International capitalism, and a resurgent religious fundamentalism, combine to further oppress women, argues Nawal El-Saadawi I am writing this paper sitting at my kitchen table in Cairo. It is 11 January 2004. The grey light of dawn has not yet spread over the sky. I was awakened by the call to prayer shouted out over the sleeping city by tens of microphones hanging from the minarets of mosques in the popular district of Shoubra where the majority are Christian followers of the Orthodox Coptic Church. The number of these microphones has multiplied steadily during the past three decades with the rapid rise in the number of mosques built with money from the petrol rich Gulf countries or from Egyptians who have spent many years working there. They constitute the middle and upper class conservative backbone of the Islamic fundamentalist movement in Egypt and the Arab countries, its main economic and political force. The call to prayer, when I first heard it as a child, was beautiful to hear. It wafted over the city in soft and sometimes musical tones. Now it has become a cacophony of strident voices, a threatening call shot through with violence. The call to prayer, the sermons and religious teachings pouring out in an incessant stream of loud and angry voices from 90,000 microphones spread over the country encroaching on people's right to rest and to silence are a form of war. This is one of the many wars unleashed on millions of peaceful people since Sadat came to power in 1971 and reopened the doors to American neo- imperialism. It was Sadat, in agreement with the US administration of Nixon and Kissinger, who encouraged and supported the political movement of Islamic fundamentalism, helped it to flourish and grow. It was Sadat who reversed the policies of Nasser, and paved the way for the World Bank, for foreign multi- national capital, and for Islamic fundamentalism. He needed an internal ally, the support of a political, economic, and cultural Islamic movement to fight against the democratic and more socially oriented parties and movements which opposed his policies. It was in this way that during his regime international capital, spearheaded by the US in alliance with the ruling class, reimposed its domination on women, men and children and paved its way under the guise of restoring the values and practices of Islam, of Islamic traditions and of the family unit as basic to the health and prosperity of society. The multinationals and their intermediaries hid behind the cloak of Islam, of a revived religious fundamentalism. This was a war on the mind of people, a campaign launched to control and domesticate their thinking, a religious brainwashing required to facilitate and hide what capital was planning to do with their land and with their lives. This war on the mind is a global phenomenon. The growing influence exercised by political fundamentalist movements is a development that has taken place in many countries in both the East and the West. The invasion of Iraq in 1991 led to more than 150,000 deaths, most of them women and children. The 13 years of economic embargo enforced on that country, mainly under American and British pressure, led to two million deaths, most of them children and women, always the first victims of scarcity and hunger in patriarchal societies. Continued Israeli military aggression against civilian populations in Palestine is taking a heavy toll on the lives and health of women and children. To prevent women from fighting back against war and increased exploitation their organisations must be dissolved when they arise, as has happened so often. More effective is to prevent them from arising by draconian laws such as the law on associations promulgated two years ago in Egypt. But perhaps best of all is to prevent them from thinking of change, of organising for change, of seeking ways to resist. Hence the repeated banning of books and articles, TV programmes discussing the situation of women, criticising religious fundamentalist thought, exposing patriarchal values and practices, extolling democracy -- real democracy and not the electoral farce of capitalist pluralism -- or defending the rights of women. Hence also the vicious attacks, the accusations of apostasy, the threats of physical assassination and the campaigns of character assassination launched against public figures, writers, journalists or activists, whether women or men, who dare to defend the rights of women. It is a ferocious war waged against the minds of both women and men, but especially women because it is only women who can liberate women and in so doing constitute a tremendous force for the liberation of society as a whole. In this war women are besieged by a double pincer assault -- that of corporate consumerism and the free market on the one hand, and religious political fundamentalism on the other: ostensibly at odds they actually combine to maintain the subjugation of women, to control their minds and their bodies by patriarchal imprisonment, veiling and domestication. In our own region, though, the most dangerous and pervasive forces in the war on women's minds are those of political religious fundamentalism. It serves to conceal, to perpetuate, to reinforce and to rationalise the economic, political, social and cultural exploitation of international corporate capital and US imperialism. Countries like ours are described as poor or backward or Third World. We are not poor. Arab countries are among the richest countries of the world due to their immense natural and human resources. But their riches in labour, mineral, fossil or other resources continue to be poured into the pipe lines of foreign plunder by the capitalist, corporate World Bank, World Trade Organisation free market mechanisms of unequal trade balances, foreign debt, speculation, currency devaluation and exchange, structural adjustment and investment policies. A military and economic war, a trade in arms, in human beings, an economic genocide continues to drain the life blood of our lands. In Egypt poverty has increased at an alarming rate as a result of open door free market policies, and privatisation of industry as well as of many services. Over 40 per cent of the population, mainly women and children, live under the poverty line of $2 a day. The feminisation of poverty is visible everywhere. Five million women are occupied as small producers in workshops, in services, trade etc. Their monthly income often does not exceed $40 per month for a working day of 10 hours. Their lot is almost always worse than that of men because they are unorganised and have little political power or representation. They constitute only two per cent of the members in the People's Assembly and only one per cent of the members of local assemblies, district and village councils. In my own life-time I have lived through seven wars and now I am the horrified witness of Israeli massacres in Palestine and the American and British massacres carried out by the occupation forces in Iraq. Women and children are the weakest section of our populations, the first and the most numerous victims of these massacres. In my village Kafr Tahla many women continue to wear mourning for fathers, brothers, husbands or other relatives killed in war. Many of them find it hard to feed themselves after the loss of a bread winner. Wars have become terribly destructive due to the development of sophisticated technologically advanced weapons. The worst are called weapons of mass destruction but there are so called conventional weapons which are almost as bad (two ton bombs, laser directed one ton rockets, cluster bombs, bombs that suck up the oxygen around them where they explode, rockets coated with depleted uranium etc..). Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons threaten the lives of millions of people. Yet perhaps the most lethal and the most dangerous weapons of all are those that brainwash, anaesthetise or paralyse the mind -- the media, the educational systems and above all the religious fundamentalist teachings which create a "false consciousness" among men and among women. False consciousness makes women obedient instruments of their own oppression, and transmitters of this false consciousness to future generations of children, of girls and boys. It is lethal because what it does to women's minds is not visible. Unlike physical female genital mutilation it is an invisible gender mutilation which destroys the dynamism, the capacity to understand what is happening, to react and resist, to change, to participate in making changes. It destroys the essential creativity of the human mind. It instills fear, obedience, resignation, illusions, an inability to decide or else it leads women to make decisions, to take positions, to defend values and ideas inimical to their own interests, to the health and development of their life. It makes women their own enemy, incapable of discerning friend from foe. During the first half of January 2004 a violent conflict burst out over the veiling of young girls in the public schools of France. The French authorities had announced that in defence of their traditional secular system they were preparing to pass a law which banned young girls and boys from wearing visible religious accessories or apparel which denoted their belonging to a particular religious faith. This ban would include such things as the Christian crucifix, the Jewish skull-cap and the Islamic veil. Following this announcement a wave of protests broke out in the Arab world. The argument was that wearing the veil by girls and women who were Muslims was ordained by divine law and no woman or girl could be forced to disobey what Allah had commended her to do. Religious dignitaries and sheikhs, Islamic thinkers and scholars, heads of political parties or movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jihad, parliamentarians and journalists joined in the general clamour as though some terrible catastrophe had befallen the Islamic faith and its followers although in the Qur'an there is absolutely nothing to indicate that the wearing of the veil is a divine command. So why this furore over a piece of material which is wrapped around the head of women and conceals it? Why should the head of women in particular be considered so dangerous that it must be made to disappear? This is no more than the age old patriarchal struggle over women's heads, the fear that they might begin to think and throw off the bonds of slavery, of an inferiority enforced on them in all religions and in all societies. For the Muslim men who raised their voice in protest this was an integral part of their struggle to maintain men's control over women, men's control over their minds. This was above all the desire of Islamic fundamentalists to preserve the political power they exercise in society, a cornerstone of which has always been power over women. But in this political fray there were other players using women's rights or lack of rights to their own ends. Chirac had his eyes on the polls, on future elections. The American administration raised the banner of human rights, of women's right to choose. Bush is preparing for the next election and also found in this conflict a suitable occasion to hit back at the French government with which he has been at odds since the war on Iraq. Besides, one of Bush's declared aims in waging war first against Afghanistan, then against Iraq was "the liberation of women". The British government took the same position, probably in an attempt to retrieve some of Blair's lost popularity amongst many people in England, including the Muslim community. Strangest of all however was the spectacle of young women in the streets of Paris and Cairo and other cities demonstrating against the French government's announcement in defence of their right to wear the veil, and of God's divine commandments in defence of this symbol of their servitude. This is a signal example of how "false consciousness" makes women enemies of their freedom, enemies of themselves, an example of how they are used in the political game being played by the Islamic fundamentalist movement in its bid for power. During the month of September 2003 I met a group of Iraqi women in New York and was astounded when they expressed their happiness at the "liberation of Iraq" and its occupation by American troops. Perhaps they or their families had suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical regime but how could they fail to realise that the Iraqi people, and with them Iraqi women and children, would suffer at the hands of a colonial military occupation. Was it fear, this essential component of women's subservience in a world growing ever more violent, or was it the false ideas installed by a media system ruled over by men like Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi, by the neo-fascists of the Bush era. The slogan raised by the girls and young women who demonstrated against the announcement made by the government of France was "the veil is a doctrine not a symbol." Another argument used as a part of the brain washing process is to consider the veil an integral part of the identity of Islamic women and a reflection of their struggle against Western imperialism, against its values, and against the cultural invasion of the Arab and Islamic countries. Yet in these demonstrations the young women and girls who marched in them wearing the veil were often clothed in tight fitting jeans, their faces covered with layers of make-up, their lips painted bright red, the lashes around their eyes thickened black or blue with heavy mascara. They walked along the streets swaying in high-heeled shoes, drinking out of bottles of Coca Cola or Sprite.. Their demonstration was a proof of the link between Western capitalist consumerism and Islamic fundamentalism, how in both money and trade ride supreme, bend to the rule of corporate globalisation. It was an illustration of how a "false consciousness" is shot with contradiction. * The above is extracted from a paper the writer presented at the World Social Forum in Mumbai.
