Let the angels sing. That’s our culture

Al-Qalam, November 2006

I’m wondering whether allegations of sexual harassment in South Africa will soon become ‘normal’, like stories of murder, rape and armed robbery. Will we all become desensitised to it to the extent that we yawn when we see yet another story of accusations of sexual harassment against some or other politician.

But I wonder more about how much and why we are patient enough to have our intelligence also assaulted by claims that such incidences are because ‘it’s part of our culture’. The most recent of the culture defences came from ANC chief whip in the National Assembly, Mbulelo Goniwe. His accuser claims that when she rejected his attempt to get her into his bed, he said: “I thought you were a real Xhosa girl.” Do you remember our former deputy president who thought he just had to have sex with the woman who called him “Uncle” because, he claimed, according to Zulu culture a man should never leave a woman sexually unfulfilled?

I was reading one of the scores of articles written about the Goniwe case, entitled “Not in my Xhosa culture” and published in the Mail & Guardian when I realised how close to home this issue of the opportunistic use of culture really was.

After all, isn’t Islam (or, if you will, “Islamic culture”) often used as a justification for the hateful (and, in fact, unIslamic) manner in which many Muslim women are treated – including the ways they are sexually treated in the bedroom? Indeed, many Muslim men use much more powerful religio-cultural arguments to get what they want from women than the vague resort to “Zulu culture” or “Xhosa culture” which is more easily disputed. And this misogyny is fast becoming part of the popular culture of Muslims in South Africa and around the world.

Have you heard of all those pamphlets with “naseehat” (advices) to brides which tell them how to be good slaves to their husbands – including in the bedroom? They all resort to “Islamic culture” or “Islam” to convince the poor woman of her subservient status. Possibly the most famous bedroom-related one is the alleged hadith that, “If a husband calls his wife to his bed and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” When a Muslim man wants his jollies (or anything else from his wife), the best way to get them is to make a religious argument. And hundreds of thousands of Muslim women believe that this is now their unchallengeable duty. No headaches, no upset tummies, no exhaustion because of looking after the babies, nothing can be a good enough excuse for the angels. No questions may be asked, no complaints proffered, no explanations offered.
The methodology of the use of Islam for male sexual fulfilment spans a spectrum – from opportunistically quoting Qur’anic verses and ahadith to adopting certain customs and integrating them into Islamic practice. I heard numerous examples of both types recently when I participated in a conference on Islamic Feminism in Spain. Scholars from various parts of the world – many from the Muslim world – told of their experiences as Muslim women and how Islam is abused in order to subjugate women. Thus it is that while, on the one hand, the angel hadith is used to force wives into sex whenever their husbands want it or the verse from Surah Al-Nisa is quoted to argue that hubbies have an Islamic right to batter their wives (with some good ulama even providing guidelines on how to do it without leaving scars), other sex-related anti-women practices can find no real religious justification. This, of course, does not stop certain Muslims from saying there is religious justification.

An example of this is the case of female circumcision (or what some activists would prefer to call “female genital mutilation” or FGM). Now we all know that this abominable practice (which is also done by Christians in some parts of Africa) has nothing to do with Islam, right? Wrong! It seems that someone forgot to send that memo to the (then) Shaikh of Al-Azhar, Jad Al-Haqq ‘Ali Jad Al-Haqq who, in 1994, ruled that it was an Islamic duty! Indeed, FGM suddenly became equated with Islam itself. Note the statement later by Egyptian Shaikh Youssef Badri: “[Female] circumcision is Islamic… There’s nothing which says circumcision is a crime, but the Egyptians came along and said that Islam is a crime.”

There are numerous other “rules” – usually with no basis in Islam but talked of as if they have such a basis – that seek to regulate women’s behaviour or to separate men and women and to isolate women because, we are told, men are sexually weak and women are temptresses that can lure us weak creatures into sin. Apart from the fact that I, as a man, feel quite insulted by this assertion that I am inherently a weak creature, it is interesting that people can spin an argument in whatever way they want in order to achieve the same objective. A few centuries ago, Muslim women were told they had to isolate themselves from the society because – get this – women’s libido was uncontrollable and, I suppose, a woman would jump the first man she saw in the street, destroying her marriage and the community as a result. Neither perspective has any basis in Islam, but such things easily become part of “our culture” and begin to be regarded as religious.

The Muslim community, I suppose, will probably implode if Muslim women suddenly began asking for their right to experience pleasure during sex. The Prophet (s) is reported to have said: “Let none of you come upon his wife like an animal, let there be an emissary between them.” When asked what the emissary was, he replied, “The kiss and sweet words.” In another hadith, the Prophet (s) points out that one of the deficiencies of a man is that “he should approach his wife and have sexual contact with her before exchanging words and caresses, consequently, he sleeps with her and fulfils his needs (i.e. orgasm) before she fulfils hers.” In a statement that would raise even feminist eyebrows, Al-Ghazali elaborated on the importance of a woman achieving orgasm by asserting, “Congruence in attaining a climax is more gratifying to her because the man is not preoccupied with his own pleasure, but rather with hers.”

And, Dear Imam Al-Ghazali, if he is more preoccupied with his own pleasure rather than hers? Will the angels curse him until the morning? I very much doubt it. After all, my “cultural” understanding is that the angels spend most of their time singing the praises of their Creator; I doubt they will want to waste energy on curses.