Lima Beans

Maureen Dowd is back from book leave permanently, so we can all start loving to hate her again. And with good reason; today she elevated the debate over Karen Hughes' role with this gem:

W. thinks so highly of Ms. Hughes, his longtime Texas political nanny, spinner, speechwriter and ghostwriter, that he put his Lima Green Bean, as he called her when she prodded him about the environment, in charge of the critical effort to salvage America's horrendous image in the Islamic world - even though what she knows about Islam could fit in a lima green bean. Why get any Muslims involved in reaching out to Muslims? That would be so matchy.

Incidentally, I have a good reason not to have a Muslim czar for public diplomacy: the U.S. needs to avoid participating in the debate over Islamic theology. Dowd then proceeds to paint an ugly picture of women's rights in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fundamentalist Taliban is recrudescing in Afghanistan...

So the Taliban was bad... but we shouldn't have helped the Northern Alliance overthrow it... because it might come back. Dowd offers no proof that the "recrudescent" Taliban has done anything substantial against women and she utterly igores the vast strides made for women's rights in Afghanistan.

...and women's groups in Iraq are terrified that the new constitution will cut women's rights to a Saudiesque level.

Again, the "it was better under Saddam" argument. Dowd would prefer the certainty of universal oppression to the possibility of gender oppression.

The back-to-burka trend has been widely reported throughout Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, and young women activists told The Los Angeles Times that their mothers had more freedom in the 60's. Najla Ubeidi, a lawyer in the Iraqi Women's League, agreed: "During the 1960's, there was a real belief in improving women's conditions. We could wear what we liked, go out when we liked, return home when we liked, and people would judge us by the way we behaved."

A large percentage of American women would also report having exercised a great deal more freedom in the 1960's as well. What's more, remember that Saddam didn't come to power until 1979, something Dowd seems to hope her readers will forget. What really proves that Dowd's lima bean of Middle Eastern knowledge is no larger than Hughes' or anyone else's is her ignorance of the region-wide "back-to-the-burka" movement that has indeed occurred since the 1960's. A quick history lesson: Arab women's rights blossomed in the 1920's, about the same time nationalism was first appearing, and while the British and French were still firmly in control. After Arab nationalism ran its course (the death knell was the 1973 October War), Arabs - men and women alike - joined what would be called a "revival" if it occurred in Christianity. In a twist of sociology that western feminists like Dowd find hard to imagine, the re-donning of the headscarf by a large portion of Egyptian and other Arab women was self-motivated. It was a status thing: the richest and most pious women wore it, so those who wanted to appear rich and pious began wearing it again, and back it came. A few Arab men require their wives to wear scarves, but most women do it voluntarily and may choose to doff it for outings in more Westernized parts of town. It is considered extremely rude to ask a woman about her veil-wearing habits. I have not been to Iraq, nor have I read any proper scholarship on Islamic trends among the Shi'ites, so I am not qualified to write specifically about the extent, nature, or motivation of Islamic revivalists there. Most western journalism on the topic is, like Dowd's piece, motivated by concerns other than descriptive sociology, and tends to give a superficial look at Iraqi life. But for Dowd to ignore the entire body of scholarship and experience on modern Islam vis-a-vis women in writing her piece shows that her knowledge of Islam exceeds only her desire to be fair-minded. It's good to have you back, Maureen.