You write [in "Nine Parts of Desire"] that Islam is one of the few religions to include sex as one of the rewards of the afterlife.
Well, for men anyway. Although there's been some pretty interesting research on that passage of the Koran that says the word "virgin" is mistranslated and it should say "white raisin." Which is going to leave a lot of people very disappointed.
Oh, absolutely. So when did things start to change?
It starts to change when Islam moves out of 7th century Arabia, it starts to change with Omar, and then as the religion moves into other cultures that are repressive of women it almost invariably adopts the repressive customs.
Mesopotamia and the Persians were into the seclusion of elite women. If you were an aristocrat, you would never go out without being completely covered, if you went out at all. In fact, in Mesopotamia, if you were a slave you had to go uncovered, and if you were a slave who covered yourself you would be punished for doing that, because that was aping your betters. They had this notion that elite women [should be] secluded women, and that kind of meshed with the idea that seclusion had been ordained for the prophet's wives. And so it became the norm that Muslim women were supposed to be secluded to some extent if you could afford it in the household, or if you couldn't do that, then at least covered. So that's where that came from, rather than from within the faith itself.
And then, tragically, Islam arrived in Egypt -- in the 8th century, I think -- and the hideous custom of genital mutilation for women, which has come down the Nile from stone age Central Africa and become very much a part of Egyptian custom, then gets incorporated in Islamic custom. And it doesn't travel backward into the Arabian Peninsula countries, but as Islam travels forward into Southeast Asia, that custom goes with it, as if it's part of the teachings of Islam.
And the stoning of adulterers?
The Koran does not proclaim stonings. You're supposed to shut her up in a room alone, that's supposed to be the punishment. The stonings -- I'm not sure what the origin of that was. It was certainly in the old Hebrew tradition that you would stone adulterers, and Mohammed had a lot to do with the Jewish communities in Arabia, so it may have come into the Islamic practice that way.
But basically, in Islamic law -- the sexual part of Islamic law -- it's almost impossible to get a conviction if you're doing it the right way. You have to have four male witnesses to actual penetration, and you can imagine the number of times when that would be the case. And if you don't have four witnesses you're not even supposed to bring the charge, and you can be flogged for bringing a charge you can't prove. So, the fact that it happens at all is a distortion, because it's not supposed to.
Basically what progressive Islamic scholars will say is that the prohibition is there to keep social order, to show that it's important, but the fact that it's essentially not prosecutable under Islamic law is supposed to be a balance to this. And also there are so many outs -- it's not a death penalty matter if you're not married; it's only a death penalty matter if you have a legitimate way of satisfying your sexual needs and you don't take that way and you do this instead.
But these things aren't widely known, I think, even by people who support the Islamic scholars in some of the more undeveloped parts of the Muslim world.
It largely sounds like Islam was much more progressive and pro-women several centuries ago than now.
Well, it depends where you mean, because when you talk about Islam now you're talking about a billion people, living in every kind of circumstance you can imagine. So if you talk about Islam in Malaysia, there are women police chiefs there, and in Indonesia the president is a woman, so where are you talking about when you say "Islam now"?
We tend to jump immediately to the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, etc., and not the mosque down the street. Because "Islam now," I can tell you, at the mosque near where I live has some pretty red-hot women's activists as key figures there. So it's not a monochrome picture at all.
Sure, but there are a lot of people out there who took one look at the riots in Nigeria, people being burned alive over a beauty pageant, and said, "This is a religion that hates women."
I know. It's easy to come to that conclusion. But I think we all have to look deeper these days and try to understand a bit more.
I think a place to start is with Islam in America and to get to know our own Muslim community a lot better than we do, because the interesting thing is that we don't usually see Islam in a democracy. We see Islam in all kinds of tyrannies and despotic countries and we think that that's the face of the faith.
In the United States, it's the first time there's been a significant Muslim population really feeling part of a democracy. I guess you could say in England, but because of the way English society is more closed to outsiders and immigrants, it's going to take more generations there than here.
But if you go to an American mosque, in most cases you'll find an incredibly multicultural scene; you'll find people who have origins in all corners of the globe. And actually, nowadays a Muslim in America is more than twice as likely to be African-American as they are to be Arab in origin. So it's pretty interesting place.
Because people have come from all kinds of cultural traditions, they have to practice a religion that they can all agree on, and you find that these extremes are very quickly brushed away in the need to get back to the essence of the faith. There's an overemphasis, I think, on the fact that women have to be the responsible ones in terms of containing their behavior so that society doesn't disintegrate into this orgy of sexuality that the Saudi Arabians particularly fear.
Next page: Mohammed was a really warm man and a passionate man who really loved his wives