Notes on the Baghdad Gang Rape

The Rape Accusation. Yesterday, Sabrine al-Janabi, a 20 year old married woman from Baghdad, accused members of the Iraqi National Police on al-Jazeera television of gang-raping her. After she was taken into custody as a "terrorist suspect," Sabrine al-Janabi was raped by three officers before an American committee took her into custody and brought her before a judge. She accused a court officer of raping her again after her hearing.

The Guilty Rebuttal. It's the polite journalistic convention to say "alleged rape" in cases like this. However, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's comments today lent enormous credibility to al-Janabi's account. As a result, I'm going to ignore the convention here. Not only did al-Maliki deny that the officers had raped Sabrine al-Janabi, but claimed that there were three warrants for al-Janabi's arrest on "security" matters. In other words, he was accusing al-Janabi of being a terrorist without actually using the literal term. Al-Maliki extended the web of innuendo to Sunni politicians by claiming the accusations were instigated by "certain parties" in order to discredit the military crackdown in Baghdad. Much like abusive police in the U. S., Maliki is pulling out all the stops to smear this woman well before there's been a chance to investigate. These kinds of smears are the mark of someone who knows his side is guilty.

To top off his performance, Prime Minister al-Maliki announced that he was rewarding the officers in question. Here, it was as if al-Maliki was congratulating the police officers for raping the poor woman. It's almost as disgusting as the rape itself.

The Modern vs the Traditional. Sabrine al-Janabi's rape accusations have a profound modernity about them. In traditional Muslim societies like Iraq, a woman's virginity or fidelity is valued as a matter of the honor of the men in her family. When they are raped, women are considered as dishonoring the family and generally cover up the assault to avoid being punished by male relatives. In making her accusations, Sabrine al-Janabi represented herself as an individual woman rather than as a symbol of her family honor and was accusing the Iraqi police of harming her as a person rather than dishonoring her family. This is a bold claim. The articulation of women as persons in their own right rather than as the mothers, wives, or girlfriends, and objects of fantasy is still the subject of a broad cultural conflict in the United States let alone Iraq. If Sabrine al-Janabi's claim to personhood were accepted as a matter of course, that would be a strong sign that she was living in a modern world.

Understanding Bush and the American Right. I've seen a couple of commentaries mentioning that al-Maliki's response out of the Bush administration's playbook of accusing their opponents as aiding the terrorists, punishing critics, and rewarding failure and incompetence (sorry no time to run down the links right now). I think it's the other way around though. Instead of al-Maliki playing out of the Bush playbook, it's the Bush administration that has been reverting back to traditionalism on a variety of fronts. These include adapting the preening machismo of the traditional white South, promoting religion at the expense of science, valuing personal loyalty over competence, and engaging in delaying actions against the efforts of women, African-Americans, gay people, and immigrants to claim a routine status as persons. The Bush administration and the right may use the contemporary media apparatus to pursue their goals and may try to adapt as much of the modern language of individuality as they can, but they're still pursuing an agenda of traditionalism. They're speaking out of the playbook of Nouri al-Maliki, Moqtada al-Sadr, and the global jihadis.