Male Anxieties

In one sense Islam has never underestimated woman. The notion of a Weaker Sex is foreign to it: no Arabic translation exists for the expression (Gentle Sex was tried but soon abandoned). The Muslim tradition, one might say, rather reveals an anxiety about women, and the strength of their desires, demands and capacities. The Muslim man conceives woman as uncontrollable and untameable: a being who can therefore only be subdued by repression. In Arabic tradition, woman is fitnat—a term signifying at once beauty and turmoil: a terrestrial Eve whose sin has long since been forgiven (Islamic theology does not hold the descendants of Adam and Eve responsible for their guilt), and who continues to tempt man with her charms or her disorder. The origins of this idea of woman, as a sexually—but also socially—active being, go back to the nomadic tribal societies of the Arabian peninsula before Mohammed. Islam both inherited and inverted them. For on the one hand, it retained the right of women—whether or not they were married—to manage their own economic affairs, in its laws of property, and assumed the vigour of their desires, in its conception of sexuality. But on the other hand, just because of the threat to male security posed by these licences, it clamped down on women a fearful seclusion—at once physical (the imposition of the veil) and social (the creation of segregated spaces, harems or baths). Islam never held that women lacked a soul, or strength, or intelligence. Because of that, exactly because of it, the Prophet said that God preferred some of his creatures to others, a decision of the Almighty that was arbitrary yet had to be accepted as a rule, a way of governing human affairs, much like privileges that are unjustifiable but are still declared to be valid. The rule would not have had to be so rigid if the religion had taught that women were innately lesser anyway. This dual definition of the feminine by Islam is well formulated by a recent author: ‘Paradoxically, and contrary to what is commonly assumed, Islam does not advance the thesis of women’s inherent inferiority. Quite the contrary, it affirms the potential equality between the sexes. The existing inequality does not rest on an ideological or biological theory of women’s inferiority, but is the outcome of specific social institutions designed to restrain her power. . . . The belief in women’s potence is likely to give the evolution of the relationship between men and women in Muslim settings a pattern entirely different from the western one. For example, if there are any changes in the sex status and relations, they will tend to be more radical in the West and will necessarily generate more tension, more conflict, more anxiety.’ footnote¹

The Muslim attitude to sexuality is consequently a far cry from the Christian. Christian piety traditionally enjoined sexual abstinence—matrimony itself being no more than a pis-aller for the Pauline tradition. For Islam, on the contrary, sexuality must be satisfied if the social harmony of the Umma is to be realized. Muslim culture lacks any notion that women prefer to sublimate their sexuality, or merely undergo it in the interests of procreation. Precisely for that reason Islam confines their movements to spaces that men can control. If both man and woman are positively sexed (the Muslim paradise is a purlieu of eternal carnal pleasure), women must be subdued so that man can exercise his promiscuity within a legal framework sanctioned by the state. Unlike the Western tradition in which patriarchy and puritanism fused in an oppressive synthesis at the expense of women, here patriarchy was contradictorily hedonist in its basic convictions. An Arab proverb expresses its underlying outlook: ‘Wherever a man and a woman find themselves together, the devil is the chaperon.’ But the contradiction, of course, only intensified the final fanaticism of the patriarchical code that became consolidated after the Conquests. Men now no longer tolerated their wives even to be in the presence of other men; women were banished from every public space; their formal economic rights lost all meaning; they could be repudiated in the law at will.

At a time when Islamic fundamentalism continually exalts the glories of the earliest Arab past, it is worth recalling the evidence that women were not so universally oppressed in that epoch. Aisha, the favourite wife of the Prophet himself, a woman of great intelligence and capacity for intrigue, could allow herself robust protests at the multiplication of his menage, and the divine approval supposedly conferred on it in the audiences of God with his Messenger. On learning of Surah 33–49 of the Koran—‘O Prophet, we have made allowable for thee thy wives to whom thou hast granted their heirs, those whom thou hast taken into their possession from the spoil which Allah has given thee as property, the daughters of thy uncles or thy aunts either on the father’s side or the mother’s side who have emigrated with thee, and any believing woman, if she offers herself to the Prophet, and the Prophet wish to take her in marriage’—she is reported to have observed sarcastically: ‘Verily, thy Lord hastens to do thy pleasures.’ footnote² It is to her that tradition attributes the significant change in the form of interpellation of the Koran, a book which is initially addressed to the Believers (in the grammatical masculine), and then mid-way through the text alters to the Believers (gender-neutral): she is supposed to have told the Prophet he was discriminating against women in using the first form; he agreed and changed to the second in transmitting the message of God.

