HISTORY GONE WRONG? 411high, and much higher for women than for men. That alone speaks of
a society that accords women an inferior place, and this is clearly related
to attitudes cultivated in Islam and especially in the Islam of the Arab
world.
A word of caution. Many Middle Eastern specialists, keen to defend
Islam against (Western) denigration or condescension, insist that Mus
lim gender relations, though shaped by religious doctrine, are in great
part independent of it. Among their arguments: these rules and practices
go back to pre-Islamic times, or were learned from non-Arab peoples,
or were linked to income and status (rich men's wives did not have to
work or shop), or were a response to the threats of urban life, shielding
women against insults to personal and family honor. They have a point:
If Islam were to disappear tomorrow, Arab men would still see women as
they do today. Other scholars, sometimes the same, stress the allegedly
hostile motivations of Western scholars: "orientalist" scorn and malev
olence, "essentialist" ignorance and foolishness. The use of such pejo
rative code words is to dismiss rather than refute. Very convenient.
So these customs go way back; and once they were sanctified by
holy writ, they took on authority and rigor. Yet even sacred texts are
not immutable: "There has been much breaking and bending of
Quranic admonitions throughout Muslim history."^24 And indeed,
women's status in Arab lands does show changes backward and for
ward over time—now more liberal, now reactionary. One reads of ex
ceptional figures: queens and princesses who have reigned, even
governed (also political leaders such as Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan,
Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, and Tansu Ciller in Turkey); or of "liber
ated" women who have lived in the West and brought new attitudes
home with them, often to the shock of their more conventional com
patriots. One even hears of lords and masters mocked in the privacy of
the harem (what is privacy good for?); and one buys a new kind of in
timate, best-selling autobiography recounting the abuses of male dom
ination (a call for help and a school for scandal).^25
The historian Bernard Lewis, among others, tells us that "the steady
march of [Muslim] women into the public arena, as important players
in the economy and increasingly important players in politics, is... ir
reversible and of enormous significance."^26 Women have the vote now
in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran, and even the Ayatollah Khomeini, funda
mentalist though he was, never suggested that women should lose that
right.^27
I am skeptical. I don't know what constitutes "important players."
Nor would I anticipate an early transformation of structures that rest