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The Virginity Test

Posted June 2nd, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Sometimes I wonder what year it is.  2011, or 1911?

Item:  former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s legal team is about to spend at least half a million dollars trying to discredit the immigrant chambermaid who accused him of rape and sexual assault.  Presumably, they’ll try to use her sexual history against her.  After all, she’s a widow with a 15-year-old child.  That is, she’s no virgin.

Item:  the so-called virginity tests forced on women protestors in Cairo by the military.  In fact these were officially sanctioned rape, even if no penetration was involved.  They were a deliberately chosen means of intimidating, humiliating, and attempting to control women.  To say that virginity has nothing to do with political activism is to belabor the point.  It’s not as though those who “passed” the publicly administered “test” were released with the military blessing to go demonstrate in freedom.  It was yet another means of repression.

For those who might think this is a peculiarly Islamic thing, consider that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, with whom he lived monogamously for 19 years, was twice widowed by the time they married.  And that of the nine women he married after her death, only one was a virgin at marriage (the others were all divorced or widowed).  Since virginity was clearly a non-issue to Muhammad himself, any religious argument for it is hard to make.

As for those virgins in paradise, well, see my TEDx talk for that.

The same applies in Christianity.  Yes, of course I know about the Virgin Mary — I wrote a book about her.  But as I pointed out there, to reduce the concept of virginity to the existence of a biologically useless membrane called the hymen is worse than absurdly literal.  It totally misses out on the grand metaphor of virginity, which existed around the world at the time.  As with a virgin forest, it stood for incredible fecundity, for a surfeit of growth and reproduction, untamed and unfettered.  That is, virginity was the miracle of fertility, and in that respect, the Virgin Mary is the last in a long and once-powerful line of mother goddesses.

So let’s not blame religion.  That’s just the excuse.  Nor such a thing as a “Middle East mentality.”   Because…

Item: as late as the 1970s, British officials were administering virginity tests too.  And again, the purpose was to intimidate women — to deter them from entering the country as immigrant brides (if they weren’t virgins, it seemed, they had to be lying about their reasons for entering the U.K.).   And while we’re talking about Brits, by the way, how weird is it that at that same time, the early 1970s, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin for his enterprises?  Flying the friendly skies?

Perhaps all this means that in forty years’ time, the confusion of virginity with virtue will be as outmoded in Egypt as it now is (Branson excepted) in England.  But then of course it’s not about virtue, and never was.  It’s about the peculiar desire of some men (thank God not all) to control women — their sexuality, their behavior, their freedom of choice.  That is, it’s about not about women as people, but as possessions.

Item:  A commenter on this blog, fulminating against Islam with such blatant racism that I had to bar him as spam, summed up his argument this way:  “We know how to treat our women.”  That “we” evidently referred only to men, specifically to non-Muslim western men who think of women as possessions — “ours” — and as such, to be (mis)treated as “we” see fit.   He was, he made clear, a fundamentalist Christian.

So tell me, what year are we living in?  Scratch the years I gave at the top.  If you go see Werner Herzog’s new movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (about the prehistoric paintings on the walls of that cave), you might discover that even Neanderthals had more respect for women than this.  And they lived 35,000 years ago.

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File under: Christianity, feminism, Islam, Middle East | Tagged: Tags: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, DSK, Egypt, fertility, Great Britain, Khadija, Muhammad, rape, sexuality, UK, virgin forest, Virgin Mary, virginity tests, Werner Herzog, women | 14 Comments
  1. Hossam says:
    June 2, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    As usual you wrote a very well article. It sometimes amazes me how some people quickly forget the past. It is something horrible if it really did happen, a disgrace. I think that guy’s ridiculous excuse “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” shows how much lack we have in terms of understanding of human rights and what constitutes rape. So we are about 40 years behind, i just hope we start catching up soon.

  2. lavrans says:
    June 2, 2011 at 11:24 pm

    As usual, I wonder about how much all of this is the struggle of overcoming “civilization”.

    Of course the Neanderthals treated women better… women were still part of the family. To move into a city requires agriculture and religion. Both of those seem to require hierarchies, and the simplest one is that of sex, followed by color, and then all the other facades that mean so little.

    Of course that’s a bit simplistic. Plenty of bad behavior to go around, but I’m constantly surprised by how much people seem to require someone else to provide them with the rules of composure, of respect, even while the ideal can be pulled from every mouth with very little prompting.

    We all know the myth of respect and virtue. What is it that makes it so enticing to withhold that from as many people as possible and upon such capricious reasoning? Religion itself of course isn’t an excuse- even though many put extra conditions on women and “others”, all of the prophets spend their time treating everyone as equally as possible.

    What turns me from religion and religious people is the awesome ability of the organization of religion to be so consistent in its absolute rejection of the very simple idea that the priests, those who manage the religion, should be bound to act LIKE their phrophets. They don’t seem to have a problem claiming some special connection to their God, but I suppose it’s a lot easier to [i]CLAIM[/i] to be the closest thing to God’s Chosen One on Earth than it is to ACT like the prophet who brought God’s word here.

    BTW- I don’t know how to do italics in this

  3. lavrans says:
    June 2, 2011 at 11:25 pm

    Oops- didn’t mean to post yet- I don’t know how to do Italics, so the CAPITALS aren’t meant to be shouts, just emphasis…

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 3, 2011 at 9:25 am

      I know — WordPress seems to take sadistic delight in forcing commenters to capitalize by denying the use of italics. Awaagh….