A few generations later, it was still possible for Sukaina, a granddaughter of the Caliph Ali, to reply—when asked why she was always so gay when her sister was so solemn—that she had been named after her pre-Islamic great-grandmother, but her sister after her Muslim grandmother. Famous for her jokes and wit, ‘she once assembled poets around her, had them declaim their latest works, and then judged and rewarded them according to the way the poets described their beloved or their relationship in the poems; she was known for her elegance too. She wore her magnificent hair in a special style that was named after her when it became fashionable. However, when men also began to imitate her, the pious Khalif Omar Ibn Abd al-Aziz had them whipped and their heads shorn.’ Her contemporary Aisha Bint Talha never veiled her face, rejecting the remonstrations of her husband with the words: ‘The Almighty has honoured me with beauty. I want the people to see this and understand what rank I enjoy before them. I will not veil myself. Nobody can reproach me with a fault.’ footnote³ Examples such as these all come from the social and dynastic elite of the early Islamic world, since the literary tradition is largely confined to the ruling stratum of the time. But it is unlikely that the resistance they record to the full subjugation of women which later became de rigueur was confined to the privileged alone. Popular life may have taken even longer to be transformed, especially in areas of recent conversion from above. But by the end of the Abbasid epoch a regime of comprehensive discrimination and repression was in force across the Muslim world that was to last for a millennium.

The First Cracks

The French occupation of Egypt, in the epoch of revolutionary expansion under the Directory, was perhaps the first shock to produce tiny cracks in the long impermeable order of Arab male domination. An anecdote reported after the event by Napoleon to Clot-Bey gives a glimpse of that moment. In 1799, he recounted, ‘General Menou married an Egyptian woman from Rashid (Rosetta). He treated her as he would a French wife, taking her by the arm each time they went in to dine, reserving the best place at table for her, offering her the finest dishes, picking up her napkin if it slipped from her knees.’ When the lady in question described all this to her friends in a Turkish bath one day, they started to hope for a comparable change in their situation, and drew up a petition to ‘the Great Sultan Bonaparte’ beseeching him to impose similar conduct on their Egyptian husbands. footnote⁴ Whatever we may think today of the symbols of 18th-century civility, such stirrings of revolt are suggestive of the initial impact of the West on the minds of upper-class Arab women. Because of its awakening in cultural contact with Europe, the cause of women in the Arab world would ever after have to seek expiation of that original sin.

In time Egypt became—as it remains—the one Arab country to witness a militant and influential movement of women’s liberation. Paradoxically, this was to be in some ways less inhibited before the advent of modern nationalism than after it. In the epoch of Mohammed Ali (1811–1841), the semi-independent Egyptian regime—nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire—sought to modernize the country along European lines. footnote⁵ Mohammed Ali sent a large number of intellectuals to France with the aim of forming a generation of cadres for the new state he was determined to construct. Among these was Rifaat Rafea al-Tahtawi (1801–1873). Son of an impoverished family of long religious tradition in Upper Egypt, he was made chaplain (Imam) to a regiment in the fledgling Egyptian Army, and then to the first student mission dispatched to Paris. There he discovered the ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu. Inspired by an Enlightenment outlook, on his return he published two books (1858 and 1872) depicting with admiration the situation of women in France. Al-Tahtawi wanted Egyptian women to develop their intellectual abilities and participate on an equal footing with men in the social and economic life of their country. He denounced the institution of the harem as a prison and was the first to describe the condition of women in Egyptian towns as one of generalized unemployment. In his ardour, he even advocated raising the minimum age at which women could be married to twenty-five (not the most popular demand, one must imagine, in a society based on absolute segregation of the sexes).

Some decades later a judge, Qassem Amine, published several articles in the journal Al-Moayed explaining to Egyptian women that they were themselves to blame for their inferior position in society, and advising them to stay at home and occupy themselves with housework, since they were incapable of emulating French women. His attacks so incensed Princess Nazli Fadel that she invited him to her literary salon and overwhelmed him with counter-arguments. He thereafter campaigned eloquently against the degenerate customs of Egyptian society that were alone responsible for women’s complete passivity before the tasks of their own emancipation and that of their country. His two books The Liberation of Women (1899) and The New Woman (1901) became breviaries of early Arab feminism. Both Amine and Tahtawi banked everything on education as the key to unlocking the oppression of women and the general stultification of Egyptian society. Their projects were no panacea, but we owe to them at least the admission of women into schools and so the possibility for women themselves to lead the struggles for their liberation.

The Rise of Modern Nationalism

The epoch of Tahtawi and Amine—the last half of the 19th century—was to be the only time in the history of the Middle East when the West could be taken as an unproblematic pole of progress by Arab thinkers who at the same time never questioned Islam within their own societies. Theirs was a quest that conceived the two not as rival but as compatible. A few decades later, the terms had become mutually exclusive: total antipodes. The arrival of modern nationalism transformed the context for the emergence of Arab women. On the one hand, in a society still profoundly hostile to the appearance of women in any male setting, nationalist mobilization provided the possibility—something quite new—of female speech and assembly in public. The first demonstrations by Arab women occurred under this sign. Thanks to the national cause, women’s unions or movements could now be formed. In the Egyptian uprising against the British in 1919 women marched in the streets for the first time, chanting ‘Long Live Independent Egypt!’ Among them was Hoda Sha’rawi, future founder of the Union of Egyptian Women, still veiled, participating against the will of her husband, a cousin to whom she had been married at the age of thirteen. Two years later, Palestinian women were demonstrating against Zionist immigration under heavy veils, riding in closed cars. The struggle for national emancipation brought with it a certain measure of liberation for women.

On the other hand, however, the new nationalism also reclaimed many of the most patriarchal values of Islamic traditionalism as integral to Arab cultural identity as such. In 1911 Suleiman Al-Salaimi, founder of the journal Al-Afaf (Purity), could define its tasks thus: 1) To assure Egyptian women every juridical right, and a position in society equal to that of man; 2) To combat disclosure of the face (Al-Sufur) and mixing of the sexes as perils to the vocation and honour of women; 3) To render men alone accountable for the degeneration of the Law and the spread of Evil from towns into villages—and accountable to men alone, as superior and responsible (qawwamun) for women according to the Koran, their guardians from birth to death. footnote⁶ The contradictions of this programme have continued to haunt the history of Arab women to this day—the agonizing duality of a commitment to equality that exists side by side with a zealous conservation of inequality, in the name of national identity and cultural continuity.

Hoda Sha’rawi incarnated this tension in her career. Born into an aristocratic family in 1879, from a very early age she dedicated her life to two causes: the emancipation of Egyptian women, and the struggle against British occupation. footnote⁷ She was to be responsible, among other things, for persuading the Wafdist Talaat Harb to found the Bank of Egypt, whose starting capital she is said to have provided from her family fortune. Passionate and radical in struggling against the British and in demanding economic and political reforms for women, she remained very timid in her attitude to the religious code governing the private and family life of her sex, constantly protesting her devotion to Koranic precepts and Muslim values. Towards the end of her life she presided over the first Pan-Arab Congress of women’s organizations in Cairo, which adopted a series of demands that combined a call for the right of women to vote and be elected to public offices, with an appeal for the limitation of male prerogatives of divorce, restriction of polygamy to cases where wives were sterile or incurably ill, and imposition of a minimum age of sixteen for the marriage of women. Once again, in other words, Arab women found themselves demanding an absolute equality of political rights with men, without daring to make the same claim for civil rights. Men’s power to repudiate their wives at will was not to be abolished, but merely restrained. Polygamy remained a male privilege, but its scope was to be reduced. Moreover the women who posed these demands could only do so by volubly asserting that they were the pleas of mothers and wives, made in the interests of the nation, and in conformity with a better interpretation of the Shar’ia (Islamic Law). To relieved applause the Syrian delegate to the Congress exclaimed: ‘When women grow up illiterate, they suckle men in ignorance and apathy.’

It would be historically unjust to criticize these first timorous pioneers of women’s emancipation. Confrontation with Islam and its institutions was not simply a question of courage. The real difficulty was that to resist Islam was to struggle not just against an established political power (beneath the canopy of colonial rule itself), but also against profound popular attachments, in which the subjective identity of the majority of the population was at stake. For Islam, as we have seen, is not simply a religion—it is a total experiential order that blends the spiritual and the practical, the political and the private, indissolubly together. To reject its authority in daily behaviour is akin to defying nature itself. Hence women like Hoda Sha’rawi or Hifni Nassef, for all their ultra-pedagogic approach, were reviled and insulted in their time—an epoch in which no feminism had yet understood that political emancipation was only the beginning of the struggle. The repressive force of Islam can be seen in negative from the history of the early women’s press, which flourished to a remarkable extent at the turn of the century in Egypt. Between 1892—when a Lebanese woman Hind Naufal published the first woman’s magazine in Arabic, Al-Fatat (Miss!)—and 1913, no fewer than fifteen women’s journals appeared, often addressing their readers as wives and mothers, but also calling on them to participate in the ‘renaissance of women’ by insisting on their right to education and careers. The pages of the country’s principal daily, Al-Ahram, were filled with vigorous polemics between men attacking ‘this new wave of pernicious disorder’ and women retorting to them under signatures of anonymity. But one of the most striking facts about this initial flowering of women into print was the predominance among the organizers of the new feminine press of non-Muslims: out of fifteen founders of these journals, only one was certainly and another possibly from an Islamic background—while six were Maronite, one was Coptic and perhaps two were Jewish. footnote⁸ The vitality of this press was thus in part a function of the fact that the political revival of Islam as a central vector of nationalism was yet to come.

The Post-Colonial Regimes

The Second World War marked the watershed for French and British colonialism in the Middle East. European power never recovered its pre-war positions, as formal mandates were relinquished in Iraq, Syria and the Lebanon in the later forties, and informal protectorates were overthrown in Egypt and Iraq and eroded in Jordan in the fifties. Nationalist military regimes became the regional norm, committed to development and statebuilding within the framework of an increasingly independent capitalism. In their policies towards women, these postcolonial governments proved to be poor—bureaucratic—relations of such pioneers as Al-Tahtawi or Qassem Amine. All proclaimed the goal of promoting the position of women, by the dual route of assuring them education for jobs and granting them the franchise for votes. The first of these has been much more meaningful an advance than the second. Nasserism in Egypt could boast of the number of women doctors it trained. The Ba’ath regimes in Syria and Iraq congratulate themselves on the proportion of women who work as secretaries or teachers, and now have responsible posts in public institutions. All these states have their ‘Union of Women’, mass organizations that are typically relays of the ruling party—with which not the smallest conflict can ever be remembered. The political rights of women, nominally granted by the national state, are in practice a dead letter, since these are military dictatorships of one kind or another, in which the suffrage has no meaning.

In this sense, the programme of the early Arab champions of the women’s cause—however limited it was—has still been far from realized. Its Belle Epoque liberalism may seem naive and anachronistic today, but it was more sincere in its belief in the virtue of democratic procedures, however parliamentary, than the legionary populism that succeeded it. So far as civic rights go, on the other hand, there is more—dismal—continuity with the past. The post-colonial states of the Middle East had to govern still underdeveloped countries, in which labour movements were refusing to lie down. They typically responded by incessant invocation of the spectre of imperialist humiliation. For quite above and beyond the genuine exploitation and oppression of the colonial powers in the region, of which the Suez Canal long remained the greatest symbol, there was a profound sentiment of humiliation among the Muslim Arab populations of the Middle East. There the memory of a resplendent past when the Arabs ruled a gigantic empire, when barbarian and backward Crusaders were defeated, when Islamic civilization was superior to that of mediaeval Europe, was a perpetual wound. Colonialism was lived by the Arabs not simply as a domination or oppression, but as a usurpation of power. The principal victims of this complex were to be Arab women. For the cult of a grandiose past, and the ‘superiority of our values to those of the West’, inevitably led to a suffocating rigidity of family structures and civil codes. Everywhere, under the supposedly modernizing regimes of ‘national revolution’, the laws governing the domestic and private sphere—marriage, divorce, children—continued to be based on the Shar’ia. The justification of this relentlessly retrograde nexus is always the same. How many times has every Arab feminist had to listen to men’s arrogant refrain: ‘Do you want to become like Western women, copying the degenerate society that is our enemy?’

