A lot is said these days about the right’s “war on women,” which refers to social conservatives’ attempts to reduce access to abortions and avoid paying for contraceptives and abortifacients in healthcare plans. Whether you agree or disagree with these positions, they are not what this article is primarily concerned with.
Rather, I want to draw attention to a war on women that has continued for a millennia-and-a-half in Muslim-majority countries. This war on women is perpetuated by a religiously motivated mindset that treats women as second-class citizens or even property.
The latest high-profile victim of this damaging cultural value system is a Dutch woman who was raped while vacationing in Qatar this March. After reporting the rape to police, she was immediately arrested for illicit sex and was jailed until last week. The Qatari court convicted her of the crime of sex outside of marriage, which resulted in a $864 fine and deportation. Her attacker was convicted of the same crime and given 100 lashes.
Al Jazeera reported last Monday on the comments of Qatar’s former justice minister Najeeb al-Nuaimi, who said in the interview that something as small as the victim "being seen walking with" the accused could lead to doubts about whether there was really force involved in the encounter or if the actions of both parties were purely voluntary. This is the plight of sexually assaulted women in fundamentalist Islamic societies: Guilty until proven innocent.
Cases like these involving Westerners are not unprecedented: In 2013, a Norwegian woman was sentenced to 16 months in prison after reporting a rape in the United Arab Emirates and was only released after a pardon by the country’s ruler. But these high-profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg of legally enshrined sexism in traditionalist Islamic countries. Countless outrages involving women from these countries go unnoticed by the West.
The issue here is the Islamic tradition of Sharia: A collection of laws and instructions for civil governance derived from the Quran, the sayings of the prophet Muhammed and early Islamic jurisprudence. Sharia is influential in the judicial systems of 15 Islamic countries, while most Islamic countries employ either a secular judicial system or a mixed system in which secular courts are responsible for most decisions, but Sharia covers family law.
Sharia calls for the death penalty for a man convicted of rape, but the requirements to prove guilt are so strenuous that the attacker is seldom convicted. Instead, the perpetrator and victim are usually both charged with sex outside of marriage, which according to Sharia carries the death penalty for a married woman and flogging for unmarried women. In countless incidents, both legal and extrajudicial, in Islamic countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, women are beaten, jailed or killed after being raped.
This is quite obviously a moral outrage. Yet the desire to maintain a politically correct positive image of Islam has muffled Western knowledge and criticism of these despicable crimes. The U.S. is not powerless in the Muslim world. We wield tremendous amounts of money and influence. We need to leverage our resources to change sexist cultural attitudes and bring an end to this institutionalized victim blaming. We must encourage and promote legal and social equality for women in Muslim countries. If we decry the Islamic State’s abominable treatment of women but remain silent on the injustices perpetrated in the Muslim countries considered our allies, we demonstrate what many people in the Muslim world already believe about the U.S. — that we really do not care about them, just our own interests in the region.