“It’s not left or right, it is right or wrong” March 5, 2023 Roger Ray
Time Magazine, Dec. 8, 2022
By Azadeh Moaveni https://time.com/heroes-of-the-year-2022-women-of-iran/
These younger women are now in the streets. The movement they’re leading is educated, liberal, secular, raised on higher expectations, and desperate for normality: college and foreign travel, decent jobs, rule of law, access to the Apple Store, a meaningful role in politics, the freedom to say and wear whatever. They are quite unlike those who came before them; sometimes they feel more like transnational Gen Z than Iranians: they are vegans, they de-Islamicize their names, they don’t want children. I’ve often wondered what has made them so rebellious, because their ferocious character was evident well before 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini, arrested at a metro station by the morality police who enforce the dress code, died after being held in their custody on Sept. 16, setting off the most sustained uprising in the 43-year history of the Islamic Republic. The average age of arrested protesters is notably low—Iranian officials estimate as young as 15. I can only conclude that when a generation’s aspirations for freedom appear tantalizingly within reach, the more humiliating the remaining restrictions seem, and the less daunting the final stretch of resistance feels.
In 2008, Morning Joe co-host, Mika Brzezinski discovered that the man sitting next to her, Joe Scarborough, was being paid 14 times as much as she was. He started the show, it was named for him, but when she considered how much she contributed to the show and how big the difference in their pay was - Joe was getting, not just twice as much and not even ten times as much, but 14 times her salary, she was furious.
Initially she may have been angry at MSNBC for exploiting her but she came to believe that the problem was actually with her. Somehow, she had not advocated for herself. She was so happy to land a position on a national news show that she failed to recognize her own value to the very successful program.
There are a lot of twists and turns to this story line. Joe and Mika eventually divorced their respective spouses and married each other but before that, Mika negotiated a much more equitable contract. Don’t feel sorry for her, Joe makes $13 million a year and Mika now makes $10 million. . . and I don’t mind saying that I think they are both horribly over paid, but the only reason I bring this up is that Mika took her story on as a cause for other women. She wrote the book, Know Your Value, and she has held annual conferences for encouraging women to have the self-confidence and courage to demand fair treatment.
I have always been entirely sympathetic with her cause, even though I have reservations about having a multi-millionaire blue-blood spokesperson for the downtrodden women in the world. But her movement got my attention recently when it was announced that this year’s Know Your Value conference will take place in Abu Dhabi. Now your talking! These conferences always feature top-notch keynote speakers but taking a women’s rights event to a Muslim country has made me forgive Mika for a lot of her years of “high school cheerleader” style of reporting the news.
Now, Abu Dhabi is no Saudi Arabia. They are not an extremist Muslim nation, or this conference couldn’t be hosted there. They have, in fact, tried to model religious harmony and have even built an interfaith center which hosts Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu congregations. Still, to take a very feminist conference into a Persian Gulf state is exactly what this world needs right now.
If you have been listening to my sermons for very long, you know that I am convinced that all of the world’s major religions are due for a modern
Reformation. In fact, the term for the 16th century reformation was “Protestant,” literally, “those in protest.” All of the world’s religions have undergone reformations in the past, when enough people are brave enough to protest the status quo. In terms of misogyny and homophobia and the promotion of radicals who embrace terrorism, Islam is in sore need of reform.
We liberals prize freedom of religion as well as tolerance of differences. At one level, we are trying to fight against any reflexive xenophobia by insisting that differences in apparel or diet should not be alarming to us. I’ve even seen a meme that compares women wearing the hijab to Catholic nuns wearing a habit. This classic “whataboutism” argument falls apart pretty quickly upon examination. This what we call, in philosophy, a tu quoque fallacy. Ignoring the the original issue of the oppression of women in Muslim states by saying that Christians do the same thing. Granted, the Catholic Church is very patriarchal and is so misogynist that they constantly praise virginity and deny women any role of ordained leadership in their church. However, in spite of the fact that Catholics and Evangelicals keep trying to impose their values on the whole of our population, and they have succeeded in overturning Roe v Wade, still, we mostly maintain individual choice in this country. And, I am convinced, these recent backwards steps are the last gasps of a dying and out of date form of Christianity.
Still, Catholics, as backward as they are, cannot rationally be contrasted with Islam as it is institutionalized in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. There are 350 million people in this country and fewer than 50,000 of us are Catholic nuns and more than half of them no longer wear a habit. And every single one of them chose to enter holy orders, no one made them become a nun and in most convents, street clothes are the accepted norm.
In more conservative Muslim states, total covering of a woman’s body in public is the law. We are all familiar with the case of the 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody last fall after being arrested for improperly wearing her head covering, allowing some of her hair to be seen in public. Most women in Iran didn’t choose this, the extreme laws that regulate how women must appear in public is a product of the Islamic revolution of the early 70’s.
Prior to the revolution, Iran was a country with a moderate form of Islam and women were very fashion conscious and there were as many mini-skirts in Tehran as there were in New York City.
50 years later, the strict dress code and rules that restrict women’s education and careers are still in place, but they are beginning to be challenged.
My complaint against my progressive peers is that standing under a banner of tolerance, we have defended the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab without seriously questioning whether those women want to be wearing a hijab. Freedom of religion also includes the option of freedom from religion.
Many of you know that I have just returned from an extended winter vacation in Thailand on the tropical island of Phuket.
Thailand is a largely Buddhist nation with a Buddhist royal family, but they have a significant Muslim minority population. It was not difficult to spot the Muslims on the beach. But you have to wonder, even in a country that legally provides for religious diversity, did this woman choose to wear a hijab in the heat and humidity of a tropical beach, or is this a standard imposed upon her by her faith community and her family?
I have heard the comedian, Bill Mahr, say several times, “You can despise Donald Trump, but you can’t despise all of the people who vote for Trump.” And my gut reaction to hearing that is to just say to Bill, “Here, hold my beer.” But what about all of the women who still go to Catholic mass every week? Why do these intelligent, educated, professional women still attend, contribute to, and support a patriarchal, misogynist religion when they wouldn’t tolerate that kind of oppression in their home or their workplace?
It is difficult for most people to think beyond the limitations of their environment. I was eleven years old when the public schools were integrated in my hometown in rural Kentucky. I can honestly tell you that prior to my first day in fifth grade, I didn’t even know that I had been attending a segregated school.
I didn’t even know that there was a “colored” school in Glasgow. It had not occurred to me that I had not seen any black kids, that I knew from surrounding farms, in my school.
Indoctrination is not always conscious. My older brother still does not understand why I am so mad at him for being a Trump supporter. And in the one conversation we had about it in 2016, I pointed out to him that my daughter is a brown immigrant and the couple I always bring to breakfast when I meet him in Birmingham for breakfast are both women and yet he voted to take away the rights of my friends and to encourage prejudices against my daughter. I mean, I have disdain for Trump on moral grounds, but I made it very specific and personal in my conversation with my brother, and his reply was, “We shouldn’t let politics come between us.” And I replied, “Neither my daughter nor the civil rights of my friends are matters of politics, this is about ethics.” And that was the last time we have talked. This is not about left and right, this is about right and wrong.
As I have often said through the years, if you are morally opposed to same sex marriage, then just don’t marry someone of the same gender. However, your religious views should have no authority over the choice of others. If your religion teaches you that abortion is a sin, then maybe you shouldn’t get an abortion. The problem is when you try to legislate your religious values for everyone and, frankly, I think it is a problem to brainwash your own kids into that kind of subjugation, but that is a much more complex issue.
There is misogyny and patriarchalism in all of the world’s religions and, of the big five: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, Islam is the youngest and might logically be expected to be the most progressive, but the opposite is true. The other four religions have successes and failures in their attempts at modernization but progressives among the Islamic faith are still far too few.
This is anecdotal but, in some ways, not a surprising illustration of my point:
In 2008 the 34-year-old Italian artist, Pippa Bacca,
set out to make a statement of tolerance and trust by hitchhiking, wearing a wedding dress, across the Middle East. Her intention was to go from Istanbul to Jerusalem, but she was raped and murdered before she ever got out of Turkey. As you can see, her wedding dress was modest, it just wasn’t a hajib. And I know all too well that women are raped and sometimes murdered by strangers in Europe and America as well, it is just that Pippa’s death was rather more predictable.
It isn’t universal but there is a mentality among Muslim men that insists that women are supposed to keep them from being sexually aroused and if you show too much of your face and hair, or if you travel unaccompanied by a man, that you are basically asking for whatever happens to you and that, I submit, is not a matter of religion, that is a matter of ethics. It isn’t about being right or left on the political or religious spectrum, it is about right and wrong.
I love the song by the Haymarket Squares that says, “These are not opinions, I am right, and you are wrong.” The chorus repeats:
Who the hell are you to deny
Your fellow man his human rights?
Nobody says that you have to agree
But you have to let others be free
A saying that was common among Christian reformers of the 19th century was, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.” We don’t often agree on the line between essentials and non-essentials but whatever else we may debate, individual freedom is a line I can’t cross. Your religion cannot dictate the sexual orientation of others, your beliefs cannot take civil or reproductive rights away from women. Not as a government nor as a family. If it isn’t obvious, there is no such thing as an “honor killing.”
Just last month, the popular YouTuber, 22 year-old Tiba Albi, was strangled to death by her father because he deemed her YouTube videos to be an embarrassment to her family. What could be more dishonorable than killing a member of your own family because they refuse to be bound by your religious beliefs?
Any religion that makes such horrible crimes normal in any way must change or die itself.
We have an audiology professor at MSU who is a very active Muslim who regularly speaks locally in defense of Muslim beliefs. I have attended some of her talks and she will seriously try to defend the tradition of giving women only half of the inheritance that sons receive because men have to support a family. As if there were no Muslim single mothers.
And she defends women having to stay in the back of the mosque because, she explains, “You can’t expect men to look up and see a bunch of women bowing with their behinds in the air,” as if a woman, even fully covered, in that position, would drive a man into a mating frenzy.
I certainly respect any woman’s decision to be modest, if that is her choice, but to suggest that a woman bending over, or not covering her hair, is a provocation to men, well, I think it is obvious that the shoe is on the wrong foot here. Men need to choose to not be rapists.
Martin Luther King, Jr. often repeated the injunction that people should stand up straight because no one can ride on your back unless you bend over for them. “Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.”
I don’t want to blame the victims here but, the only way that these regimes can continue to oppress women in this way is if most of them complacently go along with it. You cannot stand idly by and expect oppressors to suddenly see the error of their ways and become liberators.
In December, Time Magazine chose to honor the women of Iran as their “heroes of the year” because, in the wake of the death of Masha Amini, many Iranian women just started to refuse the restrictions of the morality police. They
The government’s violent crackdown was anticipated, but even though more than 400 protestors have been killed and thousands have been jailed, these public acts of defiance continue as the women of Iran begin to stand up for themselves.