Decolonization came a decade later in the Maghreb, starting in the mid-later fifties and finding completion only with the end of the Algerian War in the early sixties. European rule was longer here, and its penetration deeper, than anywhere in the Middle East—by the Second World War France had already occupied Algeria for more than a century. Because of the uneven concentration of European settlers in North Africa, French policy varied significantly towards its three possessions once nationalist movements emerged within them. Tunisia and Morocco gained independence peacefully in 1956, while the fln had to wage an eight-year war of national liberation to eject the French—one of the great epics of post-war decolonization. The much greater radicalism of the revolutionary experience in Algeria might have been expected to produce a more advanced social situation for women after Independence than in the neighbouring states. Ironically, however, the result was rather to be the reverse. Algerian women participated in the fighting against the French forces of occupation, playing an essential role in the military and political struggle unparalleled—to this day—anywhere in the Arab world. But this practical transformation of the position of the younger generation found no ideological or social reflection in the new Algerian state they had helped to create. footnote⁹

Algeria had suffered much more traumatically from the impact of French cultural imperialism than the adjacent colonies, because of the presence of three million French settlers there. The movement of liberation was thus lived more intensely than in any other country as a battle between Islamic tradition and Christian aggression, and Independence came to be identified with a recovery of suppressed Muslim customs and values. The mobilization of women in arms for the conquest of nationhood was thus of little avail to them once it was achieved. That has been a general lesson of contemporary experience, in fact. Woman as warrior brings no necessary change in the statute of woman as citizen and person, once the battles—still less training-exercises or military parades—are over. The first Congress of the National Union of Algerian Women in 1966 declared that it would ‘devote itself entirely to the protection of the family unit’ through ‘the establishment of structures that are in conformity with the Algerian personality and Arab Islamic culture’. A decade later the Algerian National Charter of 1976 devoted a single page to the position of women, which included the blunt admonition: ‘The National Union of Algerian Women must adapt its activity to the specific problems posed by the integration of women into modern life. It must realize that the emancipation of women does not mean the abandonment of ethical beliefs deeply held by the people.’ Meanwhile the official journal of the ruling party, Al-Moujahid, was contrasting images of ‘responsible’ Algerian women with those tainted by mixing with Europeans, who imagined that liberation could consort with such alien decadence as ‘make-up and immodest clothing’.

The Tunisian Paradox

Morocco, which had been a Protectorate with a hereditary Sultan rather than an outright colony, emerged as the most conservative of the three Maghrebine states under a monarchy whose power was consolidated by independence. Significantly, the legal position of women differs little from that in post-revolutionary Algeria. By contrast, Tunisia presents the apparent paradox of a state that has been the most consistently pro-Western in the Arab world, yet has also pursued relatively the most enlightened policies towards women of any Arab country, as table one below indicates. In the absence of either the massive implantation of French colons, or the preservation of a royal feudalism, Tunisia emerged less traumatized by European rule and less tethered by monarchical traditionalism than the other two North African states. Bourguiba, pro-Western in other respects, also proved—perhaps surprisingly—to be a committed liberal in this one. After independence he took up the issue of women’s position in Tunisian society as virtually a personal cause. Not only were all features of the Shar’ia humiliating for women eliminated from the Legal Code, but the President made himself a symbolic defender of women maltreated by men or by their families—forcibly entering houses where girls were being fattened by their families to make them more marriageable, or rescuing young women from husbands about to be imposed on them, in the full glare of television publicity. However mixed the motives of such actions, the civil position of women in Tunisia is now objectively freer than in any other Arab state.

Visitors to the Lebanon for many years received the impression that this was the country where Arab women had achieved the greatest emancipation. But the reality lay elsewhere in the strange and obscure

