No Sisterhood in Islam

by Mary Jackson (March 2009) 

Yvonne Ridley

Phyllis Chesler has commented on the cold indifference with which women in the Muslim world view the barbaric punishments inflicted on those women who transgress the strict and arbitrary “moral” code of Islam. Worse, Muslim women, even in the West, may collude in such punishments. A notorious recent example is Tissie, the mother of Amina and Sarah Said, who dragged the girls back to their father to be shot for being too “Western”. (Atlas Shrugs has more on this case.) The collusion may be indirect: Chesler quotes a study from 1994 by anthropologists Ilsa M. Glazer and Wahiba Abu Ras on the relationship between women’s gossip and honour killings in the Arab world, concluding that: “Women’s gossip creates the climate in which the [honour killing] of a young woman is inevitable.”

those liquid brown eyes. Flawed, but gripping, the film was made in 1991, ten years before, in an inversion of justice, the atrocity of September 11 made it harder to criticise Islam. While the men clearly hold all the cards, and Betty’s Iranian husband is, in accordance with his rights in Islam, a despotic brute, it is an understatement to say that the women are no friends to Betty. Their robotic indifference to her plight is prefigured by this scene, in which the plane first lands in Tehran. Observe, from 4:45 minutes in, the inhuman sound, which you may take at first to be an engine, but which turns out to be ululating, a grotesque trilling emitted by a black flock of women, descending like crows. Fast forward to this scene, at Betty’s daughter’s school. First watch, from 4.10 onwards the cowed fellow American wife, who has betrayed Betty because of her mechanical obedience to her husband, which obedience Islam puts before any compassion or independent thought. Then notice the sinister, smiling women in the school, even more trapped under an Islam they have known all their life. They promise to help Betty by allowing her to bring her daughter in late – enabling her to plot their escape – but betray her again and stand by indifferently when she receives a savage beating from her husband. In their Islamic eyes, this is deserved, for she has “insulted” him. The betrayal is natural too, for deception is allowed in order to spread or enforce Islam. Violence and deception are acceptable; her rights are non-existent; Islam must not be questioned. The husband referred to these women in an earlier scene as “devout”. He is right.

Heather Mac Donald believe that good girls don’t get raped. This idea is undermined above all by Muslim rape victims, who unlike their “slutty” Western sisters, rarely get drunk or flirt, but it gives comfort to those who like to cling to a semblance of control over their lives – and how else can Muslim women do this?

A society that distorts relations between men and women will pervert relations between women too. A society suffused with Islam puts these perverted relations beyond question. Is it surprising, then, that there is no sisterhood in Islam?

To comment on this article, please click here.

To help New English Review to continue to attack sentimental notions about Islam, please click .If you have enjoyed this article, and would like to read other articles by Mary Jackson, click here. 

Mary Jackson contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome