An Intelligent Man’s Guide to Modern Arab Feminism
The following pages are an attempt at presenting a brief introduction and periodization of the modern feminist movement in the Arab World. It takes the form of a guide because it can only provide a number of essential personalities, events, currents of opinion in the limited space allowed.
The Nahda
The woman’s question was central to the problematic of the Nahdah, the Arab cultural renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century. The pioneers of the Nahdah regarded women’s inferior status as the basic cause for the backwardness of the Arab and Islamic societies and were unanimous in affirming that there will be no renaissance for Arabs and Muslims without the renaissance of Arab women. Bustânî, Tahtâwî, Afghani, `Abdû, Qâsim Amîn and Tâhir Haddâd.and otehrs shared the belief that the renaissance of women will be achieved mainly through education. This is the gist of the famous address by Mu`allim Butrus al-Bustânî on the Education of Women in the 1860’s. But the men of the Nahdah mostly envisaged an educated bourgeois or aristocratic woman confined to her home and whose education was mainly invested in educating her children.
One major break from this tradition is to be found, very early on, in the writings of the Maronite Lebanese converted to Islam, Ahmad Fâris al-Shidyâq (1804-1887). Shidyâq’s Al-Sâq `Ala-l-Sâq (Paris, 1855) acclaimed as a founding text in Arabic modernity, was written in praise of women and the Arabic language. More, the author declares that while writing his book, “as if I myself had become a woman”. In contrast to the rest of the Nahdah pioneers, who emphasized education, Shidyaq considered Work as the main motor of the Arab renaissance. He urged the right of women to work; attacked segregation between men and women because it treats woman as a sexual object, called for the equal right of women to divorce, and critiqued the double standards in dealing with women’s infidelity. The radical novelty of Shidyâq resides in his vision that the repression of woman’s instincts was the basis of male domination. He defended woman’s equal right to sexual pleasure. Not content with the formal equality between the sexes, he looked into the consequences of social inequality on women. In his moving pages of observations on the England of the Industrial Revolution, Shidyâq discusses prostitution not only as a moral question but also as a consequence of poverty
Qâsim Amîn (1863-1908) is credited with the first work in Arabic devoted to the liberation of women. In his Tahrîr al-Mar’ah (The Liberation of Woman, 1899) to be followed a year later by Al-Mar’ah al-Jadîdah (The New woman, 1900), Amîn rejected the notion of woman as an inferior creature and called for woman’s equality with man. But, in direct contrast to Shidyâq, he was a purist concerning relations between the sexes. Although he attacked polygamy as an impediment to the progress of women and of society, he nevertheless rejected sexual pleasure and approved of the veil (the head cover) but opposed the Niqâb and the Burqu`. The anonymity imposed by these two forms of veiling, he argued, would encourage licentious behavior.
The Beginnings
The inter war period was a period of gestation for modern Arab feminism in more than one sense.
Great strides were made in the battle for education. As early as 1928, Egyptian Universities had opened their gates to girls. The immediate results were wider access by women to administrative posts and generally an increased presence in the labor force with the development of industrialization during WWI and its aftermath.
Equality of Rights was no more a slogan. A new era of women’s militancy started. As early as 1920, Egyptian women workers imposed the first legislation on working hours for women. Nabayiwwah Musa (Egypt) was among the many pioneers in the struggle for working women’s rights.
That period also witnessed the proliferation of women’s press, especially in Egypt and Lebanon: Hind Nawfal’s Al-Fatat (November 1892), Rosa Antûn’s Majallat al-Sayyidât wa-l-Fatayât (1903-), Mustafâ `Abd-al-Râziq’s Al-Sufûr, (1915-), Nabawiyyah Musa’s Tarqiyat al-Fatât (1923-), and Munîrah Thâbit’s Al-Amal (1925-)…
But the issue of the veil and segregation dominated the best part of that period. “Unveiling or death”! is the motto launched by the the Iraqi poet Ahmad Sudqî al-Zahâwî in a founding article, Evils of the Veil (1908) in which he accused sexual segregation between men and women of encouraging pederasty. In another article, In Defence of Women, a year later, he argues that freedom is a gift common to both men and women and derides the argument about man’s superiority based on his superior physical strength. Animals are stronger than men, should they have superior rights over them? Al-Zahhâwî opposed polygamy and called for women’s equal right to divorce, based on a simple argument: if women are given the right to approve their marriage, according ot he Shari`ah, how can they be deprived of any say in its dissolution? Al-Zahhâwî goes even further in his critique as he evokes the inequality inherent in the Islamic promise of Heaven in which men are promised the famous seductive houris (700 to 70.000 of them) whereas women are promised to desire only their husbands. Zahhâwî’s writings on the woman question provoked demonstrations against him in the streets of Baghdad and the city’s Ottoman wâlî ultimately dismissed the poet from his teaching post at the Law school.
