Headscarves and Hymens (17 page)

When an eight-year-old is effectively sold off by impoverished parents to a forty-year-old man, the use of terms such as
marriage
and
husband
is an abomination. While a Dubai-based news organization claims that the story is a hoax and has circulated a video of a little girl who is allegedly Rawan, alive and well, the Yemeni journalist who originally reported the story stands by it, accusing local officials of a cover-up. There’s no denying that global outrage over the story has brought scrutiny
to the prevalence of child brides in Yemen and throughout the region, opening an important dialogue. Hooria Mashhour, Yemen’s human rights minister, made a statement acknowledging this to CNN: “This isn’t the first time a child marriage has happened in Yemen, so we should not focus only on this case. Many child marriages take place every year in Yemen. It’s time to end this practice.”

Human Rights Watch identified the political and constitutional transition taking place in Yemen as an important opportunity to secure protection for women’s and girls’ rights, recommending that the minimum age of marriage be set at eighteen. SEYAJ, a Yemeni children’s rights group, issued a similar request. It remains to be seen at the time of this writing whether such a recommendation will make it into Yemen’s yet-to-be written constitution; how, further down the line, it will be enforced; and if religious and tribal leaders will accept it.

Some Yemeni girls are sold into marriage by families who cannot afford to take care of them. But poverty is not the only motivator behind child marriage and its supporters. UNICEF identifies the gender discrimination inherent in social attitudes as a contributing factor. Such discrimination makes sure boys get preferential access to education while girls begin their primary task of procreation. Some ultraconservative Salafists in Egypt were keen on getting rid of a minimum age of marriage. My book focuses on Arabic-speaking countries of the
Middle East and North Africa, but it is worth remembering that one of the first things Ayatollah Khomeini did after the 1979 Iranian Revolution was to remove the minimum age of marriage as part of his push to revise all law in accordance with Sharia.

When Yemeni activists tried to ban child marriage in 2010, some of the country’s most influential Islamic leaders declared that those who opposed child marriage were “apostates.” They understood that such a decree would make it difficult if not impossible for parliament to approve legislation setting a minimum age of seventeen for marriage. Even more disturbing was the number of Yemeni women who followed the teachings of those religious leaders and who showed up in the capital to protest the child marriage ban, carrying signs that read, “Yes to the Islamic Rights of Women.”

Whose Islam deems the “marriage”—or, rather, the de facto rape of girls as young as eight—a “right”? Certainly not mine, nor that of many other Muslims. Yet these influential religious leaders, these ultraconservatives and proponents of child marriage, use what they say is the example of the Prophet’s marriage to one of his wives, Aisha, to justify child marriage. They cite that example knowing that many people will be afraid to appear critical of anything the Prophet is believed to have done—hence the labeling of those who oppose child marriage as “apostates.”

If they are so eager to follow what they believe was
Muhammad’s marriage to a child—Aisha’s age has been disputed, with varying accounts putting it at nine and others at nineteen—why are they not as eager to follow the example of his first marriage? Khadijah, a rich divorcée and Muhammad’s senior by fifteen years, employed Muhammad and proposed to him. While Khadijah was alive, Muhammad was not married to any other woman. Muslims are taught she was the first person to believe in Muhammad when he told her he had received a revelation. So are our esteemed clerics ready to follow that example and advocate marrying older women? Look around and try to find a modern-day Khadijah. Why has the notion of the child bride persisted, but not the older spouse modeled by Khadijah? Most of Muhammad’s wives were older than him. Why are our clerics not advocating marrying older women as sunnah, the example of Muhammad that Muslims are encouraged to emulate.

The simple answer is because Khadijah represents the power and autonomy that some clerics despise in women. The child bride is helpless, malleable, without experience of any kind, and lacking any ability to challenge a man’s authority. So those clerics who insist on the “Islamic right” to marry little girls should just be honest about it: they want malleable and powerless girls who will never challenge them. We must say no once and for all by outlawing such marriages and seeing them for what they are: pedophilia. The protection of our girls must take priority over the fragile egos of clerics and of
those men whom clerics give the green light to sexually abuse girls. Regardless of how old Aisha was when Muhammad married her, we must have the guts to say that marriages in the seventh century were one thing and marriages in 2014 are another, and that today it is a crime to marry little girls. We must be unequivocal in this.

