20 April 2012
I’ll Have a Slice of Clitoris, Please
By Gwynne Dyer
Let’s suppose that you are an artist who knows you have to shock people if you really want to get on in the trade. And not being Damien Hirst yet, you should probably justify your shock tactics by claiming that they serve some good cause or other. So which cause will it be?
Children of war? Taken. AIDs victims? Even Benetton has done that. Well, then, how about female genital mutilation?
That’s more promising: FGM offer possibilities for really shocking images, if you want to go down that road. And our artist certainly does.
To work, then. Obviously, an anatomically correct sculpture of a woman about to undergo this ordeal would be ideal, but not a tedious conventional sculpture made of metal, wood or papier mache. This is high art, CONCEPTUAL art, so how about we do it as a cake? Then we could eat her afterwards. Nice symbolism.
Our aspiring artist (let’s call him Makode Linde) decides that his cake-woman should be black. And since he doesn’t want to be left out of the picture, he decides that the cake-woman should have a life-size body but no head.
Instead, Makode Linde will poke his own head up through a hole in the table that the cake lies on, just where the cake-woman’s head would be. He’ll be in cartoonish black-face, of course. And he invites the minister of culture to the event, in the confident knowledge that (this being Sweden) the poor fool will actually come.
Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth rolls up to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, accompanied by several of her ministerial entourage, and is invited to be the first to cut the cake. Not just anywhere, though: she is told to cut a slice from the cake’s “clitoris”. As she does so, Makode Linde screams loudly. Then, laughing at the surrealism of it all, Liljeroth feeds some of the “clitoris” to the blacked-up artist. He laughs, too.
You will have realised by now that I am not making this up. It happened in Stockholm last week, and you can see several videos of it on YouTube. And it didn’t make me any happier when I found out that the artist himself is black.
Well, not black, actually. Linde is mixed-race, with a Swedish mother and a West African father, and he has lived in Sweden all his life. But the fact that all the participants in the event knew he was “black” made it all right for them. Well, sort of all right: if you look closely at the crowd of white Swedes in the background of the video, they’re laughing, but it is distinctly nervous laughter. They know there’s something wrong here.
Indeed there was. This event has unleashed a torrent of self-criticism in Sweden, together with a great deal of abuse from foreigners about the “racist” Swedes. The smarter Swedes suspect that they have been tricked into looking worse than they are by Makode Linde, but they’re not sure quite how he did it. So let’s help them.
Linde claims to be an “Afromantic”, whatever that means. “I’m revamping the black-face into a new historical narrative,” he explains unhelpfully – and adds that he had made this cake because the Artists’ Association of Sweden had put out a call for artistic cakes to mark its 75th anniversary. But what he’s really doing is distorting FGM into a racial issue, because racial issues are his artistic stock-in-trade.
The sub-text of Makode’s little game is that black Africans are the victims of female genital mutilation, and that somehow it is the fault of white people. That’s why he appears in the sort of extreme, caricatured black-face that was used by white comedians about a century ago.
Except that the victims of FGM are not particularly black. The ones in Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria are, but the last time I looked Egyptians were not black, and 97 percent of Egyptian women have suffered “female circumcision.” It is generally done by the mothers and grand-mothers of helpless little girls, so the perpetrators of this atrocity are almost always of the same ethnic group as the victims.
They are usually of the same religion, too. The great majority of FGM victims are Muslims, but the custom is clearly pre-Islamic. (It was already being done in Egypt under the pharaohs.) It is common all over the northern half of Africa, but its roots are in the north-eastern part of the continent, where the Christian majority in Ethiopia and the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt practice it as enthusiastically as their Muslim fellow-countrywomen.
FGM is an agonising procedure (usually done without anaesthetic) whose main purpose is to deprive women of the possibility for sexual pleasure so that they will not be tempted to stray from the beds of their husbands. No amount of cultural relativism can excuse it, but this is not the right context for that discussion. The question here is: why did Linde create this ugly and deeply misleading event?
