Should a Woman Cover Her Face?

One of the beneficial side-effects of Bush's freedom initiative has been to revive discussion of the plight of women in Muslim society. Here are two recent articles on the subject.

Writing in the Arab Times, Raid Qusti asks:

Should a Woman Cover Her Face?

Is there a written law in Saudi Arabia or in Saudi Basic Law that says a Saudi woman must cover her face in public? I do not know if such a law exists. When I asked several Saudi lawyers, the answer was “No.”

Every society in the world has laws as part of its structure. These laws are written and codified so that anyone who wants can look them up in public libraries. Every citizen in those countries knows the law; if they don’t, they can easily find out. Unfortunately, there is much vagueness about Saudi law, especially when it comes to social conduct.

Worse still, there is a government body known as “The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.” It is known generally as the mutawaa, or religious police, and they operate all over the Kingdom without laws or written guidelines.

She notes:

[C]omplaints from the public against the narrow-mindedness of some of the organization’s members are on the increase. Instead of being something to be proud of, most members of the public fear the organization as if everyone in it were phantoms or bogeymen.

People hired to do these jobs should be of the highest quality and possess considerable religious knowledge. That is not, unfortunately, what we see in reality. The reality is people in our streets and malls who are obsessed with women who do not cover their faces in public and who are implementing their own version of the law according to their own personal beliefs.

“Cover your face woman,” “Fear God,” “The abaya is supposed to be worn over the head and not on the shoulders.”

I personally have had my own experiences with them.

The last was a few months ago when one of them approached me and my family in the mall. The shock was not that I found two bearded young men in a public mall, yelling at women who were violating what they believe is a dress code but that the two young men were not members of the commission.

“Excuse me, are you from the commission?” I asked one of them after he gave a lecture which in sum was that a woman must cover her face in public as a sign of purity.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked. And I answered, “I am from the media. And my understanding is that every commission member must wear a name tag, according to what the head, Ibrahim Al-Ghaith, said in an interview with Okaz.”

After some hesitation, he said, “No. I am not from the commission. What difference does that make? As a Muslim, you should be happy when a brother Muslim gives you advice and even if I were from the commission, what would you do?” he challenged.

For some reason, I did not want to engage in further discussion with him so I said, “Thank you for your advice” and my family and I walked away. We could still hear him yelling, “The abaya is not on the shoulders!” “Cover your face, woman”!

Read the whole thing here. Chilling, no? Then consider this report from Der Spiegel; it's terrifying.

THE DEATH OF A MUSLIM WOMAN

"The Whore Lived Like a German"
By Jody K. Biehl in Berlin

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe? The deaths have sparked momentary outrage, but will they change the grim reality for Muslim women?

The shots came from nowhere and within minutes the young Turkish mother standing at the Berlin bus stop was dead. A telephone call from a relative had brought her to this cold, unforgiving place. She thought she would only be gone for a few minutes and wore a light jacket in the freezing February wind. She had left her five-year-old son asleep in his bed. He awoke looking for his mother, who, like many Turkish women in Germany, harbored a secret life of fear, courage and, ultimately, grief. Now her little boy has his own tragedy to bear: His mother, Hatin Surucu, was not the victim of random violence, but likely died at the hands of her own family in what is known as an "honor killing."

Hatin's crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family's adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame -- the embrace of "corrupt" Western ways....

The crime might be easier to digest if it had been an archaic anomaly, but five other Muslim women have been murdered in Berlin during the past four months by their husbands or partners for besmirching the family's Muslim honor....

In many cases, fathers -- and sometimes even mothers -- single out their youngest son to do the killing, Boehmecke said, "because they know minors will get lighter sentences from German judges." [interesting: considering the recent US Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the death penalty for minors]. In some cases, these boys are revered by their community and fellow inmates as "honor heroes" -- a dementedly skewed status they carry with them for the rest of their lives.

The problems of Muslim women go far beyond these horrific honor killings. A social survey conducted last summer by the German government shows that:

49 percent of Turkish women said they had experienced physical or sexual violence in their marriage. One fourth of those married to Turkish husbands said they met their grooms on their wedding day. Half said they were pressured to marry partners selected by relatives and 17 percent felt forced into such partnerships.

German authorites, the article says, are aware of the problem, but are reluctant to act because of political correctness. The nation's Nazi past inhibits any official criticism of ethnic cultures.

But this goes beyond culture to questions of basic human rights. I am reminded of the story, probably apocryphal, of the British officer in India who stopped a suttee killing. A local leader protested: "but it is our custom to kill a woman when her husband dies." To which the British officer replied, "and it is our custom to hang men who murder women."

Read the whole disturbing thing here.