Racing Thoughts

“[…] the acceptance of marital rape has little to do with “Lebanese” or “Arab” culture, and it cannot solely be blamed on the supposed backwardness of religious authorities. It cannot be attributed to some inherent darkness within Islam, as it so often is. In fact feminists across the world, from all different religions (in addition to atheists) and “cultures,” have fought the same battle and have heard the same arguments lobbed against them from civil, military, religious, and “traditional” authorities. In Lebanon, it is particularly obscene to single out the Mufti or the religious courts more generally for perpetuating sexism and patriarchy because women are considered the legal appendages of men in all areas of law and society. It is just too easy, and too convenient to think that the only obstacle to legal equality is religion, particularly when the constitutive exception in Lebanese law is a nationality law that holds that only children of Lebanese citizens who have a penis are worthy enough be Lebanese citizens. And by the way, if the infant has a vagina she automatically loses this entitlement. The argument cited to continue this discrimination is invariably the oh-so-sacred “sectarian balance” in the country. And yet when one plays devils advocate and says “ok, so men who are married to ‘foreigners’ should not be able to give their citizenship to their spouses or children either” one is met with blank stares, as if the thought never occurred to them. And I am sure that in many cases it hasn’t, because all of these interconnected legal exceptions-from rape laws to nationality laws to marriage and divorce laws to inheritance laws to banking laws and to census registry laws- all of these together produce what it means to be a Lebanese woman today. And as a Lebanese woman, my enemy is not the religions authorities, or the civil state, or the criminal justice system. Rather, my enemy is the logic unites all these authorities together and makes them (sometimes uneasy) allies: the logic of privilege, ownership, entitlement, and a discriminatory weighting of gendered lives. […]”

- Excerpt from the article “Sexual Violence Is A Crime, Sometimes” by Maya Mikdashi, posted on January 11, 2012 on Jadaliyya