Mick Hartley

Pamela Bone on Benazir Bhutto and the hatred of women that runs through Islamism (via b&w):

Are women across the world mourning Benazir Bhutto? They should be. Not because she was a saint; she wasn’t. She was at least a beneficiary of the billions stolen by her husband from the people of Pakistan. Nor did she do anything much for Pakistani women during her two periods of leadership, declining even to try to repeal the infamous Hudood laws whereby rape victims can be punished for adultery.

She should be mourned not because of what she was but because of what she symbolised. Her death was a political assassination, not an honour killing, as some have said.

Nevertheless it was a reminder of what we face. Bhutto was murdered because to her enemies she was Westernised, a traitor to her culture and an American stooge. She was murdered because she had vowed to bring secularism and democracy to Pakistan. She was murdered because she was all these things, and a woman.

“I know I am a symbol of what the so-called jihadists, Taliban and al-Qa’ida, most fear,” she wrote in her autobiography, Daughter of the East. “I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan.”

Yes, fear is the right word. The fear of women, of women’s freedom, and most of all, of women’s sexuality, runs through Islamism. It is a large part of Islamist hatred of the West. “The issue of women is not marginal,” writes the Dutch scholar Ian Buruma. “It lies at the heart of Islamic occidentalism (anti-Westernism).”

It is the “deep, ignored issue”, writes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. Why, I wonder, is it mainly men who are making these points?

To call these warriors for God sexually repressed is to absurdly understate it. Consider Mohammad Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers who — despite having spent his last nights in the US going to strip clubs — wrote in his will that no pregnant woman or other “unclean person” should come to his funeral and that no woman should visit his grave.

Or Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian philosopher, one of the chief inspirations for al-Qa’ida, who, during a visit to the US in 1948, wrote home about the “seductiveness’ of young women he saw dancing at a church hall (to the song, Baby It’s Cold Outside), about the “shocking sensuality” of women everywhere he went in the country.

Consider that in parts of Afghanistan still controlled by the Taliban, so great is the need to keep women powerless, silent and invisible that girls’ schools are burned down and a male schoolteacher who defied an order to stop educating girls was last year killed and dismembered.

No wonder they hated Bhutto, the first woman to lead a Muslim country, who was not only brave and strong but physically beautiful, her loosely draped Islamic headscarf more an object of adornment than of modesty. No wonder Islamist militants had been trying to kill her for more than a decade.