"
OCTOBER 1, 2011
Moderation, Saudi-Style
Women will always be serfs under sharia.
by Andrew McCarthy
A woman is sentenced to be whipped ten lashes for . . . drumroll . . .
driving a
car. That might have made for a fairly typical week in Saudi Arabia.
After all, the
kingdom's 20 million subjects and 5 million immigrant laborers are under
constant surveillance by the mutaween, the Commission for Promotion of Virtue
and Prevention of Vice, a police force several thousand strong that
enthusiastically enforces Saudi law.
Whipping is a common punishment, so much so that our Saudi allies carefully
regulate it: When the authorities impose hundreds of lashes, the sentences are
carried out over weeks or months, no more than 50 strokes per session. Maybe
the CIA should have consulted the enlightened sheikhs to ensure that
waterboarding terrorists was as humane as whipping drivers.
In the scheme of things, you might even say that Shema Jastaina's ten-lash
sentence was pretty darn moderate. Certainly the thirtysomething driver got off
easier than Khamisa Mohammed Sadawi. She is the 75-year-old Syrian who, in
2009, was sentenced to 40 lashes, as well as four months in the slammer.
Busting through her door, the mutaween caught her consorting with two young
men, neither related to her. The elderly woman was apparently undermining
Saudi virtue by accepting a bread delivery. The painstaking Saudi investigation
uncovered that 24-year-old Fahd's presence on the scene was halal because, in
his infancy, Khamisa had breast-fed him. Sure, she was about 50 at the time,
but in the kingdom, blood is thicker than water, and breast milk —
well, you get
the idea. Alas, Fahd's companion, Hadian, had not had the pleasure. He was thus
a stranger, his moral rectitude imperiled by the septuagenarian
temptress. Forty
lashes, next case.
It turns out, though, that the week of Ms. Jastaina's conviction for
driving while
female was anything but typical. Only a couple of days earlier, the maestro of
Saudi justice, King Abdullah, decreed that henceforth, Saudi women would enjoy
the right to vote and hold public office. At least, that's how the announcement
was splashed across the West by our Islamophilic media and the kingdom's
network of well-compensated cheerleaders.
Leave it to us party poopers at National Review. On the Corner, the invaluable
Nina Shea, who directs the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom,
pointed out that there is considerably less to Abdullah's edict than meets the
eye.
For one thing, the word "vote" does not appear in it. Instead, women will be
allowed to "participate in the nomination of candidates" in municipal
elections. It
is anything but clear that this equates to a right to vote in
elections. What passes
for "elections" in the Saudi monarchy is a bifurcated procedure in which
candidates first are nominated by amassing a required threshold of support and
later compete in an election. The most sensible interpretation of the decree is
that women will partake in part one but not part two.
As for holding office, women will be permitted to serve on the king's
consultative "Shura Council." Sounds great, except the Shura Council, like the
local councils whose memberships are determined by the aforementioned
municipal elections, has no actual power — which is what you might expect in
an autocracy. The royal decree is window dressing.
And even as window dressing, it may not be authentic. At 88 and in failing
health, Abdullah is essentially non compos mentis. Throughout his more
sentient years, the king's regard for the fairer sex was
unexceptionally Islamist.
Recall his 2002 visit to Pres. George W. Bush's Crawford ranch, when Abdullah's
advance team demanded that all air-traffic controllers directing his
flight and all
airport personnel meeting it be men. (Naturally, the FAA lapdogs complied, and,
once the story inevitably leaked out, the State Department dutifully echoed the
Saudi party line that no such demand had ever been made.) Thus, as Nina
relates, it is widely rumored that an opportunistic royal daughter somehow
finagled the decree out of the daffy old polygamist.
All the more reason to doubt the decree will ever be implemented. The next
Saudi elections are four years away. Abdullah's chances of still being around
then to enforce the diktat are even more iffy than Barack Obama's chances of
remaining the president who debases his office by bowing to Saudi kings. The
sensibilities of Abdullah's putative successor, Prince Nayef, are said
to be of the
mutaween variety. He's unlikely to suffer suffragettes, especially if
the ladies
have to drive to the polls.
The fanfare around the unprecedented non-voting voting announcement is what
made the week atypical. It spotlighted the abundant precedent for whipping
Islamic women — cruelties imposed for engaging in activity so mundane no
Western woman would think of it as "exercising a right."