Retreat and Advance

The traditional exception to this desolate scene is now itself in many ways now moving closer to the rule. Kuwait, which gained independence under its ruling dynasty in 1960, adopted a constitution two years later which declared the state a democracy in which sovereignty was formally vested in the nation rather than the reigning family. Buoyed by its huge per capita oil revenues (much higher than Saudi Arabia’s), the Kuwaiti city state soon developed one of the widest and highest levels of education, for both young men and women, anywhere in the Arab world. In the late sixties and early seventies, Kuwait looked much more like a modern city than any other Gulf capital—the veil a rarity among the younger generation, women driving cars and moving freely about town. The laws governing the civil and family status of women remained as untouched—and untouchable—as anywhere else in the Middle East. But a genuine Kuwaiti Women’s congress was founded in 1971, attended by a hundred women, which demanded women’s right to vote. Its impact was great enough to force three sessions of parliament into heated debates and divisions on the question. footnote¹⁰ Yet the women of Kuwait have not yet won this battle, and Kuwaiti society itself is now in full reaction to its relative ‘liberalism’ of the past. Today a growing number of adolescent girls are choosing to leave school to become the second or third wife of a man. For it is now in marriage—even if polygamous—that respectability is to be found, not in the achievements of work. The pressure to conform to repressive social and sartorial norms is steadily increasing. Even women prepared to wear the veil, provided it is of varying colours, and the long dress, as potentially elegant or comfortable, complain of the deadly monochrome garb into which they are forced—‘men feel the need to put us in uniform’—as the visible symbol of their lack of individual freedom of choice.

If socio-religious intolerance is increasing in Kuwait, there is little sign that the repressive order elsewhere in Arabia is moderating over time. If anything, the traditionalist regimes of the desert and gulf have reacted to the dramatic social changes their wealth has brought by fastening the institutional and cultural fetters that paralyse women. The time of ‘Arabia without Sultans’ has not yet come: over most of the peninsula, neither military nor populist moments have so far materialized. Under the dynastic rule of princes and sheikhs, not even the dichotomy between political and civil rights that marks the Arab world elsewhere prevails. Women have no political rights either, full stop.

On the other hand, at the other extreme in South Yemen the revolutionary struggle against the British threw up a state that launched the most genuinely radical attack on the inherited structures of women’s oppression that the Arab world has yet seen. A wide range of economic, social, legal and ideological reforms was enacted by the post-revolutionary leadership of the country, with the aim of promoting a material emancipation of women—in notable contrast to the regressive trend of development in Algeria. The difference between the outcomes of the two revolutions seems to have been a product of at least three factors. British rule in Aden involved no settlement, and made little effort to challenge local cultures. Islamic traditions were all too visibly and menacingly embodied in Saudi Arabia, a hostile and counter-revolutionary power over the border. The international correlation of forces had changed since the turn of the sixties: the power and influence of the ussr were now significantly greater, providing both effective aid and (for better or for worse) institutional example for the new republic. Despite the terrible fratricide that has recently stained and weakened the Democratic Republic of South Yemen, there is no doubt that it has done more for the cause of women than any other Arab state. footnote¹¹ As table one shows, its record of reforms is second only to that of Tunisia—but these have been achieved in a far more backward environment, and so represent a more substantial real transformation of the female condition. Nevertheless, even here changes were introduced with prudent justifications from Muslim tradition, in order not to shock the male population unduly. As a member of the committee which drafted the new family law of the dry put it to the journal Middle East in 1983: ‘We researched the old books of the Hadith to show that we had not created anything, everything is in Islam. We only gave vitamins to old ideas to have them triumph.’ Such declarations speak volumes for the pressure of religion on revolution everywhere in the Arab world.

Feminism and Islam

The panorama of women’s situation in the Arab lands from the Atlantic to the Gulf thus remains, with all the regional variations suggested, a grim one. In the two national states with the longest modern history of real independence, with which this survey started, the current state of affairs can be summed up with a pair of expressive facts. In Egypt husbands still enjoy the legal power of Beit at-Taa over their wives: that is, the right to summon the police to bring back a wife by force, if she has left him. In Syria a husband can legally repudiate his wife and keep the children if she takes a job without his permission. In conditions like these, what possibilities can there be for a true women’s movement such as other parts of the world—developed or underdeveloped—know today? The bitter reality is that Arab feminism, in the modern sense of the term, exists as a force only in the student milieux of Europe and America to which a privileged few can escape, and in a growing but still very modest academic literature. The double knot tied by the fatal connexions in Arab culture and politics between definitions of femininity and religion, and religion and nationality, have all but throttled any major women’s revolt so far. Every assertion of the second sex can always be charged—in a virtually simultaneous register—with impiety to Islam and treason to the Nation.

