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Female Warriors Of Allah, The Modern Military’s Death Trip

Feature Article Female Warriors Of Allah, The Modern Militarys Death Trip
MAR 5, 2015 LISTEN

This week, African war machine found itself in the cross hairs of an outraged lopsided war fighting innovation. Panting after future shock and awe terror attack and to further sour its radicalizing trend, boko haram has gone too far into sending young girls on kamikaze suicide bombing missions. From June 2014 to this day, at least 27 women have carried out suicide missions in Nigeria.

Shockingly enough, March 1, 2015 sharply opened up the streets of torments for a new waged vendetta against African muslim girls forced into fighting knights by terrorist networks. Frantically seeking to indemnify itself from mass slaughter, the Nigerian mob has taken upon its shoulders the illegitimate seal of a popular blood avenger. In Bauchi city, at Muda Lawal in Nigeria, a teenage girl suspected of preparing a terrorist attack had been clubbed to death, her body sprinkled with fuel and set on fire. In a northeastern Nigerian market, another girl suspected of being a suicide bomber had been set ablaze.

Harking back to the global mobilization around the April 2014 kidnapping of 300 Nigerian girls by boko haram in the town of Chibok, the gendered victimization by radical terrorists had then sparked a global outrage laced with shivers of anxiety for muslim girls. Yet, boko haram has succeeded overturning a global compassion into a popular scapegoat on which fatalism, inchoate threats, tensions, and fears could be discharged on women. Slowly and surely, muslim females will be soon exiled into the tundra of public hostility and outcast. From now on, young muslim girls are under suspicion of providing a haystack to concealing proxy carnage on behalf of extremist groups. Thus far, radical terrorist groups have set muslim women on a long and prolonged crucifixion spot.

Undoubtedly, terrorists have forced us all out of the cockpit of a self-inflicted amnesia. The pervasive visual stereotypes of muslim womanhood has been hanging for some stretches of time in the balance of that submissive and ubiquitous veiled harem females along the persistent icon of belly dancers performing for an unredeemable feudal society. Beyond however our romanticized and amnesic visual repertoires about muslim women, let us stop for a moment feasting our imagination from the tribal belly dance hip twist.

Tellingly, muslim women have played a significant role in past and present warfare. During the 7th-century, Arab princess Khawlah bint al-Azwar al-Kind'yya fought against the Byzantines to the benefit of early muslims. During the early period of muslim conquest, the battle heroine and war leader Salaym bint Malhan fought within the ranks of the prophet Muhammad and his troops. Cladded with an armory of swords and daggers strapped around her pregnant belly, she fiercely had the upper hand in her military campaigns. Another female warrior of Islam is to be found in Umm 'Umara, also known as Nusaybah bint Ka'b. She fought along her husband and two sons at the battles of Uhud and Mecca in 630 CE.

Her intrepid battle skills forced Muhammad himself to this confession: “on the day of Uhud, I never looked to the right nor to the left without seeing Umm 'Umara fighting to defend me.” Unsurprisingly, the prophet's own wife A'ishah got rid of her veil to take command at the Battle of the Camel, also called, the Battle of Bassorah in Iraq on November 7, 656. Muslim women warriors bear the proof of martial exploits. Muhammad's granddaughter Zaynab bint Ali fought in the Battle of Karbala on October 10, 680 AD in present day Iraq.

In 629, at the Battle of Khaybar opposing Muslims against the Jews, Umm Al Dhouda bint Mas'ud fought so magnificently that an equal share of the spoils to a man's was apportioned to her by the prophet Muhammad himself. During the 15th-century Yemen, Sharifa Fatima, also called Fatima bint al-Hassan, the female Zaydi chieftain, conquered the city of San'a. And in the 18th-century, Amira Ghaliyya al-Wahhabiyya led a brilliant military resistance movement to defend Mecca against foreign incursions.

Notwithstanding the undeniable martial exploits of individual muslim female warriors, the nub of the story is not about women's new role as devotees in the Trans Sahel terror fighting machine. It stands far from a celebratory aphorism befitting some military gender populism. To bemoan the involvement of young girls in suicide bombing squads is to fend off the ripple of anti-muslim women feelings running throughout the streets in this age of terrorism. For sure, female terrorists do not emerge de novo out of the ether.

Ironically, the influx of muslim women into terrorist strategic gambit, far from promoting women's fighting power in warfare, stands out on the contrary, as a dual cause and symptom of the decline of the modern army. For a horizon cleared of major wars, national armies have entered a cycle of a downward trend to the point of mutating into unnecessary might. Certainly, the return of the female warriors of Islam in war zones will amount to spasms of hatred spewed on women. As history has given us the token of proof, women hardly benefited from what Clausewitz coined “the cash payment of war”. Henceforth, the modern military has set out for its own imminent death trip while accommodating in his warfare manual the playback lyrics of female warriors of Islam.

Narcisse Jean Alcide Nana is the author of the book, Démocratie A Haut Débit (Paris, Edilivre, 2014)

Bibliography
Rosalind Miles & Robin Cross, Hell Hath No Fury: True Profiles of Women At War From Antiquity to Iraq (New York, Three Rivers Press, 2008).

Martin Van Creveld, Men, Women and War ( London, Cassell & Co, 2001).

Kruk Remke, The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature (New York, I.B. Tauris, 2014).

An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, trans. by Philip K. Hitti (New York, 2000).

Lichtenstadter Ilse, Women in the Aiyam al-Arab: A Study of Female Life During Warfare in Pre-Islamic Arabia (London, the Royal Asiatic Society, 1935).

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