Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof

  Muslims sometimes note that such conservative attitudes have little to do with the Koran and arise from culture more than religion. That’s true: In these places, even religious minorities and irreligious people are often deeply repressive toward women. In Pakistan, we met a young woman from the Christian minority who insisted on choosing her own husband; infuriated at this breach of family honor, her brothers bickered over whether they should kill her or just sell her to a brothel. While they argued, she escaped. After the Taliban was ousted in Afghanistan, banditry spread and Amnesty International quoted an aid worker as saying: “During the Taliban era, if a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh, she would have been flogged; now, she’s raped.” In short, often we blame a region’s religion when the oppresion instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it’s also true that one reason religion is blamed is that it is often cited by the oppressors. In the Muslim world, for example, misogynists routinely quote Muhammad to justify themselves.

  So let’s face the question squarely: Is Islam misogynistic?

  One answer is historical, and it is no. When Muhammad introduced Islam in the seventh century, it was a step forward for women. Islamic law banned the previously common practice of female infanticide, and it limited polygamy to four wives who were supposed to be treated equally. Muslim women routinely owned property, with rights protected by the law, while women in European countries often did not have the equivalent property rights. All in all, Muhammad comes across in the Koran and the traditions associated with him as much more respectful of women than early Christian leaders. After all, the apostle Paul wanted women to keep silent in church, and the early Christian leader Tertullian denounced women as “the gateway of the devil.”

  A fully covered. woman in Kabul, Afghanistan, with her daughter (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  Yet over the centuries Christianity has mostly moved beyond that. In contrast, conservative Islam has barely budged. It is still frozen in the world view of seventh-century Arabia, amid attitudes that were progressive for the time but are a millennium out of date. When a girls’ junior high school caught fire in Saudi Arabia in 2002, the religious police allegedly forced teenage girls back into the burning building rather than allow them to escape without head coverings and long black cloaks. Fourteen girls were reportedly burned to death.

  The Koran explicitly endorses some gender discrimination: A woman’s testimony counts only half as much as a man’s, and a daughter inherits only half as much as a son. When these kinds of passages arise in the Bible, Christians and Jews mostly shrug them off. It has been much harder for pious Muslims to ignore unpleasant and antiquated passages in the Koran, because it is believed to be not just divinely inspired but literally the word of God.

  Still, many modern-minded Muslims are pushing for greater gender equality. Amina Wadud, an Islamic scholar in the United States, has written a systematic reinterpretation of chauvinist provisions in the Koran. For example, verse 4:34 refers to wives and is usually translated roughly like this: “As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and beat them.” Feminist scholars like Wadud cite a barrage of reasons to argue that this is a mistranslation. For example, the word translated above as “beat” can have many other meanings, including to have sex with someone. Thus one new translation presents that same passage this way: “As for women you feel are averse, talk to them persuasively; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them), and go to bed with them (when they are willing).”

  The Islamic feminists, as these scholars are known, argue that it is absurd for Saudi Arabia to bar women from driving, because Muhammad allowed his wives to drive camels. They say that the stipulation that two female witnesses equal one male witness applied only to financial cases, because women at the time were less familiar with finance. That situation is now obsolete, they say, and so is that provision. The feminist exegesis argues if the Koran originally was progressive, then it should not be allowed to become an apologia for backwardness.

  A useful analogy is slavery. Islam improved the position of slaves compared to their status in pre-Islamic societies, and the Koran encourages the freeing of slaves as a meritorious act. At the same time, Muhammad himself had many slaves, and Islamic law unmistakably accepts slavery. Indeed, Saudi Arabia abolished slavery only in 1962, and Mauritania in 1981. In the end, despite these deep cultural ties, the Islamic world has entirely renounced slavery. If the Koran can be read differently today because of changing attitudes toward slaves, then why not emancipate women as well?