The sheer, implacable weight of this double burden can be seen most clearly—and painfully—in the history and literature of Arab feminism itself. How many times, over successive generations, as the tides of religious fundamentalism (or opportunism) have ebbed and flowed, have we seen women who were once courageous in their rejection of mystification and oppression eventually bow before them and on occasion even end by defending them! Fear of being accused of the contagion of ‘Occidental values’ all too easily leads to discovery of the superior virtues of the Harem, compared with Western marriage and adultery, as many examples show. Some of the most outstanding contemporary feminists, daunted by the scale of the tasks before them and the isolation in which they stand, have changed their tone recently. Thus Ijlal Khalifa, author of the most thorough books on the history of women’s movements in Egypt and Palestine, can write: ‘The Egyptian woman accepted Ottoman colonization and Turkish Emirs, with all that they inflicted on her country, because the Ottomans shared the same religious beliefs, and prayed five times a day to the same God. She complained of the oppression of the Turks to an Almighty they had in common. . . The situation was quite different with the British (who) represented an exploitative occupation, for they had their own country but wanted it to live off ours.’ footnote¹² Exploitation, in other words, ceases to be such once the exploiter is Muslim! Another recent writer, Aziza al-Hibri, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington and co-editor of a book on Feminism and Marxism, has gone much farther in attempting to reconcile feminism to Islam. In an essay symptomatically entitled ‘A Study of Islamic Herstory’, she argues that the idea that the Koran underwrites male supremacy over women is based only on a misunderstanding of the term Qawwamun in Book IV, Verse 34. ‘The word Qawwamun,’ she blandly explains, ‘is a difficult word to translate. Some writers translate it as “protectors” and “maintainers”. However this is not quite accurate. The basic notion involved here is one of moral guidance and caring.’ footnote¹³ The kind of spiritual care in store for women is tersely set out elsewhere in the same verse from the Koran, which she has forgotten to cite: ‘As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.’ So much for the philological mysteries of Qawwamun!

Yet another distressing case of accommodation to obscurantism is that of Leila Ahmad—precisely because of her once admirable stance. In 1982 she wrote, with a great deal of courage: ‘Islam and feminism are naturally incompatible (as Ataturk found). . . This incompatibility can only be resolved, if any significant advance is to be made in the status of women, by the complete severance (which Ataturk resorted to) of Islamic tradition from the issue of the position and rights of women.’ footnote¹⁴ A year later, under the pressure of a misconceived national pride and rivalry with the West, she had succumbed to the worst mythomania of the Arab consensus, and was describing the harem to American readers—in a feminist journal—as an institution that gave a feminine space to women that the West had never granted! While still proclaiming herself a ‘feminist’, Leila Ahmad now explained that her encounter with the contemptuous anti-Arab racism of American society, and its hypocritical indignation at the fate of Arab women, had made her realize the vital importance of defending the customs and relations prevalent in her own society. footnote¹⁵ Nor is she an exception in this change of mind. Nawal al-Sa’adawi is the best known Arab feminist of all, a novelist celebrated for her searing recreations of her upbringing in Egypt. footnote¹⁶ Yet she too is now starting to claim more and more insistently that Arab women are really more politicized than their Western counterparts, because they are more concerned to change the political system under which they live than its mere consequences, the superficial features of women’s oppression. In so arguing, Sa’adawi (most probably unconsciously) simply confirms the rule of official Arab machismo—you can have political rights, but don’t lay a finger on private customs; fight for independence or the nation, but leave the family and the sacred alone.

So as long as women’s organizations or currents in the Arab world seek to conjugate together—either from tactical desire to win toleration or fervent identification with existing society—Islamic tradition and female emancipation, they are bound to end by putting up with women’s oppression itself, or many of its dimensions. If feminism is defined as a struggle against every inherited tradition and instinctive value informing relations between men and women, Arab feminism has yet to emerge into the light of day. I do not claim that the task of creating one will be easy, or that the alternative to the unsatisfactory compromises of the present is clear. The weight of the past is heavy and menacing. The identification of what is just with what is sacred is deeply embedded in the minds of Arab men and women alike. The advent of modernity, in a milieu of social and economic underdevelopment and juridical and familial rigidity, has generated a frightening loss of balance and security, even for those who reject the reigning order. What feminism has anywhere brought reassurance? The development of an Arab feminism will be anguishing and dangerous.