12 August 2010
A review of Princess by Jean Sasson, and a troubling experience of the inculcation of fear of men in Muslim girls
I started writing a review of Princess, a biography of a Saudi princess written by Jean Sasson, but, as the Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, something happened at work very shortly after that prompted me to also turn this into a blog post.
First the book. Princess recounts the life of Saudi Princess, Sultana, from childhood in the 60s to her own motherhood in the 90s. It was lent to my wife by a friend, I casually started reading the blurb and found it so engrossing I was a couple of hundred pages in before I realised the time. This book is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever read and I can say with complete sincerity, unputdownable.
Sultana tells of ritual and absolute oppression by the men of the household and wider society. The men hold untold wealth and absolute power, able to deny or cover up their own offence or justify any/all behaviour as that sanctioned or encouraged by their faith or tradition. The women are denied education (save for reciting the Koran); forced to wear an abaaya (not unlike a burkha, but even more covering) from their first menstruation, which incidentally makes them eligible for marriage to whomever the father chooses usually for simple financial gain; routinely mentally, physically and sexually abused and killed.
The treatment of women is so vile that it is actually difficult to grasp the reality of a woman’s life in this period. Most of this book reads like science fiction set in a whole other world; that it does so, makes the story’s impact all the greater. For someone raised in Britain without really a religious upbringing and only having ‘moderately’ religious friends, I did not know anything like it. Seeing women in a full burkha complete with a metal mask on the streets of Dubai is the closest I’ve ever come to such closeting of women. To quote the book: “those who are free cannot fathom the small victories of those who live on a tether”, and this is simply the princesses response to the unprecedented decision of allowing her to see her fiancé before she married him.
The second strand of the story, on the near limitless wealth of the Saudi royalty, is one less emotional and nearly as interesting. The princess astutely observes how the such wealth, and lack of drive that usually entails, is stagnating progress in oil-rich states; princes live on huge monthly stipends, and women are placated with more jewels, homes and finery than they know what to do with.
This book is a remarkable insight into the role of women in Saudi cultures, but what is also striking is how women hold their oppression and faith in tandem. Sultana praises Mohamed and turns to God and the Koran, which gave us Shariah and yet denounces her faith’s sanctioning of the maltreatment of women . The book begins with the caveat that it does not intend to offend Islam, but routinely demonstrates how, in actuality, what morals can be gleaned from the Koran are routinely ignored by men who’s urges and wallets are beyond control, and it is more truthfully used a manual for the oppression of women.
Princess is set in a period 40 to 20 years ago in Saudi Arabia. Since that time the world has become smaller and the ability of the followers of Sharia law to stifle human rights violations have become tougher than ever. There are still, however, despairingly regular, prominent cases of female oppression, the most recent being the impending execution of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani by Iranian authorities for alleged adultery. The fact that these cases exists, and the international legal wrangling surrounding her proper defence, shows how tenaciously the (male) enforcers of the law have clung to old, repressive traditions and resisted fair, secular values.
Now on to what made me want to write more than just a review of the book. As part of my PhD I routinely perform cognitive assessments on children aged from 4 to 18. On one particular occasion, just a week or so ago, I introduced myself to the patient’s mother, who was a head-scarfed Muslim, and immediately found that she was anxious about the assessments and asked if I was just me administering them. It isn’t unusual for parents or the children to be anxious about being left with strangers to do ‘tests’ in an unfamiliar environment, and we often let parents or guardians sit in the corner in order to help the child relax (as long as they don’t start to sign language answers, which has happened before). In this case, however, the patients were fine but it was anxiety solely on the mother’s part about my being male and left unsupervised with her daughter. Leaving your young daughter in the company of strangers is perhaps a legitimate fear, but this was a research facility in a hospital and was beyond the Stranger Danger stuff you usually teach to kids.
We are normally on a tight schedule on assessment days and run tests in parallel so the mother had to accompany the sibling for the physio tests in another department. She insisted that there be another woman in the room with me during the cognitive assessment and didn’t otherwise feel comfortable with it taking place. Despite the hassle, we acquiesced and managed to get a research assistant to sit in for the duration of each if the 90 minute assessments. It was a frustrating waste of resources to have the nurse just sitting there, but we needed to do our upmost to appease the mother because clinical research participants, particularly from ethnic minorities, are few and far between (an issue for a whole other article).
Having just finished reading Princess only a couple of days beforehand I suppose I was more sensitive of the situation than normal and although I know it has nothing to with me personally, and only a matter of my being male, it is still hard not to take exception to the insinuation. My offence, however, is really a non-issue. What shocked me at the time was that, hard-line Muslim or not, this practice of not leaving a female with a man unaccompanied was still being practiced in the Britain in 2010.
I’m not sure of the root reason for this behaviour. I’ve heard and read different versions from as many sources, but it is categorically unhealthy: it treats men as unrestrained sex-obsessed fiends to be constantly feared, and women as weak, and constantly vulnerable; the girls were barely pubescent and yet they were made acutely aware of their sexuality and that I, men, should not be trusted.
