THERE can be no doubt that the khula'a law, which allows a woman to unilaterally repudiate a marriage, represents an important step forward. But while we applaud its enactment, we must be aware that it will remain vulnerable unless legal and constitutional guarantees are put in place to foil attempts by reactionary forces to have it repealed. Nor should our forward drive stop there. To sustain the momentum, more steps need to be taken. For example, a provision should be included in the marriage contract investing the wife with the right to obtain a divorce for prejudice, whether material or moral. More generally, it is essential to promote a cultural climate conducive to the adoption of a standard marriage contract drafted along the lines of the one entered into by the Prophet Mohamed and his first wife, which stipulated that she could terminate the contract at any time and that he would not take a second wife. Another factor is the spread of reactionary interpretations of religious teachings. Some of the proponents of the male-superiority theory use specious arguments to back their claim that women are somehow inferior to men, often citing religious texts to justify their position. But there are always other texts that assert the full humanity of women and the equality of both sexes. There is no greater proof that the issue has nothing to do with religion than to underscore some of the aspects of the first marriage entered into by the Prophet of Islam. Not only was it exemplary in terms of the equal humanity of both partners, but in many other aspects, such as the wife having the right of divorce and the husband not taking a second wife. However, reactionary chauvinists choose not to see these examples nor bring them to light, as if they never existed. Those who are today expounding reactionary ideas in the name of religion are worthy successors of those who supported King Fouad in the 1920s in his bid for the Islamic Caliphate and who, in 1937, wanted his son Farouk to be crowned in Al-Azhar not in Parliament. They also uphold the legacy of those who attributed socialism to Islam in the 1960s only to say the exact opposite a few years later. They are reminiscent too of those who, after years of telling us that war with Israel was a religious duty for Muslims, suddenly decided in the seventies that Islam enjoined us to make peace with that country, invoking a religious text to support their new pacifism: “If they lean towards peace, so too should you.” They are the same people who invoked religion to justify the infamous practice of breaking the will of recalcitrant wives by locking them up in the so-called ‘house of obedience, beit el ta'a, then reversed their position. To these people we say: We know as much about Islamic jurisprudence as you do, and one of the first things we learned is that it is defined as the extrapolation of judicial rulings from available legal proof or, in other words, through a process of deductive reasoning that involves a human agency. This was best expressed by the great Islamic jurist Abu Hanifa in his description of Islamic jurisprudence as “a science of opinions, so that if someone comes forward with a better opinion we accept it.” Abu Hanifa accepted just over a hundred of the Prophet's Hadiths as apostolic precepts, while Ahmed ibn-Hanbal accepted hundreds of thousands. Moreover, Abu Hanifa, known as the Supreme Imam, refused to base judicial rulings on Hadiths ascribed to just one source. The conclusion to be drawn from a thorough reading of the thousands of reference works on Islamic jurisprudence is that it is a human science that was initially established by great thinkers. These were followed by the strict traditionalists who spurned deductive reasoning altogether and insisted on a dogmatic adherence to Scripture. With their limited knowledge and lack of intellectual abilities, these so-called ‘expositors' invested the purely human field of Islamic jurisprudence with a divine character. The use of religion to justify this view is a political cover for fossilised societal attitudes deriving from three sources: Bedouin customs, medieval values and a patriarchal culture that is deeply rooted in tribal society. What can we expect of men who have drunk deeply from these sources and who, moreover, have never drunk from the well of universal human culture and whose inability to master the linguistic tools of the Renaissance keeps them isolated from the great masterpieces of human creativity? This cultural insularity makes the absence of objectivity on the issue of women's rights absolute. The situation is rendered even more intractable by the fact that men are clinging to the myth of their superiority over women out of a tremendous lack of self-confidence, and a sense that they must at all costs defend themselves against what they see as a challenge to their supremacy. The time has come to break the institutionalised concept of male superiority that colours the general attitude to women in our society. To that end, measures must be taken to safeguard the steps already taken in that direction and to prevent anyone in the future from engineering a cultural setback. For, at the end of the day, the notion that men are innately superior to women is deeply entrenched in the cultural tissue of society. It is only by recognising the existence of an organic link between people's cultural formation and the beliefs they hold that we can understand and properly address the mentality that seeks to keep women at the same lowly status to which they have been relegated throughout much of our history. One of the most shocking aspects of the male supremacist mentality that has taken hold in some societies is that it is not, as might have been supposed, confined to the male segment of the population. Although men are its source and beneficiaries, the myth is embraced wholeheartedly by many girls and women, who raise their children to accept without question propositions that run counter to all contemporary values of progress, science and civilisation. The issue is addressed in greater detail in myforthcoming book, currently being prepared for publication. Entitled The Tragedy of Women in our Contemporary Reality, it talks of the impossibility of liberating women from the yoke of the male supremacist culture, which is a form of slavery, unless women themselves are at the vanguard of a movement to change societal attitudes in line with the requirements of the age, to replace the reactionary view of women as inferior beings with a view that accepts them as equal to men in all respects. Moreover, they should promote the notion that although they constitute half the population, their actual value, as mothers, is far greater than their numerical weight. It is tragic that in this day and age, when the advanced world is concerned with knowledge, development, civil liberties and human rights, we should still be asking the shameful question: Are women equal to men? (The last in a two-article series.) Heggy is the 2008 winner of Italy's top prize for literature “Grinzane Cavour”. http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarek_Heggy http://www.tarek-heggy.com
