Arab and Muslim women writing on feminism etc.

I have a small collection of books by Arab and/or Muslim women, mostly on the topics of feminism, women's issues and the like, that I long planned to approach comprehensively, and this seems as good a time to do it as any.

I picked out as many of these books as I could find and arranged them chronologically from the earliest copyright and/or publication date to the latest, so as to capture, if possible and if there, the development, or the changes, or the cross-talk, if any, between the ideas in these books.

Please join in, whether you are reading the same books, similar books, or just feel like commenting and chatting.

So my first book here was Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at point zero (written in 1973) and I just adored it. Where was this book my whole life! I feel like I'm probably the last person to have read it so don't know if there's any point in describing the plot. You want female rage? Here is female rage, burning like the Sun. How healing, how consoling, how fortifying this book would have been to me (and to who knows how many more even today) when I was young. And really, before I proceed with anything else on the topic of Arab and Muslim feminism, here is all the proof anyone might ask for, that in terms of understanding the female condition in a misogynistic world, and in terms of decrying it, hating it, and wanting to fight it, Western/white feminists have nothing on these women.

It stands to reason--who better than the most oppressed understand oppression, want to end oppression, are ready to lay down their lives fighting it?

Firdaus is simply the grandest character I have ever read about. Female, male or female, real or fictional. Firdaus is pure human, pure freedom.

'I am saying that you are criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands, the pimps, the lawyers, the doctors, the journalists, and all men of all professions.'
They said, 'You are a savage and dangerous woman.'
'I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.'

I found a copy of that book in college and when I had finished reading it, I went and special ordered everything else by her I could find, which at the time was God Dies By the Nile and Two Women in One. In fact, it was the very first time I had ever special ordered books just because I wanted them, not because they were a class assignment or something.

>2 southernbooklady:

It's like being in love! I went to bed and woke up thinking about Firdaus.

I also need to learn all there is to learn about El Saadawi herself. I have a couple more of her books but I think non-fiction all.

Memoir from the Women's Prison is one of the better-known nonfiction books. Anwar Sadat had her imprisoned and Firdaus was inspired by one of the earlier prisoners in the same facility, I think.

I have that. It boggles my mind that I was actually IN Egypt, in Cairo, when she was imprisoned (twelve to thirteen years old, so really not helpful to understanding anything in retrospect).

So far I read only the Wikipedia article on her--what a person, what a legend.

Moving away from fiction, the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) might be a useful resource.

"Established in 1995 by a coalition of women’s rights activists with the aim of strengthening the capacities of women’s rights organizations and addressing women’s subordination and violence against women and girls in the Horn of Africa, SIHA has grown substantially and is now comprised of 136 member organizations..." While the Horn of Africa is not exclusively Muslim, nevertheless much of SIHA's work concerns Muslim women.

‘Most of the men are your enemies’: one woman’s crusade in Somalia (Guardian)

Ibado Mohammed Abdulle is a counsellor, friend and campaigner for women who have been made refugees in their own country by the impact of the climate crisis...

One of the books that opened up new Middle Eastern women writers to me was In the House of Silence. It's a collection of autobiographical essays by Arab women writers. Some I liked more than others, as is the way with such collections. But I've been making my way through their works as I can, although much of it is hard to find in English. Here's a list of contributors:

Liana Badr (Palestine)
Salwa Bakr (Egypt)
Hoda Barakat (Lebanon)
Fadia Faqir (Jordan)
Alia Mamdough (Iraq)
Samira Al-Mana (Iraq)
Ahlem Mostesghanemi (Algeria)
Hamida Na'na (Syria)
Aroussia Nalouti (Tunisia)
Nawal El-Saadawi (Egypt)
Fawzia Rashid (Bahrain)
Hadia Said (Lebanon)
Zhor Ounissi (Algeria)

The only name besides El-Saadawi I was even vaguely familiar with was Salwa Bakr. The book itself came out of some conference about women and writing, so some of it is a little academic and inward-looking. But much of it is not. El-Saadawi's is the most in-your-face and uncompromising of the pieces, but Mamdough's piece, "Creatures of Arab Fear," was really good. And I really liked Mostesghanemi's "Writing Against Time and History." About half the essays are written by women who had been educated in or escaped to or been exiled to Paris or London and did their writing in French or English, and about half are by women who had not. The ones who had worry away at the west/east dichotomy of their lives, trying to pick it a part in an attempt to understand the whole. The attempt seems to fail more often than not.

I recognise Hoda Barakat but no one else... Say more about what grabbed you?

I'm currently reading Fatima Mernissi's Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society, finished writing in 1973, first published in 1975, revised edition in 1983, additional material 1987.

It's so absorbing. Wonderful stuff. I'm up to the second chapter but better, I think, to comment on the whole.

Incidentally, have you come across some discussion in that re: Arab Christian (or other religious minorities) vs. (or plus) Arab Muslim feminism/feminists, how does that work, who is who, any comments on shared activism, or lack of such activism... etc.?

Since Arab and Muslim societies tend to observe complete religious segregation, in particular prohibiting Muslim women from marrying outside the religion (and all children of Muslim men being prohibited from adopting religions other than Islam), I imagine cooperation between feminists belonging to different religious communities would be limited in scope, as it's Islam as "the sacred basis of society" that dictates the general circumstances and frequently laws most forcefully.