  4. chefranden says:
    June 4, 2011 at 2:33 pm

    “So let’s not blame religion. That’s just the excuse. Nor such a thing as a “Middle East mentality.” Because…”

    Yes let’s do blame religion. Where do you suppose the British got the idea that a bride should be a virgin in the first place?

    • sirnassir says:
      June 7, 2011 at 9:06 pm

      Except that numerous societies with vastly different religions, from Buddhist Japan to Muslim Turkey, valued virginity amongst potential brides. This shows that religion isn’t at the root of the issue, since the problem (if that’s what you would like to designate it) crosses religious and cultural boundaries.

  5. Lamiaa says:
    June 10, 2011 at 2:17 am

    you made me cry … thank you

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 10, 2011 at 8:53 am

      Thank you, Lamiaa. Your tears, my privilege. You definitely earn the title Luminous Woman (http://luminouswoman.blogspot.com).

      • Lamiaa says:
        June 12, 2011 at 6:50 am

        🙂 Thanx Lesley..

  6. Ali Zaidi says:
    June 21, 2011 at 8:51 am

    “….consider that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, with whom he lived monogamously for 19 years, was twice widowed by the time they married.”

    According to Shia Islamic literature Khadija never married before marrying the Prophet. So may be it is not justified to claim that Khadija was a two-time widow before she married the Prophet.

    • Ali Zaidi says:
      June 21, 2011 at 9:08 am

      “… is not justified to claim that Khadija was a two-time widow….”

      Oops! Ofcourse you are justified to make this claim but what I meant to say was that it may not be entirely true that Khadija was a two-time widow before marrying the Prophet.

  7. Lamiaa says:
    June 21, 2011 at 2:07 pm

    khadija had kids before Muhamed PBUH we all know that and even if she didn’t we all know she was 25 years his senior and women didn’t stay unmarried that long in that community so it is highly probable she was…I wonder when will men de-sexualize their intellects and truly think out side the box. It is thought that ruined the lives of widows and divorced women denying them a second chance at a happy married life.

    • Ali Zaidi says:
      June 22, 2011 at 10:43 am

      My only point is that when you say “..khadija had kids before Muhamed PBUH we all know that….”, it reflects only one version of the Islamic history. There is enough historical literature available on Khadija not being ever married before Muhammad PBUH.

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        June 23, 2011 at 6:43 pm

        The earliest Islamic historians all agree that Khadija was twice widowed, but what interests me is this: why does it seem to be so important to you to believe that she was not?

Channeling Khadija

Posted September 14th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Occasionally – okay, rarely – the first time you meet someone is indelibly etched on your mind.  Meeting Tamam Kahn was like that.  It was a few years ago at the Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico (once the haunt of Georgia O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence) at the all-women AROHO – A Room of Her Own – writers conference, where I was teaching, taking a break from working on After the Prophet, and generally high on being in high desert.

That morning I was stretched out on a table, doing some Pilates exercises between sessions (on the table, because nobody was going to stumble over me that way, I guess;  stretching, because I’d hiked further than I’d intended before breakfast) when Tamam appeared, long blond Rasta locks and all.

She didn’t say hello.  She didn’t say her name.  She just stood there and began to chant, and I sat upright immediately.  This chant commanded attention.  It took me a moment to realize whose voice this had to be:   that of Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, the woman to whom he fled in terror after his first encounter with the angel Gabriel, who held him and assured him that he was not crazy and that this really was a divine revelation, and to whom he stayed married in a monogamous and extraordinarily close relationship until her death.

“You wrote that poem?” I asked when Tamam fell silent.  And I mean silent:  all the buzz and chatter around us seemed to have fallen away.  She didn’t answer — just kind of half-smiled and began chanting another, this one in the voice of Aisha, the youngest and most controversial of the nine women Muhammad married after Khadija’s death.

It wasn’t just the rhythm.  These poems had a fierce, elegant energy, an urgency and passion that seemed to bring these women alive.  When I’d written my ‘flesh-and-blood biography‘ of Mary, many people had asked me if I’d felt like I was channeling her.  I’d said no way — I’m not into channeling or any of that New Agey kind of stuff.  But that morning at Ghost Ranch, it honestly felt as though Tamam was channeling these seventh-century women.  By the time Tamam/Aisha had finished, I was officially blown away.

Those poems have now been published in Untold: a History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad – just two of seventy poems in all, embedded in a prose narrative.  Here’s me on the back cover:

In a sustained act of spirited research and imagination, Tamam Kahn brings Muhammad’s wives out of the shadows and into the light.  The women of ‘Untold’ have at last found their perfect teller, in voices so gemlike and clear that one wants to chant them aloud, dance to them, celebrate with them.

And yippee, publication brings Tamam to Seattle for the next few days, doing readings and a Sufi retreat weekend.  So if you’re anywhere near, check her schedule here (I’ll be at the Thursday reading in the chapel of the U District’s United Methodist Church on 43rd between 15th and University), and prepare to be blown away.

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File under: art, Islam | Tagged: Tags: Aisha, Khadija, Muhammad, poetry, Sufi, Tamam Kahn, Untold, wives | 1 Comment
  1. Mary Johnson says:
    September 15, 2010 at 8:18 am

    What a terrific story, Lesley. I can picture you and Tamam at Ghost Ranch, together with Khadija and Aisha.

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