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Muslim matrons of jihad

Margaret Wente



Asra Nomani is a Western journalist with family ties in Pakistan. She recently took a leave from The Wall Street Journal to spend some time there. In Islamabad, she found a different kind of warrior: the educated, middle-class women of her own extended family.

I wish I could tell you that these women are among the brave guerrillas who have been defying the Taliban by running illegal schools for girls and chronicling atrocities with camcorders concealed beneath their burqas. They are not. They
are raising money for jihad.

They are also turning to the certainties of fundamentalist Islam. They are voluntarily donning the veil and the burqa, voluntarily giving up their professions and returning to their homes, voluntarily withdrawing their
daughters from Westernized private schools and sending them to study the Koran.
They do not demonstrate in the streets. Instead, they hold tag sales for the
Taliban.

"They consider themselves each a mujaheda,the female version of a mujahed, a
freedom fighter," Ms. Nomani wrote in a chilling story she filed to Salon, the
on-line magazine. "O Allah! Curse the disbelievers," they pray. They condemn
American aggression as an assault on Islam, and don't believe Osama bin Laden
did it.

These are among the "moderate Muslims" who, we are reassured, support Pakistan's
alliance with America.

Islamic fundamentalism has been spreading for a generation, and the religious
revival among the prosperous matrons of Islamabad began several years ago. It is
hard to understand, and uncomfortable to read about. We Westerners have invested
a lot in the belief that the fanatic, dogmatic version of Islam exists on the
margins, among the poor and disenfranchised, and the occasional off-centre
university graduate. The alternative is far more frightening.

The women who are leading the movement to cover up again drive Honda Preludes
and chat on Nokia cellphones. They have BAs and PhDs from Western universities.
And yet they are convincing their sisters that true liberation means renouncing
their rights, turning their backs on modernity (its ideas, not its material
goods) and submitting themselves to Allah's will.

Since Sept. 11, many people in the West have set out to search for the voices of
"moderate Islam." They aren't easy to find. In Britain, Canada and the United
States, many imams preach the kind of hate to their followers that would cause
anyone else to be hauled before a human-rights commission. Even the leading
figures invited to the White House as the faces of Islamic moderation in America
have, off camera, repeatedly condemned America as a depraved nation that
deserves God's punishment. As one White House staffer told The Washington Post,
"To be honest, it's been difficult finding someone who is -- how should I put
this? -- totally clean, or who qualifies as a through-and-through moderate."

But why should this surprise us? In 1989, Salman Rushdie was condemned by Muslim
religious leaders around the world for a book he wrote. Not one stood up in
defence of free expression or of his right to write the book. Many of them said
he should be killed. Many ordinary Muslims who lived in Western democracies said
they agreed. Some even said so on TV. We defended Mr. Rushdie, of course. But we
ignored the bigger message: Much of the Islamic world is poisoned by bigotry and
intolerance.

Mr. Rushdie calls it "paranoid Islam" -- the tendency to blame outsiders,
"infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies. This tendency predates many of
the foreign policy atrocities that are routinely attributed to the United
States. "Twenty years ago," Mr. Rushdie wrote last week, "it was already de
rigueur in the Muslim world to blame all its troubles in the West and, in
particular, the United States."

Last Sunday, there was another grim dispatch from the front lines of ideology
and belief. This one was by Martin Regg Cohn, Asia bureau chief for The Toronto
Star. In it, he set himself the task of finding the voices of moderation in
Pakistan.

Mr. Cohn visited some of the nation's top universities. He interviewed leading
academics who regard themselves as the vanguard of modern, moderate Muslims. And
this is what he heard: There is no proof that Muslims were involved in the
attacks on America.

One progressive woman in Lahore, a department head who teaches comparative
religion and modern political thought, told him: "They say that most of the Jews
took the day off. When the World Trade Center was hit, most of them were not
there."

An astonishing number of educated Muslims believe the attacks were a Zionist
plot. They also believe that, even though it could not have been Muslims who did
it, Muslim people have every right to lash out at the West. Belief in the Jewish
conspiracy is so common that no one bothered to conceal this view from Mr. Cohn.
"We as Pakistanis feel it's the Jews behind all this mess created so far,
because they have a stronghold in the economy of America, and the policies that
she is practising," said another professor. He said none of the Jews who worked
in the World Trade Center have been reported dead yet. "It means this must have
been planned by the Jews themselves, so that Israel would benefit."

I was shaken by this story, and so, I think, was Mr. Cohn. It was not what he
had expected to find. Pakistan's elites, he concluded, have lapsed into "denial
and intellectual dishonesty."

The story drew a flood of letters. Some were painfully self-critical. "Muslims
are suffering a siege from within -- of distorted history, theology developed
for the expediency of rulers and, of course, the closing of minds in the early
12th century," wrote Anwar Ahmed, the head of a Canadian-Pakistani professional
association. "I have come across many who, though they have everything this
society could bestow, wish the Taliban well. What can one make of this?"

One thing one can make of it is that the real battlefield of this new war is not
some bombed-out city in Afghanistan. Another is that both the hawkish and dovish
constructions of the conflict are overly simplistic. If only we hadn't abandoned
them to such awful poverty, they never would have bombed us, one side argues. If
only we can smoke 'em out of their caves, our problems would be over, says the
other.

If only it were that easy.

And here's another tough one. How can people like us find common ground with
highly educated people who have lapsed into unreason? How can you begin to
debate people who think the Jews did it, and want them dead? How can you build a
bridge with modern women who convince their reluctant husbands that they should
go back into purdah?

Asra Nomani doesn't try to explain what's happening to her cousins. She just
describes. "Give us all the strength to do jihad," they pray. She reports that
her own wedding in 1992 was the last one in the family where the girls were
allowed to dance.