In any case, basically I wonder is it mainly or even only the Muslims--or atheists from Muslim backgrounds-- who fight inequality in Islamic societies, if there are prominent Arab Christian feminists. In theory, at least, it seems it would be difficult for a Christian or someone with a Christian background to take on the mission that pits one against someone else's religious culture.

Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society, Fatima Mernissi, finished writing in 1973, first published in 1975, revised edition in 1983, additional material 1987.

This was great, eye-opening. The starting point:

Beyond the Veil is a book about sexual space booundaries. (...) It started from a harmless question: why can't I stroll peacefully in the alleys of the Medina that I like and enjoy so much?

I love this and feel it in my bones--this practical, lving-experience based encounter with a problem that forces you into a reckoning. As you may know, I have a thing about the street and the women, about being female in the "street", whether we have that basic freedom of existing in it or not and why not, what it means.

I'll present Mernissi's ideas as hardly more than bullet points because there are too many to go into in detail, but please understand this won't do justice to the complexity and subtlety of her arguments.

Crucial ideas: Islam has codified and imposed a system of slavery on women for about 14 centuries. In this system men possess women, women are not constituted as human beings who belong to themselves, but as human beings belonging to men. The Muslim umma, then, the community of believers, properly refers to men and the male brotherhood, who own the female portion of the population.

The subjugation has a religious basis and justification. "Allah does not speak to women"--the Koran addresses itself to the male subject, posits the male as the subject, and the male mediates between god and the woman and informs her of her duties and rights.

Islam as a "sacred basis of society" is not only accepted by the traditionalists but generally speaking by the "modernisers" as well, because (as far as I can tell) anything else is a non-starter. There is no way to dispense with understanding the Koran as the word of God and that human society should be based on the word of God--one can only hope to negotiate about the interpretation of that word.

...the Muslim message, in spite of its beauty, considers humanity to be constituted by males only. Women are considered not only outside of humanity but a threat to it as well.

Concerning that threat, Mernissi sees one of the differences between the West and Islam in the respective understanding of female sexuality. The West, she says, sees women as biologically inferior and sexually passive; in Islam, there is no insistence as such that women are biologically inferior and they are seen as sexually active.

What stimulates the greater control and domination of women in Islam is a fear of unregulated, free, self-determining, self-actualising female sexuality.

Mernissi illustrates this with a comparison of Freud's ideas and those of the 11th century theologian Gazali.

In some ways Islam has a healthier view of sex--sexuality isn't pathologised, men and women's sexual instincts are seen as basically the same, lovemaking is appreciated as both a necessity and pleasure, and women's sexual satisfaction is very important (or at least taught to be important).

However, the actual social arrangements of heterosexual relations belie these theoretical levelling ideas. Muslim marriage squarely favours the master, not the slave, and it does so to the extremes where practically any kind of abuse is possible without repercussions for the man, up to and including killing the woman.

Mernissi introduced me to the idea that what Islam fears and condemns above all, and does everything to destroy, is heterosexual love. This is how she puts it and I must admit this angle is new and strange to me, although I'd have no trouble recognising the obstacles Islam places to heterosexual relations.

The destabilisation, the prevention of conjugal love is achieved through the institutions of polygamy and repudiation, both a sole male prerogative. Polygamy is widely consciously understood as humiliating and debasing to woman, and used precisely to debase her and facilitate her exploitation. But it also reinforces the tensions and the fear of women who, remember, are seen as sexually active and threatening, yet through polygamy are rendered even more sexually frustrated, and therefore even more of a danger to social order. (Justifying even more control etc.)

Repudiation breaks the marital bond so easily that it further reinforces woman's insignificance. The point of all of this is to cement a woman's unimportance to the man as an individual, being only a means to satisfy his sexual and procreative needs. Finally, asserting paternity as sole ownership of children also works to diminish the woman, as not even her role as the mother of a man's children is given any value.

In such conditions it's no wonder heterosexual love has little opportunity to develop, and less meaning.

Another thing I wasn't quite aware of until Mernissi is just how Prophet Muhammad's sexual behaviour shaped Islam and the destiny of Muslim women. I knew it did, but not all the details.

The details are sordid.

After the death of his first wife Khadija when he was fifty, Muhammad married twelve more times, and besides indulged in some unspecified number of relations with concubines and other women he didn't marry. Three of the marriages were not consummated because the women changed their minds and left (all three were relatively more "free" tribal women who seem to have had second thoughts about sharing a husband). One was, notoriously, to a girl so young she was not yet eighteen when he died at sixty-two. Mernissi also brings up two incidents that paint a regrettable picture of Muhammad and his sexual legacy. He is said to have said to his favourite grandson Hassan "you resemble me physically and morally", when Hassan boasted of having 200 wives, or rather having had 200 wives, as he was wont to marry and divorce them in fours at a time, moving on to new stock all the time.

And, Muhammad once got excited by the sight of his adopted son's wofe, whereupon the adopted son offered to divorce her so that prophet could marry her, never mind the dozen or so wives back home already.

How different might Islam have been if Muhammad hadn't acted the randy old goat after his wife died? If he'd remained a widower or married just the one woman again? It seems certain that the women's condition within it would have been quite different.

