AFTERWORD 355human beings should be oppressed. This is not to deny that women suffer
grievously from oppressive laws in many Muslim countries. It is only to
say that the principle on which Muslims stand is not the "right" to oppress
women. Rather, what the Muslim world has reified over the course of his-
tory is the idea that society should be divided into a men's and a women's
realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in
the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the
public life of the community.
And I must say, I don't see how a single society can be constructed in
which some citizens think the whole world should be divided into a
women's realm and a men's realm, and others think the genders should be
blended into a single social realm wherein men and women walk the same
streets, shop the same shops, eat at the same restaurants, sit together in the
same classrooms, and do the same jobs. It can only be one or the other. It
can't be both. From where I stand, I don't see how Muslims can live in the
West, under the laws and customs ofWestern societies, if they embrace that
divided-world view, nor how Westerners can live in the Muslim world as
anything but visitors, if they embrace that genders-shuffied-together view.
I don't offer one answer or another to the questions I am posing. I only
say that Muslim intellectuals have to grapple with them. And they have
been. Some of the most daring departures from orthodox Islamic doctrines
emerged in Iran, during the two decades after that country expelled the
United States and claimed its cultural sovereignty. There, anonymous writ-
ers proposed that every generation had the right to interpret the Shari'ah
anew without reference to the accumulated code of the religious scholars.
This idea and others like it were suppressed. The suppression made news
in the West-it was more evidence that Iran was not a democracy. What
struck me, however, was that such ideas were voiced at all in the Muslim
world. I wondered if it could only happen in a place where Muslims were
struggling with themselves and each other, not with the West.
After 9/11 the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure on Iran,
and in the face of this external threat, ideas with a Western aroma lost
credibility because they smelled of collaboration: they no longer needed to
be suppressed; they could gain no purchase with a public that had turned
conservative, a public that chose the ultranationalist Ahmadinejad to head
up their nation.