The regime was sufficiently mortified by the attention it received
that, according
to the BBC, Abdullah has revoked the whipping sentence — not the driving ban
or whipping in general, mind you, just Ms. Jastaina's ten lashes. It is a small
favor to be thankful for. Like the embarrassed retreats that sharia
regimes tend
to beat on those rare occasions when the world takes notice of the persecution
of apostates, homosexuals, and non-Muslims, it shows how craven is the folly of
averting our eyes and biting our tongues when it comes to Islamist, er,
eccentricities.
More interesting, however, were the terms of the American discussion about
political rights in Saudi Arabia. It was as if we were all one big, happy
civilization.
Maybe, some suggested, voting rights are natural and unalienable. In the United
States, of course, we hold the equality of human beings to be
"self-evident." The
Declaration of Independence is explicit on the matter when it comes to
"all Men."
Implicitly, we now recognize that the principle applies to all men and
all women,
regardless of race or creed. Thus, if voting is a foundational right
for one, it
must be for all.
Others countered that unalienable rights are few and sweeping: life,
liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness — but not voting. The overarching principle
of equality
renders this distinction insignificant. Whatever their taxonomy — natural,
constitutional, statutory — we see voting rights as universal. The notion that
they could be granted or denied by a king was rightly seen as a perversion of
equality's premise that the ruler is no greater than the rest of us.
All very nice . . . and utterly beside the point. Saudi Arabia is a
sharia state. In
fact, it is the quintessential sharia state. Most Muslim countries
tout Islam's law
as supreme, but they incorporate other legal codes in tacit acknowledgment of
its deficiencies. Egypt, for instance, mixes sharia with Napoleonic
civil law. In
stark contrast, the Saudi monarchy boasts that its law is the law of
Islam, period.
Sharia needs no patches, because it is Allah's perfect, indivisible
prescription for
living human life.
The vice and virtue with which the mutaween concern themselves are not
reflective of universal values, nor are they meant to be. They are distinctly
Islamic. Sharia is based on Islamic scripture: primarily, the Koran,
the hadith,
and certain biographies of Mohammed deemed authoritative for more than a
millennium. It is not entirely literal and static — there is wiggle room for
jurisprudential interpretation. But neither is sharia what we'd call
dynamic, at
least not in the influential mainstream. The prohibition against
women's driving,
for example, is based on a fatwa issued by the late Abd al-Aziz bin
Abdullah bin
Baz, who was made the kingdom's grand mufti by Abdullah's predecessor, King
Fahd. And why not? As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Sheikh bin Baz is best
known for his 1966 fatwa declaring that the world is flat.
The voting edict, if we are to credit it as such, was not a case of
King Abdullah's
deigning at long last to give women what the West takes to be their due. As
Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques (the cities of Mecca and Medina), Abdullah is
the Muslim ummah's most revered ruler. True to that status, his concern is
limited to what sharia has to say on any given matter — and if it says
something
opposed to Western sensibilities, he emphatically rejects Western
sensibilities.
While American generals, diplomats, and media divas agitate over a Koran's
being torched by an obscure Florida pastor, the Saudi government torches Bibles
every single day as a matter of official sharia-driven policy.
In a Muslim society, women's rights are understood strictly in an
Islamic context.
Western theories about universal precepts are irrelevant. Western
civilization is
not seen as a guide but as a competitor. The mission of classical Islam is to
supersede Western tenets, not adapt to them.
Furthermore, in Islamist ideology, what makes the ruler viable is his
fidelity to
sharia. The Muslim Brotherhood's most influential theoretician, Sayyid
Qutb, put
it plainly: "The ruler in Islamic law is not to be obeyed because of his own
person; he is to be obeyed only by virtue of holding his position
through the law
of Allah and his Messenger." In Saudi Arabia, a woman's testimony is worth half
that of a man. Ditto her inheritance rights. She may marry only one man, while
the man may marry four women. The man may peremptorily divorce his wives —
and he gets custody of the kids.
These are not the king's whims. Abdullah enforces them because they are sharia
strictures derived directly from Islamic scripture. His legitimacy as monarch
hinges on enforcing Allah's rules. And these rules are fixed and knowable.
Anyone can read them in Reliance of the Traveller (Umdat al-Salik), the sharia
manual that has been endorsed by the scholars of al-Azhar University, with the
Saudi government itself certifying the manual's English translation.
