Fatima Mernissi is a contemporary Moroccan feminist writer. In The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, trans. by Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1987), pp. ix, 8, 24, she writes:
"...if women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Koran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite...Not only have the sacred texts always been manipulated, but the manipulation of them is a structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies...
The return to the past, the return to tradition that men are demanding, is a means of putting things 'back in order.' An order that no longer satisfies everybody, especially not the women who have never accepted it. The 'return' to the veil invites women who have left 'their' place (the 'their' refers to the place that was designated for them to leave their newly conquered territories. And it is implied that this place in which society wants to confine them again is to be marginal, and above all subordinate, in accordance with the ideal Islam, that of Muhammad - the Prophet who, on the contrary, preached in AD 610 a message so revolutionary that the aristocracy forced him into exile. "
And, in Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, trans. by Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992) pp. 1-9, Mernissi reflects on the state of the Arab world relative to the West in the aftermath of the Gulf War:
"The Gulf War is over. The soldiers have long since returned to their bases. But for many people, and I am among them, this war is one of those things that have no end, like symbolic wounds and incurable illnesses...
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the men, institutions, and symbols of the Eastern European despotisms were seen as having universal meaning, despite the fact that they were geographically and ethnically localized...If a child should play around at translating the expression 'Iron Curtain' into Arabic, he would stumble on the word hijab and translate it as al-hijab al-hadidi. And he would be right, because the translation of the word 'curtain' in the sense of something that divides space to impede traffic, is precisely hijab ...
In the days following the crumbling of Berlin's hijab, just before the bombing of Baghdad, Europeans emerged for the Arab masses as promoters of the democratic credo, which would solve the problem of violence and reduce its use. And then the powerful wave of universal hope raised by the Europeans' song to freedom and the promise to condemn violence was rudely and brutally dashed by this war. It was a war in which the nonplused Arab masses witnessed in a few months, like some bad twist in a tale in the Arabian Nights , the putting to sleep of those humanistic European youths who had been singing of nonviolence. What they saw on their television screens was the appearance of another breed they had forgotten about: old generals, with kepis and medals just like those of the colonial army, generals who enumerated with pride the tons of bombs they had dropped on Baghdad...
Violation is obscene. But violation, just after having flaunted before the eyes of the victim the hope of a new era in which violence would have no place, is more cruel than anything the human mind can describe...
I was born in a harem, and I instinctively understood very young that behind every boundary something terrifying is hiding. It is fear, or rather fears, that I want to speak about...
In my group boundaries are fixed in law. On this side of the Mediterranean they become hudud(limits). The hudud, the sure and certain boundaries that enclose and protect when one feels fear, like those our ancestors built around the medinas, were shown by the Gulf War to be pointless, at least when under Arab control. How can an Arab woman, I ask, insist on raising with her own group her problem, which is the hijab (veil)? How can she demand the negotiation of new boundaries for the sexes if her group feels naked and vulnerable in a world where bombs in a fury of passion can single out Baghdad?...
Boundaries, hudud, hisn, burj, symbolic or stone-built casbahs - all are meant to discourage enemies. The Muslim man had to be alert, on the defensive, with one eye on the hudud that hemmed in the women, the other on the frontiers of the empire. What happens when the two boundaries give way, and both at the same time? The enemy is no longer just on earth; he occupies the heavens and the stars and rules over time. He seduces one's wife, veiled or not, entering through the skylight of television. Bombs are only an incidental accessory for the new masters. Cruise missiles are for great occasions and the inevitable sacrifices. In normal times they nourish us with 'software': advertising messages, teenage songs, everyday technical information, courses for earning diplomas, languages and codes to master. Our servitude is fluid, our humiliation anesthetizing.
It is true that Mecca is still the center of the world, even though it needs the American air force to protect it. But what can such a force protect against, against what deviation and confusion? What about the women in the city? What prayers should be said, to avert what violence? Who is afraid, and of whom, in a city without boundaries? What will become of the women in the city where the defense of the hudud is in the hands of foreigners?
How, and through what precise management of fears, will the military map be superimposed on the map of desire, and how will the two be maintained and reflect each other in order to weaken the Arab man, who is already so closely controlled by the electronic agenda? And who will pay the price for all these indistinct boundaries? Traditionally women were the designated victims of the rituals for reestablishing equilibrium. As soon as the city showed signs of disorder, the caliph ordered women to stay at home. Will it be we, the women living in the Muslim city, who will pay the price, we who bear the boundary against desire tattooed on our bodies? Will we be sacrificed for community security in the coming rituals to be performed by all those who are afraid to raise the real problem - the problem of individualism and responsibility, both sexual and political?"