Another point I wish to note is that according to Mernissi there is a wealth of data on pre-Islamic practice but very little analysis of it (presumably up to date at least). This reminded me of similar remarks elsewhere regarding Muslim data and sources on slavery. It points to a widespread problem of repression of scholarship that may (rightly or wrongly supposed) challenge Islamic doctrine (or politics).

The fourth part of the book deals with the specific situation in Morocco (data from 1971) but equally sheds light much wider. It saddened me to compare Mernissi's hopes with recent reports from the country by Leila Slimani. No doubt there has been change, quantitatively. But qualitatively? So little.

I'll post later a few longer quotations so that people might appreciate Mernissi's insight better than is possible from my jottings.

>11 LolaWalser: wow. that title just jumped to the top of my TBR list. The thing about Muhammed and child brides is extremely icky. I still remember an account in The Oceans of Ink where several women had to plead with the supposedly progressive scholar in the book that child marriage was a travesty. He kept coming back to "but the Prophet did it" as his justification for the practice. If ever there was a situation that demonstrated that the female of the species were justnot people at the core of his world view, that was it.

>12 southernbooklady:

Yes, basically every problem women face in Islam comes back to the fact that they are not seen as people, but a special sort of cattle.

Regarding Muhammad, his cult indeed poses the greatest obstacle to changing behaviours. Sexual exploitation of children and child marriage are not unique to Islam, but no other tradition finds a justification for that in such a figure--and more than a justification, an encouragement.

Because Muhammad isn't just the God's human messenger; he is considered perfect, the best role model a Muslim could have (male of course). And this, like the belief that the Koran is literally the God's word, poses an essentially insoluble problem.

I found some amusement in the stories Mernissi discusses regarding Muhammad. Defenders of Islamic polygamy argue that it's not really a "all you can eat" buffet, that there are some brakes applied because the believers are urged (and again, all of this is addressed to men) to treat each wife equally. So, presumably, the average Ahmed would run out of means to support and take care of each wife equally while the number is still in single digits. And one of the examples of "treating each wife equally" is the time Muhammad had sex with all of his nine wives in one morning, giving full satisfaction to all nine. The moral goes, unless YOU can pull off such a feat, fella, don't bother with marrying nine.

Also amusing is that this kind of story isn't deemed scandalous but impressive.

In the chapter 'The Prophet's Experience of the Irresistible Attraction of Women' Mernissi details the contradictions between what Muhammad preached and how he behaved. For example, he taught that a man looking to marry ought be motivated by a woman's religion, but he often married and picked as concubines women he simply found beautiful. He even married a few non-Muslims, two Jewish (about one's status there is some debate that he didn't marry her but kept as a concubine) and one Christian. Mernissi flatly disagrees with the apologists who claim that all of Muhammad's marriages were made for political reasons (not to mention that politics can't explain hundreds of affairs).

The Prophet's desire for Maria was so strong that it led him to violate another of his ideals: that a man should be just in his dealings with his wives. A man should keep strictly to the rotation schedule and not have intercourse with a wife, even if he so desired, if it was not her day. Hafsa, one of the Prophet's wives, however, caught him having intercourse with Maria in Safiya's room on Safiya's day. 'O Prophet of God, in my room and on my day!' fulminated Safiya angrily. Afraid of the anger of his other wives, and especially of his most beloved Aisha {this is the one he married at six years old}, he promised Hafsa never to touch Maria again if she would keep the incident secret. But she spoke out, and the Prophet received orders from God to retract his promise; he then resumed relations with Maria.

Note the "God told him to fuck" gambit--not the first nor the last time "prophets of god" received such instructions from up high.

The farcical aspect of this approach to marriage comes to the fore again in discussing repudiation (Muslim divorce whereby the man--and only men can do so--divorces a wife on the spot simply by uttering the requisite formula.)

In the section on Morocco Mernissi quotes from the letters people sent asking for advice.

I had a quarrel with my husband and he repudiated me. Now I came back to him but he did not perform the legal formalities for our remarriage. Can I still stay with him or do I have to go to my parents' home? I have three children and he always keeps swearing, using the repudiation formula without ever performing the necessary acts to make our life lawful again.

Note that when the poor woman frets over the legality of her status, it's not merely about a matter of law, but religion--it's not just that the asshole keeps yanking her between the "married" and "divorced" status but also between that of living piously and sinfully.

The saddest testimonies come from women who were married as children. Not one really understood what was going on, even as they were falling pregnant and giving birth. One thought she was sick and dying, another spent days hiding and crying, not wanting people to see her belly. No relatives cared for them, they could turn to no one for help.

In the chapter about mothers-in-law, who had and still have a special role in Muslim marriage, another testimony I found moving to tears was from a woman married off so young her mother in-law bought her toys and brought children to play with, for a whole year, before the marriage was consummated... when she turned nine.

Mernissi's own Berber grandmother was abducted as a child, sold to an official, and spent her whole life as a concubine--a slave.

Edith Wharton writes In Morocco about seeing small children slaves in the nice houses, in the 1920s.

Abdallah Taia writes about a slave (black African) in a Moroccan household in the 1990s.

Wow, this is on YouTube... probably not for long, so if interested, better hurry...

