiri, in 2013. In January 2014, after intensive lobbying by rights activists, Morocco amended the article in its penal code (Article 475) that allowed rapists of underage girls to avoid prosecution by marrying their victims.

Rights groups welcomed the amendment but said that a complete overhaul of Morocco’s penal code was needed to ensure the protection of girls and women in the country, where (as in many countries across the region) rape is such a taboo that families hush it up or force survivors to marry, and where child marriage persists.

I despise the word
victim.
I’ve never called myself a victim of sexual assault. I’m a survivor, and so is every girl and woman who survives the crime of sexual violation. But there is no word other than
victim
to describe Amina Filali and Amina Tamiri. How do you survive a marriage to your rapist? Trapped in a state of perpetual victimhood as the wife of your rapist, where is the chance to heal, to mourn, to grieve over what happened to you, to overcome and overpower the trauma, when your rapist is there with you every day? It does not bear thinking about. There is no survival. The two girls’ suicides underline that.

Listen to Dalal, who was just sixteen when she was
forced to marry her rapist. Dalal is from Jordan, where Article 308 of the penal code allows rapists to escape punishment if they marry their victims. She spoke to us in March 2014 for the BBC World Service radio documentary
Women of the Arab Spring.
In 2012 her assailant kidnapped and raped her and then held her against her will for five days. She escaped. A judge sentenced her rapist to twenty-three years for rape and armed kidnapping, and for drugging Dalal, but he told Dalal’s assailant that if he persuaded her to marry him, he could get out of the sentence. Dalal initially refused to marry him, but then gave in under pressure from her rapist’s parents and her own.

“When I married him it was like he was raping me again because I didn’t want him. I didn’t want to get married, and he raped me and hit me and burnt me with cigarettes and his parents would encourage him to do these things,” she said.

When Dalal spoke to us for the documentary, she had returned to her parents’ home pregnant and intending to get a divorce.

“Girls like me, their position in society is different from their parents and other people. I’m against the idea that someone who is raped then gets married to her rapist. But the girl doesn’t have any other option because she’ll forever be ostracized by all society,” Dalal said.

For
Women of the Arab Spring,
I went with producer Gemma Newby to Jordan to see what effect, if any, the
mass uprisings had had on the kingdom, which remained under the rule of King Abdullah. Jordan might not have had its own revolution, but it had felt the ripples of those nearby. There were protests over the economy, and women’s groups had come out on the streets to protest child marriage laws, so-called honor killings, and domestic violence. Subsequent political reform brought in a 12 percent quota for women in parliament, and there are now eighteen female parliamentarians. One of those women lawmakers, Wafa Ben Mostafa, heads a campaign to abolish Article 308. I asked her if Jordanian women could successfully push for its repeal in the way their Moroccan counterparts had fought Article 475.

“It will not be surprising when I say to you that every woman member of parliament attended the session for signing the petition and none of them opposed, and this indicates that more women in parliament will naturally lead to there being better laws for women. Twenty-two members have signed the petition to cancel this law, but it is difficult to do so because there are various legislators and jurists and men in parliament who think this article preserves the structure of Jordanian society and protects the social fabric,” Ben Mostafa told me.

Yet as Dalal’s case painfully makes clear, Article 308 doesn’t protect girls and women from the men who rape them; in many cases, it does the very opposite.

Eva Abu Halaweh, a lawyer and executive director of Mizan, a center that, among other things, advocates for
the rights of girls and women who suffer the consequences of Article 308, told me there was no mechanism for the attorney general in Jordan to follow up on cases such as that of Dalal, whom Mizan repesents.

According to an article in
Al Arabiya News,
weddings arranged under Article 308 must last for five years for the rapist to be guaranteed immunity against future prosecution. Abu Halaweh said it was hard to know how many cases there were of girls or women marrying their rapists, because Article 308 is not referred to in marriage contracts. But a September 2014 article in
The Jordan Times
estimated that as many as 95 percent of rape cases in Jordan are resolved with the survivors marrying their rapists.

Such marriages, Abu Halaweh said, aren’t “real marriage in practice because a woman’s will wasn’t taken into consideration; it’s usually pressure from family, and sometimes they receive money, a high dowry. Some people think it’s for the benefit of women, but usually she doesn’t benefit.”

Abu Halaweh said that Article 308 pushed women between “two false choices”: “to save your life from honor crime you marry your rapist. If you don’t, you face a life-threatening crime from your own family.” She told me of women placed in protective custody and girls placed in juvenile centers in order to protect them from relatives who intended to kill them to rid the family of the “shame” of their rape.

To further complicate the ramifications of Article 308, and to illustrate how the ban on extramarital sex forces women into ridiculous options, Abu Halaweh said that sometimes Article 308 was invoked by girls under the age of eighteen who wanted to marry their boyfriends but could not obtain their families’ approval, and that couples caught having sex are pressured into Article 308 marriages by their families.

Why does Jordan still have Article 308? I asked Abdel Moneim Odat, the head of the legal committee in the Jordanian parliament.

“The reason we don’t punish the crime is in order to protect the family, the girl in general, her parents, and her reputation, because when a girl gets married the social impact of the crime disappears,” he said. “We would have to look at studies and statistics—legislation is a social need which expresses the wishes of a particular society—it springs from traditions, customs, and beliefs. The law cannot be separated from this.”

Article 308 makes it clear that Jordan desperately needs to have a conversation on sexual freedom, shame, and honor. Legislation should set, and not follow, the example. Dalal’s mother now realizes that Jordan continues to reward rapists while punishing their victims: “I regret the day I helped him get off the twenty-three-year sentence,” she said, “because he and boys like him think, ‘She’ll marry me and I’ll get off the punishment.’ He robbed her of her treasure, she’ll never get it back, it
won’t be like it was for her before this happened. This raping and marrying the victim is wrong.”

Nothing more horrifically epitomizes marital rape than child marriage, which a 2010 UNICEF report defines as a marriage in which one of the participants is under eighteen years of age. This sorry practice is permitted and prevalent not just in poor countries such as Sudan, Yemen, and my own, Egypt, but also in much wealthier Saudi Arabia.

In Sudan, girls can legally marry as soon as they reach puberty. In Yemen and Saudi Arabia there is no minimum age for marriage. According to Human Rights Watch and Yemeni government data from 2006, 52 percent of girls are married before they turn eighteen (often to much older men) and 14 percent before age fifteen. Witness the case of Rawan, an eight-year-old Yemeni girl who was killed by her “husband.” She died of internal bleeding after a man five times her age fucked her to death on their “wedding night.”