Mansour Fahmi (1886-1959) dealt with the question of the veil from a totally different angle. In his doctoral thesis entitled La condition de la femme dans la Tradition et l’évolution de l’Islamisme. (Paris, 1913) he resorts to ample philological and historic evidence in order to prove that neither in pre-Islam nor in the Prophet Muhammad’s time, there existed a piece of cloth designed to hide woman’s face from men. Among the evidence provided by Fahmi is that the hijâb in âyah 52 of Surat al-Ahzâb refers to a cloth partition inside the tent and the Jilbâb in âyah 59 (of Al-Ahzâb also) refers to a shawl for the body. Back in Egypt, Fahmi was bitterly attacked and forced to renounce his theory. His book is still not translated into Arabic.
The Lebanese Zaynab Fawwaz Al-`Amili (1860-1914), author in 1893 of a book relating the lives of 455 women who played important roles in their societies, was probably the first Arab-Muslim woman to openly criticize the veil. She advocated celibacy as a form of resistance to polygamy. Long before Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Zaynab Fawwaz held women responsible for their inferior status, blaming them for “seeing themselves and their lives from the perspectives and opinions of men…so that they came to recognize themselves only through them”.
The Lebanese-Syrian Nazîrah Zayn al-Dîn (1908-1975) was one of first Syrian-Lebanese women to unveil. She advocated complete equality between men and women, defended women’s right to vote and to participate in government and called for interpretation (ijtihâd) in matters religious. In her book Al-Sufûr wa-l-Hijâb (Unveiling and Veiling, 1928) she argues that it is decidedly not a piece of cloth that will guarantee woman’s chastity. Her book came out at a time of bitter polemics that raged in Syria between Hijâbiyyîn and Sufûriyyîn and added fuel to the fire. A whole group of women pioneers defended her: Hafni Nâsîf, Nâzik al-`Abid, Hudâ Sha`râwî, Laure Thâbit, Julia Tu`mah Dimashqîyah, Marie `Ajamî, May Ziyâdah, Ibtihâj Qaddûra, Mariana Marrâsh, Labîbâh al-Hâshim, Salmâ Sâyigh, Habbûbâ Haddâd, Hind Nawfal, etc. On the side of men, many defended Nazîrah: sheikhs `Ali `Abd al-Râziq, Tâhir al-Nafsânî, Abî Yûsuf `Abd al-Quddûs, but also laymen such as the historians Muhammad Kurd `Alî, the Belgian Jesuit Père Henri Lammens and Muhammad Jamîl Bayhum, the poet Khalîl Mutrân, the writer Amîn al- Rîhânî and the philosopher Felix Fâris, etc.
That period is also a period of remarkable women in their own right as individuals. May Ziadeh, writer, animated a famous literary salon in Cairo during the years 1915-1916. She carried on an unhappy love affair with the famous writer `Abbâs Mahmûd al-`Aqqâd, that ultimately broke up due to `Aqqad’s conservative positions on women. Back in her hometown in Lebanon, this excentric rebellious woman was unjustly accused of madness by relatives, eager to put their hands on her properties, and interned. Released, after a number of years, she died alone in Egypt. Her only refuge was an obsessive correspondence and platonic love affair with Jibran Khalil Jibran author of The Prophet.
Huda Sha`rawi (1879-1947) is one of the first women to unveil in Egypt. But she is to be remenbered mainly for her work in organising women. In 1923, she created the first woman’s organization in Egypt, the Woman’s Union, which defended Arab and Moslem women’s rights in international congresses. In 1940, Hudâ Sha`râwî created the first pan-Arab women’s organisation.
Feminism after WWII
A curious dialectic emerged between women liberation and national liberation during that period. Many women had participated in the struggle for independence from its early days. In Egypt (1919) women shed the veil as they joined the mass demonstrations against colonial power. The women of Jaffa (Palestine) appealed to the General Islamic Congress in the 1930’s asking for their right to fight alongside men against Zionism and Imperialism. Under independence, many women shed the veil, now that the colonizer was gone and “we are among ourselves”.
Nevertheless, national liberation could not be easily harnessed to serve women’s liberation. After independence, priority was given to ‘national goals’ at women’s expense. They were asked to return home and rear their children, as in current expression used in the Algerian case. Yet, the modernizing post-independence regimes accounted for much of the achievements for women.
Transformations and reforms
Wide progress was achieved in the access of women to education in the context of policies designed to provide free schooling for all.
On the other hand, severe restrictions were imposed on the most flagrant forms of discrimination against women. Egypt which had abolished polygamy, forced marriages and repudiation as early as 1925, baned clitoridectomy in 1956.
Large reforms were conducted in the personal statuses of women. The minimum age for marriage was put at 16 for girls and 18 for boys (Algeria, 1963). Iraq adopted the Ja`fari (shiite) code establishing equality in inheritance between men and women, Elsewhere, courts practiced dissuasion on the second wife, and women frequently obtained the right of guard of children in cases of divorce.
Advanced secular family codes were adopted, especially in Tunisia and Democratic Yemen. In the latter the Family Code of 1973 abolished the financially exorbitant dowry, established monogamy and granted women equal right to divorce.
