Driving Change in the World

When I was three or four my parents bought me a pedal car, a small metal-bodied car with pedals that propelled the car forward. I loved that car. I became quite fast driving it around our house. When I was a little older my father put me on his lap and let me steer our car down the street. I absolutely fell in love with driving and got my first license as soon as legally possible, at sixteen years and one month old.

To me driving represented freedom and self-determination, thrill and satisfaction, solitude and meditation. It still does. I love to drive.

I simply cannot imagine how I would feel if, after all that, my government told me I was not allowed to drive a car because I was too tall, too dumb or because I was a man.

I’ve been hearing stories here and there about women wanting to drive in Saudi Arabia for some time now. Today I read a story on Huffington Post about Saudi women asking Hillary Clinton to help them be allowed to drive. I say go for it. They should also appeal to Laura Bush since “W” and his family are closer to the Saudi royals than Hillary.

There is a petition which I signed on the Change.org website, which was recently cyber attacked by China because of their support for Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei.

According to Women of the Revolution, Manal al-Sharif dropped her campaign to call for the driving ban to be lifted. She was detained and released on May 21, 2011 and rearrested the next day and released on bail on May 30, 2011. She’s a computer security consultant but she can’t drive.

A video of her driving and discussing the ban was posted on YouTube. It is here.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prevents women from driving so it’s not a Muslim thing as perhaps the “Shariers”—my new word to denote those who try to scare gullible Americans that American Muslims are trying to institute Sharia law here in the US in much the same way the “Birthers” tried to scare gullible Americans that Obama…you know the rest—might have us believe.

Wahabism is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. And Wahabism is as fundamentalist conservative as the Reverend Ted Haggard was before he realized the door to his closet was opened.

We cannot surmise for certain that granting women the right to drive would commence in Saudi Arabia a social revolution for gender equality, but there may, however, become a large number of Saudi soccer moms.

In Iran, women are working as taxi drivers, picking up only women as fares. And, as Lubna Hussein made progress for women in the Sudan in 2009 by wearing trousers, the Muslim world is slowly changing.

This morning, while driving to work, I saw a crowd of Syrians outside the CNN building on Sunset Boulevard holding signs that read “Free Syria” and “Where is the media?”

That may be their mistake; confusing CNN with legitimate media, thinking that CNN cares. But I used to do that too—protesting outside Rockefeller Center in 1986, hoping to raise NBC’s awareness and concern about the forced relocation of the Navajo just so Peabody Coal could strip mine coal.

A century ago the American Suffragist movement was working hard to gain women the right to vote, which it won in 1920. Saudi women will get the right to drive one day.

Maybe royal Saudi nephew and Fox News investor, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, can help. I suggest we all write him letters asking him to intervene directly at Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, c/o Fox News Channel, 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY  10036.

This can have a double affect. Bin Talal has already called for it. Show him and shower him our support. And it makes visible again, the close connection between Fox and bin Talal, the guy who wanted to fund the Ground Zero Mosque that Fox on-air conservatives were against.

We may also want to write to “W” at his Presidential Center. The website talks about Middle East’s “Wave of Freedom”, a Bush Institute Area of Engagement is “human freedom” and one of the Bush Institute’s Integrated Initiatives has a women’s initiative. Bush has to do some good in the world. You can send them an email at lwike@bushcenter.com. You may need to copy and paste this email address. And I say why not?

Perhaps for the betterment of the world we should commit to this century being the century of women. We have Hillary encourage the Saudis to give women the right to drive and we allow the Iraqis, Afghanis and Libyans to successfully encourage Hillary, Barack and the rest of us to give women in those three countries the right not to have their children and babies killed in our wars.

I’m harping on the death of children in war again, eh? What a downer. Well, here’s an upper. “Drive My Car” performed by the man who wrote it (with Lennon) and sang it, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.

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's Trial Postponed

Today it was reported that the trial of Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman accused of violating Islamic law for wearing trousers (doesn’t that seem ridiculous?), has been postponed until it could be determined if she is subject to trial because of being an employee of the United Nations.

