June 1994
ANTOINETTE FOUQUE: The fatwa that threatens your life was pronounced by the fundamentalists because you dared to criticize the apartheid that Islam inflicts on women.
TASLIMA NASRIN: I became aware of discrimination between men and women as a child. My brothers could go out, but I couldn’t. This discrimination leaves its mark on all women. They are constantly kept under guard; they are guarded by their fathers until they reach adolescence, then by their husbands, and finally by their sons. Many women have, like me, been to university and have jobs, but they are kept shut up in the workplace or at home. They spend their lives in captivity because they are the slaves of men. So long as women—even educated women—do not have access to equal rights, neither their bodies nor their minds will be free.
The Koran oppresses women: it says that the first woman was born of a man’s rib, that women are the slaves and sexual objects of men, who are their masters, and that men can have four wives and divorce them as they see fit. I have denounced the harmful effects of Islam and social taboos in my articles.
1 I even dared to write against the prophet Mohammed, against the texts in which he threatens women with hell if they do not submit to their husbands’ sexual desires and promises them heaven if they drink their husbands’ blood and pus. That’s why the fundamentalists issued a fatwa against me. I’ve been living in captivity ever since.
AF: Confinement, like the headscarf, is a sign that the churches have always, as we know, asserted their control over women’s bodies and their fertility. As Freud demonstrated in The Future of an Illusion, monotheism is the illusory triumph of the pleasure principle of narcissistic male omnipotence, the pleasure principle of a sex that wants to be chosen, absolutely unique and sovereign, over the reality principle, which teaches us that there are two sexes. It is the sons’ envious appropriation of women’s creative capacity and it reflects the oldest of all theological and philosophical phantasms: engendering children without any trace of the maternal. It is uterus envy, which is misogyny itself. Women disappear; they are enslaved, imprisoned, made invisible, and foreclosed. On this point the difference between fundamentalism and orthodoxy is quantitative, not qualitative. For women, all monotheisms are fundamentalisms.
In Europe Catholicism is returning in force, thanks to a papal morality that, having opposed painless childbirth until 1956, is now violently opposed to anti-AIDS contraception. By allying itself with Iran, the Vatican is trying to force the UN to omit any mention of the right to abortion in the papers to be presented at the Population Conference,
2 advocating that women should go back to the home.
TN: In Bangladesh, which is a people’s republic, 80 percent Muslim and 20 percent Hindu, Islam became the state religion when the army seized power in 1988. Before, it was a secular state. Our constitution, which was inspired by British law, established the legal equality of men and women. But the Islamic Family Code allows men to take four wives, to inherit two-thirds of all family property, to have custody of children over the age of seven in the event of divorce, and so on. There are no equal rights. There is no democracy in the family, in society, or in the state.
Politicians, the government, and society have turned Islam into a weapon. Any civilized country has to opt for secularism. When I speak of secularism I do not mean equal rights for all religions. I mean a society in which religion remains in the private sphere. And a civilized country also means a country in which women have equal rights in every domain, in which they are treated as human beings, in which there is no discrimination between blacks and whites, and in which property and wealth are distributed on an equal basis.
AF: If it is to make any progress, democracy must indeed reinforce the philosophical basis of secularism with and for women. We can see this in Algeria, where women are behind the democratic mobilization that is trying to get the country out of the impasse of fundamentalism: on the one hand, fundamentalist terror and, on the other, a state in which Islam has been the official religion since 1963 and that imposed a family code on women in 1984,
3 despite the long struggle women waged against that proposal. Secularism must rely on women, and women must rely on secularism in order to preserve their right to education, work, freedom, and equality.
However, the democratic model has always been haunted by the exclusion of the other. This is what a reading of the Greek texts teaches us. In order to found Athenian democracy, Athena, who was the motherless daughter of Zeus, absolved Orestes of matricide and drove the avenging Erinyes into the underworld. The alliance of males combines with that of religions to block women’s pursuit of emancipation. Ever more homosexed and ever more undifferentiated, public life here in France is unfolding without women, and we have been fighting for parity for several years now.
TN: In Bangladesh a law introduced a parliamentary quota that gives an extra thirty seats (out of three hundred thirty) to the women of the majority party, because no more than two or three women have ever been elected to parliament. The women who take those seats have not been elected; they are named by the ruling party. People make fun of them because, in their view, politics is men’s business. And in fact there are no openings that would allow women to become involved in politics. Those who do so usually inherit the role of a husband or father who has been killed, like Benazir Bhutto.
Our prime minister and the leader of the opposition party (both women) are elected members of parliament, but they are implementing the policies of their husbands or father and doing nothing for women. As for the parties, the women involved act on the advice of men and do not want to change the system. When, in accordance with Islamic law, the fundamentalists issue a fatwa forbidding women to work outside the home or condemning a woman who has denounced the system, no woman politician protests, because she and her party would be accused of being anti-Islamic. And, given that the majority of the population is Islamic, she keeps quiet.
AF: Like the other monotheisms, Islam is the primary obstacle to women’s entrance into public life, and into political life in particular. But in secular states women face other very constraining obstacles. The principle of equality, for instance, is essential and has to be defended, but it is dangerous for us because it has not been thought through. It helps to conceal misogyny. The hatred of women, of “Woman,” on the part of both men and women, is the root of all rejections of the other. It is the root of all racisms. Perhaps at bottom it is not so much hatred as a primordial, archaic envy of women’s procreative capabilities. And that envy is all the more influential in that it persists in denying the existence of what it envies.
The principle of equality is perverse, and it denies reality: there are women, and there are men. Because the dissymmetry with respect to procreation has not been thought through, it reappears in the form of obstacles to equality and the penalization of women for their contribution to humanity. Equality and difference cannot exist the one without the other, nor can either be sacrificed to the other. Ifwe sacrifice equality on the altar of difference, we go back to the reactionary positions of traditional societies, and if we sacrifice the difference between the sexes on the altar of equality, we sterilize women, deprive them of their identity, and sterilize humanity.
TN: A new generation of women is being born in Bangladesh. On March 8, last year, they celebrated Women’s Day by marching through Dacca chanting “It’s my body; it’s my decision.” I had adopted this slogan in my own texts, and I felt less isolated. All over the world women are assigned to reproduction. In the Third World, governments decide whether or not they must be sterilized and whether they may have one child or two. Women are used in Western countries too. They are used in all social systems, by all government and all states. This dictatorship over women must be abolished. It is up to them to decide whether or not they have abortions, how many children they have, and with whom they have them.
AF: “Our bodies belong to us” was one of the first assertions to be made by the Women’s Movement in France in the 1970s, and it is a precondition for our liberation. Later, on October 6, 1979, we marched to demand the renewal of the Veil law and the reimbursement of the costs of abortion,
4 with a banner on which I insisted on writing “The uterus belongs to women, the factories belong to the workers, the production of living beings belongs to us.” The slogan led to a lot of polemics, and yet it is up to women to produce, or create, living beings.
The ancestral duty to procreate that churches and states have forced upon us for thousands of years now has to be transformed into the right to procreate. There will be no justice and no freedom for women until procreation is enshrined in law. The universal right, not a duty or a prescription but the affirmative right—and the right to abortion is obviously part of it—of all women in the world to procreation and full control over their own bodies.