Why do you think there's so much fear, especially there?
Well, that comes out of the Bedouin Arab notion that male honor is dependent on female behavior. This is something that's mixed up with Islam but it's not of Islam, it's from the desert culture. And the idea is that your honor depends on the women of your name -- your sisters, your mothers, your daughters -- not your wife, interestingly, she's her father's and brother's problem. So if there's a hint of a suggestion that they're misbehaving sexually, you're cooked, man, and the only thing you can do about it is get rid of them. Kill them, to get your honor back. There's nothing else you can do.
Tell me about Wahhabism.
It's the most distorted view of Islam. It's really joyless. It's so austere that it denies any kind of human pleasure -- no music, no beauty. They really are the haters of beauty. So austere that when you bury somebody in Saudi Arabia you mustn't even mark the grave. So a graveyard in Saudi Arabia is just a fenced area of sand, with no markers whatsoever. And the austerity extends to men as well. It's total asceticism, really. Life as a complete restriction. And I don't think that any sensible reading of Islamic texts can bring you to that conclusion, because Mohammed was a really warm man and a passionate man who really loved his wives and made no bones about it. He was not some kind of person who preached that life should have no pleasure in it.
How did it get so distorted?
I guess Abdul Wahab must have been one of these charismatic preachers, like Jim Jones, who can lead people to act against their own interests and against their own rational thought. And then, of course, he had a lot of followers and they helped the first king of Saudi Arabia to the throne, and the quid pro quo for that was that the kingdom had to follow his teachings.
In these countries where you have stonings, these really extreme practices, why do you think that occurs? Why are women considered so threatening in those areas?
I don't know why in those areas and not other areas. I didn't go to Afghanistan under the Taliban so my only experience with this really is in Saudi Arabia. Iran, even though there are lot of restrictions on women, there weren't anywhere near as many as there were in Saudi Arabia. I really can't answer that question of why in one place and not another, except to look back at the cultural history and what was the situation for women in pre-Islamic times and try to draw some conclusions from that.
Do you think a situation like what happened in Nigeria is possibly a reaction to the Western sexualization of entertainment?
No. I mean, Africa is pretty sexual too -- we didn't invent this. No, I think Nigeria's own culture is pretty hot sexually and I think you have there a lot of intercommunal tensions. You have a place that's been incredibly misgoverned, that's had to put up with some unbelievably corrupt and cruel military regimes, and there's not a great sense of Nigeria -- Nigeria as a place, Nigeria as a nationality. It tends to be very much this tribal group and that tribal group, and Christians vs. Muslims, us vs. them. And I think it's that lack of cohesion that makes any explosion likely to flare up a whole round of other intercommunal tensions.
By the way, did you find the remark [in the Nigerian newspaper] blasphemous?
That Mohammed would have married ... it's not for me to say what's blasphemous to a Muslim. I think it was probably pushing the argument too far; I haven't read the whole article. The fact is, Mohammed did appreciate female beauty; there's no doubt about that. Some of his wives were supposedly very remarkable-looking women. Whether he would have wanted to marry somebody who was displaying that beauty in public would probably be the tricky issue. Because the hadith of how he got a couple of his wives after the battle, when the Muslim army had proven victorious, he would go and throw his cloak over the women that he wanted to take for a wife, and that was the sign to all his troops that she was the prophet's. But, of course, he also, famously, sent home a woman who didn't want to be married to him, so he never, as far as we know, forced his attentions on anybody.
I think that at the bottom of it, the distinction is between the public world and the private world. And the huge difference between the West and orthodox Islam is that orthodox Islam says "private is private, and you in the West have lost your way. You don't know what's private anymore, you use your daughters' bodies to sell cars, and this is not a good thing." And a lot of feminists would agree with them.
There are so many contradictions between what the Koran says and these places where you get a completely different interpretation. It's baffling.
I know. I think that's what happens when a religion falls into the hands of misguided teachers. The thing that makes me optimistic is in Iran, after the revolution, women who would never have been able to have a public life under the Shah because their families would have seen it as a godless system, were allowed to get educated. In fact it was required, and literacy shot up into the high 90 percent for women.
Now you see the younger generation coming up -- they are very self-confident, and they can't be challenged Islamically, they know their stuff. They've read the Koran, they've won prizes for reciting it, and so you have these women who are respected teachers who say, "This isn't what it says, and here's what it does say, and this is an Islamic state so you have to live by what it says."
They've managed to actually change a lot just through doing that, and nobody can really argue with it because it's not some secular politician trying to pass a law. They don't have to pass a law, because it's written in the Koran. So they've managed to achieve a lot in Iran, in terms of getting a better deal for women legally. And I think that women's literacy has been the key to that. And also the fact that in Iran women do have a public voice. It doesn't exclude them from the public sphere.
Next page: As the American Muslim community grows in confidence that will be an impetus for change