The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [20]
When I visited with the women of the Turkish movement Milli Görüs, I found them assertive and clamorous, almost to the point of being aggressive. They angrily defended their own oppression: “I want to wear a hijab, I want to obey my husband.” I have also met Moroccan women who said: “I want to wear the hijab, because Allah the Exalted has commanded it.” “Well,” I respond, “if you want to do everything that Allah the Exalted has said, then you’ll stay in your cage.”
Meanwhile, many are waiting for an enlightenment to take place in Islam. But that enlightenment won’t come by itself. That is why the way in which Muslims think about Islam has to change. Muslims need to think differently about how they deal with their faith, about life, about giving meaning to life, and about their own sexual morality. The few Muslims who have gained their individuality can hold up a mirror to the community from which they have emerged to make them face their still-undeveloped individuality, to make them see the “I” that is constantly being oppressed and curbed by dogma, prescriptions, and the stifling culture of gossip that rules in most Islamic communities. Emancipation doesn’t mean the liberation of the community of the faithful or its safeguarding from the power of evil outside forces, such as colonialism, capitalism, the Jews, and the Americans. It means the liberation of the individual from that same community of the faithful. And to liberate him- or herself as an individual, he or she must first come to think differently about sexuality.
The best way for Islamic culture to liberate itself from its backwardness is by ceasing to blame others for that backwardness. Muslim men and women must carefully, thoughtfully reevaluate their current sexual morality and their adherence to Islamic moral guidance. They must also determine how the prescribed morality is actually practiced; what are its real-life consequences and results. For instance, how many people succeed in living up to the standard that everyone must enter into marriage virginal and pure, the way Allah wants it, according to the Koran? How do men and women actually relate to one another in the real world, in day-to-day life? To what extent are family violence and violence against women unintended consequences of the striving after an unattainable ideal that is meant to secure an agreeable place in the afterlife? Is overpopulation and the rise of sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, in Islamic countries a direct consequence of the existing sexual morality? What about the rise in the number of abortions among Muslims in the West?
Instead of devoting their energy and money to the development of an even larger atomic bomb—as Pakistan and Iran are doing—the Islamic world would be better employed in critically examining its own sexual morality and the suffocating effects of its own cultures and societies, and devising proposals for change.
Scientific and scholarly research are necessary but not sufficient to overcome the cultural challenges in making large groups of people change their position. Almost all books about Islam written by Muslims are educational texts and guides instructing Muslims on how to behave in accordance with the precepts in the Koran and the Hadith, theological studies with little that is creative or new. Alongside these there are novels by Muslims about love, politics, and crime, in which the role of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad are studiously avoided, although the moral undercurrent is that one should observe religious precepts, otherwise things end very badly. Most Islamic soaps, broadcast around the world via satellite, share not only their bad acting but also an adherence to Islamic sexual morality in relationships between the main characters. The message is that if a young man and young woman choose each other out of love they will come to a