Rawan reportedly died after she was
raped,
just as Lama died after she was
raped.
Until child marriage is put in those terms, until we stop using euphemisms to water down what we do to our girls, more prepubescent girls will die from internal bleeding from the trauma of sex on their little bodies. More girls will die like Fawziya Ammodi, twelve, another Yemeni, who died in 2009 from severe bleeding after struggling for three days in labor. Her baby also died.

Slavish obedience to the clerics, who know how to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of religion, is killing our girls. We must speak—blaspheme, if necessary; be accused of being apostates, if that is what is required. Muslims are taught that Islam put an end to the Arabian practice of burying alive newborn baby girls because they were considered worthless and a burden, but as long as we stay quiet in the face of the abomination of child marriage, we are effectively burying our girls alive today.

There was a moment in Egypt in 2014, as a three-month-long curfew in provinces across the country kept people at home for most of the evening and all of the night, when the patriarch at home and the patriarch in the presidential palace were mirror images. As more and more people began to chafe at an effective house arrest, it could have been an opportunity for the boys and men of the country to reflect on the fact that house arrest is the reality in the lives of the women they know. Most Egyptian families impose a curfew of some sort on their female members, especially the unmarried ones.

Some men to whom I suggested the connection scoffed. I asked them to consider how frustrated their sisters or female friends were by a curfew that would not be soon lifted. I reminded them that while the “father of the nation” was about to lift the curfew he had imposed on the country, the father at home would be keeping his curfew in place.

I lost count of the number of “yes, but” replies I received. Some men explained why the curfew imposed on girls and women at home was correct and should continue while the curfew imposed on the country had gone on too long and should be lifted. A range of excuses—from “What will people say if a girl comes home in the middle of the night?” to “It’s not safe out there for girls”—was offered as justification. Perhaps the saddest response came from a young Egyptian woman, currently studying in the United Kingdom and present in the audience
at the taping of the Al Jazeera English television program I took part in called
Head to Head.
She insisted that her father didn’t hate her and that the reason he imposed a curfew on her was out of concern and to protect her.

“Protect you from what?” I asked her.

She answered, of course, that her father was protecting her from the men on the streets. This begs the question: Why don’t we ever consider imposing a curfew on boys and men as a way of protecting girls and women from the harm men do them in public? The very idea is, to many, laughable. But it is time to present the issue in such stark terms, and it is time either to oppose both curfews—from the patriarch outside, on the whole country, and the patriarch inside, on only girls and women—or else be called hypocrites.

Several times, when discussing misogyny in the region, I have heard: “But the women [Egyptian, Saudi, Moroccan, etc.] are so strong. They’re the real powers at home.”

Who are these strong women who run their homes? Lama’s mother certainly wasn’t one of them. Manal Assi in Beirut wasn’t, either. The notion of the strong woman at home is a myth we are encouraged to believe in order to keep in place an oppressive system, in order to deflect the question of injustice and inequality. The “strong woman” at home cannot advance herself if she has internalized patriarchy and its ills.

That myth reminds me of bell hooks’s description in her 1981 book
Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism
of the romanticization of the Black female experience:

Repeating, meaninglessly, that women “run their homes” is a cop-out, an abdication of the responsibility to speak out and to condemn the institutionalized misogyny of personal status laws that permeates every aspect of the female experience in the region.

Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and other women who’ve critiqued their cultures and communities were attacked for doing so, but their insistence on those critiques inspires me, and their courage in the face of such attacks—many
from men who didn’t want outsiders to see “dirty linen”—reminds me that it’s only through such critiques that we stand a chance of overthrowing the patriarchs in our homes and in our minds.

