Women, The Olympics & Islam

by Tina Trent (Oct. 2008)

Atlanta, 1996

At the Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Olympics, one hypnotically hot day in July, I stood on the pavement outside Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium as two Middle Eastern men angrily snapped photographs of me. Five thousand miles from Iran, a few blocks from my home, five years before 9/11, I came face-to-face with Islamic extremism on a crowded Atlanta sidewalk.

“Death to tyranny! Long live freedom! Long live Iran!”

Unfortunately, the one place where blame for Western silence has landed quite squarely is the one place it should not land at all: on the shoulders of those second-wave feminists who took up the cause of Islamic oppression of women long before 9/11. They might not have won many fights, including the fight with the Iinternational Olympic Committee (O.I.C.), but that is no justification for denying their efforts. Few people have succeeded in overcoming the extreme social forces at work in places like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, not with diplomacy and not with bombs.      

any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.” Atlanta Plus demanded that those countries intentionally excluding women from their teams be barred from participating in the upcoming Atlanta Games. It helped that the Atlanta Games were being promoted as a celebration of that city’s role in the civil rights movement: perhaps the emphasis on ending race segregation would reinforce the message of ending gender segregation at the Games. But that was not the way it worked in Atlanta. In sharp contrast to their response to racial apartheid, the I.O.C. refused to impose penalties on Saudi Arabia or on any other country for practicing gender apartheid.

From Apartheid to Veiling

Although Atlanta Plus was effectively silenced, the I.O.C. recognized that opposition to male-only Islamic teams would not go away. It would need to be defused. No better method existed for accomplishing this goal than playing the “cultural differences” card, or arguing that it was Muslim women who did not want to compete in front of men. If women in Islamic states were shown to be choosing to exclude themselves from participating in the Olympic Games, it would undermine the activism by Muslim women who spoke out for the inclusion of women, necessarily, from the safety of exile in the West. That activism was thus deemed “political” and “anti-Islamic” (the I.O.C.’s official justification for ignoring Atlanta Plus had been that they were specifically targeting Islamic countries), and the voices of women in exile were deemed “inauthentic.”      

The key to this strategy was to shift the debate from gender apartheid to veiling.

By the time athletes marched into the stadium in Beijing alongside the male-only teams from Saudi Arabia, Brunei and the U.A.E, the story had changed again: it was now, “Veiled Athletes Challenge Stereotypes.” It is acceptable to write inspirational stories about athletes competing in sports while veiled. It is acceptable (across the political spectrum) to write articles that positively contrast the presumed modesty of veiled Eastern women to the presumed sexual impropriety of non-veiled, Western women. Laudatory stories are laudatory, so long as they are laudatory about the right things.

Everything in Afghanistan is About Gender

In 2004, an important and overlooked account of “what happens” appeared in Elinor Burkett’s book, So Many Enemies, So Little Time, An American Woman in all the Wrong Places. A month before September 11, Burkett had traveled to Kyrgyzstan to take a Fulbright position teaching journalism. After the attack on the Twin Towers, she struck out from there for Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, reporting on the conditions of ordinary people as she found them. The result was a nearly unique look at Islamic gender oppression from the point of view of an American-born woman. Reviewers predictably praised Burkett for “transcending her own identity” in the course of her travels (the highest conceivable praise), but the book is actually remarkable for an entirely different trait: her prickly insistence on bringing western sensibilities to bear upon the social conditions she witnessed.

pornography in private, and the reaction was identical.

Observed Darabi:

Dr. Homa Darabi

Homa Darabi had once been a prominent child psychiatrist and university professor and had founded a psychiatric clinic in Tehran after returning there from the United States in 1976. Before the 1979 revolution, she was also a member of a movement that opposed the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi because of his regime’s repression of women. But after the Shah was overthrown, she became an outspoken opponent of the new Islamic Republic. Because she refused to observe, or as a doctor, enforce, the rules of hijab, she lost her position at Tehran University and eventually her private practice as well. 

So many perfectly intelligent, bright young girls,” her sister Parvin wrote of that time. 

 

 

Tina Trent is a writer living in Florida

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