There is no outright sharia prohibition against a woman's being given the right
to vote or to hold public office. Islamic scripture, however, plainly
frowns on the
concept of women ruling men. "Men are the protectors and maintainers of
women," says Sura 4:34, "because Allah has given the one more strength than
the other." In the natural order, the verse elaborates, "righteous women are
devoutly obedient" towards men. Those who stray from obedience are to be
disciplined, including by physical beating. Furthermore, a well-known hadith
quotes Mohammed as observing, "A people that leaves its leadership to a
woman will never succeed." Consequently, Reliance explains that a caliph, the
supreme leader of the Muslim community, must be a man — women are not
qualified.
So why not simply ban women from voting or standing for office? The question
exposes a fundamental chasm between Islam and the West that continues to
escape notice. We Americans consider ourselves a free, self-determining people.
Charting our own destiny is how we define ourselves. It is a power we most
openly — even defiantly — express by voting for officials whom we endow with
immense powers to effectuate our will.
In Islam, it is simply not that important. Islamists define themselves by
submission to Allah and his laws. Lawmakers are ministerial functionaries, not
visionaries. The society's destiny has already been charted: It is
divinely enjoined
to make Islam supreme over other systems.
The Muslim Brotherhood's leading jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, is held
in high esteem by the House of Saud. Between fatwas approving suicide
bombings in Israel and the killing of American soldiers in Iraq, he has also
decreed that sharia approves of women's participation in politics. To
his gullible
admirers in Western academe, that is a sign of Qaradawi's nuance and
moderation. In reality, though, his rationale is completely consistent with his
endorsement of women as shahada — jihadist martyrs. In Islam, it is never about
the fulfillment of the individual; it is about what the ummah needs to overcome
its enemies.
For Qaradawi, to defeat a better-equipped foe, it may be necessary for women
to carry out attacks. Similarly, if women are not active in politics
and education
(three of the sheikh's daughters have earned doctorates), those arenas will be
left to secular women and their corrosive Western ideas. Muslim women are
welcome, because they are needed in the fight.
Moreover, when it comes to political rights, the Islamist sees the
stakes as very
low. Qaradawi shrewdly figures that permitting a few female officeholders will
impress the West without creating a danger that the women would actually be
ruling men. More to the point, neither men nor women may make law for
themselves. "Legislation belongs to God," the sheikh teaches. "We only
fill in the
blanks."
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the
author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage
America.
OCTOBER 1, 2011
Moderation, Saudi-Style
Women will always be serfs under sharia.
by Andrew McCarthy
A woman is sentenced to be whipped ten lashes for . . . drumroll . . .
driving a
car. That might have made for a fairly typical week in Saudi Arabia.
After all, the
kingdom's 20 million subjects and 5 million immigrant laborers are under
constant surveillance by the mutaween, the Commission for Promotion of Virtue
and Prevention of Vice, a police force several thousand strong that
enthusiastically enforces Saudi law.
Whipping is a common punishment, so much so that our Saudi allies carefully
regulate it: When the authorities impose hundreds of lashes, the sentences are
carried out over weeks or months, no more than 50 strokes per session. Maybe
the CIA should have consulted the enlightened sheikhs to ensure that
waterboarding terrorists was as humane as whipping drivers.
In the scheme of things, you might even say that Shema Jastaina's ten-lash
sentence was pretty darn moderate. Certainly the thirtysomething driver got off
easier than Khamisa Mohammed Sadawi. She is the 75-year-old Syrian who, in
2009, was sentenced to 40 lashes, as well as four months in the slammer.
Busting through her door, the mutaween caught her consorting with two young
men, neither related to her. The elderly woman was apparently undermining
Saudi virtue by accepting a bread delivery. The painstaking Saudi investigation
uncovered that 24-year-old Fahd's presence on the scene was halal because, in
his infancy, Khamisa had breast-fed him. Sure, she was about 50 at the time,
but in the kingdom, blood is thicker than water, and breast milk —
well, you get
the idea. Alas, Fahd's companion, Hadian, had not had the pleasure. He was thus
a stranger, his moral rectitude imperiled by the septuagenarian
temptress. Forty
lashes, next case.
It turns out, though, that the week of Ms. Jastaina's conviction for
driving while
female was anything but typical. Only a couple of days earlier, the maestro of
Saudi justice, King Abdullah, decreed that henceforth, Saudi women would enjoy
the right to vote and hold public office. At least, that's how the announcement
was splashed across the West by our Islamophilic media and the kingdom's
network of well-compensated cheerleaders.
Leave it to us party poopers at National Review. On the Corner, the invaluable
Nina Shea, who directs the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom,
pointed out that there is considerably less to Abdullah's edict than meets the
eye.
For one thing, the word "vote" does not appear in it. Instead, women will be
allowed to "participate in the nomination of candidates" in municipal
elections. It
is anything but clear that this equates to a right to vote in
elections. What passes
for "elections" in the Saudi monarchy is a bifurcated procedure in which
candidates first are nominated by amassing a required threshold of support and
later compete in an election. The most sensible interpretation of the decree is
that women will partake in part one but not part two.
As for holding office, women will be permitted to serve on the king's
consultative "Shura Council." Sounds great, except the Shura Council, like the
local councils whose memberships are determined by the aforementioned
municipal elections, has no actual power — which is what you might expect in
an autocracy. The royal decree is window dressing.
And even as window dressing, it may not be authentic. At 88 and in failing
health, Abdullah is essentially non compos mentis. Throughout his more
sentient years, the king's regard for the fairer sex was
unexceptionally Islamist.
Recall his 2002 visit to Pres. George W. Bush's Crawford ranch, when Abdullah's
advance team demanded that all air-traffic controllers directing his
flight and all
airport personnel meeting it be men. (Naturally, the FAA lapdogs complied, and,
once the story inevitably leaked out, the State Department dutifully echoed the
Saudi party line that no such demand had ever been made.) Thus, as Nina
relates, it is widely rumored that an opportunistic royal daughter somehow
finagled the decree out of the daffy old polygamist.
All the more reason to doubt the decree will ever be implemented. The next
Saudi elections are four years away. Abdullah's chances of still being around
then to enforce the diktat are even more iffy than Barack Obama's chances of
remaining the president who debases his office by bowing to Saudi kings. The
sensibilities of Abdullah's putative successor, Prince Nayef, are said
to be of the
mutaween variety. He's unlikely to suffer suffragettes, especially if
the ladies
have to drive to the polls.
The fanfare around the unprecedented non-voting voting announcement is what
made the week atypical. It spotlighted the abundant precedent for whipping
Islamic women — cruelties imposed for engaging in activity so mundane no
Western woman would think of it as "exercising a right."
The regime was sufficiently mortified by the attention it received
that, according
to the BBC, Abdullah has revoked the whipping sentence — not the driving ban
or whipping in general, mind you, just Ms. Jastaina's ten lashes. It is a small
favor to be thankful for. Like the embarrassed retreats that sharia
regimes tend
to beat on those rare occasions when the world takes notice of the persecution
of apostates, homosexuals, and non-Muslims, it shows how craven is the folly of
averting our eyes and biting our tongues when it comes to Islamist, er,
eccentricities.
More interesting, however, were the terms of the American discussion about
political rights in Saudi Arabia. It was as if we were all one big, happy
civilization.
Maybe, some suggested, voting rights are natural and unalienable. In the United
States, of course, we hold the equality of human beings to be
"self-evident." The
Declaration of Independence is explicit on the matter when it comes to
"all Men."
Implicitly, we now recognize that the principle applies to all men and
all women,
regardless of race or creed. Thus, if voting is a foundational right
for one, it
must be for all.
Others countered that unalienable rights are few and sweeping: life,
liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness — but not voting. The overarching principle
of equality
renders this distinction insignificant. Whatever their taxonomy — natural,
constitutional, statutory — we see voting rights as universal. The notion that
they could be granted or denied by a king was rightly seen as a perversion of
equality's premise that the ruler is no greater than the rest of us.
All very nice . . . and utterly beside the point. Saudi Arabia is a
sharia state. In
fact, it is the quintessential sharia state. Most Muslim countries
tout Islam's law
as supreme, but they incorporate other legal codes in tacit acknowledgment of
its deficiencies. Egypt, for instance, mixes sharia with Napoleonic
civil law. In
stark contrast, the Saudi monarchy boasts that its law is the law of
Islam, period.
Sharia needs no patches, because it is Allah's perfect, indivisible
prescription for
living human life.
The vice and virtue with which the mutaween concern themselves are not
reflective of universal values, nor are they meant to be. They are distinctly
Islamic. Sharia is based on Islamic scripture: primarily, the Koran,
the hadith,
and certain biographies of Mohammed deemed authoritative for more than a
millennium. It is not entirely literal and static — there is wiggle room for
jurisprudential interpretation. But neither is sharia what we'd call
dynamic, at
least not in the influential mainstream. The prohibition against
women's driving,
for example, is based on a fatwa issued by the late Abd al-Aziz bin
Abdullah bin
Baz, who was made the kingdom's grand mufti by Abdullah's predecessor, King
Fahd. And why not? As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Sheikh bin Baz is best
known for his 1966 fatwa declaring that the world is flat.
