Is Phyllis Chesler right?

Thanks to Dreams into Lightning for turning me on to Phyllis Chesler, a feminist, a citizen of the world and an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York.

In the March 7, 2007 edition of the London Times, Chesler tackles the subject of what she calls "sexual and religious apartheid" in the conservative Muslim world in a thoughtful – and provacative - column entitled “How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam”.

Chesler knows of what she speaks. She was married to what she calls a “Westernized Afghan Muslim”, and brought to live in Afghanistan, where things went from bad to worse. And then worse still as her eyes were opened to the very real presence of sexual and religious apartheid.

“Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.”

“I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).“

“Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticize Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colorful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country.”

Synchronicity is surely at work. I’ve been struggling with a lot of issues relative to living here in a fundamentalist, ultra-conservative Muslim country. When I first got to Saudi, I was gobsmacked, romanticizing a culture and people so different than what I’d grown up knowing.

I spent a lot of time looking for – and seeing – the similarities between the women I’d grown up with and the women of this place. And for awhile, that was comforting.

But, as I’ve learned more about life here, as I’ve been exposed to more of the nitty-gritty, I’ve started to see the differences – broad, sweeping, profoundly different differences. I’ve started to question whether if – like geological structures – what lies beneath the common soil is fundamentally dissimilar. Some places are volcanic – born of fire, others are carbon – born of life.

I've started wondering how safe - psychologically, emotionally, spiritually - it is for me as a western woman to be in a a place where women are often seen as less-than, where marriages can be dissolved with a text message and where much of what I see I can not understand or sometimes even stomach.

When I started working through these issues, my husband understood – he’s lived overseas for more than a decade. He told me I needed to come to my own place of peace.

Maybe Chesler’s insights - or at least components of them - are a first step toward that place. She is radical, she is controversial, she is outspoken. Some may call her racist and hate-filled and maybe even as evil as the concepts she attacks. But is there a chance that she is right?

More thoughts on Sexual and Religious Apartheid.

Chesler is the author of several books, including Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness and How Afghan captivity shaped my feminism. : An article from: Middle East Quarterly.