Feminism Inshallah: A History of Arab Feminism

A 2014 film by Feriel Ben Mahmoud, featuring various feminist activists, historians, politologues, ordinary folk...

Covering such a huge territory in some 55 minutes, this is very much an intro and quick survey of the topic, which is amazingly complex (colonialism and the struggle for independence complicating matters for Arab/Muslim women way beyond what Western feminists had to face).

Some points that stick in my mind:

--how much the 1920s were a decade of renewal, hope, dreams of liberation and progress, and specifically for women, in Arab countries as well. Huda Sha'arawi taking off in public her veil on return to Egypt from a conference on feminism, and women breaking into cheering.

--Nasser giving in to Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb marking the beginning of the end of hopes for a progressive Egyptian society

--losing the war with Israel and the defeat of pan-Arabist project in 1967 crucially boosting the ideology of religious conservatives, already numerically in huge advantage in these poor, illiterate, by and large rural societies

--in Algeria, in a pattern familiar in many places struggling for independence, the anti-colonial fight uses women but on victory betrays them most cruelly. As an interviewee notes, the freedom fighters discovered you can get men to shut up about wanting anything else if you let them lord it over women.

--Gulf states and their stinking oil economies exert nefarious influence throughout the Arab-speaking world. An ultra-monetary economy can afford to acquire the material trappings of modernity while keeping half its population in the state of the 7th century cattle to which Islam reduced women.

--the spread of extremism from the Gulf states is carried by guest workers who return home bringing Saudi customs and beliefs. Not just the wearing of scarves but full-face niqabs spreads and becomes normalised--in Egypt, the country where domestic industry in the 50s and the 60s turned out films showing men and women kissing.

--extremists on the TV channels (the clip with the imam explaining how terrifically kind to women Muhammad was when he taught not to mark the face when beating your wife, and also how you can beat her only for refusing sexual favours...) preach to masses of still illiterate, still rural people

--a historian notes as political Islam's greatest victory the changing of the hijab from a militant object to an identitarian object. The "normal" has been pushed further into religious conservatism; even women disagreeing with veiling and/or politicisation of Islam find themselves compelled to cover, as the consequences of non-conformism may be dire.

--religiously conservative veiled women reject feminism but are able to behave and live with greater freedom than their forbears could have imagined: work (although the careers seem skewed to religiousy counselling and the like), keep the money they earned (this is not haram, is all one needs to know)--"so what do they need feminism for?"

--a "Muslim feminism" emerges in Malaysia. This seems to involve proposing female-friendlier readings of the Qur'an.

--much more to my liking, activism among some young women focusses squarely on the worst, most intractable taboos: speaking of the body and sex. Actually just the one young woman in Tunis unleashes a firestorm of hatred against her when she posts on Facebook a photo of her nude torso with, written in Arabic, a message that her body is nobody's "honour" (I paraphrase).

A commentator says that this is the root of the women's tragedy in these countries, the idea that a man's "honour" rests in a woman's body.

--a young Egyptian woman who just wanted to play a guitar with other people, and started a girl group because of course she couldn't be allowed to play with boys, found herself inadvertently ipso facto a feminist doing feministy things although, as she says with disarming frankness, feminism was never on her mind. But so it happens, when you fucking can't ride a bicycle while female without drawing the frothy ire of every fucking beardo waving some holy book or another and cursing you to hell.

One last quotation from Mernissi's book, closing the circle with the opening quotation above:

The Deseclusion of Women: on the Street

...

Traditionally, only necessity could justify a woman's presence outside the home, and no respect was ever attached to poverty and necessity. Respectable women were not seen on the street. In class-conscious Morocco, the maid, who has to go wherever she can find a job, occupies the lowest rung of the social scale, and to be called a maid is one of the commonest insults. Only prostitutes and insane women wandered freely in the street. ... The Pascon-Benathar survey revealed that when a rural youth visits a town he assumes that any woman walking down the street is sexually available.

Women in male spaces are considered both provocative and offensive. ...

A woman is always trespassing in a male space because she is, by definition, a foe. A woman has no right to use male spaces. If she enters them, she is upsetting the male's order and his peace of mind. She is actually committing an act of aggression against him merely by being present where she should not be. ... The man has everything to lose in this encounter: peace of mind, self-determination, allegiance to Allah, and social prestige. ...

The male's response to the woman's presence is, according to the prevailing ideology, a logical response to exhibitionist aggression. It consists in pursuing the woman for hours, pinching her if the occasion is propitious, and possibly assaulting her verbally, all in the hope of convincing her to carry her exhibitionist propositioning to its implicit end.

During the Algerian revolution, the nationalist movement used women to carry arms and messages. One of the problems the revolutionary movement faced was the harassment of these women by Algerian 'brothers' who mistook them for prostitutes and interfered with the performance of their nationalist task. ...

>14 LolaWalser: “It even goes with me to the mosque.” So pointed. Such a rebuke to the stupid. I’d insert a smiley face here if I weren’t psychologically incapable of emojiness.
Plus, so much historical info for flogging my persistent ignorance arising from bouts of political lassitude.
Thanks, greatly.

>16 dypaloh:

hahaha! I well remember that line! :)

You're most welcome. Thanks for watching.

