Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and founder of the non-partisan human rights organisation Al Haq (which we Maltese correctly understand to mean justice, or fairness), wrote a book called Strangers in the House – Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. Much of it is about his father Aziz, who was the first prominent Palestinian to accept Israel’s existence and to advance a solution based on two states. The supporters of Arafat – a brilliant self-publicist who left millions stashed away in Swiss bank accounts after a lifetime of rabble-rousing among the hovel-dwelling poor – branded Aziz Shehadeh a despicable collaborator, blackened his name, and threatened him with extermination. Years later, he was mysteriously murdered, and the crime was never solved.
Aziz Shehadeh had argued that a tenable solution for the perennial problem of the Occupied Territories would have to be bargained, and not bombed, into being. His son Raja writes that Occupied Palestine is a place where “society conspires to destroy, discourage, and bring down by rampant corrosive jealousy those who triumph. It’s a society that encourages you to cringe. Most of your energy is spent extending feelers to detect public perception of your actions, because your survival is contingent on remaining on good terms with your society.”
I read that and thought: well, I know what he means. It doesn’t just happen in the Occupied Territories. It happens in any small and static society in which people have a foreshortened horizon.
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Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, said in 1925: “I flatly refuse to believe that today, in the luminous presence of science, knowledge and civilisation in all aspects, there exist…men so primitive as to seek their material and moral well-being from the guidance of one or another sheikh.” I know what he meant, too: most of you who are reading this grew up in an island where people ran off to the kapillan for advice on just about anything, confusing the secular with the religious. It wasn’t quaint; it was disturbing. If Catholics were able to shake off this prurient invasion of their daily lives, with prying even among the bed-sheets, then one day Muslims will be able to do the same. It’s an evolutionary process. When our ancestors were burning heretics at the stake and the secular courts were punishing people for their religious sins, they never thought it would be possible to be as we are now: doing as we please without looking over our shoulder for informers whose testimony might have us wracked and boiled in oil.
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Zainab Salbi, who heads a global advocacy group for women, said that when women have money that they have earned themselves, they are more likely to begin the crucial task of questioning their lot. She was speaking in reference to the women of Afghanistan, who are among the most oppressed in the world. Yet her words hold true for every society. The pay cheque came first; equal status came later. A society of women who are financially dependent on their husbands, fathers or brothers would never have been able to fight for equal standing in society. By definition, their dependence rendered them unequal. That is why women first got their rights written into the law of the land in those countries where they were conspicuous in the workplace, thanks to the Protestant work ethic. In Catholic countries, where woman’s place was in the home, the rights were a much longer time in coming. Our grandmothers got their vote late in life. How humiliating that must have been for the women who actually thought about these things: watching their husbands go out on polling day to have a say in who got to run the country, while they were prevented by law from expressing their own will and opinion. No wonder they trained whole generations of women not to think, but just to follow orders, and left them uneducated. Train them to think and the next thing you know, they’ll be thinking that they’d quite like to have a vote too, or a say in how their property is sold from under their nose. Heavens, they might even wear lipstick outside the privacy of the marital bedroom.
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“As Muslim women start to question, they shift from being badges of family ‘honour’ to being dignified humans. ‘Honour’ demands sacrificing your individuality to maintain the reputation, status and prospects of your husband, father and brothers.” – Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam, 2004
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The idea of society as a non-interference pact between groups is wrong and it cannot function in practice because we are all involved with each other. In Malta now there are clearly two groups: one that believes in and adheres to the tenets of Catholicism, and another that does not. The latter includes those who, on the face of it, follow the rules for the sake of convention, but who in their real hearts believe otherwise. “Sunday mass attendance down again,” said the newspaper headlines. That’s unsurprising. For this little country to stay 99 per cent Catholic (I used to wonder about the exotic identity of that other one per cent), the state and the church would have to fuse, imposing mullah-like control over our behaviour and turning Catholicism into a way of life in the same way that Islam is, as it used to be in our great-grandparents day, or before that, when they lashed sinners at the public whipping-post. Give people religious freedom and many of them will choose not to be religious. That’s just the way it is, the odds of the game, and it’s infinitely more preferable than the only alternative, which is to make Catholicism the religion of Malta in the same way that Islam is the religion of Saudi Arabia. Thanks, but no thanks. Turn-out for Sunday mass is higher in Gozo than it is on the main island: 72.7 per cent against Malta’s 52.6 per cent. Enough said.
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The archbishop has said that his team will be researching the matter, trying to find out why people are not going to mass on Sunday. I can tell them that for free: we don’t see the point of it. We know that we are not going to burn in hell for eternity just because we don’t feel like getting dressed on a Sunday morning, wresting ourselves from our homes, driving to church, sitting there for an hour watching the performance of an ancient rite, and then driving home again while lunch burns or doesn’t get cooked. Sunday mass to most of my generation seems pointless; I didn’t need the church’s survey to tell me that, because a straw poll works wonders. To our children’s generation it is more pointless still. They haven’t grown up in a society, as I did, in which Sunday mass was one of the focal meeting-points of the week, a place where all the young people would gather at the back of the church, dressed to impress, and make eyes at each other. Let’s be honest, shall we? That’s the only reason many of us went, and then, when we grew up and found other places to meet potential dates, we stopped going. Try telling one of today’s 18-year-olds that they should go to mass on Sunday, and if there’s any kind of brain between his or her ears, the reaction you’ll get is, “Oh yes? Why exactly should I? What are the consequences if I don’t?” You’d better have an answer ready.
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“Traditions deserve to be respected only insofar as they are respectable – that is, exactly insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women” – Amin Maalouf
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Yosanne Vella, who lectures in the pedagogy of history, has had
published a paper entitled Women victims of crime in 18th century Malta. In it, she tells of the rapes of a four-year-old, a nine-year-old, a
10-year-old, and of a six-year-old whose rapist, Pawlu Gatt, was
sentenced to a year in prison and 20 strokes of the cane, and was fined 100 scudi, to be paid towards the dowry of his victim. There have always been paedophiles. The difference is that now there is a greater awareness. It wouldn’t even have been seen specifically as a paedophile crime in those days. The crime would have been that of taking away the girl’s virginity against her will (of course, against her will) and greatly reducing her chances of making a good marriage – hence the contribution to the dowry.