Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization

Three. Tribes, Women, and Honor in the Age of Globalization

After my long journey across the Atlantic en route to Doha, I boarded the connecting British Airways flight in London along with a planeload of other Westernlooking passengers. I traveled in business class, watching the latest American movies on the drop-down screen in front of me, eating snacks, and drinking tea. As the tiny image of our plane on the in-flight screen gradually approached the Arabian Peninsula, the topography below us changed dramatically.The sun was setting , and from my window I could see a vast ochre desert undulating toward the horizon. Our pilot announced that we would be arriving at our destination soon, the last transfer point before Doha. One after another, the women on my flight suddenly began disappearing into the restrooms of the plane. They filed past in their fashionable European clothes, only to emerge covered from head to toe in black traditional robes, some with black veils over their faces. It was like a costume change in a play in which the actors slipped effortlessly into alternate roles. One minute Western-looking women were chatting confidently with their husbands, and the next they were transformed into reserved, whispering companions, sitting more self-consciously in their seats with a subtle hint of deference. These women were preparing themselves for the culture in their home countries. Their costume change on the flight epitomizes one of the modern world’s great social dilemmas: how to maintain cultural traditions in three Tribes, Women, and Honor in the Age of Globalization 83 03-0132-3 ch3 4/6/07 3:50 PM Page 83 84 Tribes, Women, and Honor the face of globalization. In today’s world, different societies overlap, are mixed, and juxtaposed—their people forced to walk a tightrope, from which a slight slip could be disastrous. The women on my flight would be at ease in Western clothes sitting in a café in Regent’s Park in London but in their home country would acquiesce to the segregation and modesty demanded there. They are caught up in a global charade in which public appearance is locked in with tradition. If these women were to challenge their local customs by revealing another “identity,” they would be gossiped about and slandered by their society, which could greatly embarrass their entire family. The best course for them is to observe their society’s traditions while assimilating what is convenient from the Western world—carry an expensive Valentino purse with the black robes, say, and employ the Western rhetoric of women’s rights while ignoring the poverty and universal human rights violations in their country. Modern Muslim women like those boarding at London who comfortably synthesize Western and Islamic cultures are following the Aligarh style. On disembarking and submissively walking three paces behind their husbands, they switch to the Deoband model. No subterfuge is involved here, merely cultural values, such as honor. In these changing and difficult times, women are both the embodiment of those values and its primary victims. Furthermore, those values are divorced from the justice and compassion advocated by Islam, and more in line with the vagaries of tribal custom and notions of honor. To understand this phenomenon, one must recognize that it lies outside the realm of theology, and within that of anthropology. The World Is Not Flat Thomas Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, gushes with excitement about today’s new world.1 Not unlike “stout Cortez” in Keats’s poem (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”), who thinks he is the first European to “discover” the Pacific Ocean and stares at it “with a wild surmise,” Friedman believes he has “discovered” the new world through the lens of globalization, and it is a “flat,” “connected” world. With the increased lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution, large numbers of people are now connected across the planet. Friedman is optimistic about these trends but also implies that 03-0132-3 ch3 4/6/07 3:50 PM Page 84 if a society balks at them, it will be trampled and soon flattened. Globalization must not be—indeed cannot be—resisted. From a traditional society’s point of view, the world is not flat but uneven, with valleys, ravines, and mountains. Culture, custom, and ideas inherited from the past are highly prized marks of identity and therefore determiners of behavior. They define how...