Feminism, Islam and Western culture

Janet Albrechtsen:

EACH time Germaine Greer visits Australia - such as last week when she turned up at the University of Sydney to receive her honorary doctorate - one is reminded how Western feminists have dropped the ball on what really matters on the feminist front.

Greer's feminism is the worst example of Western indulgence.

It's not so much what she says that matters - for it's all rather farcical these days - but what she and other so-called feminists do not say that betrays how feminism has lost its way.

On Friday Greer told her audience: "The intellect is a little bit like sexual ability: use it or you lose it." True enough and nice work if you can get it. But hardly cutting-edge feminism at work there.

Back in late 2002, Greer was back on the soapbox in Australia lambasting the medical profession for imposing unnecessary medical tests on women, such as pap smears and mammograms.

When asked about the impending war in Iraq, Greer suggested that women protest by dressing up in burkas. Go girl! Don the preferred garb of Islamic oppression to protest against what exactly? The continued oppression of women in countries such as Iraq?

Last Friday while Greer was preaching about the importance of knowledge for knowledge's sake, in New York another feminist was delivering a more sobering message. Last week Mukhtaran Mai, a 33-year-old Pakistani woman, collected an award for "her incredible courage and optimism in the face of terrible violence".

Mai was gang-raped by five men on the order of a Pakistani tribal council in 2002 as punishment for her brother's alleged love affair with a woman from another tribe. This illiterate and working-class young woman then did the unthinkable. She took her grievance to court.

A near impossible task in Pakistan where Hudood laws - a series of Islamic decrees applied in conjunction with the country's secular laws - mean that if a woman is raped, a conviction requires four adult male witnesses or the rapist confessing. If sex is held to be consensual, the woman can be charged with zina - extramarital sex - illegal under Hudood laws. In Mai's case, the five rapists were duly acquitted. While the Pakistan Supreme Court has suspended those acquittals, it remains to be seen whether the perpetrators will be punished.

When Mai received $US2500 ($3400) in compensation from the Government for her ordeal, she immediately used that money to build a school for young girls. Through a translator this shy young woman, dressed in a headscarf and flowing robes, told her glittering New York audience that her goal was to end oppression through education. Spot the feminist. Mai or Greer?

Women such as Uzma Saeed, a legal activist in Lahore, are campaigning for a repeal of the Hudood laws in Pakistan. Saeed told BBC News: "About 60 per cent of women in our jails have been imprisoned as a result of Hudood laws. I know many cases where a husband has wanted to marry again and so accused his wife of illicit relations with another man." Spot the feminist. Saeed or Greer?

Back in Australia, the silence of the feminists and others on egregious cultural issues is having devastating consequences for women. Australian feminism has been hijacked by a soft Left loathing of Western culture, a romanticisation of other (especially indigenous) cultures and a trend towards cultural relativism where it is just fine to use culture as an excuse. But criticise another culture? No way.

Indeed, the "culture made me do it" defence is now an essential part of any defence lawyer's armoury. Recently, the lawyer for one of three Pakistani brothers convicted of gang-raping two teenage girls in Sydney in 2002 argued that his client's sentence should be reduced because this 27-year-old man was a "cultural time bomb". The lawyer pointed to the defendant's "cultural conditioning"; he grew up in Pakistan, "a society with very traditional views about women".

Where was the feminist outcry? At least the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, to its credit, treated that defence with the contempt it deserved. Last Friday Justice Michael Grove said those comments were inappropriate and the court refused to reduce the sentence given to the three Pakistani brothers.

But you can hardly blame a bloke for trying it on. After all, our persisting cultural cringe about imposing our values on those who do not share them is such that these claims are often successful.

Who can forget the footage of the Chief Justice from the Northern Territory descending on the Yarralin community. He took his courtroom to the indigenous community to sentence a 55-year-old Yarralin man for bashing and raping a 14-year-old girl.

The anal rape of a crying, screaming child saw the man go to prison for just one month because the girl was promised to the man under customary indigenous law. And who were the leading critics of this case? Chris Ellison (a white man), Warren Mundine (a black man) and a few indigenous women. But where was the white feminist outcry?

These are just the most recent examples of how liberal loathing of Western culture has become an instrument of oppression. And while feminists such as Greer are harping about the irrelevant, a new wave of real feminists is emerging where it counts. In places where it is most dangerous to speak out. Such as Pakistan. Elsewhere, Islamic feminists from countries such as Malaysia, Mali, Egypt and Iran are marching to launch a "gender jihad" in support of women's rights. This is real-life feminism at work.

If we think Western feminists had it tough, being shut out of the workplace in the 1950s, spare a thought for those women in Islamic countries who are victims of "honour killings" for bringing shame on their families, or the millions of women across western and southern Asia, the Middle East and large swaths of Africa who are mutilated by female circumcision.

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