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the forgotten queens of Islam
The new Family Code, in force since 1984 in Algeria, states among other things that <<a woman must obey her husband and give him the consideration that he merits... as head of the family (...) she must respect his parents and his family (...), that the children of the couple must be educated in the religion of the father.>> This is merely a legal sample of much more brutal customs, such as the clitoridectomy 1 practised on 90% of Moslem women in the countries of North Africa, honour killings, not to mention Afghanistan where women are literally imprisoned in their homes, unable to work, get an education, or care for their health.
This is the tip of the iceberg in a culture practising misogyny in every sense of the word. To legitimise such practices, the male class relies on a sui generis interpretation of the Koran, although the sacred book does not provide evidence to support such aberrations.
In her book Las Sultanas Olvidadas (The Forgotten Sultanas), Fatima Mernissi 2 argues that women in Islamic countries were not always subject to strict seclusion. There were Moslem women who headed states and waged wars, but they have been erased from the official history. The silence that has enveloped these political leaders is, for Mernissi, the greatest purge in history. So she set out to rescue them from oblivion.
She found no traces of these women in monuments, palaces, or even oral traditions, which usually preserve the memory of those excluded from history. Finally, she scoured libraries where, after much hard work and to her astonishment, she found what she was looking for and what no one had wanted to be revealed:...