It’s Much Worse than
Any War on Women
Baseball and English language-mangling legend Yogi Berra
was once asked why he no longer patronized Ruggeri’s, a well-known St. Louis
restaurant. Yogi replied, “The place is
so crowded that nobody goes there anymore.” After reading the second dozen set of
columns/articles bewailing why nobody is writing about the kidnapped Nigerianschoolgirls, I think I better understand what he meant.
The girls in question are from northern Nigeria. They were abducted from a government run
school featuring Western-style education by a group called Boko Haram. The group’s name translates as "Western
education is forbidden." It is
particularly hostile to the education of women.
It has threatened to sell the girls or have them married to its members
before allowing them to be retrieved.
A Muslim woman endures
caning as
punishment under sharia law. |
In light of the growing outrage, Nigerian President
Goodluck Johnson defended his government’s efforts to date and vowed to do more
to find the girls. For his part, President
Obama called the abductions "outrageous" and "heartbreaking''
and sent experts and other assistance.
Boko Haram has a long history of violence, particularly
since 2009, when an attempted government crackdown resulted in the arrest and
subsequent execution of the group’s founder, Muslim cleric Mohammed Yusuf. The group’s actual name for itself is Jama'atu
Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, which is Arabic for "People Committed
to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad." It has killed thousands of Christians and
Muslims in an attempt to bring strict Islamic law to all of Nigeria.
The usual caveat by authorities is that Boko Haram is an
extremist group whose views do not reflect mainstream Islam. There is even some hesitancy to label them a
terrorist organization. However, Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, Fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government, writes in today’s Wall Street
Journal, “Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too
representative.” She goes on to condemn “Baffled
Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as ‘Islamophobes’
than to stand up for women's most basic rights.”
Proponents of Islam like to point out the rights granted
to women in the Qur'an and by the
prophet Muhammad were a vast improvement in comparison to the situation of
women in Arabia prior to the advent of Islam.
Most historians agree this is true but some note, “After the Prophet's
death the condition of women in Islam began to decline and revert back to
pre-Islamic norms.”
There is no question that women often suffer
disproportionally in contemporary Islamic communities under traditional sharia
law, even those lacking extremist groups.
Recently, a twenty-five year old widow in Banda Aceh, Indonesia was
invaded in her home and gang raped by a group of five men because she allegedly
was having an affair with a married man.
The Jakarta Globe reports the
rapists then dragged the woman to the Wilayatul Hisbah or sharia police.
Most of us would view this woman as a victim and survivor
requiring healing and compassion.
However, Ibrahim Latif, a regional sharia official, insists the woman
and her lover should both be publicly beaten nine strokes with a cane for the
crime of adultery. He did not see the
woman’s brutal rape as extenuating circumstances but he did concede the rapists
also warranted nine strokes with a cane for their actions.
The Sydney Morning
Herald reports other cases from the region.
In 2010, three sharia policemen raped a twenty-year-old university
student after they found her riding a motorcycle with her boyfriend. In 2012, a sixteen-year-old girl hanged
herself after sharia police published her full name in local media and scolded
her for acting “like a prostitute” with friends at a concert.
This week, Malala Yousafzai announced her solidarity with the abducted Nigerian girls. Yousafzai is the Pakistani teenager who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, also for attending a Western school for girls.
This week, Malala Yousafzai announced her solidarity with the abducted Nigerian girls. Yousafzai is the Pakistani teenager who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, also for attending a Western school for girls.
To be clear, these governments are not in league with extremists but they have been notoriously passive. In Nigeria, the BBC reports long-standing tensions between the Muslim-dominated north and Christian-centric south. “Many Muslim families still refuse to send their children to government-run ‘Western schools,’ a problem compounded by the ruling elite which does not see education as a priority.” In Indonesia, Ismail Hasani, a scholar at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University explains, “When we talk about law [here], we talk about three different systems that are not clearly delineated – common law, sharia law and national law. There is no boundary.”
Lauren Wolfe, Director of Women Under Siege project in
New York, recently penned an op/ed piece in the Winnipeg Free Press in which she argues, “Crimes against women and
girls are not only commonplace, but they go ignored, unprosecuted and
unreported by the international media every single day, especially when they
occur in the global south . . . Boko Haram is sneering at a world that has
shown time and again that girls are expendable and easily weaponized. It is targeting society's most defenseless and
fetishized.” Hires Ali makes the same
point in her Journal piece. “Where governments are weak, corrupt or
nonexistent, the message of Boko Haram and its counterparts is especially
compelling.”
Attacks against women serve an even more sinister end. Rape and other crimes against women are often devastating not only to the victims but to the other members, male and female, within their families and communities. Muslim extremists are not merely waging literal war on women but using women as weapons against any who will not accept their version of "pure" Islam.
While boundaries between different religions, cultures,
and nationalities are worthy of respect, there are certain concepts of basic
dignity that are universal. Fair
treatment of women, especially the most young and vulnerable, is one of
them. Governments everywhere must take a
stand to protect their citizens rather than protecting themselves from
political displeasure by groups within that citizenry. Currently, we paradoxically state, much like
Yogi Berra, the problem is so important that nobody does anything about
it.
Outrage we got.
What we need is action.