Supra Lubna

Yesterday morning after waking up I looked to see, as I do every day, how many visits my blog has received. Given that it was Labor Day I expected 3. I was surprised to find 61, about 55 of which had read my second piece on Lubna Hussein’s trial being postponed arising from her arrest in Sudan in July on charges of indecency for wearing trousers.

Yesterday it was announced that she had been convicted and fined $200 and the punishment of 40 lashes had been set aside. I laughed because Lubna won. Despite the conviction which they had to give Lubna to save their faces, Lubna backed them down. It was a small victory compared to the conviction but it was a major victory compared to what could have happened.

She had stated to the world media that if convicted she wanted to receive the 40 lashes in public. Because of international publicity Lubna garnered for her case by being brave and outspoken, she backed the Sudanese authorities into a corner and they had no choice under the intense global media spotlight to back down.

I read farther down the story to find that Lubna said she was not going to pay the fine because she was going to appeal the conviction and she wanted the law repealed. An LA Times online story that said she wore the same trousers to trial that she was arrested in.

I laughed again because Lubna inspired me. When I said in my first piece about Lubna, “The world needs more brave souls like her”, I didn’t know she would be this brave.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, I am finishing a screenplay about honor killing that I wrote with my friend Rinde who was born and raised in northern Kurdistan (southwestern Turkey) and writing a book about the history of honor killing, I always try to imagine the audience it would attract world wide.

The movement Lubna could be starting in Sudan could spread far and wide. In America more than fifty years ago, the Civil Rights movement was sparked by a seamstress named Rosa Parks who simply refused to sit at the back of the bus. She was arrested and the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

What Ms. Parks began obviously led to the election of the first African-American president of the United States, whose middle name happens to be the same as Lubna’s surname.

Change is possible. Because the Civil Rights Movement began in a place as fundamentalist with its Jim Crow laws toward blacks as the Sudan is with its Sharia laws toward women, a Civil Rights Movement for women can begin in Sudan.

I want to emphasize that in no way do I, as a western man, mean to suggest anything bad about Muslim men. Quite the contrary.

A victory for Lubna is a victory for Muslim men everywhere because then Muslim men will not have to use their anger and other emotions and get as upset about something as trivial as women wearing trousers. Then Muslim people everywhere can turn their attention to the more important issues facing people everywhere. It takes a lot of brain power and energy to get angry. And it is very draining.

Why not put that mental and emotional energy to good use in other ways and for other issues like food and education and health care for all the people?

As I said in my second piece about Lubna, Sharia’s indecency laws are constructed so that the woman becomes responsible (by covering up every bit of skin) for Muslim men being tempted when the responsibility should be on Muslim men to see some skin and learn to control their temptations.

Muslim men not being responsible for controlling their own responses only makes them weaker. Therefore, the indecency laws may need to be revised if not only to give women stronger rights and to make women more comfortable in their dress and to make Muslim men stronger to control their responses. Trousers cover all the skin. Modesty is all that is required by Quran. Are Lubna’s trousers not modest?

If Lubna’s trousers violated the indecency laws for many of the same reasons that were discussed 80 years ago in America when Hollywood stars began wearing trousers—the argument that trousers removed a woman’s femininity—then that has nothing to do with indecency as much as personal taste on the part of the Sharia interpreter.

It seems to me that Muslim women wearing trousers would be more in line with the equality that Prophet Muhammad stressed between Muslim women and men. But that’s just the opinion of a westerner who has done some study of Islam and Quran in the past ten years.

When Lubna wins by repealing the law, I suggest she launch her own line of clothes. She will make a fortune selling her own brand of trousers all over the world and could use that money to help other causes for the women and children of Sudan and other countries.

Lubna Hussein

Beginning in the Roaring 20s, when many things began to change, tennis clothes and sportswear influenced female fashion so that by 1926 Hollywood actresses began a trend of wearing pants. By 1930, Greta Garbo, Ina Claire, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn were causing sensations by wearing pants. Shortly thereafter, if not before, women were wearing suits. Traditional opinions of the day were against this trend, and a number of “experts” were paraded forth to explain that women secretly wanted to be men, and to complain that femininity was being lost.

But for all the controversy they caused, Hepburn, Garbo, Lombard and Dietrich never had criminal charges filed against them for wearing trousers—especially a crime that carried a punishment of forty lashes.

Right now in Sudan, Lubna Hussein (the woman pictured above) is preparing to stand trial for wearing pants in public in Sudan. Perhaps many of you already know the story. If not, Lubna Hussein worked for the United Nations and would have been exempt from the charge. But, Ms. Hussein wanted to go to trial because she wanted to challenge the law she was accused of breaking—a decency law—for which she has quit or will soon be quitting her job. The world needs more brave souls like her.

It is very unwise and illogical to lump all Muslim countries—and the cultures they contain—into a category one conveniently labels as “standard Islam”. There are differences from country to country—and perhaps even from region to region within countries. If decency for women in Afghanistan is a burqah, or Saudi Arabia a chador or elsewhere a hijab, or in Iran simply jeans and shirt like Neda Soltan, the woman killed in Teheran a month ago whose video became world renown on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet, and whose 40th day of mourning was yesterday.

I have long been interested in the struggle of equality for women in Islam. From all of my reading, I believe that Muhammad never intended women to be regarded in Muslim society as they have throughout history. I also don’t think Jesus intended women to be regarded as second-class citizens in Christian society as they have throughout history.

With the mourning anniversary of Neda yesterday and the approach to trial next week, both because of strict fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law and lust for power and control, it is interesting to observe today is the anniversary of the death of Ahmad ibn Hanbal in 855 CE. Ibn Hanbal was a Muslim scholar and theologian who refused to accept the view of Caliph Al-Ma’mun who decreed that the Quran was a creation of God.

The Caliph demanded that ibn Hanbal and another Imam, Muhammad ibn Nuh, to accept his decree but they refused “to acknowledge the literal creation of the Quran as created like other of Allah's creatures.”

They were sent in irons to al-Ma’mun to be punished. In transit, ibn Hanbal prayed to Allah so that he would not meet al-Ma’mun. Suddenly, al-Ma’mun died and ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh were both sent back. On their return journey, ibn Nuh died and ibn Hanbal was left to prepare his funeral and bury ibn Nuh.

Ibn Hanbal was later flogged by al-Mu’tasim, the half-brother of al-Ma’mun, who succeeded him, for not accepting the Quran-as-God’s-creation and was banished from Baghdad by al-Wathiq, the son of al-Mu’tasim and successor as Caliph.

So you see, there is honor in what Lubna Hussein is doing from a historical perspective as well as a feminist perspective. Many scholars and theologians in Islam have rebelled against the more power-hungry fundamentalists throughout history as Islam has struggled to define itself then just as it continues to do so today.

I am a westerner trying to learn as much about Islam as possible for peaceful purposes. To paraphrase Richard Pryor at the beginning of his monologue, hosting Saturday Night Live back in December 1975, “Hope I’m successful.”

This is a link to Lubna Hussein’s Facebook page (not to be confused with Lubna Hussain with an “a”) for anyone who wants to offer her support.