Women were also granted minimum political rights such as the right to vote and be elected to legislative bodies starting with Lebanon in 1952 and Egypt in 1956),
The new feminists
A new breed of feminists grew out of the limits of post-independence achievements and of the disappointments of the Arab liberation movement as far as women’s rights were concerned, especially under the impact of the 1967 war with Israel. New topics now cover all aspects of the woman’s question, based on research (in medicine, psychology, law and sociology): clitoridectomy, prostitution, sexual aggression, the problems of `ayb (shame), honor and dishonor, pre-marital sex, contraception, marriage, divorce, problems of women at work, discrimination in law, domestic work, etc.
In a way, those new feminists revived Shidyâq’s problematic on the repression of women’s sexuality as the basis of man’s control over women.
Nawâl Sa`dâwî, Egyptian medical doctor, feminist and political activist, locates woman’s question in what she calls the patriarchal class structure. Though she relates women’s liberation to the wider movement for national and social liberation, she does not consider the victory or successes of the latter as a sufficient condition for women to win equal rights and equal status. For that, she calls upon women to become a strong political force and impose their rights by themselves. In her early writings, Sa`dawi distinguished between the priorities of Western feminism and those of Arab feminism, but she moved later to radical Westernized feminist positions which pitted women against men
Fâtimah Marnîsî, sociologist (Morocco) is the author of Sex, Ideology and Islam (1983), Beyond the Veil, The Political Harem (1987, translated as The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, (1991), Islam and Democracy (1994). Marnîsî feminized the argument that the manipulation of the Past is a means of political control and applied it to the control exercised by men over women. She provides a feminist reading of the Islam of the Prophet Muhammad in which she reveals the struggle between God’s new message of equality between all believers (including equality between men and women) and the ancient norms of tribal society based on rapt (sabi) raids and slavery. On the other hand, she evokes the fear of the modern world as the basis for male domination and relates the liberation of women to the problematic of democracy versus authoritarianism
The Literature of Freedom
Alongside the new feminists in the medical and social sciences, a new generation of feminist writers emerged. Laylâ Ba`albaki (Lebanon), Etel Adnan, Ghâdah al-Sammân (Syria), Nâzik al-Malâ’ikah, Daisy al-Amîr (Iraq), Samîrah `Azzâm and Fadwâ Tûqân (Palestine) to name but a few. Their writings expressed not only freedom and rebellion against the old modes of literary expression, but also freedom and rebellion as an outlook on life.
Ba`albakî’s Anâ Ahyâ, though little talked about these days, still stands as a courageous novel on the emergence of woman-as-an-individual in the Beirut of the ‘golden sixties’. Ghâdah al-Sammân, describing the woman’s unbearable condition of Arab women and the uncertain fate she faces transcends national boundaries to join all the oppressed of the world.
“Despite my white flesh, I am a negro woman, because I am an Arab woman. Victim of the wa’d under the sands of the Jahiliyyah desert, I am now the victim of the new wa’d, buried under inherited disdain.
I am not looking for love, I am only looking for a lonely and suffering woman like myself, to hold her hand while both of us deliver among the thorns of the field, begetting children for the tribe, children who will be soon be taught to hate us.”
Etel Adnan’s unique rage in The Arab Apocalypse (1980) announces catastrophes to come. Not surprisingly she will be one of the first writers to take the Lebanese civil war as a literary subject (Sitt Marie Rose, 1978 and 1982). But, more importantly, Adnan will soon developed a style in which the act of writing itself becomes feminine. (The Spring Flowers Own and The Manifestations of the Voyage, 1990, Of Cities and Women, 1993, Paris, When It’s Naked, 1993). With Etel Adnan, women writers have liberated themselves of the burden of proving themselves vis-à-vis men as being capable of producing literature.
The backlash
The eighties brought the woman’s question back to ‘square one’. Women’s rights were again at the center of the fundamentalist backlash against the distorted modernism of the last quarter century. The same topics evoked by the pioneers evoked are again on the agenda: the veil, segregation, banning women from work (what a tragically absurd solution to the problem of unemployment!), the political and legal equality of women, polygamy, etc.
Tragically, women’s rights were, and still are, the first concessions Arab regimes are willing to concede to fundamentalist pressures.
Jacques Berque had said it so well when he spoke of “woman as the last vestige of man’s sovereignty ” in the Arab-Muslim world. That made them ideal scapegoats for the frustrations and problems of society. Alienated, repressed and frustrated in their national and social aspirations, troubled in their identity, facing an unknown future in an increasingly globalized world, how easy has it become for male society to take it out on women in order to reaffirm male superiority. How futile and displaced are these symbolic acts hopelessly designed to cover up for the incapacity to face up to real challenges, changes and problems of the post-modern world.
More than six decades ago, Nazîrah Zayn al-Dîn, addressed that same issue of scapegoating in her reply to her male critics:
“You have not developed with time. Time has folded your flags and you have squandered your ancestors’ heritage … Do you want, now, to unfurl your flags over your women’s faces, taking your women for a substitute kingdom to the kingdoms you have lost?” (Al-Fatât wa-l-Shuyûkh, 1929, vol. 1, p. 40).