Sitt Marie-Rose by Etel Adnan, first published in 1978

"You didn't see anything, really," Mounir says, "I can't tell you what the desert is. You have to see it. Only, you women, you'll never see it. You have to strike out on your own, find your own trail with nothing but a map and compass to really see it. You, you'll never be able to do that."

The man speaking is a Christian Lebanese from a rich family and he's talking about the Syrian desert to a company of male and female friends, all Christian. The men are arrogant machos preening in front of the despised female sex. They are in Beirut in 1975, they are modern, they are better than the retrograde Muslims, and better than the Syrians. Mounir and his friends Tony, Pierre, Fouad travel to Syria and Turkey to hunt birds--actually simply kill them. There is no capture, no using of the carcasses, they just drop as many birds out of the sky as they can manage.

When the war breaks out in April, after the neofascist Christian Phalange massacres a bus of Palestinian refugees, Mounir and his male friends take to dropping Palestinians, Muslims, and dissident Christians with the same easy cruelty, the same unconcern for life.

They dreamed of a Christianity with helmets and boots, riding its horses into the clash of arms, spearing Moslem foot-soldiers like so many St. Georges with so many dragons.

But Adnan sees behind the lying banners of a war of religion.

The Crusade which I always thought was impossible has, in fact, taken place. But it's not really religious. It's part of a larger Crusade directed against the poor. They bomb the underprivileged quarters because they consider the poor to be vermin they think will eat them. They fight to block the tide of those who have lost everything, or those who never had anything, and have nothing to lose. They have turned those among them who were poor against the poor of "the others". They have perverted Charity at the heart of its root. Jerusalem is the great absent. That city, founded a few thousand years ago by the Canaanites, their ancestors, where Christ died and rose--they've never been there. They don't plan to go. The spiritual Jerusalem is dead, in their consanguineous marriage, and under the weight of their hatred.

The Phalangists capture a Christian woman who had spent years assisting Palestinian refugees, Marie Rose. Mounir knows her, they went to high school together and at sixteen were each other's first love.

"I don't consider the Palestinians an enemy. They belong to the same ancestral heritage the Christian party does. They are really our brothers."
"Do you know that they yell Allahu Akbar at the moment of assault?"
"And the crosses that you wear, aren't they also a sign of allegiance to the same God, and therefore also a kind of battle-cry?"
"Their presence in our country has been a constant provocation."
"Because they were on vulnerable ground. Someone killed their poets when you were off hunting. Someone killed their political leaders in their sleep, while you were off driving around like wildmen on the mountain roads mimicking a Monte Carlo auto rally or the Italian Grand Prix. Someone bombed their camps while you were out dancing. ..."

Mounir leaves the room as dozens of Phalangists file in to rape Marie-Rose one after another, in front of the deaf-mute children in whose school they have set up their interrogation and torture chambers.

"In this superstitious country", Adnan notes, no one takes notice of the disabled, they are forgotten with the blindness of fear.

She was, they admit, a worthy prey, though they don't consider her a museum piece, real booty, an exemplary catch. She was a woman, an imprudent woman, gone over to the enemy and mixing in politics, which is normally their personal hunting ground. They, the Chabab, had to bring women back to order, in this Orient, at once nomadic and immobile. On the Palestinian side, they dealt with crimes similarly. The stakes were different, but the methods were the same.
She made the mistake of venturing into their territory. ...

Mounir, Tony, Fouad, and even Bouna Lias, an orphan who had never known his mother, finding themselves before a woman who can stand up to them, are terrified. She breaks on the territory of their imaginations like a tidal wave. She rouses in their memories the oldest litanies of curses. To them, love is a kind of cannibalism. Feminine symbols tear at them with their claws. For seven thousand years the goddess Isis has given birth without there being a father. Isis in Egypt, Ishtar in Bagdad, Anat in Marrakesh, the Virgin in Beirut. Nothing survives the passing of these divinities: they loved only Power, their Brother or their Son. And you expect Marie-Rose to hold her head up in this procession of terrible women, and find grace in the eyes of the males of this country?

The hidden face of Eve, Nawal al-Saadawi, first published in Arabic in 1977; first English translation 1980

Another fantastic, revolutionary book by this incredibly courageous woman. It ranges over so many themes I need to acknowledge them all at least by listing them:

* Part I - The Mutilated Half * The Question that No One Would Answer * Sexual Agression Against the Female Child * The Grandfather with Bad Manners * The Injustice of Justice * The Very Fine Membrane Called 'Honour' * Circumcision of Girls * Obscurantism and Contradiction * The Illegitimate Child and the Prostitute * Abortion and Fertility * Distorted Notions about Femininity, Beauty and Love * Part II - Women in History * The Thirteenth Rib of Adam * Man the God, Woman the Sinful * Woman at the Time of the Pharaohs * Liberty to the Slave, But Not for the Woman * Part III - The Arab Woman * The Role of Women in Arab History * Love and Sex in the Life of the Arabs * The Heroine in Arab Literature * Part IV - Breaking Through * Arab Pioneers of Women's Liberation * Work and Women * Marriage and Divorce *

As you can see, she didn't baulk at tackling the most taboo, incendiary themes, such as female circumcision, rampant sexual abuse of female children by family and strangers, virginity, the whole complex of loathsome beliefs and practices surrounding it, prostitution, sex and women in general; all the way to calling out and rejecting the reactionary interpretations of Islam.

