النسوية العربية الحديثة

CS III Common Lecture, Monday, March 25th, 1996

I. The Nahda (mid-19th century-WWI)

1. The woman’s question central to the Nahdah problematic as the woman’s inferior status was seen as the basic cause for the backwardness of the Arab and Islamic worlds. The main writers if the Nahdah were unanimous that there will be no renaissance for Arabs and Muslims without the participation and liberation of women. Bustani, Tahtawi, Afghani, `Abdu, Qasim Amin and Tahir Haddad

– great emphasis on women’s education

2. The pionneers have in common idea that women’s liberation comes mainly through education. But they envisaged an educated bourgeois or aristocratic woman confined to her home and the rearing of her children.

– Qasim Amin (1863-1908): first book on the liberation of women “Tahrir al-Mar’ah” (1899). “New woman” (1900): woman’s equality: she is not an inferior creature; polygamy impedes the progress of woman and society

3. Ahmad Faris al-Chidyaq (1804-1887):

– Al-Saq `Ala al-Saq (Paris 1855): founding text in Arabic modernity and literature (a new Arabic language) was written in praise of women and the Arabic language as the author declares and adds that while writing his book, “as if he had become himself a woman”. In contrast to the rest of the Nahdah pioneers, Shidyaq considered that the right to work was not only the main value of modern civilization but the main factor in the renaissance of the Arabs. He urged the right of women to work; attacked segregation because it treats woman as a sexual object. He was the first toraise the equal right of women to divorce, and critiqued the double standards in dealing with women’s infidelity. The radical novelty of Shidyaq writings on women was

• repression of woman’s instincts as basis of male domination
• woman’s equal right to pleasure
• treated prostitution not as a moral question but as a consequence of poverty

II. The Beginnings (between the two wars)

1. Battle against veil and segregation. “unveiling or death”! (Zahhawi)

2. The battle for Education, Work, Access to administative posts, Equality of Rights…

• 1928, Egyptian Universities opened to girls,
• Work: in1920, Egyptian women workers impose first legislations on working hours,

3. Women’s press:

• Hind Nawfal: Al-Fatat (November 1892-),
• Rosa Antoun: Majallat al-Sayyidat wa-l-Fatayat (1903-),
• Mustafa `Abd al-Raziq: Al-Sufur , weekly (1915-),
• Nabawiyyah Musa: Tarqiyat al-Fatat (1923-),
• Munirah Thabit: Al-Amal (1925-)…

4. Second generation of feminists (include women)

i) Ahmad Sudqi al-Zahhawi: (Iraq’s great poet):

– Article on the “Evils of the veil” (1908):

• will not guarantee woman’s chastity, encourages infidelity (anonymity);
• segregation encourages pederasty;
• veil breeds ignorance and lowers women to animal status

– Article “In Defence of Women” (1910): outcry (demonstrations) against it, Ottoman wali of Baghdad dismisses Zahhawi as teacher at Law school.

• man is the one who is incomplete without women
• freedom, a gift common to both men and women
• man’s superiority based on his superior physical strength: animals are stronger than men, should they have rights over men?
• equal right to divorce: if given right to approve her marriage, why not right in its dissolution?
• against polygamy
• criticises inequality in Islamic promise of Heaven: men promised seductive houris (700 to 70.000) women promissed to desire only their husbands

ii) Mansour Fahmi (1886-1959):

– First scientific study on veil: La condition de la femme dans la Tradition et l’évolution de l’Islamisme. Paris, 1913.

– On basis of ample philological and historic evidence, proves that neither in pre-Islam nor in prophet’s time, there existed a piece of cloth designed to hide woman’s face from men. The Hijâb in âyah 52 of Surat al-Ahzâb refers to a cloth partition inside the tent and the Jilbab in âyah 59 (of Al-Ahzâb also) refers to a shawl for the body.

– Back in Egypt, Fahmi forced to renounce his theory; his book still untranslated into Arabic.

iii) May Ziadeh: writer, animated literary salon in Cairo 1915-1916, unhappy love-affair with `Abbas Mahmud al-`Aqqad, broke up due to `Aqqad’s conservative positions on women, accused of madness by her relatives and interned in Lebanon, released, dies alone in Egypt. Her only refuge, an obsessive correspondance and platonic love affair with Jibran Khalil Jibran, author of The Prophet.

iv) Huda Sha`rawi (1879-1947): organisation of women. One of the first women to unveil in Egypt. In 1923, created the first woman’s organisation in Egypt, the Woman’s Union, defended Arab and Moslem women’s rights in international congresses. In 1940, created first pan-Arab women’s organisation.

v) Nazirah Zayn al-Din (1908-1975, Ba`klin, Lebanon, daughter of a judge): one of first Syrian women to unveil and defend women’s rights. Influenced by French culture. Advocated complete equality between men and women, right to vote, participate in government and ijtihâd in religion. In Al-Sufur wa al-Hijab, it is not a piece of cloth which will defend woman’s chastity. (Same argument will be advanced by reformist Iranian mullah Talqânî at beginning of Iranian revolution). The hijab= Darkness; unveiling= LIGHT.

