CEDAW: Pseudo Science & Pseudo Care

There’s a lot going on lately in Jordan and the Arab world to tempt one to claw their faces off. But I won’t claw my face off, because I obviously need it.

It seems to me that there is a growing tendency for Jordanian conservatives to pose as pseudo-scientists of late, and this is most evident in their refusal of the CEDAW (Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) which, interestingly enough, was not even signed within the last decade (signed in 1992) and was ratified in 2007. The uproar caused by the country’s recent lifting of its reservations on one of the three articles it originally objected to has been quite telling. It sort of opened Pandora’s Box of Medieval retardedness.

Why do I say it has been revealing? Because conservative opposition of the CEDAW bases its critique of the Convention on arguments that are comfortably called pseudo-scientific and retrogressive. To avoid using cliches as these opposition forces do, I’ll get to specifics:

1- On March 23, 2009, I was at the Professional Associations (PAs) Complex in Amman attending a session organized by the Women’s Committee at the PAs (the latter controlled by Islamists) and the Afaf Charity Association (yes, that is the charity that organizes mass weddings to help people get married). The session was about the reasons why these two parties believe Jordan should not only keep its reservations on CEDAW, but should also dump the whole Convention in the trash.

And to give you an idea of how that went, let me paint you a picture: Al Rasheed hall was full of jilbab and burka wearing women, which is understandable given that the PAs are famously controlled by Islamists. Maysoon Darawsheh (member of Afaf), speaking at the opening of the session, showed a slide of this man right here:

I’m sure you’ve seen him on Oprah. Darawsheh must’ve picked him up from there:

…much to the amusement and surprise of the attendees who all gasped in wonder and disgust at the abnormality. Then Darawsheh said: “This is what CEDAW will do to us, it will turn men into women and women into men. It will upset god’s natural system. I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan.”

Darawsheh did not mention anything about the history of the man in the picture (a transgendered Thomas Beatie) or about how it relates to CEDAW exactly. Her tactic was quite cheap: shock the masses into disgust and they’ll nod in approval at anything you say afterward.

2- Operation Shock and Awe aside (if you can cast it aside, that is), Darawsheh proceeded to show slides of the Convention’s articles and arguing against them one by one. The one thing common in all her arguments (her trump card if you will) was that “CEDAW calls for absolute equality between men and women, which means canceling any differences between the two.” She even went so far as to declare that CEDAW promotes “sexism against men” by making sure that women enjoy their same rights and obligations. She didn’t, however, detail how exactly this means discriminating against men, or why the genders being equal in the eyes of the law will be such a menace to society. Or whether she approved of the current discrimination against women. Maybe she forgot?

The one conclusion I could draw from her all-too-identical points was that she, and like-minded people, simply do not want anything to change in the Jordanian society. To them, men and women are leading good lives the way things are: women know what to do, and men know what to do. Nobody protests, nothing changes, everyone is happy.

3- To justify this conservative Muslim outrage at the Convention, Darawsheh noted that “not only Muslim societies are threatened by this Convention, as Christians are as well.” She said that they (I guessed the anti-CEDAW Muslims) are joining forces with the Vatican (the Vatican! Yes, the one with the Pope who offended them a couple of years ago, remember?) to counter the Convention’s disastrous effects on society. Holy war? What holy war? That’s religious tolerance for you!

Does the joining of forces of some Muslims and the Vatican for a certain cause make that cause automatically and universally just? Does it kill the counter-cause immediately? Darawsheh did not say, and she forgot to mention that the Vatican has lost its place in the progressive Christian world of today and does not enjoy any influence on non-Catholic Christians. Not to mention that she chose to ignore the long, bloody relationship between Muslims and Catholics and the Vatican’s OKing the Crusades. Ironically, the word “crusade” is habitually chosen by conservatives to describe what they see as malicious intrusion in the affairs of the Muslim world. Is it possible that the esteemed pseudo-scientist Darawsheh simply forgot to reflect on all that?

The sad thing is that I am not even making this up.

4- Also speaking at the session, director of Afaf Charity Association, Mufeed Sarhan, called CEDAW, “A deliberate attack on the foundations of Arab and Islamic societies through weakening the family unit.” He somehow forgot to mention that over 90 percent of UN member states are party to CEDAW, a total of 185 countries, mainly non-Arab and non-Muslim.

5- Since the whole session was organized to counter Jordan’s lifting its reservation on Paragraph 4 of Article 15 of CEDAW, I feel it’s necessary to put that here:

“State Parties shall accord to men and women the same rights with regard to the law relating to the movement of persons and the freedom to choose their residence and domicile”.

Another speaker at the session, Dr Munther Zaytoun, professor of Shari’ah and Islamic Studies, foresaw “social corruption” as a result of this “liberty granted to women to be mobile and choose their residence”, linking this freedom to prostitution, sexual crime, and “implicit obligations for women to work for a living and support themselves”.

