May 25, 2004
Sex, politics and the Mideast
I've blogged recently about the links between sexual repression and terrorism in the Middle East.
A column today on National Review Online looks at a related aspect of the sexual politics of the Middle East -- how Islam and tribalism reinforce the second-class (at best) status of women in Iraq.
Steven Vincent writes of unpleasant incidents during the course of traveling with a female Iraqi friend, where even teen-aged boys feel free to glare and monitor the behavior of a grown woman:
Something frightening lies at the heart of this nation, I've come to understand, something dark, irrational, thuggish, especially among the "ignorant men" of its lower classes. In public, it often takes the forms of a weaponized stare that glowers at an unescorted woman — or a woman accompanied by a foreigner — as if yearning to see her disgrace herself, do something scandalous or un-Islamic, in order to fuel invidious gossip and innuendo. In private, it manifests itself in the threat, and frequently the reality, of violence to restrain and subjugate females. To accommodate and placate this malevolence, Iraqi females learn to repress their own behavior and instincts, while safeguarding their most important social possession — reputation.
As I examine in my forthcoming book Romance on the Road, Iraq itself is the source of veiling laws brought by the Assyrians 3,000 years ago to distinguish between virtuous, married women (who had to wear the veil) and prostitutes (who did not). Gradually this Assyrian restriction on female sexuality spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and Eastern Mediterranean.
Much later (after 700 A.D.) Islam arrived, allowing men under the guise of religious fervor to further control their daughters, sisters -- and, as Vincent describes, even complete strangers.
My chapter in Romance on the Road on the Middle East examines conflicts for the Arab man between a strong sexuality that steers him to the more uninhibited Western tourist and a religion that reels him back to his own -- sexually naive -- women, seen especially in Egypt. Vincent's column reveals that in Iraq, local women are not just sheltered --- they are actively humiliated, and the dating war takes a dark, nasty turn.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:57 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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