I’m still wrestling with just how big a deal the whole situation was. It falls well outside the remit of my PhD but what I would really like to do is sit down with that woman and ask her why she really feels the need to shield her daughters from male company; what exactly she expects to happen and what might happen in situations where it is not possible to provide a chaperone. What might be even more interesting would be to probe the thoughts of the daughters and how they feel about men, perhaps, being children, they don’t really notice or care as yet.
Mostly I worry about the kind of message she is sending her daughters who are growing up in a liberal and permissive society. These girls are second generation immigrants subjected to an insidious way of making them fear men from childhood. Whilst it’s not quite full on Sharia law, it’s one of these traditions subsumed by it that are easily practiced behind closed doors and I imagine very rarely surfaces as a problem in the wider community, or comes to the attention of people like me who are acutely aware of it.
Daughters of Arabia, Sasson’s follow-up to Princess, concentrates on the Sultana’s Sultana’s daughters and as an heart-wrenching and depressing as I know it’s going to be, I can’t wait to read it.
23 June 2010
Proposal for a Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub Book Swap scheme
I’m a hoarder at the best of times, but I’m even more precious when it comes to books. It’s always been a dream to have my own personal library, big enough that I would need a ladder to climb the shelves. As time’s gone on, The Origin of Species aside, I’ve realized that there are just too many books in the world to spend time reading any of them twice. I’m slowly coming to realize that reading, thinking about and discussing books is more important than having colorful stacks of paper on a shelf. To that end, I’ve become a huge fan of book swapping schemes and I think it would be a great idea to get something like that going for everyone involved in the Birmingham SITP
For those new to it, book swapping is quite simply a way to share books that you’ve read and pick up one’s you haven’t for free. They usually centre around a communal box or shelf, but they can be set up anywhere where there is a pool of people who enjoy reading. It was Book Crossing that first got me interested in freecycling books and since then I’ve been a regular contributor and beneficiary of the book swap scheme at my local train station (I must have swapped over 20 books over the last year or so), and I’ve campaigned unsuccessfully (and I admit only intermittently) for a book swap to be started at Aston – the box posing a fire hazard and it not being ‘in keeping with the university aesthetic’ are two of my favorite reasons for being rebuffed so far.
With public book swap schemes you’re relying on the kindness of strangers and the hope that people don’t just use it to dump their old Jackie Collins’, although one man’s trashy romance novel is of course another’s literary getaway. Hosting a Birmingham SITP book swap will be a chance to swap books of a scientific/skeptical bent. Of course, because the scheme won’t be public in the same way as at a train station, the swaps needn’t be permanent, and people can arrange between themselves to lend books out and get them back as they wish.
Given that the regular monthly meetings are already packed with great speakers, it might be an idea to hold a separate event which would make things closer to a traditional book club. It might also be an idea to post reviews of books that people have read, so that even if you don’t have the book to swap and can’t make the meetings, people can still read recommendations and participate in the scheme more generally. I’d like to kickstart things with a quick review of Richard Wiseman’s Quirkology, which loosely ties in with the talk (‘The psychology of anomalous experiences’ with Professor Chris French on July 14) and is a book I’m happy to donate to a new home.
Quirkology by Richard Wiseman
Quirkology is in a way the perfect book swap book as it’s really interesting but I’m unlikely to want to read it again anytime soon. It’s one of the better collections of pop-psychology books stuffing shelves (or Amazon warehouses) at the moment, largely down to Richard Wiseman’s obvious love of the work and direct involvement in some of the studies.
There are a number of retreads of studies that you’ll have come across if you’ve read any other pop-psychology (Milgram etc.) but it’s a great gateway to some of the methods and fallacies in psychological research, written in an easy, accessible style. ‘Believing six impossible things before breakfast’ is a great, if slightly disconcerting, chapter on the psychology of superstition. The search for the world’s funniest joke is probably the highlight and the worldwide eradication of FTSE-itis is very clever, taking full self-knowing advantage of the psychology that fills some of the book.
It’s a good book to dip in an out of, written by a psychologist who’s doing a lot to make science and psychology fun and engaging.
01 June 2010
My reviews
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road is ostensibly about a man and boy surviving day to day following an untold apocalyptic event that has left the world barren and shrouded in darkness. They are attempting to find salvation by reaching the coast, all the while battling the elements, crippling hunger, other survivors and the voice in their heads saying that they’d just be better off dead.
McCarthy pared down prose echoes the landscape in a way that is at first very difficult to get used but then becomes integral to experience of reading this book. Some of the passages truly are poetic. This book is an example of when less can be infinitely more; when what isn’t said or described is almost more important than what is. This is goes even as far as leaving the characters nameless. It’s a subtle way of allowing ‘the man’ to be any man; it’s not Bob Smith wandering the around, it could be anyone – including you. It doesn’t matter what his name is because it says nothing about who he is at the world’s end.
