HISTORY GONE WRONG? 413cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think them
selves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing ac
complishment. One cannot call male children "Pasha," or, as in Iran,
tell them that they have a golden penis, without reducing their need to
learn and do.^29 To be sure, any society will have its achievers no matter
what, if only because it has its own division of tasks and spoils. But it
cannot compete with other societies that ask performance from the full
pool of talent.
In general, the best clue to a nation's growth and development po
tential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of
Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them
from modernity. To be sure, other societies depreciate women and
adulate men. No one is pure. Think of Latin America with its
machismo, or Japan with its male bonding and fatherless homes.^30 Even
the so-called advanced societies of the West can do better in this regard.
But if we view gender relations as a continuum running from nothing
to full equality, the Muslim countries, and especially the Arab Muslim
countries, would bottom out the scale. The women are humiliated
from birth. The message: their very existence is a disaster, their body
a sin.^31 The boys learn that they can hit their sisters, older and younger,
with impunity—as I have seen one do, in public, before the eyes of his
unprotesting mother. The sister did not even defend herself. Bad for
the girls, but just as bad for the boys.
Is such a failing somehow inherent in Islam? No. Islam is multifari
ous. Global in its reach, it embraces a diversity of societies (and parts
of societies) and cultures. It also contains within its sacred writings
many lessons, some of them contradictory, which can be used to almost
any purpose. The political scientist Fouad Ajami reminds us how, when
the Muslim Brotherhood condemned Egypt's peace treaty with Israel,
the Egyptian government prompdy got the University of al-Azhar in
Cairo to declare the treaty in harmony with Islamic law.^32 Interpreta
tion varies, then, with time, place, and constituency.
Even so, one must not niggle or rule out generalization. This is a fa
vorite line of defense by Muslim apologists, embarrassed by laws and
institutions that are not thought "progressive," and quick to cite ex
ceptions and variants. But Muslim societies do have common charac
teristics that rest on a shared faith. That both the Middle Eastern state
and its opposition appeal to Islam for justification and support tells vol
umes about the authority of religious discourse. Islam is the argument
that carries, and it carries backward as easily as forward.
One defence would dismiss the regressive influence of Islam by