The voting edict, if we are to credit it as such, was not a case of
King Abdullah's
deigning at long last to give women what the West takes to be their due. As
Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques (the cities of Mecca and Medina), Abdullah is
the Muslim ummah's most revered ruler. True to that status, his concern is
limited to what sharia has to say on any given matter — and if it says
something
opposed to Western sensibilities, he emphatically rejects Western
sensibilities.
While American generals, diplomats, and media divas agitate over a Koran's
being torched by an obscure Florida pastor, the Saudi government torches Bibles
every single day as a matter of official sharia-driven policy.
In a Muslim society, women's rights are understood strictly in an
Islamic context.
Western theories about universal precepts are irrelevant. Western
civilization is
not seen as a guide but as a competitor. The mission of classical Islam is to
supersede Western tenets, not adapt to them.
Furthermore, in Islamist ideology, what makes the ruler viable is his
fidelity to
sharia. The Muslim Brotherhood's most influential theoretician, Sayyid
Qutb, put
it plainly: "The ruler in Islamic law is not to be obeyed because of his own
person; he is to be obeyed only by virtue of holding his position
through the law
of Allah and his Messenger." In Saudi Arabia, a woman's testimony is worth half
that of a man. Ditto her inheritance rights. She may marry only one man, while
the man may marry four women. The man may peremptorily divorce his wives —
and he gets custody of the kids.
These are not the king's whims. Abdullah enforces them because they are sharia
strictures derived directly from Islamic scripture. His legitimacy as monarch
hinges on enforcing Allah's rules. And these rules are fixed and knowable.
Anyone can read them in Reliance of the Traveller (Umdat al-Salik), the sharia
manual that has been endorsed by the scholars of al-Azhar University, with the
Saudi government itself certifying the manual's English translation.
There is no outright sharia prohibition against a woman's being given the right
to vote or to hold public office. Islamic scripture, however, plainly
frowns on the
concept of women ruling men. "Men are the protectors and maintainers of
women," says Sura 4:34, "because Allah has given the one more strength than
the other." In the natural order, the verse elaborates, "righteous women are
devoutly obedient" towards men. Those who stray from obedience are to be
disciplined, including by physical beating. Furthermore, a well-known hadith
quotes Mohammed as observing, "A people that leaves its leadership to a
woman will never succeed." Consequently, Reliance explains that a caliph, the
supreme leader of the Muslim community, must be a man — women are not
qualified.
So why not simply ban women from voting or standing for office? The question
exposes a fundamental chasm between Islam and the West that continues to
escape notice. We Americans consider ourselves a free, self-determining people.
Charting our own destiny is how we define ourselves. It is a power we most
openly — even defiantly — express by voting for officials whom we endow with
immense powers to effectuate our will.
In Islam, it is simply not that important. Islamists define themselves by
submission to Allah and his laws. Lawmakers are ministerial functionaries, not
visionaries. The society's destiny has already been charted: It is
divinely enjoined
to make Islam supreme over other systems.
The Muslim Brotherhood's leading jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, is held
in high esteem by the House of Saud. Between fatwas approving suicide
bombings in Israel and the killing of American soldiers in Iraq, he has also
decreed that sharia approves of women's participation in politics. To
his gullible
admirers in Western academe, that is a sign of Qaradawi's nuance and
moderation. In reality, though, his rationale is completely consistent with his
endorsement of women as shahada — jihadist martyrs. In Islam, it is never about
the fulfillment of the individual; it is about what the ummah needs to overcome
its enemies.
For Qaradawi, to defeat a better-equipped foe, it may be necessary for women
to carry out attacks. Similarly, if women are not active in politics
and education
(three of the sheikh's daughters have earned doctorates), those arenas will be
left to secular women and their corrosive Western ideas. Muslim women are
welcome, because they are needed in the fight.
Moreover, when it comes to political rights, the Islamist sees the
stakes as very
low. Qaradawi shrewdly figures that permitting a few female officeholders will
impress the West without creating a danger that the women would actually be
ruling men. More to the point, neither men nor women may make law for
themselves. "Legislation belongs to God," the sheikh teaches. "We only
fill in the
blanks."
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the
author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage
America.
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