The answer, alas, brings us full circle. He thought it would have shock value, and he wasn’t going to let a few facts get in the way. See above.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 14. (“Linde…trade”; and “They…countrywomen”)
8 December 2011
Women and the Monotheisms
By Gwynne Dyer
One should not mock the sexual obsessions of Islamic fundamentalists; it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. When a senior academic in Saudi Arabia, Prof. Kamal Subhi, declares in a report for the Shura Council, the kingdom’s legislative assembly, that allowing women to drive would spell the end of virginity in the kingdom, it doesn’t really require further comment. But let’s offer a few comments anyway.
In the report, Prof. Subhi describes sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state where “all the women were looking at me. One made a gesture that made it clear that she was available. This is what happens when women are allowed to drive.”
I regret to report that this doesn’t happen to me in coffee shops. In fact, it doesn’t even happen to me in bars, although I am generally reckoned to be the most handsome man of my generation. (The late Jurassic generation.) It doesn’t seem to happen to any of my male friends either, although most of us live in the decadent, post-Christian West, where women drive all the time.
Maybe it’s just that none of us are as amazingly good-looking and sexy as Prof. Subhi, or maybe Arab women are incredibly lascivious and immoral. But it seems more likely that he was just imagining it all, in which case another possible explanation presents itself.
Perhaps he has a mentality so sex-obsessed and so fearful of women that these feverish imaginings seem perfectly normal to him. And they ARE quite normal among Islamic fundamentalists, like the Nour Party in Egypt that demands strict prohibitions against mixed bathing, “fornication”, and the appointment of women to leadership roles – and got a quarter of the votes in last week’s election in Egypt.
But the point is not that Muslims are weird; they are all too normal. All the “Abrahamic” religions, as Muslims call them, have traditionally been sex-obsessed and terrified of women, and the fundamentalists among them still are. Take the increasingly influential and importunate Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews of Israel.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, last week told an audience that included Israel’s deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, and opposition leader Tzipi Livni that she was shocked by the growing discrimination against Israeli women. She even compared the separate seating for women on some Jerusalem buses to the humiliation of Rosa Parks, the black American woman who made history in 1955 by refusing to give up her bus seat for white passengers.
Clinton also compared the behaviour of some Israeli soldiers who recently walked out on a performance by female singers to the attitude towards women in Iran. But God – at least, the God worshipped by the Haredim – is enraged whenever men listen to women singing, so of course they had to leave. As for Christian fundamentalist attitudes toward women, here’s the Rev. Pat Robertson, one of the most influential US television evangelists:
“The Feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Not to mention drive cars and hang around in coffee shops making come-hither eyes at ageing academics.
Where does all this weirdness come from? Other societies and other religions have been just as patriarchal and disrespectful of women: it wasn’t much fun being a woman in traditional Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian societies either. But nowhere else was there the same male sexual panic, the profound, ingrained fear of free women that infests all the Middle Eastern monotheisms. Where does that come from?
I started to write this next paragraph three times, and then admitted to myself that I really do not know the answer. It’s clear from the fragments of history that have come down to us from five thousand years ago that there was an intense struggle in the ancient Fertile Crescent between the old female fertility cults and the new male-centred religions, which celebrated war, hierarchy and blind obedience.
The male religions triumphed everywhere: by three and a half thousand years ago, male hierarchies ruled everything, both in the heavens and on the Earth. But why was the struggle so much more intense in the Middle East, and the outcome so much more hostile to women, than in most other places? Dunno.
It doesn’t matter, really. You can’t unpick the history; you have to start from where you are, even if you’d much rather start from somewhere else. And the fact is that people can overcome their history: most Jews, Christians and Muslims today do not have extreme anti-female attitudes. The reason we have a special name for those who still do is evidence enough that they are a minority in the present populations, if you actually needed it.
