• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 388 0

not our own. Take, for example, the plight of fourteen women who were arrested inside a popular café in an upscale neighborhood of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in 2009. Their crime was wearing pants. They were among a crowd listening to an Egyptian singer when members of the government’s public order police burst in and ordered all the women to stand up so the policemen could check what they were wearing. The women wearing trousers were arrested, even though they were otherwise dressed modestly in blouses and the traditional headscarf. The government charged the women with a violation of the country’s indecency laws. These laws are based on a strict interpretation of Islamic doctrine and impose punishment on “those who commit an indecent act that violates public morale; or who dress indecently.”1 The penalty was severe: for most of the women, a flogging, which in this case meant being lashed ten times with a whip.

One of the women, a Sudanese journalist and United Nations employee named Lubna Hussein, decided to fight the conviction. She printed and distributed five hundred invitations to her flogging, attracting the attention of international journalists and human rights activists. Her trial was covered on CNN and in major newspapers. During her trial, scores of women came to protest outside, some wearing trousers. Police fired tear gas into the crowd and, according to the Associated Press, beat some of the protestors. Perhaps because of the attention, the judge in Hussein’s trial declined to sentence her to flogging and instead fined her the equivalent of two hundred dollars. When she refused to pay, she was carted off to jail. Friends soon paid her fine and gained her release.

For most of us in the West, this episode shows the backwardness of Sudanese culture when it comes to gender roles and gender equality. We see the insistence on a certain kind of modesty in attire as a cultural and religious norm that operates to maintain a subservient role for women. Lubna Hussein and women like her are courageously trying to fight those cultural norms, sometimes at significant personal risk. We also recognize that women in Sudan have little genuine choice about what they wear in public. They might be able to fight the imposition or enforcement of the norm in a small number of cases, but for most women, most of the time, to wear pants is to risk public humiliation, arrest, fines, and even corporal punishment. That once in a great while there is a woman who can gain international attention for challenging the norm does not change the fact that the norm is strong and rigorously enforced. Hussein is the exception, not the rule, and she was jailed for her impertinence.

We also see the power of cultural norms when people from different cultures come together in the same space. A legal and social battle now going on in France concerns whether Islamic girls may wear hijabs, traditional headscarves, in school. France has a long tradition of public secularism, and many see the wearing of the hijab by students and teachers in public schools as conflicting with that tradition. Some French citizens consider the hijab a token of women’s subservience and inequality.2 On the other hand, many Islamic women and girls wear it as an expression of religious identity and argue that it should be their choice to do so. One side sees the hijab as evidence of cultural oppression and coercion, and the other side sees it as a free expression of cultural identity.

French law now prohibits the wearing of the hijab in public schools. Ironically, girls who wear it are suspended—thrown out of school without a choice—in order to protect their freedom to choose not to wear it.

The problem is even more pronounced with the burqa, the full-body covering with only a mesh screen over the eyes, worn largely by women in fundamentalist Islamic families. To see a woman wearing one in the West is jarring to our sensibilities.

One summer my wife and I visited Paris, where I had been invited to speak at an economics conference. Our first day there, we walked from