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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.
30 May 2010
Why and How I started the Aston Humanist Society
I’m am now in my eighth year at Aston University and well into the final year of my PhD. I founded the Aston Humanist Society in February 2009, quite simply because there wasn’t a society anything like it that I could join myself – perhaps the idiom that ‘getting atheists together was like trying to herd cats’ had put off anyone who had tried to start an non-theist society before me. I’m not even sure what took me so long to get round to it, perhaps my PhD finally wasn’t keeping me as busy as my supervisor would have liked.
Of the 48 social societies at Aston University, there are nine religious ones, including all the biggies: Islamic Soc, Hindu Soc, Christian Union, Sikh Soc, Jewish Soc (although there are many more denominations who are not officially listed with the Student Union); it’s a good reflection of the multicultural environment that the university is well known for. What the list of societies doesn’t reflect, however, is that there also are many students who lead a secular life that would enjoy meeting like minded people too.
Having decided to take action, I faced two bit problems: deciding what the society was actually about and almost as importantly what to call it. Like the SITP groups, but unlike religious societies or the increasing number of nationality/culture-based societies at Aston, there was no pre-formed idea of what you had to be/know in order to join. Because there was no precedent, I set the society up to be some nebulous idea of what I thought was missing: an open forum promoting values such as freedom of expression, and scientific and personal inquiry, centred around free discussion of philosophy, politics, science, religion and history.
I have could just have easily called it the Aston Secular/Rationalist/Skeptics Society (or the slightly more fun Thinkers-Not-Drinkers), but settled on Humanist simply because I am one, and I feel that humanism neatly captures the secular/rational vibe I was aiming for. Lots of people are essentially humanists, but just don’t know the term or decide not to call themselves by such a name – I guess the trouble with people who insist on thinking for themselves is that don’t usually like being labelled! I deliberately steered clear of ‘atheist’ as it has (sadly) come to have connotations of exclusivity and I didn’t want anyone to think that the group had an anti-theist agenda and be put off from joining.
It was more than just a riposte to all the religious groups, although I must admit that walking past ‘boarding the Jesus Train, WOOP WOOP!’ and ‘Obligatory Islamic Knowledge’ posters on my way to the office every morning had a little something to do with it. Starting the Aston Humanist Society was my taking a pro-active response to something else that had been bothering me throughout my studies. Without (I hope) sounding too high-minded, I was increasingly bothered by what I saw, and still see, as a pervasive culture of having ‘just enough education to perform’ at university. I know that for some, being at university is about getting a degree and then getting a job; no more, no less, and it is not really my place to judge that ambition. I think AC Grayling eloquently captures exactly how I feel (as he almost invariably does) in this quote from a short essay on Education.
“Liberal education is a vanishing ideal in the contemporary West, most notably in its Anglophone regions. Education is mainly restricted to the young and is no longer liberal education as much as something less ambitious and too exclusively geared to specific aims – otherwise, of course, very important – of employability. This is a loss; for the aim of liberal education is to produce people who go on learning after their formal education has ceased; who think and question, and know how to find answers when they need them. This is especially significant in the case of political and moral dilemmas in society, which will always occur and will always have to be negotiated afresh; so members of a community cannot afford to be unreflective and ill-informed if civil society is to be sustainable [my italics] … People who are better informed and more reflective are more likely to be considerate than those who are – and who are allowed to remain – ignorant, narrow-minded, selfish, and uncivil in the profound sense that characterises so much of human experience now”.To help make getting the group started I was lucky enough to have had the help of a number of organisations. Happenstance meant that I decided to start the group at the very same time that The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist & Secular Student Societies was being launched. I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural event, speak to lots of other societies, get a ‘starting a student society’ help pack, and even get some helpful advice from Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling. I also joined the Secular Portal which was a great way of getting in touch with other secular students, and sharing practical ideas, and managed to rope in the Birmingham Humanists to help out with our Fresher’s Fair recruitment stall at the start of this academic year. The brilliant cartoonist Thad Guy was also kind enough to let us use his images for posters and flyers.
We’ve held weekly meetings which have attempted to try and answer, or at least think about, some of the questions that god wasn’t going to answer for us: “How do we deal with the involvement of religion in major health issues, namely the Pope and his reigniting of the condoms/Aids situation”, “Should we treat paedophiles and criminals or mentally ill?”, “Trust in doctors or trust in god: how should society deal with clashes between people’s beliefs and medical ethics?” and “Do criminals should have the right to vote?”. None of these questions were going to help anyone pass their degrees directly, but I’d like to think that everyone benefited from the critical thinking and discussion that took place. I certainly left each meeting feeling a little more enlightened and with a lot more to think about.
We’ve also worked in collaboration with the Birmingham SITP on a couple of occasions and hosted both Ariene Sherine and Rebecca Watson for special ‘Skeptics in the Classroom’ meetings, held fund raising AmnesTEA parties, the Aston Happy Humanist team raised over £500 for the Cancer Research UK Relay for Life and we’re working with Aston’s Environment and Sustainability office to sponsor a university-wide bookswap scheme to promote the pleasures of environmentalism and reading.
It started out as just a few of my friends meeting in the university bar, but over the last year and a half the AHS I would like to think that the AHS has been a success and achieved at least some of its lofty ambition. We have over 70 members on Facebook, more than 30 paid up members and around 10 people at each of our weekly meetings, which is apparently good going for all but the very biggest, well established societies at Aston.
As student society (although staff members have also attended meetings), the nearing end of the 2009-10 academic year, and soon my PhD, has meant that the society has started winding down. I’m not sure where I’ll end up once my PhD is over, but if there isn’t a society to join, I’ll use this experience to just start another one. The ubiquity of social networking now makes starting and maintaining societies much easier. Very recently I’ve been following the progress of Alice Sheppard (aka PenguinGalaxy on Twitter) as they set up a STIP in Wales. Her blog post, coincidentally written at the same time as mine, echoes many of my feelings, although she has a tougher job given the scale of the group.
I hope that I have at least laid the foundations of some form of secular society at Aston; whether it remains a humanist society once I’m gone is irrelevant, as long as a bunch of students get together in some form or other discuss the world around them, for no other reason than because they want to think for themselves and learn what others have to say.
27 February 2010
We have a new look!
Sajid kindly installed a new version of Textpattern for us, and yesterday I installed this new theme. I really like it!
It’s nice to have a bit of change, and the old theme had been around for a while. This theme is also a bit more masculine, which I hope will inspire Tulpesh to get more involved.
We can change the photo and the colours, so we might experiment with different versions of this theme.
What do you think?
10 September 2010
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