  Muhammad himself was progressive on gender issues, but some early successors, such as the Caliph Omar, were unmitigated chauvinists. One reason for their hostility to strong women may have been personality clashes with the Prophet’s youngest wife, Aisha, the Islamic world’s first feminist.

  Aisha was the only one of Muhammad’s wives who was a virgin when he married her, and she grew to be a strong-willed woman with whom he spent a great deal of time. Aisha knew firsthand the perils of a society that treated a woman as a fragile chalice of honor, for she herself was once accused of adultery. While traveling across the desert in a caravan, she lost a necklace and went to look for it—and then was left behind by the caravan. A man named Safwan found Aisha and rescued her, but since they had been together without a chaperone, they were accused of having an affair. Muhammad sided with her—that’s when he had the revelation about needing four witnesses to attest to adultery before punishment could be applied—and ordered that the accusers be flogged with forty lashes.

  After Muhammad died in Aisha’s arms (according to Sunni doctrine, which is disputed by Shiites), she took on an active and public role, in a way that annoyed many men. Aisha vigorously contested views of Islam that were hostile to women, and she recorded 2,210 hadith, or recollections of Muhammad used in Islam to supplement and clarify Koranic teachings. Ultimately Aisha even led an armed rebellion against a longtime adversary, Ali, after he became caliph. That insurrection is called the Battle of the Camel, because Aisha commanded her troops by riding among them on a camel. Ali crushed the rebellion, and then for centuries Islamic scholars discounted Aisha’s importance and rejected her feminist interpretations. All but 174 of her hadith were discarded.

  Yet in recent decades some Islamic feminists, such as Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan, have dusted off Aisha’s work to provide a powerful voice for Muslim women. There is, for example, a well-known statement attributed to Muhammad stipulating that a man’s prayers are ineffective if a woman, dog, or donkey passes in front of the believer. As Mernissi notes, Aisha ridiculed that as nonsense: “You compare us now to donkeys and dogs. In the name of God, I have seen the Prophet saying his prayers while I was there.” Likewise, Aisha denied various suggestions that her husband considered menstruating women to be unclean.

  Another dispute about the Koran concerns the idyllic black-eyed virgins who supposedly will attend to men in the Islamic afterlife. These are the houri, and some Islamic theologians have been quite specific in describing them. A ninth-century scholar, Al-Tirmidhi, recounted that houri are gorgeous young women with white skin, who never menstruate, urinate, or defecate. He added that they have “large breasts” that are “not inclined to dangle.” Suicide bombers have often written about their expectations of being rewarded by the houri, and Muhammad Atta reassured his fellow hijackers on the eve of 9/11: “The houri are calling you.”

  The bombers may be in for a surprise. The Arabic language was born as a written language only with the Koran, and so many of its words are puzzling. Scholars are beginning to examine early copies of the Koran with academic rigor, and some argue that a number of these puzzling words may actually have been Syriac or Aramaic. A scholar who uses the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for his own protection argues that “houri” is probably a reference to the Aramaic word for “white grapes.” That would be plausible, because the Koran compares the houri to pearls and crystal, and because accounts of Heaven f
rom the time of the Koran often included bounteous fruit, especially grapes to refresh the weary.

  Would there be as many suicide bombers if the presumption was that martyrs would arrive at the Pearly Gates and be handed a dish of white grapes?

  Westerners sometimes feel sorry for Muslim women in a way that leaves them uncomfortable, even angry. When Nick quizzed a group of female Saudi doctors and nurses in Riyadh about women’s rights, they bristled. “Why do foreigners always ask about clothing?” one woman doctor asked. “Why does it matter so much what we wear? Of all the issues in the world, is that really so important?” Another said: “You think we’re victims, because we cover our hair and wear modest clothing. But we think that it’s Western women who are repressed, because they have to show their bodies—even go through surgery to change their bodies—to please men.” A third doctor saw that Nick was taken aback at the scolding, and she tried to explain the indignation.