You may remember from reading about her here (among other more prominent news sources) last week that she had agreed to quit her position at the U.N. (which she did) because she wanted to go to trial to make her point that she and other women who wore trousers were not violating decency laws. Ms. Hussein wants the trial to go forward and if found guilty she wants a public flogging. She wants to show the world how barbaric these decency laws are.

Ms. Hussein was quoted in a report in the Times of London that she believed they referred her case to the Foreign Minister to delay her trial to try to save face. Perhaps these persecutors are afraid of her fierce courage and the world is watching especially in view of the world watching events in Iran and Sudan does not want the same scrutiny.

As technology allows us all to become more aware of each other’s humanity and struggles to maintain and preserve our individual dignity, all the Sudanese women and men who protested outside the courthouse yesterday and were subjected to the police teargas and beatings should know I support—as do many other Americans—their fight for their rights.

I’m just an ignorant westerner with some knowledge of the Quran and Prophet Muhammad’s attitude’s toward women and even I cannot see that trousers worn by women would be indecent or against Islam. Now, you may say that is because I am ignorant and a westerner where women wear less than trousers. But to my knowledge (and I have been studying Islam from a woman’s perspective for almost ten years now) the basic Islamic criteria for a woman being dressed decently is that she is covered; that she is not showing skin—ankles, forearms, etc.

Perhaps trousers show the form of a woman’s leg and that is haram (forbidden) and could cause men to have impure thoughts. But this practice forces women to be responsible for men controlling the impure thoughts in their own minds.

If that’s the belief, men will never learn control over their own thoughts. And if men never learn control over their own impure thoughts, they will always be weak. And if these men are that weak then they will never be strong Muslim men. This also puts women forever in the position of being responsible for men like their mothers were responsible for them. In that respect, these men will never grow up and become men. They will always be spoiled boys in men’s bodies. That is not what I believe the Prophet Muhammad meant Islam to be.

In the west I live in, I understand that with individual freedom comes individual responsibility. Perhaps this is not the case in all areas of America where our fundamentalist religions tell us it is evil or liberals that are causing our problems. Religious people of all types seem to want to control others who are simply expressing their decent and dignified individual liberty so the religious people can feel okay. This is how religion-based oppression begins.

Lubna’s attire, in all the photos I have seen, makes her look very dignified and respectful. How could any judge or jury call that indecent?

It is important to me that the rest of the world not lump me—as an American—with the Erik Prince’s of America. As we all know, Erik Prince is the head of Blackwater (now Xe), the private security firm hired by the U.S. State department to provide their security under Bush-Cheney and whose employees were found guilty by the Iraqi government of what seems was a massacre of innocent Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007 and are set to stand trial in America next January.

Yesterday there was a news item that Prince was a fundamentalist Christian who believed in the Crusades and the extermination of all Muslims and saw his work in Iraq as if he was a soldier in a religious war. He is also accused of trafficking in arms.

We have a lot of nutcases in America—as you can see with the birthers and those hooligans who are acting like self-righteous defenders of the American (corporate greed) way against any kind of health care for the poor. These people are not Christians and neither is Erik Prince. These people are against what Christ taught. They are the opposite of what Prophet Issa hoped people who believed in his teachings would be and do.

As I said, with individual freedom comes individual responsibility. Not everyone here in America takes that responsibility because they are free not to. And because I think it is too hard for them. It is easier for them to find fault with others rather than take a good hard look at themselves and their powerful groups and wonder if they are being oppressive.

Perhaps Lubna Hussein is making the powerful in Sudan examine themselves and making them wonder if they are being fair or oppressive. I think she has made them realize the world has changed and they must change with it.

If we could get rid of the all conservatives, fundamentalists, neo-cons and imperialists, we could actually have a pretty good world. Sounds like fantasy? I think Lubna is actually taking us all one step closer to that eventuality.

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.