I must begin with what may look like a contradiction--first, to note that we must keep in mind that the audience addressed is that of Arab women and men in the 1970s, i.e. no polemical comparison with the West is intended. But then to stress immediately that we should not think of the text as foreign, dealing with problems mostly outside our own experience, but as in fact applying to us, to women everywhere, because the principles of oppression are at the root the same. So, while Western ideas and situations may serve as a reference point, to elucidate some problem or serve as an example, we must fight the all-too-frequent tendency to interpret processes outside the West as subordinate to and tending to some ideal specifically Western status. Loving freedom and fighting for it is neither of the West or the East, it's of human nature.

Saadawi rightly observes that patriarchal systems are everywhere, that the subjugation of women is generally attempted if not the rule, and that this is related to the class war.

Her outlook is emancipatory not only in relation to the gender but class as well, which is unsurprising given that poor women are the most numerous of women, and that economic deprivation and inequality is the pre-condition of every oppression of women. And yet this insight is still neglected in the West in particular.

But, what were the speicifc problems of the women in the Arab world in 1977, and why were they?

Answering the second part first: practically, Arab women had problems because the society elevated and favoured the male and men at the expense of women. And, returning to the first part, nowhere is this clearer or faster seen than in the laws regulating marriage and divorce. Men can do everything; women can do nothing--women must suffer everything that men can do.

First, marriage is an institution in which the woman's (or, usually, the girl's) will is of no importance--it's a deal made by the prospective husband with the girl's parents, usually simply the father, or other male relatives acting as guardians. A woman can't offer or demand marriage on her own behalf.

Once married, the woman is easily divorced, but she cannot initiate divorce. Moreover, all kind of arrangements exist to make already loose marriage contract even looser and less onerous for the man, such as marrying without a written contract, or divorcing a woman temporarily in order to acquire more wives over the limit of four, then divorcing those and remarrying etc.

...it is probably not accurate to use the term 'rights of the woman' since a woman under the Islamic system of marriage has no human rights unless we consider that a slave has rights under a slave system.

(...)

Among the most serious obstacles that confront Arab women in so far as their employment and work is concerned are the laws related to marriage and civil rights. These laws still give the husband an absolute right to prevent his wife from taking a job, travelling abroad, or even going out of her home whenever she desires.

Poor female workers, representing more than 80% of the female workforce, that in agriculture and domestic service, worked for no pay at all--they worked for their husbands or families or, if in service to strangers, for their upkeep (this is a situation I saw first hand when my mother's cleaning woman in Syria showed up once with eight children of varying ages, her relatives, saying they'd all work just for food and shelter).

Women working in factories were so mercilessly exploited in conditions worse than that of the male workers that few lasted more than a few years--it suited the owners fine to run them down as hard as possible because every year brought a new crop of unskilled poor girls happy to earn peanuts.

(Prostitution, otoh, was criminalized in Egypt in 1951--and the ones going to prison were the prostitutes, not the johns. In fact the latter would testify against the women.)

The way the conditions of marriage and divorce are so essential in creating the women's miserable state isn't due just to the upper hand it gives men regarding family life, but also the status of children. Just as easily as unmarried men (but not unmarried women) can confer legitimacy on their children, if they wish to do so, the married man can withdraw legitimacy from the children he fathered in legal marriage, even with the woman still his wife. This places not just the woman but her children in limbo.

Given that the options for work for women are so few, most divorced women see themselves obliged to go back to their parents or other family--if those will have them.

Given all of this, it's not hard to see how women existed in a perennially precarious situation, always in the shadow of a threat, always potentially on the brink of ruin.

Polygamy and repudiation can be seen as the basic mechanisms that bring about women's dehumanization and disenfranchisement. From that basis other myriad forms of discrimination follow.

There are no laws in Egypt at present that discriminate between the sexes as far as education or employment are concerned. Yet, in actual practice, discrimination is a frequent occurrence. One example of this discrimination is what happens in the appointment of judges. The men who dominate the judicial system in Egypt have been able to prevent women from becoming judges on the assumption that a woman, by her very nature, is unfit to shoulder the responsibilities related to a court of law. This assumption is built on the fact that Islam considers the testimony of one man equivalent to that of two women. (...)... in the daily newspaper, El Akhbar, on 12 January 1976 ... the author maintains that the post of a judge is forbidden to women by Islam: 'It is superfluous to explain, that according to Islam, ten conditions must be fulfilled for a person to judge. Without these ten conditions, the very essence of "judging" is non-existent, and the right or even possibility to be accorded this high function is lost. These ten conditions are: Islamic belief, reason, masculinity, freedom, maturity, justice, knowledge and to be a complete individual with a normal capacity to hear, to see and to speak.'
in addition, women are not allowed to hold posts of an executive nature, such as that of a Governor, or the Mayor of a town, or the Head of a village.

The remarks on the (in)capacity of women to be judges and the justification for this found "in Islam", brings us to the question of the use of religion, Koranic verses and the hadith, in upholding the oppression of women.

Saadawi, like Mernissi in the previous book, posits that Islam in "essence" does not preclude women's equality with the men. In Saadawi's view the oppression of women in the name of the faith stems from a false and reactionary interpretation of Islam--ergo, a progressive interpretation would not only do away with oppression but also represent the authentic faith.