  “Look, when we’re among ourselves, of course we complain about the rules,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that we can’t drive. But these are our problems, not yours. We don’t want anybody fighting for us—and we certainly don’t want anybody feeling sorry for us.”

  Americans not only come across as patronizing but also often miss the complexity of gender roles in the Islamic world. “I’m a Nobel Peace Prize–winner and a university professor, but if I testify in a court, it won’t take my testimony because I’m a woman,” notes Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer. “Any uneducated man would be taken more seriously…. Iran is a bundle of contradictions. Women can’t testify fully in court, and yet women can be judges presiding over the court. We do have women judges. Any woman who wants to travel abroad needs the consent of her husband. But our vice president is a woman. So when our vice president travels abroad, she needs the consent of her husband. Meanwhile, sixty-five percent of Iranian university students are women, because they do better on entrance exams than men do.”

  Across the Middle East, attitudes are changing. Partly because of the leadership of prominent women such as Queen Rania of Jordan and Sheikha Mozah, the first lady of Qatar, acceptance of women’s rights is spreading. A UN survey in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco found that more than 98 percent of people in each country believed that “girls have the same right to education as boys.” Jordan, Qatar, and Morocco have been among the leaders in giving women greater roles. In Morocco, King Muhammad VI married a computer engineer who does not veil herself and who has become a role model for many Moroccan women. King Muhammad also reformed family law, giving women more rights in divorce and marriage, and he supported the pathbreaking appointment of fifty women imams, or preachers.

  One of the promising efforts to stimulate change in the Arab world is led by Soraya Salti, a thirty-seven-year-old Jordanian woman who is promoting entrepreneurship in middle schools and high schools. Soraya’s program, Injaz, teaches kids how to devise a business plan and then start and operate a small business. Many of them end up actually starting businesses, and the skills are especially useful for girls because of the discrimination that women face in the formal job market. By giving women an alternative way to pursue careers and earn incomes, as entrepreneurs, Injaz also facilitates the expansion of the labor force and economic development as a whole. Queen Rania has strongly backed Soraya, and the program has earned rave reviews. Injaz has now spread to twelve Arab countries and teaches 100,000 students a year how to launch businesses. “If you can capture the youth and change the way they think, then you can change the future,” Soraya says.

  A window into the squandered human resources in conservative Muslim societies is the Women’s Detention Center in Kabul, Afghanistan. The jail is a single-story compound behind a high wall in the heart of the city, without guard towers or coils of barbed wire. Its inmates include teenage girls and young women who were suspected of having a boyfriend and then subjected to a “virginity test”—a hymen inspection. Those whose hymens were not intact were then prosecuted and typically jailed for a few years.*

  Rana, the middle-aged woman who serves as director of the detention center, is in some ways a pioneer for working women, having risen through the police ranks to direct the jail. But she believes that girls who lack a hymen should be prosecuted, if only to protect them from their families. Every year, Afghanistan’s president pardons some inmates during the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends Ramadan. When women are freed, some of them are shot by relatives or, worse, “accidentally” scalded to death with boiling water. Jail is sometimes the safest place for a bold Afghan woman.

  One inmate, Ellaha, a nineteen-year-old with short black hair and a round self-confident face, startled us by greeting us in English and approaching us. She sat down in the dingy little jail room and unselfconsciously spoke of graduating from high school and attending one year of university while her family lived as refugees in Iran. Ellaha is charming, disciplined, and ambitious; in another culture, she would be an entrepreneur. Her problems began when the family returned to Afghanistan from Iran. Ellaha chafed at the more rigid Afghan customs, from the burka to the expectation that a woman will stay home all her life.

  “My family wanted to force me to marry my cousin,” she said. “I didn’t agree to marry him, because he is not educated and I don’t like his job—he is a butcher! Plus, he’s three years younger than me. I wanted to study and continue my education, but my father and uncle wouldn’t let me.”

