>No one that I know of in friendly precincts said anything, much
>less raved about, about how Islam has oppressed women "everywhere
>for centuries."
I'm struck by how quickly a posting about the US media coverage of US torture of Iraqi detainees elicited non sequiturs about the veiling, Arab men's oppression of Arab women, "odd rituals around menstruation, such as these detailed on Sistani's website," as if the detainees in question all thought about manhood and womanhood exactly like Islamist clerics like Sistani or theocrats in Saudi Arabia. Given the fact that Iraqis have, until recently, enjoyed more gender equality and secular education than citizens of many other predominantly Arab or Muslim states have, however, it is entirely possible that Iraqi men who are not fundamentalist Islamists have a better idea of male-female relations than you seem to assume.
In any case, though, the Iraqi detainees whom we are talking about are victims of rape and torture. When American women are raped or sexually harassed, you don't go around making invidious remarks about their sexual culture and history -- e.g., "Was the woman crying rape a slut?" "Was the woman claiming sexual harassment sexually repressed and anxious?" -- especially when you don't know anything about them, do you? Why should it be any different when both men and women are victims as in the case of Abu Ghraib torture?
>That women in many Islamic countries don't exhibit high levels of illiteracy?
Speaking of literacy in Iraq, though, what is responsible for the current low rates of male and female literacy in Iraq?
* "A UNESCO report prepared for the Security Council's panel on humanitarian issues in Iraq notes that literacy rates by 1987 'had increased to 80%. This is attributed to the success of the massive literacy campaign conducted during the late seventies and early eighties. . . . In 1995, the rate of illiteracy was estimated at 42%, a major shift in favour of illiteracy'" (American Friends Service Committee, "Congressional Staffers' Iraq Trip Report," <a href="http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/904a533826d741a9852568ab007b606d?OpenDocument">March 21, 2000</a>)
* Sanctions have also placed a social toll on women. Not only are they facing the physical, psychological, and emotional trauma that come with caring for their sick and dying children, but they are also increasingly burdened with the consequences of a debilitated economy and rising social conservatism. Early [*pg 241] marriage has resurfaced in rural parts of Iraq as teenage girls are married off to reduce the number of mouths a family must feed.25 Moreover, young girls are withdrawn from the education system -- such as it is -- because families prefer to educate boys who have a better chance of securing future employment.26 Not surprisingly, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, UNICEF, reports that Iraqi female literacy rates have regressed over the last decade.27 Finally, women have lost their jobs and abandoned their quests for higher education in the face of their rising poverty.
Iraq's relative prosperity prior to the imposition of the sanctions makes their effect all that more tragic. Before 1990, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, had honored Iraq for its active promotion of education,28 and the World Health Organization reported that Iraq's "[h]ealth conditions were comparable to those of middle or high-middle income countries."29 Malnutrition was virtually unknown, access to healthcare, education, drinking water and electricity was almost universal thanks to government infrastructure investments in the 1960's and 1970's.30 Sanctions, however, have helped turn back the hands of time. (Reem Bahdi, "Iraq, Sanctions and Security: A Critique," <em>Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy</em> 10 <a href="http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/articles/gen9p237.htm">Summer 2003</a>)
* In 1982 Iraq was awarded the UNESCO prize for eradicating illiteracy, as well as being credited with having created one of the strongest school systems in the Middle East. Unlike most Middle Eastern school systems, Iraqi education under Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Party was largely secular.
While the quality of Iraq's educational system was initially worsened as a result of the war with Iran (1980-88), during the period of the sanctions the educational system suffered dramatically. Due to the strangulation of funds and to the sanctions' prohibition of various school supplies, the lack of updated research materials and learning technologies kept universities in Iraq in a holding pattern. Few textbooks found in Iraqi university libraries are dated later than 1991.
At the same time, the country experienced drastic population growth from around 19 million people in 1990 to 25 million in 2002. (Dahr Jamail, "Iraqi Educational Institutions Suffering Amidst 'Empty Promises,'" <a href="http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=152&printmode=true">January 20, 2004).
Are we supposed to chalk up the radical decline of both male and female literacy rates in Iraq to Islam? Or could it possibly be that those of us who live in the USA, by virtue of our inability to end the sanction and prevent the invasion, were at least partly responsible for the decline in literacy rates and worsened conditions of women in Iraq?
BTW, I quoted Mina Hamilton in a previous posting and forgot to put
in a correction to an error in her article:
>The journalist Michael Herring was handed such a collection as a joke.
That's Michael Herr. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>