Fundamentalists are a big minority in countries like the United States, Israel, Egypt and Iran, but a much smaller minority in countries like France, Turkey, and Russia. In some places their numbers are actually growing at the moment, but the long-term trend is sharply down. By today’s standards, ALL Jews, Christians and Muslims were fundamentalists five hundred years ago.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 12. (“I started…Dunno”)
26 November 2011
Progress Report: The Arab Autumn
By Gwynne Dyer
The “Arab Spring” was fast and dramatic: non-violent revolutions in the streets removed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in a matter of weeks, and similar revolutions got underway in Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. The “Arab Autumn” is a much slower and messier affair, but despite the carnage in Syria and the turbulent run-up to Egypt’s first democratic elections, the signs are still positive.
Demonstrators in Bahrain were driven from the streets by massive military force, and Libya’s revolution only triumphed after Western military intervention in support of the rebels. In both Syria and Yemen, originally non-violent protests risk tipping into civil wars. But there is still more good news than bad.
In October Tunisia held its first-ever free election, and produced a coalition government that is broadly acceptable to most Tunisians. Some worry that the leading role that the local Islamic party, Ennahda, gained in the new government bodes ill for one of the Arab world’s more secular societies, but Ennahda’s leaders promise to respect the rights of less religious Tunisians, and there is no reason not to believe them.
Last weekend, elections in Morocco produced a similar result, with the main Islamic party, the Justice and Development Party, gaining the largest share of the votes but not an absolute majority. It will doubtless play a leading role in the new government, but it will not seek to impose its views and values on everybody else.
This Moroccan party took its name from the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party in Turkey, an Islamic party that has won three elections in a row and presided over the fastest economic growth in Turkey’s history. Like the AK Party, the Moroccan version is socially conservative, pro-free market, and fully obedient to the secular constitution.
These parties are “Muslim Democrats”, as one AK Party member in Turkey put it, comparing them to the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe. They have nothing to do with radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda. They are simply the natural repository for the votes of conservative people in a Muslim society, just as the Republican Party automatically gets the votes of most Christian conservatives in the United States.
There was no revolution in Morocco: the new constitution that was approved by referendum last July was an attempt by King Mohamed VI to get ahead of the demands for more democracy that are sweeping the Arab world. It obliges the king to choose the prime minister from the party that wins the most seats in parliament, rather than just naming whomever he pleases, and restricts his freedom of action in several other ways.
Similar changes are underway in Jordan, where King Abdullah II is also trying to ward off more radical demands for reform. And even the deeply conservative monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula all supported the Arab League’s decision last weekend to impose sanctions against the brutal Assad regime in Syria, including an asset freeze and an embargo on investments.
Syria may yet drift into civil war, but its fellow Arab states are taking their responsibilities seriously: only two Arab countries voted against the sanctions. And Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, resigned on 23 November after months of prevarication and 33 years in power, giving that country at least a chance of making progress towards a democratic future.
Egypt, by far the biggest Arab country, this week sees the start of parliamentary elections that will roll across the country region by region until early January. Demonstrators have re-occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, claiming that the army wants to hold on to power, but things are not quite what they seem.
The army has already conceded that the new president should be elected by next June rather than six months later, but the demos on the square were not really about that. They were an attempt to force the postponement of the parliamentary elections.
The newly formed liberal and secular parties tacitly back the demonstrators because they fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will win these elections. It may well do so, because it continued to operate in a semi-underground way during the Mubarak dictatorship while the old liberal parties just faded away. But the fact that some parties are not as ready as others for the elections is not an excuse to postpone them: Egypt urgently needs an elected government.
It will soon have one, and if the Muslim Brotherhood plays a major role in it, why not? It has long outgrown its original radicalism, and you can’t postpone democracy forever just because you don’t fully trust your fellow citizens.
That leaves Bahrain, the one Arab country where the “Arab Spring” was comprehensively crushed. But in Bahrain last week, the king received the report of an independent commission which concluded that there was no Iranian plot behind the demonstrations, and that many detainees had been “blindfolded, whipped, kicked, given electric shocks and threatened with rape to extract confessions.”
Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa expressed “dismay” at the findings and vowed that “those painful events won’t be repeated.” That may be a little disingenuous, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Bringing democracy and the rule of law to the Arab world was always going to be a difficult and tortuous process, but progress is being made on many fronts.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 6. (“This…States”)
3 August 2011
Mubarak on Trial
by Gwynne Dyer
Former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was wheeled into court today in a hospital bed (his lawyers claim he is very ill), and put into the same kind of iron cage that so many of his opponents were tried in before they were jailed or hanged. The charges are corruption and ordering the killing of protesters during the Egyptian revolution last February.
If convicted of the latter charge, he could face the death sentence, but he is unlikely ever to dangle at the end of a rope. Some 850 Egyptian protesters were killed during the revolution, but the kill orders were probably never written down, and it will be very hard to prove Mubarak’s personal responsibility for the killings.
No matter. He is 83 years old and in poor health, so even a few years in prison would be effectively a death sentence. This trial is not about the fate of a few wicked men. (Mubarak’s sons and seven close associates are also on trial.) It’s about a new Egypt where the law must be obeyed even by the powerful.
It’s the fact that the trial is taking place that matters, not the severity of the punishment. But given that the soldiers are still in charge, most Egyptians are still stunned to see it actually happening.
It was the Egyptian military who intervened on 11 February to force Mubarak to resign from power and end the killing. Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi heads the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that serves as an interim government pending free elections in Egypt. But the Egyptian army has never been a hotbed of democracy.
Tantawi, 75, was personally close to the deposed dictator. Mubarak is a former general himself, and the military do not like to see one of their own humiliated in public. There has also been great pressure from the surviving Arab autocracies not to have a former ruler put on trial.
Most Egyptians therefore never expected to see Mubarak on trial in open court, but the military have their own interests to defend. During 57 years of thinly disguised military rule they have built up an enormously lucrative presence in housing complexes, banking, and all sorts of other non-military activities. They also get a huge share of the country’s budget.
The country’s senior officers realise that they have to make a deal with at least some of the civilian political forces in post-Mubarak Egypt if they want to keep their privileges. Putting Mubarak on trial is a down-payment on that deal – but who are their prospective civilian partners? A lot of the young people who actually made the revolution happen suspect that it is the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood was slow to come out in support of the revolution, for it had an unwritten deal with Mubarak that allowed it to operate as a sort of unofficial opposition (as long as it didn’t challenge his rule). It has put down deep roots in the poorer sections of Egyptian society thanks to the very effective social services it provides. Its leaders are middle-aged and elderly men of a conservative disposition.
The young men and women who actually brought Mubarak down, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly secular in their views. They want a free press and real respect for human rights. So which group would the military prefer to deal with?
If there were an election in Egypt today, the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s new political front, would probably win more votes than any other party. We’ll know by next month, because there is actually going to be an election in Egypt in September.
Paradoxically, it is the liberal, leftist and radical political groups that want to postpone the election, because they too believe that the Brotherhood will triumph if an election is held this year. But it would be just the same next year. Over a third of Egyptian voters are illiterate, and at least half are very poor. The Brotherhood was there to help them over the long years when the State wasn’t.
Behind crowd-pleasing gestures like Mubarak’s trial, the military may have already cut a deal with the Brotherhood: the latter will dominate the new parliament, and in return they will leave the military’s privileged position alone.
The Brotherhood in power would do some things that the military would not welcome, like breaking relations with Israel and imposing an Islamic constitution on a country with a ten percent non-Muslim minority. But if accepting such policies is the price they must pay to defend their own privileges, the military will pay it.
So is the Egyptian revolution going to be betrayed? In part it will be, at least for a while; all revolutions are. But this is a long game, and a wise player might prefer not to take power in Egypt right now. The economy is a wreck, popular expectations are extremely high, and there will be severe disillusionment when the new, democratically elected government fails to work miracles.
It might be better to aim to win the election four years from now, when today’s victors have become tomorrow’s villains. Whether that’s a good strategy or not, it’s probably the only viable option for the secular parties.
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To shorten to 700 words, omit paragraphs 6, 12 and 14. (“Tantawi…trial”; “Paradoxically…wasn’t”; and “The Brotherhood…pay it”)