Positive Liberty

Thesis: Islamic radicals’ insistence on extreme modesty for women tells us more about the radicals’ attitudes toward men, and about their own sexual mores in particular, than it tells us about women’s submission in Islam. It is precisely the hijab’s implications for men that make it so difficult a cultural issue.

Let’s start with the infamous Australian imam Taj Aldin al Hilali. Many will recall this story from late last year:

A senior Muslim cleric compared women who go without a head scarf to “uncovered meat” left out for scavengers, drawing widespread condemnation and calls Thursday for his resignation.

Sheik Taj Aldin al Hilali denied he was condoning rape when he made the comments in a sermon last month, and apologized to any women he had offended, saying they were free to dress as they wished.

Hilali was quoted in The Australian newspaper Thursday as saying in the sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside … without cover, and the cats come to eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?”

“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred,” he was quoted as saying, referring to the headdress worn by some Muslim women.

Asked to justify an onerous restriction on women, Hilali immediately began to talk about the peculiar nature not of women, but of men: Men, he admitted with startling candor, will always force themselves upon any available woman, naturally, just as a cat would be drawn to meat. It’s an unalterable fact of life.

Now this is a striking claim indeed, if not about all men, then at least about the imam’s own experience, from which I can only presume that he speaks. What is more remarkable, commenters at the time more or less missed the significance of his remarks:

Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward said Hilali’s comment was an incitement to rape and that Australia’s Muslims should force him to resign.

“This is inciting young men to a violent crime because it is the woman’s fault,” Goward told television’s Nine Network. “It is time the Islamic community did more than say they were horrified. I think it is time he left.”

None of which really cuts to the heart of the matter. Hilali claimed, in essence, that all men are irreformable brutes. And he’s not the only one to think this way. Even the most charitable defense of the hijab sets up men as moral degenerates:

An Iranian school girl is quoted as saying, “We want to stop men from treating us like sex objects, as they have always done. We want them to ignore our appearance and to be attentive to our personalities and mind. We want them to take us seriously and treat us as equals and not just chase us around for our bodies and physical looks.”

As if women were never treated decently without the hijab. (As if the hijab did anything to help!) What’s most striking to me, though, is how the hijab emerges here not as an icon of women’s special status in Islam, but of men’s sinfulness, which must evidently be great indeed if they are expected — expected — to mistreat any woman who does not cover every aspect of her body.

Again and again, this same theme recurs: Because men always behave badly around women, women must be treated differently — so that they may be equal:

Contrary to popular belief, the covering of the Muslim woman is not oppression but a liberation from the shackles of male scrutiny and the standards of attractiveness. In Islam, a woman is free to be who she is inside, and immuned from being portrayed as sex symbol and lusted after. Islam exalts the status of a woman by commanding that she “enjoys equal rights to those of man in everything, she stands on an equal footing with man ” (Nadvi, 11) and both share mutual rights and obligations in all aspects of life.

Yet if men and women had equal rights, and if the hijab were really to prevent people from lusting after one another, then men should have to wear it too — with a veil covering the hair and all. Just as women should not be made into sex symbols, men too should not be judged on their looks, but on their character. They too should have to wear the veil. Notably, this step is not taken in Islam — and why not? It’s only when we take it for granted that men alone are radically evil that such obviously unequal measures must be taken.

Once someone has made a claim like this about his own gender, there is no easy way to back out of it. One can’t very well say, “Okay, I was wrong about all men being ungovernable sex fiends. Guess I’m the only one. My bad.” The claim must stand, for fear of admitting too much about oneself. Indeed, it must be insisted upon ever more strenuously, as a universal rule. All men must be held to the standards of the most depraved.

Some of the more extravagant claims made by proponents of the hijab would actually be subject to empirical testing…

What kind of dignity a non-believer has by the way they conduct their life and expose themselves. They have removed the shield of protection, that modesty of Hijab and left themselves unprotected and that is the cause for the assault, which takes place once every ten seconds in rape and murder around the world. But those true Muslims who observe proper Hijab are protected from such assaults and not one [case of] this type is ever heard of.

…if they were not so self-evidently preposterous. Not one case of a woman in Islamic dress being raped? Absurd. Chilling, too, when one thinks of all the rapes that must necessarily be going unpunished.

(Also note this site’s sidebar advertising, which features a shapely and proudly bareheaded woman in some tight-fitting and clearly forbidden clothing. “We are not responsible for the contents of external websites ‘Ads by Google’,” the site declares. Uh-huh. You could always take it down, you know.)

Of course the efficacy of hijab in preventing rape would be testable, if only the rape laws in Muslim countries were not so skewed against the accuser: Pakistan can require as many as four male witnesses to the act — virtually guaranteeing that the only rapes ever punished are those gang rapes in which the men later repent. The very same system that declares men to be sex fiends, and that writes this shame on women’s clothing, is also legally structured to let men get away with it.

Now, stop to think for a moment: Entire societies are founded upon this premise, that men are evil and are fundamentally prisoners of their base desires. Iran recently detained 150,000 women for bad hijab.

Meanwhile, I should think, the standard for a civilized society is to know how to enjoy pleasures — including the pleasures of the eye — in moderation, and within limits. In other words, let’s have more of Ulysses tying himself to the mast — and less Leviticus. Or, as Nietzsche wrote, by positing an Immaculate Conception, Christian theology only succeeded at maculating conception.

It’s a pity Nietzsche never wrote much on Islam.

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