Shari’a and Decency Laws in Sudan

How should one dress up decently in Sudan? According to the country’s decency laws imposed by the Islamist ruling party, to be decently dressed is for women not to wear a pair of pants, not to show too much wrist or ankle, not to let a woman’s head scarf slip. To do so would merit public flogging (either with a leather whip or a bamboo cane). Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese journalist, was about to be subjected to it had it not been for international pressure and open support from men and women in her country. In defiance, she continues to fight Sudan’s decency laws, with a promise that “I will only wear pants,” and since her sentencing, she has made true that promise.

Many Sudanese women are not so lucky. In this WP piece, about 40,000 women were arrested on charges of violating these decency laws last year. For months, Sudanese women recalled, “a man wearing a red bandana around his head and a whip on his waist was posted at a crowded bus station. He would call out to women he decided were showing too much wrist or ankle and whip them on the spot. Sometimes he would spit on them, they said.”

We who live in a liberal culture are aghast, of course. But that’s understating it. We are outraged at this example of man’s inhumanity to man. This is a form of slavery, of imposing total control over the lives of mothers, sisters, daughters who otherwise would make happy homes for these men.

But the more curious question to ask is why is it that there seems to be no moral outrage from the Islamic world about incidents like the above? Perhaps to them and to their clerics especially, women’s clothing is a way to inculcate modesty in women and self-restraint in men. They would argue that such restrictions should not be viewed as tools of oppression; that the aim of the Islamist regime through its shari’a laws is to attain virtue.

But how could shari’a laws be spiritually liberating to some and be oppressive to others? And I wonder, though, in the absence of such state restrictions, would these men and women continue to live a life of virtue?

Doesn’t virtue come from habituating one’s self in ways that are good and just and reasonable? Does it have to depend so much on externalities such as women's clothing as on a conscious, personal cultivation of it, entailing nothing less than self-mastery and the disciplining of one's self?