It is often the power and rage of personal storytelling that can begin those necessary revolutions. The power of women’s stories lies in their ability to tear down the soundproof walls of home. Sometimes those stories just need an open mic to finally be heard. In the summer of 2012, on a stage set up in the garden of an arts gallery in the middle of an old working-class Cairo neighborhood, a young woman took the mic.

“I can’t tell you this while facing you so I’m going to turn around and then share my story,” she said and proceeded to tell us, as her back was turned to us, that when she was eleven years old, a cleric her parents had hired to teach her Qur’anic recitation sexually abused her.

Courage, vulnerability, grace.

Her revelation followed a performance by a theater group that collects oral narratives from women to stage. That night’s performance by Bussy—the Arabic word for “look”—was on the theme of the street sexual harassment that women are subjected to in Egypt. After Bussy’s show, the open mic initiative Project Mareekh (meaning “Mars”) set up. The premise of their piece was simple: Sign up and take your turn to say whatever you want. No one is allowed to interrupt you. The initiative has taken
its open mic to various places and settings as a way of encouraging freedom of expression, to inspire Egyptians to find their voice and speak.

I have never before (or since) heard an Egyptian woman speak about being subjected to childhood sex abuse. Those of us in the audience were stunned. Several people hugged her after she got off the stage. After a few other speakers took the open mic, another young woman, this one facing us, told us how when she was fourteen a friend of her father’s sexually abused her and she went on to connect her suicide attempts and psychological problems to that abuse.

This courage is the same as that which fuels women to speak out against the sexual violence they’ve experienced on the street. As risky as it is to speak publicly about street sexual harassment and assault, though, speaking out against sex abuse, speaking out against the crimes that go on in the home, is riskier. Home is where the hurt is, and home is where we must start to heal.

I
n 1990, forty-seven Saudi women famously violated the kingdom’s ban on female drivers by taking to the wheel in a convoy through Riyadh, the capital city. They were denounced as whores in mosques, banned from working for two years, and had their passports temporarily confiscated.

Saudi Arabia, which fuels so many of the world’s cars with its oil, bans half its population from driving. Saudi Arabia’s conservative leadership has always justified this ban, and the nation’s broader gender apartheid, on the grounds that Saudi society is not “ready” for women to have more rights. In Saudi Arabia and other dictatorial regimes, such excuses are used not just to dismiss calls for change, but also to frame any small concessions
toward women’s rights as bold and progressive measures against society’s supposed unreadiness. This is nonsense and must be called out as such. There is nothing “exceptional” about Saudi Arabia, and the country’s blatant misogyny should not be given any leeway. Rather, Saudi Arabia is exceptional in its degree of discrimination against girls and women.

The Saudi royal family, by wrapping themselves in Islam and presenting themselves as Islam’s guardians—the king is known as the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (the mosques in Mecca and Medina)—maneuvers to make any criticism of them a criticism of Islam. Ever since Abdul Ibn Saud united tribes to create the country named after his family (which has been under the absolute rule of his sons ever since), the royal family has been locked in a deal with the clerics in which the former has free rein over foreign policy and oil wealth while the latter own domestic hearts and minds. There have been conflicts now and then between those two poles of power and influence—especially over a university endorsed by the king that has the only campus in the kingdom that is not gender-segregated, much to the chagrin of the ultraconservative clerics. But as much as it portrays itself to its foreign allies as the more “reasonable” element, the royal family understands very well that “Society is not ready” is only an excuse to brush away criticism of the country’s abysmal women’s rights record. The royal family also knows it can always count on
its allies’ silence, due to oil exports, billions of dollars in arms and business deals, and the reluctance of Muslims, especially those belonging to the Sunni sect of Islam, to criticize it. Why else did the Saudi Olympic team show up at one Olympics after another (until the summer 2012 Games) with not a single woman representing the kingdom? (Meanwhile, the Olympic committee banned the Afghan team for discrimination against women during Taliban rule.)