Let us now praise obscure women, starting with a woman who was wholly obscure until a few weeks ago, but is now famous - and for many Muslims, infamous. Wafa Sultan is a Syrian-American psychiatrist who grew up in Syria but now lives in Los Angeles. As a student at the University of Aleppo, she saw a professor gunned down in front of her by assassins from the Muslim Brotherhood who shouted “God is Great” as they pumped bullets into him. “At that point,” she told the New York Times, “I lost my trust in God and began to question all our teachings.”
Sultan writes for an Islamic reform website called Annaqed - “The Critic” (www.annaqed.com). One of her essays about the Muslim Brotherhood recently caught the attention of the Qatar-based television news channel, al-Jazeera, which put her on a show last month with Ibrahim al-Khouli, an Egyptian professor of religious studies. In the debate, Sultan said that Jews had “forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not with their crying and yelling”, while Muslims defended their beliefs “by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies”. (She went too far when she said that “we have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people”; it is only 12 years since Baruch Goldstein gunned down 29 Muslims during Friday prayers in Hebron.)
Khouli’s reaction was far more extreme. He refused to debate with her and demanded “Are you a heretic?” before claiming she had blasphemed against Islam, Mohammed and the Koran. Sultan took this remark to be a formal fatwa, or religious condemnation, and has since received hundreds of death threats. Her mother, who still lives in Syria, dares not contact her. But her broadcast has been replayed endlessly on the internet and she is working on a book whose working title is The Escaped Prisoner: When God is a Monster.
More than any other group, the women of Islam are criticising Arab states and Islamic authorities. Some protest in their native lands, such as Iran, where women were once among the freest in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world and where protests by and on behalf of women remain a feature of civil society. The leading protagonists are well known both inside and out of the country - too well known, one hopes, to be easily suppressed. They include the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who has signed a strongly worded statement against the “unequal treatment of half of the Iranian population”. There is also Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, a secular feminist activist, writer and publisher, and Simin Behbahani, Iran’s most famous living woman poet and a long-time supporter of women’s rights.
Many, like Sultan in Los Angeles, are anathematised by their co-religionists and have received death threats. Some need armed protection. Yet, with courage, they continue. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian and activist, lives with four bodyguards at all times, yet she travels and lectures constantly, and recently signed the Manifesto of the Twelve - an eloquent work signed by 12 leading intellectuals (including Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri Levy), which pleads for “the universality of free expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on every continent, against every abuse and dogma”. Another signatory is Irshad Manji, the Canadian author of The Trouble with Islam Today - who has come out, both as a lesbian and what she likes to call a “Muslim refusenik”.
It’s the critical spirit, a triumph of civilisation, for which these women stand. Others make a stand in different ways; the British comedian Shazia Mirza, and her American counterparts Tissa Hami and the comedy writer Negin Farsad, all work, as it were, on both sides of the street - guying Muslims and the attitudes of non-Muslims.
They usually reject the taint of being “political”. But in asserting their right to be funny and independent, they promote an identity other than that with which Muslim communities are increasingly identified. (The fault for this, by the way, does not usually lie with Islamophobia but with the fundamentalists, against whom these women are ranged.)
The latest member of this regiment is in some ways the most hopeful - because she seems determined to be “normal”. She is Fayrouz Shaqrawi, a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem and working in Bethlehem, who has in the past few weeks begun a blog called “The Land of Sad Oranges” (http://sadoranges.blogspot.com).
She tells the story of how she objected to being barked at by an Israeli soldier at a border crossing, and was forced to undergo a strip search for her impudence. She contrasts this boorishness with the charm of an Italian soldier, a member of a regiment of carabinieri now deployed at the border, who “asked me - in Italian - whether I spoke Italian. I said no, and he was very nice, asking where I was from and if I liked Italy. I said yes and wished Italy good luck in the coming Mondial (Forza Italia!).”
To be captivated by an Italian chat-up line, if briefly, would seem a basic human female right. By insisting on it, Shaqrawi becomes not just another Palestinian suffering Israeli oppression and western imperialism, but an intelligent individual who can meaningfully discriminate between a boor and a charmer. This is not what the current Palestinian leaders like, all the less so since Shaqrawi makes it clear on her site that an Israeli friend inspired her to start blogging.
The sheer chirpy normalcy of her blog, written with the stream-of-consciousness style of most blogs, points to a determination to have a mind of her own. It’s that which underpins all our freedoms, and which these women, in their own ways, are seeking for themselves. In doing so, they benefit us all.
