Zaineb Istrabadi, a LIS citizen, was born in London and raised in Iraq, and holds a Ph.D. in Arabic language and literature.
She is also a wonderful human being.
This may shed some light on what has gone on in Iraq and maybe a glimpse of the future.
You’ve Got to Be Kidding!by Zaineb Istrabadi
http://www.forusa.org/interfaith/islam.htmlDid you ride a camel? Had you seen a car before coming to this country?" "Did you live "'Din a tent?" These were some of the questions I was asked in 1970 during my first week of attendance at an American high school in the Midwest. The questions seemed sincere rather than patronizing, so I responded politely with short, concise answers, marveling inwardly at how little my classmates knew about the outside world. But I too exhibited ignorance as my question produced disbelieving silence followed by expressions of astonishment in the classroom during the English period, when I raised my hand and asked, "What is the ERA?"
My parents, brother, and I had arrived in Washington, DC in mid-July 1970, after having left Baghdad in early June of that year. In late August my father announced that we were heading to the Midwest because my mother had been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Indiana University. When we arrived in Bloomington I had already missed the first week of classes. It took another couple of days to determine in which classes I would be placed, since I had already taken algebra, chemistry, and physics by my freshman year. It also took a couple of days to get used I , to actually understand, the southern Indiana Hoosier accent. During all, this time and unbeknownst to me, the ERA had been a hot topic of discussion at school. In my English class, the students had been assigned the task of giving persuasive speeches either for or against the ERA. It was in my third day of school that I committed my unforgettable blunder.
The Equal Rights Amendment was explained to me not only inside but also outside the classroom. My reaction flabbergasted my classmates as much as my original question, because I was unable to understand how people could be treated differently just because of their gender; the idea, the concept, was foreign to me. "Do you mean to tell us that you were never discriminated against as a woman? What about your mother? And aren't Muslim women treated terribly in the Muslim world?" they asked me. Here we come to the crux of the matter: the Muslim world, the Muslim woman.
Is there such a thing as the Muslim world, the Muslim woman? A simple "yes" or "no" does not provide an answer. Yes, there is a Muslim world; that world stretches from Morocco in the west to China in the east, including areas of Eastern Europe, parts of west and east Africa, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and central Asia. And it includes the Arab world of which Iraq is a part. Even though the inhabitants of these regions share in the same religion, they do not share the same traditions, culture, and obviously language. By this token the experience of the Moroccan Muslim differs considerably from that of the Chinese Muslim. And Islam as it is experienced in Turkey differs from Islam in Saudi Arabia.
This brings us back to Iraq, which is a predominantly Muslim country. Both of my parents, and all of my aunts and uncles, were born and raised there. My mother finished her primary and secondary schooling there, attended college, and then was sent to the United States for graduate studies. When she returned she became a professor of English literature at the University of Baghdad. One of her sisters was a principal of a high school; her two other sisters were physicians and both taught at the School of Medicine. How was it possible for these women to achieve their goals in a Muslim country where supposedly women are oppressed, veiled, kept locked at home?
In Iraq, education is free from primary school through college. All children are required to go to school . Placement into college depends on one's final grades regardless of one's sex.
On one occasion the government thought of placing a quota on the number of women entering the universities. There was such an outcry against the proposal, with people saying that neither civil nor religious law justified discrimination, that, as authoritarian as the government was, it backed down. Thus there is equal opportunity for women to enter into universities and the various professions, and as a consequence there are large numbers of women professors, doctors, pharmacists, not to mention teachers and secretaries (professions traditionally linked to women). Women have joined the army and the police force. In the late sixties, when I lived there, Iraq's Minister of Higher Education was a woman. These achievements were possible because of Islam, not despite it.
An issue that was important to the women's movement in the United States in the early 1970s was equal pay for equal work. It is still an issue to this day, nearly twentyfive years later. This is not the case in Iraq: women receive equal pay for equal work. Another issue important to feminists in the early seventies was the right of a woman to maintain her maiden name after marriage. Iraqi women, indeed Arab women (for it is an Arab tradition), retain their maiden name, never taking on their husband's last name. Although there are some exceptions nowadays, for example in Jordan, this has been a fairly recent development and is a result of Western influence.
The situation for women was and is by no means utopian. And indeed, one cannot speak of Iraqi women as if the experiences of s even or eight million people are uniform. The experience of the educated, urban woman differs considerably from that of the uneducated, marshland woman, for instance. The rich have a considerable advantage over the poor. Nevertheless, there are still certain advantages and opportunities that Iraqi, Muslim women have over their sisters in the United States, which I as a young teenage woman took for granted.
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