I can only say I hope the progressive interpretations of Islam will eventually prevail in sufficient numbers that resorting to religious justifications for oppression becomes just a bad memory.

I've barely touched on some themes in Saadawi's splendid book and left out dozens of important things. Don't think it's a dated book--it's anchored in the past but still speaks of our present. And her vision of a self-determining, rational, happy, fulfilled human being, female or male, is for all times.

Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in their apartment), Assia Djebar, published 1980, written (various stories) between 1959-1979

This is a collections of novellas and shorter stories that works almost as a sociological document. Oh, it's beautiful ("artistic"), but very much exploratory in an almost scientific way.

Djebar is after the memory, history, the words and very voices of women. Algerian women (and, specifically, Muslim), silenced for centuries. There is a trace of Berber otherness, matrilinearity (interesting that Djebar, like Mernissi, has Berber heritage). But, overall, women are suffocated. They communicate quietly, in whispers and murmurs (woman talking is most frequently expressed as "she murmurs"), in fragments and wisps of speech.

Compare to ancient Greek shutting up of women--this is the patriarchal Mediterranean symbolically killing the woman, choking the feminine, over and over again.

This fragmented speech can be hard to take and follow. Between themselves, these women are invariably a small group of relatives, sentenced to a cloistered life in a house doing housework and raising children. So communication is rooted in a common experience and shared context. Their muted words overlap and continue each other.

There's a movie of Djebar's called The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua I'd seen before reading anything of hers, that seems deeply connected to this book. It too has a folkloric-cum-historical aim, and the "nouba", a symphonic musical form, is explicitly used to describe the speech of the female characters.

(You can watch the movie, something of a rarity, on Dailymotion. I had borrowed the DVD from the library but the video quality is the same, not great. Presumably it hasn't been re-released in a better copy. Only in French, sorry, with French subtitles for Arabic. La nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua de Assia Djebbar 1/2.)

There are women who rebel. The French colonisation is almost convenient as a moment where the fight for national liberation can coincide with women's emancipation, surge into the street, grasping of political power. At least this is the hope--running out the French will result in a new society with new rules and new people behaving differently. Algerian women played an important role in the anti-colonial fight. And they suffered horribly, imprisoned, tortured, raped.

Did the new country turn out to be what they hoped or were these sacrifices taken as all female sacrifices, for granted?

In the very important Afterword Djebar ends with the caution that the "harem" may be gone but the structure of the harem still imposes its laws on women: the laws of invisibility and silence.

Well, against silence, against ending on that note, here's a video of an Algerian Jewish singer mentioned in the book, Meriem Fékkaï:

Istikhbar (improvisation)

The story of Zahra, Hanan Al-Shaykh, published in Arabic in 1980, English translation in 1986

I wanted to live for myself. I wanted my body to be mine alone. I wanted the place on which I stood and the air surrounding me to be mine and no one else's.

But, she's a woman, so this is unspeakably weird and wicked and ab-so-lute-ly impossible, and not self-understood and normal and not worth mentioning even, as it would be for a man.

Ah, Zahra. Poor downtrodden "flower", flailing about, more passive than any animal, in-between episodes of mindless violent reaction. How hard it is when the enemy can't be seen, defined, named, when the enemy is the entire world. Neurosis and mental illness can only be a natural response in those conditions.

She doesn't imagine a better life because even just imagining demands the existence of some pre-conditions of power and choice. In her world there is only one destiny for women, marriage and children. She's not considered desirable and becomes the mistress of the first guy who shows interest. It's a sad affair conducted on a cot in a garage and a remote cafe--he's married and doesn't plan to leave his family for her.

She has an abortion, then pays to "repair" her virginity, then takes up with her lover again--who doesn't even get to enjoy deflowering her again because he knows it's fake--then has a second abortion. And the whole time she not only doesn't enjoy the sex, the man disgusts her.

Off she goes to "Africa" (country unspecified and always just "Africa" in her mind) to spend some time with her uncle, a political exile. Uncle's inappropriate attentions spark another mental crisis in Zahra, who blindly accepts a random dude's marriage proposal, made just minutes after they met.

The marriage is awful and eventually broken. Zahra returns to Beirut, to her parents (where else...)

With the breakout of civil war there's a shift of Zahra's consciousness toward the outside. This doesn't lead anywhere special. She is now lost not just in her own life but the whole city, the country, is lost with her. In the apocalyptic chaos of a city at war with itself, she falls into an affair with a sniper, despite their first encounter being a rape. She thinks maybe this time... she enjoys sex for the first time. She doesn't know what is true or false, not sure even of his name. This goes on for months, then she discovers she's pregnant, although she was taking (or believed she was taking) contraceptive pills. The revelation ends the affair and Zahra's hope that her lover is someone other than what she thought at first, a stone-cold killer.

I'm so sorry this is all in French--I'll keep looking for something with subtitles--but I have to reference it...

In 1966 Ahmed Lallem made a short (22 minutes) documentary titled Elles (They, fem.) in which he recorded a number of Algerian high school girls talking about their lives, dreams, condition as Algerian women. This was four years after independence. The girls all speak French (and quite a few are Kabyles, Berbers; not Arabs), so by that token already they are likely middle class kids of educated parents, presumably more "advanced" or modern, even progressive.

