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It has happened again - a Muslim cleric in Australia has hit the headlines with an outrageous comment about women and sexual violence. Last time it was Sydney’s Sheik Faiz Mohamad, who in 2005 (see here) was recorded lecturing in these words: “”A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world …

Strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts…all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.” Sheik Faiz likened uncovered women to sheep, put in the way of hungry wolves. This time, women were likened to “uncovered meat”, put in the way of hungry cats.

Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali made the comments in a Ramadan speech in September. He was elaborating upon an observation by Islamic scholar al-Rafihi, on who is to blame for any “rape crime”:”If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.

… If the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.

…The woman was behind Satan playing a role when she disobeyed God and went out all dolled up and unveiled and made of herself palatable food that rakes and perverts would race for. She was the reason behind this sin taking place.” (Read more of the transcript here) Of course, like many others, I find these comments appalling.As a feminist, especially, I want to speak up against these ideas. As an anti-racist, however, I do not want to contribute to any backlash in Australia against ordinary Muslims. Should I keep silent? For a number of reasons I have come to the decision that it is not a good idea to keep silent, in Australia, on the question of Islamist culture and harm to women. For one, the right is making mischief of the issue (see Miranda Devine, Pamela Bone, Paul Sheehan).

For another, I do not believe that there is no reality behind the media beat-up. For another still, we could do with more analysis and intervention. It is a very bad idea to leave all public discussion in the hands of our shock jocks, extreme nationalists and current political leaders.

Peter Manning has made a significant contribution to the public discussion, with a careful defence of the Australian newspaper’s coverage of the Sheik al-Hilali affair (here). The intercession is unorthodox, for the left, and very welcome. I take issue, however, with his framing of the Sheik’s discourse: “The difference for Hilali is that he’s out of time and out of place. This is Australia in 2006, not Egypt in the 1970s.” Manning’s perception, that the ideology comes from some superseded, pre-modern or pre-feminist age of customary prejudice, is a widely held one. We see it in the Australian’s editorial of 28 October 2006: the Sheik’s “retrograde attitudes” are “out of step with modernity”, “primitive”, “stuck in the 10th century.” I think this is mistaken. It is not some hangover of tradition, or ignorance, slowly but surely being eclipsed with our enlightenment. It is not the stubborn remnant of a patriarchal past. There is an Islamist radicalising of the old value of “modesty” in women that is entirely emergent and contemporary.
It finds its double in North America, in the efforts of fundamentalist Christians - and Modesty Zone’s Wendy Shalit - to rework the requirement of modesty in women, for a post-9/11, Christian-West investment in “moral values.”

Shalit’s target is raunch culture. Her new book, to be released in 2007, is titled Girls Gone Mild. Girls Gone Wild, of course, is the outfit that Ariel Levy (in Female Chauvinist Pigs) says is leading the mainstreaming of pornography in the U.S.A. Its capitalising on the new exposure of women’s bodies is defended in the name of “feminism,” and “freedom” - the freedom that George Bush wants to bring to the world via Afghanistan and Iraq.

One might think that the last thing a Christian-Right Presidency would want, for American women, is a hypersexualising, self-promoting display of their claim to licence. On the contrary. A Western-style “freedom for women” is a key emblem of its campaign in Afghanistan and Iraq. Women don’t have to wear the veil, in America. Women don’t have to appear modest, in America. And besides, a Christian Party can have its Babes, and its conservative moral values too. Levy finds it all a bizarre contradiction, but as Chaudhry says: “make no mistake, raunch is Republican.”

In its C21st context, it is a dangerous game that is being played on the bodies of women. Modesty, its saving grace and its paradox, has been with us for centuries: “the woman is constructed as seduction - to be forever punished for it.” (Tseëlon, 1995: 5) But this is something new, coming not from the past, but from the present - from the far off, ungrasped present. The scale is different. It has taken on the proportions of an imagined “clash of civilizations” where the lone woman on the street –in a miniskirt, or in a burqa - can seem to represent, for some, the legitimate target of cultural righteousness and revenge.

I submit that the “punishment” of rape and other sexual assault on women in Australia will only escalate, in current conditions, if we continue to misrecognise the discourse that legitimates it. It is not a relic of the past that will die out with the spread of feminism. Feminism, as “raunch,” is being used to draw women further into identification with the Bush-led “West.” There is only more crisis and confrontation in the future of Empire capitalism and its “others”.

Dr Judy Lattas,
Director of the Macquarie University Institute for Women’s Studies

I invite respectful comment on the opinions offered in this column.

Image: Punch and Judy illustration by George Cruikshank, 1827 

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