The Women, Continued

Friday morning, courtesy of Senator Rick Santorum, I attended a private screening of a new Iranian movie produced and directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh entitled “The Stoning of Sorayah M.”  It’s a very fine movie–which will premiere in Toronto next week–but a very unpleasant way to start the day.  As the title tell you, it’s about a woman (falsely) accused of adultery by her scheming husband, and, in keeping with Shari’a practice, she is stoned to death by her friends, relatives, and neighbors.  Not nice.  But very powerful.  It shows the worst, most misogynistic side of Iran, and by extension all those other Islamic countries where men hold life and death power over the women, and are rarely called to account themselves.

It is therefore even more impressive to see Iranian women fighting back against the male chauvinist pigs who rule their country.  They know their vulnerabilities full well, as they know the horrors the mullahs have prepared for them, but they are fighting nonetheless.  Have a look at this recent report from the BBC, an organization that bends over backwards to avoid publishing incendiary accounts of life in Iran.  It’s pretty tough language from the Beeb:

Women in Iran have severely restricted freedom of choice, and no equality with men.

A married woman must obtain her husband’s permission before taking a job outside their home.

A man may have up to four wives. A woman may not have up to four husbands.

Women must observe the Islamic dress code – showing as little hair as possible, and their arms, their legs and their feet must be covered.

There is no protection against so-called honour killings  or women who are raped; a husband – or a father – who kills the rape victim cannot be prosecuted and sent to jail for murder.

“This is inhuman,” a law professor at Tehran University, Rosa Gharachorloo, told me.

Yes it is, as was the stoning of Sorayah M., brutally murdered because her husband coveted another woman, and couldn’t afford two wives.

We celebrate strong women, but men throughout the Middle East fear them, and oppress them in ways the West has not seen for a long time.  I am no expert on the treatment of black female slaves in the West, but I rather suspect that contemporary oppression of Middle Eastern women is even worse than it was on the plantations, which was plenty horrible.

If you read the BBC story to its conclusion, you will find that the Iranian women are making a bit of headway;  they have recently received some limited support from the speaker of Parliament and a leading ayatollah.  Good news, you will say, and so do I.  But six of the leading Iranian suffragettes have been sent to the torture chambers, which is business as usual, and is greeted with the usual shamefaced silence in our corridors of power.  It is beyond my ability to tolerate the failure of Condoleezza Rice to condemn these outrages with her considerable energy.  It’s bad enough that the men don’t do anything.