The Isis women’s manifesto is grotesque – but some in the west would agree with every word

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/06/the-isis-womens-manifesto-is-grotesque

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One common western observation about Islamic fundamentalism is that when it doesn’t look cruel and wicked beyond belief, it simply looks silly and absurd. To me, a manifesto purportedly written by an all-female Islamic State militia, advising that nine is a perfectly good age to consider marriage, after which life should be given over to domestic activity and possibly the occasional foray into the world beyond the home – just for jihad, if there aren’t any men available – looks utterly silly and absurd.

On the other hand, if the men in my life liked nothing more than beheading people, burning them alive, flogging them and throwing them off buildings, then I’d probably look more kindly on the idea that I should never leave the house. That’s the irony of female subjugation. All of the bad things it has to say about humans are bad things about violent, brutish, impulsive, uncontrollable men, whose wrong side is never to be got on, or else. The women colluding in this sort of thing in Iraq and Syria collude in the idea that that’s what men are like. And in doing so, they reveal their unlikely common cause with our own homegrown sexists: they reduce all of us to hopeless prisoners of humanity’s worst impulses.

Feminism is billed, of course, as the antidote to female subjugation. So it’s odd that it’s so often characterised as “man-hating”. What’s more hateful to –and of – men than the idea that they cannot be trusted to even imagine comporting themselves with good sense and dignity unless the women stay hidden away, toiling to create a refuge from the dangerous and exhausting society that men have made? Gender equality is simply about understanding that we can all look after each other in the ways we choose, and respect each other’s choices. Or it would be, anyway, in a better world.

In truth, the subjugation of women makes sense only to those, male or female, who have a fantastically, pitifully low opinion of men. No wonder Islamic fundamentalists “love death”. They must throb with self-loathing and self-disgust during every waking moment of their lives. Those who hate themselves so much must find solace in the existence of another group they can hate even more: the hypocrites of the west.

Because I daresay that I would look just as silly and absurd to the women who published that manifesto, with my talk of feminism and equality and emancipation. The newspaper I work for, after all, carries articles every day confirming that some men, given the opportunity, will abuse women and children, expecting impunity and often getting it.

Ched Evans, in believing that it’s fine for him to have sex with a woman without her consent – if she is drunk and already having sex with a stranger anyway – probably has a good deal of common cause with the ideas of these women of the Islamic State. So do his supporters, each and every one of them. It’s still common for westerners to believe that women are responsible for the sexual morality of men.

And while it is indeed silly and absurd for the women of Isis to declare that beauty salons are “the work of the devil”, plenty of western feminists remain unconvinced that they should be defending a woman’s right to want Hollywood waxes or Page 3 stardom. The problem, of course, is that it’s easy to assume that women want these things because men want them, in a mirror-image of the subjugation of the Islamic State’s female authors. An enthusiastically fundamentalist woman will declaim how liberating she finds it to live under a veil in exactly the same way as a Page 3 girl will say how liberating it is to take off her top.

Whatever. The freedom to make choices means that other people have the freedom to have an opinion about whether your choices are good or bad ones. But fundamental versions of religious creeds always strive to make all choice and opinion unnecessary. We are silly and absurd to fundamentalists because they believe that a world without choice and opinion is a world without dissent. In this version, Islam is a religion of peace: in the caliphate, no argument is tolerated. They fight jihad for a world without fighting, seemingly unaware that such a world would be their nightmare. So they are silly and absurd to us, and so it goes on.

Nice as it is, equal opportunities-wise, that Islamic women are allowed to wage jihad occasionally, female martyrs to the cause are not rewarded with the attentions of 72 virgins. Instead, in the afterlife, they get to choose the favourite of their husbands and stay with him for eternity.

It’s almost touching, the silliness of the idea that one familiar husband is all a woman needs to be happy for ever, while a man would have to spend eternity fretting over the impossibility of dividing infinity by 72. (I mean – an eternity of anything? We’re all agreed that eternity sounds eventually tedious whatever the company, yes?) The two supposed ideals conform to familiar stereotypes about men being from Mars and women being from Venus, even though we know we’re all from good old Earth (leaving aside the Scientologists, as one often has to). It seems to me that fundamentalists, male and female, want nothing more than to be stereotypes and nothing less than to be themselves. That’s not silly and absurd. It’s just sad and tragic.