The importance of being "woman".

Bernard Lewis has written an interesting commentary in The Toronto Star about the important role that women can play in Islamic society. He claims that

Muslims have been keenly aware of the weakness and relative backwardness of their society for a long time now. This awareness begins, of course, with defeat in the battlefield — that is where the lessons of history are most perspicuously administered — but it has spread to other things, and for a long time now the debate has been going on in the Islamic world. "What did we do wrong? What is the secret of Western success and of our failure?"

Let me begin my discussion of that with a definition: gender. Gender, as you know, is a grammatical term. ...A new English ambassador arrived in Istanbul sent by Queen Elizabeth. The first thing the historiographer commented on was the ship on which the ambassador arrived. He writes with obvious bewilderment, "This is a ship that travels thousands of miles and carries 83 guns, besides other weapons." English ships were built for the Atlantic, and they are therefore bigger, stronger and more manoeuvrable than the Mediterranean ships of the Muslim world.

His other point is even more astonishing, and he says with palpable bewilderment, "This ambassador comes from a country which is ruled by a woman who rules her inherited realmwith complete power." He doesn't draw any inferences from that, nor did anyone else for some time to come.

Then, in 1867, a Turkish writer called Nama Kamal published an article in which he said, "The reason for backwardness is the way we treat our women, treating them only as suitable for producing children and nothing else." ...I firmly believe that women are our best hope in dealing with the Muslim world, because they have so much to gain from modernization.

... Let me end with a quotation from a Turkish woman writer of the 15th century — she was one of the very few. She was the daughter of a qadi and had access to education because she had an enlightened father, and she wrote a few poems, one of which I will read to you in English translation:

"Woman, they say, is deficient in sense, so they ought to pardon her every word, but one female who knows what to do is better than a thousand males who don't."

[Islam] [Bernard Lewis][women][feminists][Iraq][Muslims]