Her book came out at a time of bitter struggle in Damascus between Hijâbiyyin andSufûriyyîn. The latter included pionneers such as Hafni Nasif, Nazik al- `Abid, Huda Sha`rawi, Laure Thabet, Julia Tu`mah Dimashqiya, Marie `Ajami, May Ziadeh, Ibtihâj Qaddoura, Mariana Marrash, Labiba al- Hachem, Salma Sayegh, Habbouba Haddad, Hind Nawfal, etc.). No less than 20 sheikhs answered and attacked her and many defended her (Muhammad Kurd `Ali, `Ali `Abd al-Raziq, Amin al- Rihani, Muhammad Jamil Bayhum, Felix Faris, sheikh Tahir al-Nafsani, Père Lammens, Khalil Mutran, sheikh Abi Yusuf `Abd al-Quddus, etc.)

vi) Nabayiwwah Musa (Egypt): Women and work.

III. Feminism after WWII

1. Women in liberation struggles

– equality in sacrifice/equality in rights

• Jaffa women to the General Islamic Congress (1930’s) ask for right to fight alongside men against Zionism and Imperialism
• In Egypt (1919) as in Algeria (1962) and Democratic Yemen (1972), women shed the veil, now that the coloniser has gone and “we are among ourselves”

– After independence, priority for national goals at women’s expense: they are asked to return home and rear her children.

2. Transformations and reforms:

– progress in access to education

• Algeria (1963 Law), 13% in 1921-1922, 23,3% in 1977-78,
• Egypt, 1956: free schooling for all, mixed schools,

– progress in access to work (women 3% of salaried in Egypt 1956),

– restrictions on most obvious forms of discrimination against women:

• clitoridectomy (prohibited in Egypt, 1956),
• polygamy, forced marriages, repudiation (abolished in Egypt in 1925),
• political rights and right to vote (Lebanon 1952, Egypt 1956),
• inheritance (Iraq adopts Ja`fari code calling for equality in inheritance)
• minimum age for marriage 16 for girls, 18 for boys (Algeria, 1963)

– reforms in personal status of women:

• dissuasion on second wife, woman obtains right of guard of children in case of divorce
• advanced family codes especially in Tunisia and Democratic Yemen (family code of 1973: abolishes dowry, establishes monogamy and equal right to divorce),

3. The new feminists:

– new topics cover all aspects of woman’s question, based on research (in medecine, psychology, law and sociology): circumcision of young girls, prostitution, sexual aggression, the problems of `ayb (shame), honour and dishonour, sex, marriage, divorce, problems of women at work, discrimination in law, at home, etc.

– new feminists revive Chidyaq’s problematic: the repression of women’s sexuality as the basis of man’s control over women.

– Nawal Sa`dawi, doctor, feminist and political activist (Egypt).

• locates woman’s question in the social structure, especially in what she calls the patriarchial class structure
• relates women’s liberation to wider movement for national and social liberation; but does not consider it a sufficient condition for women to win equal rights and equal status; calls upon women to become a strong political force and impose their rights;
• at the beginning, Sa`dawi distinguished between the priorities of Western feminism and those of Arab feminism, but moved later to a radical feminism which pitts women against men

– Fatimah Marnisi, sociologist (Morocco): 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).

• the manipulation of the Past as means of political control; including control of men over women
• a feminist reading of 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 sabi, raids & slavery
• evokes the fear of the modern world as the basis for male domination and relates the liberation of women to democracy

– The Litterature of freedom:

Layla Ba`albaki, Emilie Nasr Allah (Lebanon), Etel Adnan, Colette Khouri, Ghada Samman (Syria), Nazik al-Mala’ikah, Daisy al-Amir (Iraq), Samirah `Azzam, Fadwa Tuqan, Sahar Khalifah (Palestine).

Ghadah al-Samman, to describe woman’s unbearable condition and uncertain fate, evokes the wa’d (old pre-Islamic tradition of killing female children at birth, by burrying them under the sand; prohibited by Islam) :

“Despite my white flesh, I am a negro woman, because I am an Arab woman. Victim of thewa’d under the sand of the Jahiliyyah’s 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.”

V. The backlash

– Back to square one: women’s rights at centre of the debate, now as the main victim of the fundamentalist backlash against distorted modernism of the last quarter century:

– Same topics pioneers evoked are again on agenda: the veil, segregation, banning women from work (what a naïve solution to the problem of unemployment!), political and legal equality of women, etc.

– Women’s rights first concessions governments concede to fundamentalists’ demands

– “Woman, the last vestige of man’s sovereignty” (Jacques Berque) .

– Women, scapegoats for all frustations and problems of society. Reaffirmation of male superiority: a futile and displaced symbolic act to cover up for incapacity to face up to real challenges and problems of modern world:

– 66 years ago, Nazirah Zayn al-Din, replied thus to her male critics:

“You have not developed with time. Time has folded your flags and you have delapidated 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-Fatat wa-l-Shuyukh, 1929, vol. 1, p. 40).