Big words, no evidence. Again, move the crowd to a state of disgust/fear and they’ll nod in agreement. I am guessing the real fear these speakers have of this article is that young women might move out of their parents’ houses and be corrupted. That their freedom of movement will be protected by the law. They forget that for that to actually happen, the social mindset has to change or else these young women will simply be shot down or stabbed to death in the name of honor. And don’t we all know what happens then? The murderers do not get punished, and the law protects them. Consequently, this argument is actually void for the time being (and for all the wrong reasons).

As for work, I suppose it all comes down to that. Conservatives do not want women to work freely (i.e. work full-time jobs and not be obliged to have a second, unpaid domestic job entailing cleaning, cooking, raising kids, pleasing the husband) because when women do work freely, men have to step up to the plate and share the domestic workload with them. Also, when women work (and are not robbed of their salaries by either their families or husbands), they achieve financial independence which equals economic power. They can then actually influence laws and society. They can also shake off men’s control over their economic and social lives in the long run.

Consider this: a woman who works freely and is not shackled by an unpaid domestic job that saps her of her energy and undermines her potential for success in her paid job: will not approve of being symbolically bought by marriage (therefore the dowry will disappear, and man loses this key purchase power), will not burden her husband and her society by being an unemployed consumer waiting to be fed and clothed in return for her sexual and reproductive abilities, will not think of herself as a second class citizen but as a full human being and therefore will contribute to the welfare of her society.

Granted, economic liberation alone will not achieve all that as there needs to be parallel progress achieved on the intellectual level. But It is, all the same, this scenario that scares the conservatives because it shakes the very foundations of their convictions: gender roles, family, women, men, the system.

So let no conservatives fool you when they claim that freedom of mobility will force women to mutate “to work for a living and support themselves,” as that is the way things should be in the first place and the restrictions imposed are nowhere near natural. An unproductive individual is a waste that society can well do away with. The argument for keeping women dependent on men is rooted in the desire to keep them just that: dependent, incomplete, inferior.

6- Zaytoun linked the freedom to choose one’s residence and move freely to prostitution and sexual crime. Again, he did not supply any evidence, or at least a logical connection. This is a cliche: that when women are forced to work they will sell their bodies, which is why men need to turn them into “honest women” by marrying them and then sponsoring them through life, all the while enjoying their free labor at home and in the bed, and even acquiring more than one wife. Did Zaytoun mean to say that all the Jordanian women (to keep it local) who are without male sponsors and who work for a living are whores? Did he mean that the only work women are capable of doing for a living is prostitution?

I think men who hide behind these absurd claims may have a deep desire to be needed. If women work, they will only choose them instead of needing them. Then they will be unnecessary, in their argument of course and not mine, and that’s just too horrific to bear.

Zaytoun managed to forget to mention anything about spousal rape as a devastating form of sexual crime, or polygamy as a form of emotio-sexual, albeit legal crime. Is sexual crime a crime only outside the boundaries of a marriage where women do not choose where to live?

7- According to Zaytoun, “Freedom given to women to choose their residence destroys the marital relationship and puts them under pressure to work beyond their capabilities.” I am not sure how a woman’s freedom to choose where to live will break up families, and I find it quite hypocritical that this same speaker did not mention anything about the injustices suffered by women who cannot choose their domicile. If a woman does not want to live in a certain place, then she should enjoy the right to refuse living in that place. It’s a basic human right. Try to reverse the situation: a man may not choose his place of residence. Nobody would ever dream of having any legal clause saying that.

Plus, in countries where women are denied freedom of movement and domicile, such as Saudi Arabia, the status of liberties is a matter of great contention. Human Rights Watch 2008 report found that “officials continue to ask all women for written proof their guardian has allowed them to travel” and that “travel restrictions can also be humiliating for many women”. These restrictive policies did not usher in a decrease in divorce cases, as they reached 35% in recent years according to the Saudi Ministry of Social Affairs, while other sources place them at 50%.

8- While conservative Islamists in the Islamic Action Front criticized the government’s refusal to abide by the fatwa to walk out on CEDAW, they forgot to mention that they are not representative of the Jordanian people and that their hullabaloo in the media was a bunch of witchcraft-science designed to manipulate the public opinion. They also forgot to note that their staunch resistance of the CEDAW is a mask for political ambitions and a tool to embarrass the government (as if the government needs help to feel embarrassed.) Quite frankly, the government’s arbitrary dismissal of the fatwa when it normally abides by fatwas was also a political gesture.

To wrap this up, I’m introducing a new label: pseudo-care. CEDAW opposition farts pseudo-science, and the government spits pseudo-care. When the government stops enforcing laws that explicitly discriminate against women, when it stops adopting a specific religious opinion with regards to women’s civil status, only then can it truly claim it wants to achieve equality. When the government stops allocating a number of seats for women in the Parliament to impose women on a society that does not see them as capable, when it stops showing off its ministers and parliamentarians a token of equality in international conferences while Jordanian women continue to be abused and denied basic human rights, and when it stops flirting with tribal and Islamist conservatism to keep its political system running, only them can we hope for true change.

Signing a Convention is a point-scoring facade when on the ground men and women do not believe themselves to be equal because the economic relationships between them, the laws governing their lives, and subsequently their culture, tell them the exact opposite.