Decoy Politics

This is ridiculous. And the fact that Anni agreed to waver his initial choice in favour of a male candidate is even more ridiculous. Majority wins, right? Sorry but no. No to democracy and democratizing the Maldives. No to patriarchal interpretations that’s central to fanaticism. I want nothing to do with a movement, be it a majority or a minority, which treats women as an optional extra.

We didn’t use to be a male-only nation. We were once a kingdom ruled by queens, both before and after the (forced) conversion to Islam. Our women weren’t a meek, submissive lot who allowed the honour of men to be founded upon the degradation of women. In fact, the infamous Arab traveler Ibn Battuta wrote: “It is a strange thing about these islands that their ruler is a woman, Khadija. Her army comprises about a thousand men, recruited from abroad, though some are natives. They are paid in rice monthly.” He also wrote how the “womenfolk do not cover their heads, not even their queen does so, and they comb their hair and gather it at one side. Most of them wear only an apron from their waists to the ground, the rest of their bodies being uncovered. When I held the qadiship there, I tried to put an end to this practice and ordered them to wear clothes, but I met with no success.” Another traveler Al-Idrisi wrote: “All these islands have a chief (ra’ïs), who unites them, protects and defends them, and makes truce according to his ability. His wife enacts as an arbitrator among the people and does not veil herself from them. When she issues her orders, her husband, the chief, though he is present, does not interfere with any of her ordinances. It has always been a custom with them that a woman arbitrates, a custom which they not depart.”

Today it’s an entirely different story. Within the past five years extremists have succeeded in doing what even Ibn Battuta could not. Everywhere you look you see women garbed completely in black from head to toe. These women do not work, do not bother with education, do not concern themselves with politics/economy, and do not believe in contraception or vaccination. Their entire world is behind the closed doors of their homes- the ‘natural’ boundary drawn for them by men who make Kaiser Wilhelm look like a liberal. Where did we go wrong?

The increasingly popular acceptance of this extremist muck as the norm, as the part and parcel of Islamic tradition, is a symptom. It signifies our unstable politics and economical insecurities and how they affect each island-state. In the face of poverty, 2004 tsunami disaster (some island populations still remain displaced in temporary refuges), low income (unless one is a parliament member), limited educational opportunities, increasing domestic violence and drug trafficking, one can easily understand what attracts a man or a woman to become a raging zealot. Amidst alienation, despair, hopelessness and feelings of being abandoned by a God who is not supposed to let His believers down, Wahhabism offers a new interpretation to the purpose of life and shows a way of feeling empowered. This ultra-extremist doctrine, which was founded by the 19th century evangelist Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, persuades the zealot that individual trials and tribulations are trivial when compared to the state of the Islamic World (Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq et al). And the only way to revive the ummah’s honour and dignity is to follow Abd al-Wahab’s example and rid Islam of the corruptions (capitalism, feminism, intellectualism, sectarian divisions, mysticism etc) that has crept into religion. In his book ‘The Place of Tolerance in Islam’ Khalid Abou el Fadl writes: “According to the Wahhabi creed, it was imperative to return to a presumed pristine, simple, straightforward Islam, which could be entirely reclaimed by literal implementation of the commands of the Prophet, and by strict adherence to correct ritual practice. Importantly, Wahhabism rejected any attempt to interpret the divine law historically or contextually, with attendant possibilities of reinterpretation under changed circumstances. It treated the vast majority of Islamic history as corruption of true and authentic Islam.”

Wahhabism was, and is, essentially a political movement that was globalized with the sword. This is evident in the history of Saudi Arabia. According to El Fadl, “in the late 18th century the Al Saud family united with the Wahhabi movement, and rebelled against Ottoman rule in Arabia. The rebellions were very bloody and the Wahhabis indiscriminately slaughtered and terrorized Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In 1818, Egyptian forced under the leadership of Muhammad Ali defeated this rebellion and Wahhabism seemed destined to become another fringe historical experience with no lasting impact on Islamic theology. But the Wahhabi creed was resuscitated in the early 20th century under the leadership of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, who allied himself with Wahhabi militant rebels know as the Ikhwan, in the beginnings of what would become Saudi Arabia. Even with the formation of the Saudi state, Wahhabism remained a creed of limited influence until the mid 1970s when the sharp rise in oil prices, together with aggressive Saudi proselytizing, dramatically contributed to its wide dissemination in the Muslim world. Wahhabism did not propagate itself as one school of thought or a particular orientation within Islam. Rather it asserted itself as the orthodox ’straight path’ of Islam. Moreover the proponents of Wahhabism refused to be labeled or categorized as followers of any particular figure including Abd al-Wahhab himself. Its proponents insisted that they were simply abiding by the dictates of al-salaf al-salih (the rightly guided predecessors, namely the Prophet and his companions), and in doing so, Wahhabis were able to appropriate the symbolism and categories of Salafism. Ironically, Salafism was founded in the early 20th century by al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Ridaas a liberal theological orientation. To respond to the demands of modernity, they argued, Muslims needed to return to the original sources of the Quran and Sunnah, and engage in de novo interpretations of the text. By the 1970s however, Wahhabism had succeeded in transforming Salafism from a liberal modernist orientation to a literalist, puritan, and conservative theology. The sharp rises in oil prices in 1975 enabled Saudi Arabia, the main proponent of Wahhabism, to disseminate the Wahhabi creed under a Salafi guise, which purported to revert back to the accretions of historical practice. In reality, however, Saudi Arabia projected its own fairly conservative cultural practices onto the textual sources of Islam ad went on to proselytize these projections as the embodiment of Islamic orthodoxy.”

This is where we went wrong- when we adopted Wahhabism as the solution to the Maldivian problem when it should have been treated as a symptom, a warning. Democracy came a bit too late. If anything, democracy, at this stage, is nothing more than necessary fiction. MDP may have members like Mariya Ahmed Didi and Dr. Aminath Jameel who speak for women and their rights. But they are nothing more than decoys. They play a role of deception, to lure us into fantasy of gender equity rather than depravity. Their biological sex might be female, but the cultural construct of their gender is not. And this is precisely why I want no part of this decoy politics.

-F