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Yesterday I wrote about Nujood Ali, the ten-year-old girl who demanded and received a landmark divorce from her husband–a man three times older than his young bride, a man who raped and battered her day after day and night after night. This all took place in Yemen.
Nujood in court with attorney Shada Nasser, her husband Faez (left) and father Mohammed (right).
What happened was not unusual. Rather, such behavior is normative, common, expected.
Today, I would like to focus on the behavior of Nujood’s former mother-in-law. She is the one who egged her son on and who savagely policed Nujood in her husband’s absence. The mother-in-law encouraged her son to beat Nujood: “Hit even harder, she must listen to you.” In addition, during the day, she guarded Nujood, who wanted to go out and play with other children. Her mother-in-law scolded her. “Impossible! A married woman cannot allow herself to be seen with just anyone–that’s all we need, for you to go ruining our reputation.”
I am not surprised. I experienced a mini-version of this mother-in-law/daughter-in-law scenario in Kabul. I also saw my former mother-in-law mistreat her female servants. (In her defense, I must say that her life was exceedingly bitter and it may have maddened her).
Nujood begged her own family to rescue her. They flatly refused. They told her that “all women go through this and that she had no choice but to return and obey her husband.” This is entirely normative behavior. (By the way, this brings to mind one of the false allegations made by the Lancet researchers who claimed that if Israel had not blocked the roads, the families of battered Palestinian women would rush to their side to rescue them). Alas, their families would probably sound like Nujood Ali’s family.
I have described such female-female cruelties in two of my books: Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman and in The Death of Feminism. Notoriously, in India, mothers-in-law collaborate in the “dowry” burning deaths of their daughters-in-law. They want a new bride who will bring a new dowry. Women all over Africa are in charge of genitally mutilating their own daughters and granddaughters. Women also collaborate in the honor killings of their female relatives. In one such case (which took place in St. Louis, Missouri in 1989, and not in the family’s West Bank home), Palestina Isa’s sisters egged their father on to kill the sixteen-year-old girl whose independent ways might ruin their own children’s chances for a good marriage. Women often enforce the Islamic Veil; arranged marriages too.
Woman’s support of the patriarchal status quo is not unique to Nujood’s Yemen or to the Muslim or African world. It exists in the West. Like men, women have also internalized sexist standards; in addition, women are permitted to compete and aggress against other women, not against men. Thus, women everywhere are biased against women whom they judge, envy, police, and often betray.
In the United States, prosecutors do not always want women on the jury when they are trying a rape case or a case in which a battered woman has killed her batterer in self defense. Female jurors are not always as sympathetic as male jurors in such cases. Also, when it comes to custody battles, women judges, lawyers, and mental health professionals are unexpectedly harsh to mothers, far kinder to fathers–especially to charming sociopathic fathers. (Good fathers are often treated as badly as good mothers are).
However, what’s different is that, in the West, the status quo is, in general, kinder and more just to women. In the Arab and Muslim world, as well as in the African developing world, the status quo is breathtakingly barbaric and heartbreaking. This is why the heroism of someone like Nujood Ali is unique, miraculous, but constitutes a strong and steady signal that America’s foreign policy initiatives must involve girls and women.
This is true in terms of outreach to immigrant communities in both Europe and America.
Heroic Muslim Girls and Women: Missionaries to Feminist America?
By now, we have all heard about Nujood Ali, the incredibly heroic ten year girl in Yemen who fled her abusive husband and demanded a divorce. This act was the first of its kind in a country where girls as young as eight are given away in marriage.
Nujood Ali
We want her as an ally. We want her counterparts in the Muslim world as allies. We want Mukhtaran Bibi on our side. She is the young Pakistani woman who was gang-raped by her alleged social superiors in order to cover up their other crimes. She escaped. She was not silenced by shame. She did not kill herself. Unlike Phoolan Devi, India’s Bandit Queen (a girl after my own heart), Bibi did not join a gang of outlaws and then exact personal revenge. Despite numerous death threats, Mukhtaran Bibi legally pursued the criminals–and won.
Mukhtaran Bibi
Personally, I wish we had more women like Nujood Ali, Mukhtaran Bibi (alright, like Phoolan Devi too) right here. Their bravery is astounding. Although they have much to lose (their lives for starters), they also have much to gain since they are debased from morning to night from the moment of their birth.
Now, Nujood Ali has written a memoir: I Am Nujood: Age 10 and Divorced.
Go to Amazon. You will read this:
“I’m a simple village girl who has always obeyed the orders of my father and brothers. Since forever, I have learned to say yes to everything. Today I have decided to say no.”
Forced by her father to marry a man three times her age, young Nujood Ali was sent away from her parents and beloved sisters and made to live with her husband and his family in an isolated village in rural Yemen. There she suffered daily from physical and emotional abuse by her mother-in-law and nightly at the rough hands of her spouse. Flouting his oath to wait to have sexual relations with Nujood until she was no longer a child, he took her virginity on their wedding night. She was only ten years old.
Unable to endure the pain and distress any longer, Nujood fled—not for home, but to the courthouse of the capital, paying for a taxi ride with a few precious coins of bread money. When a renowned Yemeni lawyer, (Shada Nasser) heard about the young victim, she took on Nujood’s case and fought the archaic system in a country where almost half the girls are married while still under the legal age. Since their unprecedented victory in April 2008, Nujood’s courageous defiance of both Yemeni customs and her own family has attracted a storm of international attention.
The upcoming National Women’s Studies Association should invite Ali and Bibi to keynote their convention in Denver later this year. Their program concerns “Difficult Dialogues” and features panels on “Indigenous Feminisms,” “The Politics of Nation,” “Outsider Feminisms,” and the “Critical and the Creative.” They wish to re-position “violence against women” by taking into consideration “nationalism, militarism, religious fundamentalism, land rights, war,” etc. They also wish to “effectively challenge nationalistic rescue narratives within and outside the U.S. (i.e. ’saving’ Muslim women under the Taliban as a justification for US invasion)?”
Ahem. That is not why America invaded Afghanistan.
Still, I think that Nujood and Bibi would genuinely qualify for and would illuminate, even bless, this gathering of American Women’s Studies professors and students.