  Ellaha found work with an American construction company and quickly impressed the managers with her intelligence and diligence. Her family was torn between horror at their daughter working with infidels and delight at the money she brought home. Then one of her bosses, an American named Steve, arranged for Ellaha to study at a university in Canada on a full scholarship. Ellaha saw this as an opportunity that could transform her life, and she leaped at it—even though her parents worried that it would be un-Islamic for a woman to travel so far away and study with men. The family also still wanted Ellaha to marry her cousin, partly because he was the son of her father’s oldest brother, the family patriarch. Ellaha’s sister, two years younger, was meant to marry the cousin’s younger brother, but the sister followed Ellaha’s example and resisted. So the family struck back.

  “When it was almost time for me to go to Canada and I was asking about flights, they tied me up and locked me in a room,” Ellaha said. “It was in my uncle’s house. My father said, ‘Okay, beat her.’ I’d never been beaten like that in all my life. My uncle and cousins were all beating me. They broke my head, and I was bleeding.” Ellaha’s sister endured the same treatment. After a week of daily beatings as they lay with their wrists and ankles chained, Ellaha and her sister agreed to marry the cousins.

  “My mother guaranteed that we would not escape, and our family took us back to our home after we promised we would be obedient,” Ellaha said. The family allowed Ellaha to resume her job, but her boss rescinded his offer of foreign study when he realized her family adamantly opposed the plan. Ellaha was heartbroken but continued to work hard. To help her do her work, she was given a mobile phone. Her family was aghast that she now could communicate unsupervised with men. The family demanded that she give up her phone.

  “Then our father decided that we must marry…. My mother came and said, ‘I have no power to help.’ So we escaped.” Ellaha and her sister fled to a cheap guesthouse, planning to go to Iran and stay with relatives while attending university there. But someone spotted Ellaha at the guesthouse and told her parents, so the police came to arrest her and her sister as runaways. The police subjected them to virginity checks, but their hymens were intact.

  They were jailed “because their lives were in danger,” explained Rana. “To protect her from the anger of her father, she’s here.” Ellaha acknowledged that that was a legitimate concern. “They were very angry,” she said of her father and uncle. “I was scared that they might kill me.” Ellaha’s father, a carpenter named Said Jamil, was indignant when we tracked him down in Kabul. He
didn’t want us inside his house, so we spoke on the street. We asked him to promise not to harm Ellaha, and he did so, but he also vowed that he would no longer allow her “to be so free.”

  We don’t blame Ellaha’s difficulties on the Prophet Muhammad or on Islam as such. Islam itself is not misogynistic. But as many Muslims have themselves pointed out, as long as smart, bold women like Ellaha disproportionately end up in prison, or in coffins, in some Muslim nations, then those countries are undermining their own hopes for development.

  There are many reasons for the boom in Muslim terrorists in recent decades, including frustration at backwardness in the Islamic world, as well as resentment of corrupt rulers. But another reason may be the youth bulge in Islam—partly because of lagging efforts on family planning—and the broader marginalization of women.

  A society that has more men than women—particularly young men, is often associated with crime or violence. The historian David Court-wright has argued that one reason America is relatively violent, compared to Europe, is the legacy of a male surplus. Until World War II, the United States was disproportionately male, and the frontier was overwhelmingly so. The result, he suggests, was a tradition of aggressiveness, short tempers, and violence that still echoes in America’s relatively high homicide rates. The same analysis, while controversial, may also help explain why male-dominated Muslim societies have similar threads emphasizing self-reliance, honor, courage, and a quick resort to violence.

  All this is compounded when the men are young. In Western countries, the cohort aged fifteen through twenty-four makes up an average of 15 percent of the adult population. In contrast, in many Muslim countries, this share has been more than 30 percent. “For each percentage-point increase of youth in the adult population,” says Norwegian researcher Henrik Urdal, “the risk of conflict increases by more than 4 percent.”