A tale of two standards

YOU just can't keep self-indulged, middle-class movie critics down. One minute they're celebrating the sassy Sex and the City series about four self-indulged New York women. So much liberating sex. Ooh. So much cutting-edge fashion. Aah. So many profound insights into the modern dilemmas facing 30-something women. Should I get married? Should I have a baby? Why haven't I fallen pregnant? Should I have an abortion? Why can't I afford to buy an apartment? What's wrong with owning 400 pairs of shoes?

When the same pert New Yorkers get a little older - Carrie worries about the monotony of monogamy and Samantha sits in her glass office, g-string around her ankles, applying hormone cream to her waxed vagina - the critics devote a zillion words to panning the poor girls. Sex and the City 2 is too self-indulgent, say the critics. They should know. Isn't it the ultimate Western indulgence to desperately seek out deep messages from a movie intended to be nothing more than fun?

Watching an altogether different movie, The Stoning of Soraya M, in the same week as catching up with the shenanigans of Carrie and her friends traipsing across the Middle East was always going to make for a telling contrast. One film, with a $US100 million ($121.8m) budget that grossed $US31m on its opening weekend, is forgotten before you leave your cinema seat. The other, with a $US5m budget and first weekend box office receipts of $US115,000, stays with you even if you'd prefer that it didn't.

Released in Australia last month, The Stoning of Soraya M is based on a true story and book written by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam. Travelling in Iran in 1986 to assess the Islamic revolution, Sahebjam ends up in a small village waiting for his car to be repaired, where he learns from Zahra, a local woman, about the stoning of her 35-year-old niece Soraya Manutchehri.

Soraya's husband Ali wants to marry a 14-year-old girl in the city and refuses to pay Soraya for a divorce. The mother of four has become, in her own words, an "inconvenient wife" who has lost her sons, their minds poisoned by a misogynist father and culture, and is unable to support the daughters Ali plans to abandon.

After the local mullah and mayor ask Soraya to cook and clean for the recently widowed local mechanic, Hashem, and his mentally disabled son, Ali sees a chance to fuel rumours that his wife is being unfaithful.

What follows is a harrowing account of injustice where a wife accused of adultery by her husband must prove her innocence but a man accused of adultery by his wife is presumed innocent.

It is a story that records in detail the barbaric stoning to death of a woman at the mercy of men and religion, where sharia law dictates that the rocks must not be so large as to kill immediately but must be large enough to inflict pain. As one observer on the PoliticsDaily website noted, "it's a fitting image, rock-throwing . . . fitting for the Stone Age, that is".

It is a tale of moral courage when Zahra confronts the menfolk with a different version of Allah, who, she says, would never condone the brutal killing of Soraya. It is also the story of Zahra's promise, when she fails to save Soraya, to tell the world about the stoning death of her niece.

Be warned. Few details are spared from an extended scene where the mullah tells the menfolk they must restore their honour by stoning Soraya. The result is haunting. The sound of stone thudding against skin. The horror of two young sons reluctantly hurling rocks at their mother. "Go ahead, boys," the mullah says. "For God." The sight of a broken body, a white dress caked in blood and dirt.

Left-liberal critics have derided The Stoning of Soraya M as a message movie. Too close to "lurid torture porn", Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. Local echo Tim Elliott at The Sydney Morning Herald dismissed the film as a predictable message movie where the men are "leering archetypes of Islamic patriarchy".

This is the ugly result when political correctness and cultural relativism meet movie critic. Their Goldilocks critique goes something like this: if you're Al Gore talking about climate change or Michael Moore dumping on capitalism, then your message is just right. But a movie with a message about Islam being co-opted by men to denigrate, violate and kill women is, yawn, just too much message. "I know stoning is bad, but I want a movie about it, not a sermon," Elliott wrote.

So movie critics want some nuance in their stoning movies. Let's see how that works. If Soraya were guilty of adultery, do we have some interesting moral confusion about the rights and wrongs of stoning? Nope. Let's make her a bisexual who pole dances in the local tavern when she's not engaging in group sex. Does that work? No. Lazy with the housework, then? No. It turns out stoning is abhorrent any way you cut it. Unless you're a movie critic trapped in the mindset where it's only acceptable to make stark judgments about Western culture. In which case, you get a little queasy about a movie that speaks with moral certainty about the evils of Islam being used to stone women to death.

And while Western feminists navel gaze about their latest work-life imbalances and play games to decide whether they are more like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte or Miranda, Islamic feminists have other things on their agenda. They are waging a quiet war within Islam to stop atrocities against women. Stoning executions still occur in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia. Indeed, potentially in any country that adopts sharia law. A Pew poll on Pakistani public opinion released last August found 83 per cent of those surveyed support stoning adulterers.

Isobel Coleman, author of Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, told ABC radio's The World Today on Monday, Muslim women are "fighting theology with theology". They are arguing the violence against, and restrictions on, women in the name of Islam are not in fact Islamic. While political Islam has been on the rise for the past four decades, Coleman says the broad demographic trend of rising levels of female education means "a more and more educated generation of women . . . are demanding change". But they are doing it from within. When asked about the West's debate over the burka, Coleman pointed out Islamic feminists have "bigger fish to fry". Watch The Stoning of Soraya M and you'll know what she means.