A habit of violence grown ordinary : constraints on Muslim women's participation in war - 1

However, there is a wide gulf between constructive protest against injustice and the generally destructive practices of war. Indeed, if we define war as an almost exclusively male preserve, where do women fit in? Although they have been expected to represent the ideals of the community, it would also be fair to say that, as one looks back over Muslim women's historical involvement in warfare, one particular female role stands out: woman as victim. From the days before Islam, when women were regarded as booty in battle, to be won and used, to later conflicts when enemy women were taken as slaves or became the concubines of the men in power, there is a single underlying theme of female passivity.

Little has changed. In 1982, when the Lebanese Phalangist soldiers entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, apart from the business of slaughtering the inhabitants, they also engaged in mass rape. During the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, as we have seen, accounts of rape were widespread. The conflict between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims also revealed shocking tales of the rape of small girls and the forced impregnation of Muslim women.

What we are seeing is a double-pronged female role in war: what women represent and what they actually do. Their symbolic positions are rooted in the twin notions of honor and shame. As an embodiment of the honor of the nation, women are the symbol for which men are prepared to lay down their lives. In 1948 Palestine, for instance, it has been suggested that the indigenous Arab-Muslim population preferred to flee rather than risking the honor of their women at the hands of the advancing Zionists. (40) But women also represent shame, in the sense of the sexual prize to be claimed by the victorious warrior male or the rape victim shunned by her own community. In reality, however, women do whatever they can, whether it be in the area of providing support services to male soldiers, guarding the home front, or firing the guns themselves. But the violence inherent in their symbolic roles is likely to place constraints on their actions.

Women, Islamism and empowerment

Today, a significant group of Muslim women activists and intellectuals are seeking to interpret their religion for themselves, in the process removing from it biases which privilege men at the expense of women. Some of these women scholars "contest the validity of the notion of equality of the sexes in terms of the lived experiences of women. They argue that over a hundred years of struggle for equality have only rendered Western women more helpless since equality is articulated in male terms and demands that women behave like men". (41) Islamic feminism, as it is sometimes called, starts from the premises that, firstly, "the source of any difficulties experienced today is not Islam and its traditions, but certain alien ideological intrusions"; secondly, "any feminism which is to succeed in an Islamic environment must be one which does not work chauvinistically for women's interest alone"; and, thirdly, it must be recognized that "Islam is an ideology: which influences much more than the ritual life of people". (42)