The simplicity of the sentences belies the complexity of story and the skill of writer and this meticulously realised post-apocalyptic hell feels all too plausible given the current way of the real world. The words bleak and unforgiving in no way do justice to this book. The unremitting misery of the character’s fight for survival can feel as choking as the foul air that they are breathing, but beneath the desperation is a story of true love and hope. There is a touching balance and inter-dependence between innocence of the boy, who has known no other world than the one buried under ash, and the father, who knows full well how it will all end.
The book has a lot to say on our relationship with the world, and particularly man’s drive for survival and proclivity for searching for meaning, when all meaning appears lost. The story works best when it is just the man and boy making their way along the road; I found that some of the subtleties of the meditations on life and god are lost on occasions where they bump into strangers and ‘the message’ seems a little shoe-horned in. That said, these encounters managed to convey more on what it is to be human than countless other entire books.
The end left me with a strong mix of heavily conflicting feelings, and I know that most will not be happy with it for one reason or other. I for one have no idea how I would have wanted it to end, probably because. This book will really stay with me for a long time because it is the first that has ever made me genuinely cry from having really cared about the characters, and for that, I can’t praise it enough.
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
In the End of Faith Sam Harries argues that we are reaching a point where essentially religion will be the end of us all, unless secular atheists stand up to fundamentalist and moderate religionists alike.
This book, literally, starts with bang, and Harris doesn’t really let up for the rest of the book in an almost relentless barrage of arguments and ideas laying pretty much all the world’s ills at the doorstep of religion, and in a post 9/11 world, Islam in particular – an entire chapter is devoted to The Problem with Islam, and 4 pages to quotes from the Koran advocating violence against unbelievers.
There is definitely a need for this kind of book, which is not afraid to skirt around difficult issues, and ignores the trend for diffidence in the majority of books dealing with the problems faced in a world where religious proponents hold a great deal of sway over the lives of many.
Harris certainly has the courage of his convictions; the book is very strongly worded and definitely falls into the ‘militant atheist’ camp (although I really hate that phrase). Whilst, largely, well argued, some of the book will not sit well with some, particularly the advocacy of torture, futility of pacifism and essentially fighting fire with fire.
I enjoyed the section on the empiricism of Mysticism and the need and justification for claiming spirituality as something which is compatible with a rational, atheistic outlook, but found the majority of the book a little scatter-gun in its approach.
The End of Faith is full of great pithy, quotable one liners, but I found it lacking as a cohesive argument, however forcefully it was argued.
Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk
In a sense this is very much what you would expect of a Chuck Palahniuk novel: inventive narration (more of which later), outlandish characterisation, gratuitous sex and violence and biting, if a little heavy handed, satire.
The story is told in the Pidgin English of a child terrorist agent from an unknown communist state, who has been dispatched to America to infiltrate an all American family and commit an act of terrorism designed to bring the country to it’s knees.
First things first: the narrative. Using broken English allows Palahniuk to ignore any form of subtlety (which has never been too much of a concern for him anyway) and be nothing less than brutal in sending up Western consumerism and American culture. The language does take a while to get use to; the tone is a little uneven, and I found it took longer to read than most novels because I was constantly re-reading passages in order to make sense of them. I didn’t mind this too much however as on the whole I thought it worked very well and was quite cleverly used.
However, revealing the story as a series of reports back to the homeland doesn’t really work when we have to recap events the precede the visit to America in order to get some back story on the character – it was an unnecessary distraction from the story, and as I’ve written in other reviews of Palahniuk’s books, just one idea too many.
It says a lot for the book it is the language rather than the story itself that has driven much of this review, which is shame a because I actually really enjoyed it. Pygmy makes for a pretty complex character despite the mechanised personality drummed into him, and there is a palpable sense of tension and Operation Havoc draws near. The trials and tribulations of the adoptive family make for great, if at times cartoonish, reading.
Spoiler alert!
Some of the violence is just half a step away from being too far; the encounter between Pygmy and the clear-yellow bully makes for brutal reading, but then, through the eyes of Pygmy, the massacre in the gym takes on an almost comical tone.
Spoiler ends
The jacket describes the book as a comedy, which might be a bit of a stretch, although it did score a pretty high wry-smile count. An excellent take on Western imperialism and his finest book since Fight Club, but that’s not the ringing endorsement it should be, given some of the uneven dross in between.
The Gum Thief
by Douglas Coupland
Written as a series of letters between two employees at a Staples stationary outlet (and later various members of their friends and families), this is a story of one man’s battle with himself and his mid-life crisis and a young goth finding out who she is under all her make up.
It’s touching and clever as the beginning of the book unfolds as letters between the two main characters, but the novel falls apart as more and more letters are flying around in order to incorporate more characters in to the mix; it all becomes a little unbelievable.
I normally hate stories within a story as they’re usually too knowing for their own good but I really enjoyed them here, Glove Pond and Toast are fantastic swipes at the pretensions that drown writers.
The book is full of neat observations; one of the character’s musings on what it means to be you and what part of ‘you’ is alive are brilliant, but it’s also littered with unnecessary ‘zeitgeisty’ references to google and youtube, which feel a little contrived and like Coupland is clutching for something that made Generation X so good.
8 September 2010
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