Youve Reversed a Long Way, Baby

Its International Womens Day -- and no one wants to talk about the Islamic States hold
over women. Why Beijing+20 looks more like Beijing minus 2000

BY LEELA JACINTO-MARCH 5, 2015

Its that time of year when activists, envoys, politicians, and their
aides are putting final touches to their International Womens Day
events. March 8 may be just another day for most Americans, but in
some parts its a very big deal. Presidents and prime ministers will
soon be affirming that equality for women means progress for all.

Speeches are being polished, mission statements are making the

rounds, and draft documents are being examined in excruciating
detail.

This year also happens to be Beijing+20 or 20 years since the

watershedU.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. So, anyone
whos anything in the womens movement wants everything to be bigger,
better, brighter. At the United Nations New York headquarters, a high-level
international womens conference will bring together officials and activists
from across the world for a two-week extravaganza that will include
marches and celebratory events featuring, Ive been told, the likes of Hillary
Clinton, Bill de Blasio, Michelle Obama, and top musical artists.
By the time the international news teams descend on Manhattan,
journalists will have exhausted everything they have to say about the three
missing London schoolgirls who are believed to have crossed the TurkeySyria border into the self-declared Islamic State caliphate which, in
case you were wondering, will not be represented at the U.N. conference.
Kadiza Sultana, 16, Shamima Begum, 15, and Amira Abase, 15, boarded a
London-Istanbul flight on Feb. 17, joining a wave of women and girls
heading for the Syria-Iraq badlands controlled by the Islamic State.
But who knows, something miraculous could happen to the three teenage
girls who dominated the British headlines for several days. They may be
found; they may realize that the jihadi El Dorado is actually Hell on Earth;

they may miss their mummies. Until then, we can only wring our hands and
hope and pray.

Two and a half years ago, we were horrified when Taliban militants attacked
a preternaturally articulate Pakistani student on her way home from school
in the Swat Valley. But Malala Yousafzai has a way of tapping into our
collective conviction that good must surely triumph over evil. She survived;
she emerged re-energized in her commitment to girls education; she
delivered a rousing address at the U.N.; she won a Nobel Peace Prize.
This time though, we seem to have hit an all-time low. After what Amnesty
International has called a devastating year when the worlds politicians
miserably failed to protect those in greatest need, our girls are more
vulnerable than theyve ever been. Straight-A students in London are being
swayed by an Islamist group advocating sexual slavery, child marriage,
gender subjugation, grotesque murders, and genocide of minorities.Women
inside Islamic State-controlled territory are enticing other women across the
world on social media sites with uploaded images of chick-jihadi
heaven. And with it, a centuries-old progression on gender rights is going
down the toilet in some parts.
Nobody has a clue about how many vulnerable women and girls are at risk.
Some experts say an estimated 550 Western females are believed to have
migrated to Islamic State-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq. This figure,
however, does not include women from neighboring Arab countries. It

would be safe to say that the number of women across the world at risk of
being swayed by the Islamic States message whether or not they plan to
make their way to the caliphate is in the thousands.
While some of the female migrants accompanied their fighter husbands,
others have traveled independently, sometimes to marry fiancs they
encountered online. The idea of women voluntarily signing up for a life of
extreme restrictions in a conflict zone is so baffling that it has sparked a
jihadi brides discourse that has ranged from the astute to the absurd,
including an infamous CNN segment on the Islamic State luring women with
kittens and Nutella.
Why are Western women and girls signing up for the Islamic State dream?
For the same reasons that men are, say the experts.
Like their disaffected menfolk in the West, female migrants to Islamic State
areas are inspired by a new vision for society and a chance to live out, what
they believe, is a true Islam. As Katherine Brown, a lecturer in defense
studies at Kings College London, noted in a BBC piece, Women are joining
[the Islamic State] because it provides a new utopian politics
participating in jihad and being part of the creation of a new Islamic state.
Unlike their male counterparts, though, the female migrants or muhajirat
arent getting anywhere near the heart of the action.
A vision of female Islamist warriors strutting around in their all-black hijabs
and brandishing Kalashnikovs first captured our imaginations shortly after

the 1979 Iranian revolution, when Tehran was fighting the long, terrible
Iran-Iraq War against a Western-backed Saddam Hussein. By the time the
United States decided to oust Saddam, we were spooking ourselves
with reports of al Qaedas [nonexistent] female foot soldiers. Desk-bound
editors are particularly susceptible to female ninja fighters, and so, over
the years, Ive spent more time than was necessary writing on black
widows and their white counterparts. Bereaved, avenging Chechen
women: done. Moroccan widow of Afghan hero Ahmad Shah Massouds
killer: check. By the time Somalia-bound, al Shabab-supporting British
national Samantha Lewthwaite(yes, the white widow) was distracting
from coverage of the Westgate mall attack in Nairobi, I had to patiently
explain the jihadi gender status quo. These are hard-line Salafi groups that
view women as baby factories or incubators of the next jihadi generation, I
explained. Their women have no agency and no mobility except with
a marham, or male escort. So, our very white widow will very likely have to
find herself another male provider in al-Shababistan, marry him, pop out his
babies, and sit at home. End of non-story.
With the Islamic State, we see the same misconceptions with a few
alarming differences. Months after the June 2014 fall of Mosul, Iraq, when
the trickle of females heading for Islamic State areas turned into a
flood,reports of the newfound caliphates al-Khanssaa female brigade
began circulating. The old images of niqab-encased, pistol-packing mamas

resurfaced. They were reinforced by the adrenalin-pumped social media

posts of jihadi sistahs posing with rifles, declaring their passion for suicide
belts, and braying over the Islamic States brutal killings of Western
hostages. The al-Khanssaa girls, it seemed, were on the front lines of the
fight against the kafirs (infidels).
Turns out its not quite true. The much-touted al-Khanssaa brigade is just
ahisbah (religious police) for chicks. They check the square inches of female
face visible beneath veils and whether burqas are billowing or too formfitting for Islamist comfort. They havent reached anywhere near the jihadi
glass ceiling. Not that crashing the party is anything to celebrate: Nigerias
Boko Haram, for instance, has started using female suicide bombers on an
almost industrial scale. But lets be clear: Militant Islamist groups in subSaharan Africas peripheral regions are very low on the jihadi pecking order.
The respected jihadi groups with ideologues releasing sermons and
statements believe women have no place on the battlefield.
This is amply clear in a lengthy manifesto uploaded by al-Khanssaas media
wing on jihadi forums and recently translated by the London-based Quilliam
Foundation. Titled Women of the Islamic State, the chilling document
features rants against feminism, science, and secular education. It also
decrees that females are best married before they reach 16 years old and
can start wedding men when they hit 9.
This is not the stuff of Beijing+20 its Beijing minus 2000 or, more

accurately, Raqqa circa apocalypse. If people in the international

equality for women means progress for all crowd want to make any
progress, they simply must address this issue.
The problem is, will they?

But the women of the Islamic State, unlike al Qaedas monochrome widows,
are dangerous because they effectively and tirelessly put out a message
thats cogent, consistent, and compelling if youre in the mood for that
sort of thing. Because the group is also alarmingly prolific, Ive had to read
too many of their takfiri texts, and I can attest that, beyond a point, it starts
to make sense in a twisted kind of way.
Its a state Graeme Wood reached at the end of his Atlantic cover story,
What ISIS Really Wants. I must confess I found the article interesting and
well written, but not shocking. How do we know what the Islamic State
really wants? They tell us repeatedly, in as many languages as the group
can manage. And its discourse is far more compellingly Islamic than
anything al Qaeda ever put out in over a decade. So, I was stunned by
the backlash to the article from the liberal-left set.
I really dont want to get into the details of that here.Whats important for
the womens movement, though, is to avoid the pitfall of abandoning
gender rights in a bid to steer clear of the rabidly Islamophobic
right.Thousands of women and girls are being swayed by the Islamic
State/Khanssaa message because they believe it is Islamic. The vast

majority of the worlds estimated 1.2 billion Muslims beg to disagree, and
they have the worlds leading Islamic scholars on their side. Thats great.
Now go get the message out. But dont steer clear of asking hard questions
to arrive at effective solutions. And stop ignoring women in Muslim-majority
countries who are raising alarms about Islam-lite initiatives supported by
either Wahhabi or Muslim Brotherhood-funding Persian Gulf monarchies.
The good news is that plenty of womens rights activists from Afghanistan
to Tunisia clearly understand whats happening to their societies and
theyre not taking it lying down even in the face of Islamist threats. Too
manyhigh-profile Afghan women who have taken on the Taliban have been
killed by a hard-line Islamist group that, were now told, we must engage in
talks with. How thats going to happen beats me (and has beaten several
top diplomats and officials). But no one in power seems keen to re-examine
those contradictions. In Tunisia, the womens movement came together
with other civil society groups to send a peaceful, powerful message to the
Islamist Ennahda party that they were not going to sit quietly while secular
activists and politicians were being assassinated. Ennahda got the message
and bowed out of the 2014 presidential election, which was widely hailed as
free and fair.
How many women must die and how many must travel to Islamic State
lands for us to realize that right-wing, conservative forces must be
challenged whether theyre in the East or West, North or South?

On March 9 (since March 8 falls on a Sunday), U.N. delegates and

representatives of more than 1,100 NGOs will gather in New York for the
59th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
Traditionally, the conference ends with an outcome document, called the
agreed conclusion, after much wrangling and late-night negotiating. This
time, though, the CSW outcome document will not be negotiated during the
two-week conference. That is being done by U.N. member delegations
ahead of the event. So, when participants from across the world troop into
the conference on March 9, they will be handed a political declaration that
has been pre-negotiated, signed, sealed and delivered before they have
even set foot in the UN complex, notes activist Lyric Thompson on the
website openDemocracy.
The official line is that a predetermined outcome will enable participants to
get on with the business of implementation on national and local levels.
Final-statement negotiations tend to hijack the two-week conference,
according to organizers. That may well be the case, but some argue that
the whole point of getting together more than 8,000 NGO representatives
from across the world in New York is for activists to push their governments
to do more on gender rights.

The truth is, weve gone so far back since Beijing 1995 that womens rights
advocates actually prefer not to open old international declarations to push
for further advances because they are afraid of conservative backlashes. It

is far too dangerous now to re-open international agreements on womens

rights, wrote gender rights advocates Anne Marie Goetz and Joanne
Sandler this year. The power of these reactionary forces in an international
forum is considerable; they could seriously reverse progress made at
Beijing.
Well, fancy that. Were marking Beijing+20 in mortal fear of sliding back to
pre-1995. If thats the case, fine, lets not reopen agreements. Lets not
waste time kvetching over words. We have to get down to work, and we
have to start now. Happy International Womens Day 2015, sisters. Enjoy
the commemorations, tea parties, solidarity gatherings, marches, and
celebrations because, god knows, we have the right to enjoy ourselves.
Were not living in the Islamic State.