Elles - Ahmed Lallem (Algérie / 1966 / 22:35 / VOSTF)

Interesting detail noted in the write-up on the link: the male teachers of Arabic who keep bringing up Islam and the girls' duty in religious terms were Egyptian. I presume the teachers were imported because of a lack of Arabic-speaking professionals? Or were they Egypt's "gift" to Algeria? Would be interesting to look into.

The film was never distributed in Algeria. Lallem (b. 1940) was a member of the FLN. In the early sixties he studied television and film in Yugoslavia, France and Poland. In the mid-1990s he went into exile in France where he died.

Before death he had revisited some of the girls in the 1966 documentary, in (link to YouTube)

Algériennes, 30 ans après (1995).

"Il y avait un espoir immense"--there was an immense hope

1984--total regression; re-establishement of extreme patriarchal laws

Memoirs from the women's prison, Nawal El Saadawi, English translation first published in 1986

My last El Saadawi book, boy, I'll miss her.

She was arrested in September 1981, suddenly, without a warning or warrant. Police showed up at her door, broke it down, and took her away to the prison. No formalities, no lawyers, no charges. Just like that--from your house into a cell.

And, as it transpires, it could have been worse. The prison she was taken to was not the worst; she was locked up in the "political" cell, with more than a dozen other "political" prisoners, and they were treated somewhat more cautiously than the ordinary criminals.

The conditions were nevertheless more appalling than anyone in the West might expect (and, again, this is AFTER the fact of the totally tyrannical manner of the arrest).

The cell was dirty, ill-equipped, overrun with vermin, the furniture scant and broken, BUT... the cell next to it, of the same size, housed about three hundred women plus their children--Saadawi reckons maybe 600 people.

When she arrived the two cells were not properly isolated, so the political women lived with the constant shrieking and howling of the mothers and babies next door. It was so unbearable that it prompted the first collective action of the politicals (who ranged from communists to religious fundies), a demand to the authorities to extend the separating wall all the way to the ceiling. This was actually granted, one small mercy among a myriad torments. And, a sign of the camaraderie that would establish itself among almost all these women regardless of their affiliations, including even a few of the prison guards.

Saadawi was released less than three months later but you can tell the prison existence weighed a lifetime.

Her energy is amazing. This is the person you'd want to go explore other planets with, or fight a war, or build a city. She exercises every day in the morning and soon an entire line of prisoners from the criminal cell, who can see her routine, join her and follow her lead every day. A prison guard tells her about her niece who seeks out every word Saadawi published, and who wants to become a doctor like her. And about other prisoners.

They've all had miserable lives. Fathiyya-the-Murderess was a poor miserable woman, planting and harvesting with her own hands, while her husband lounged around the house, a lazy bum. Eating, burping, smoking his waterpipe. One day she came back from the field and found him on top of her daughter, her nine-year-old daughter. She struck him on the head with her hoe and got a life sentence.

Distant view of a minaret, Alifa Rifaat, English translation first published in 1983

I enjoyed this a lot, with one story in particular becoming a "fave forever", My World of the Unknown. Its whimsical, fairy-tale flavour is not typical for the collection, all the other stories have simple realistic plots based on familiar incidences in Egyptian women's limited, humdrum lives--unrequited sexual desire or love, betrayal of infidelity, losing a man's affection, ageing, spinsterhood... Summed up like that they sound downbeat, but Rifaat has enough subtlety and subversive humour in painting the situations that the women's resilience and dignity too come across.

Quoting from my fave:

... I neglected my garden and stopped wandering about in it. Generally I would spend my free time in bed. I changed to being someone who liked to sit around lazily and was disinclined to mix with people; those diversions and recreations that previously used to tempt me no longer gave me any pleasure. All I wanted was to stretch myself out and drowse. In bewilderment I asked myself: Could it be that I was in love? But how could I love a snake? Or could she really be one of the daughters of the monarchs of the djinn? I would awake from my musings to find that I had been wandering in my thoughts and recalling how magnificent she was. And what is the secret of her beauty? I would ask myself. Was it that I was fascinated by her multi-colored, supple body? Or was it that I had been dazzled by that intelligent, commanding way she had of looking at me? Or could it be the sleek way she had of gliding along, so excitingly dangerous, that had captivated me?
   Excitingly dangerous! No doubt it was this excitement that had stirred my feelings and awakened my love, for did they not make films to excite and frighten? There was no doubt but that the secret of my passion for her, my preoccupation with her, was due to the excitement that had aroused, through intense fear, desire within myself; an excitement that was sufficiently strong to drive the blood hotly through my veins whenever the memory of her came to me, thrusting the blood in bursts that made my heart beat wildly, my limbs limp. And so, throwing myself down in a pleasurable state of torpor, my craving for her would be awakened and I would wish for her coil-like touch, her graceful gliding motion.
   And yet I fell to wondering how union could come about, how craving be quenched, the delights of the body be realized, between a woman and a snake. And did she, I wondered, love me and want me as I loved her? An idea would obtrude itself upon me sometimes: did Cleopatra, the very legend of love, have sexual intercourse with her serpent after having given up on sleeping with men, having wearied of amorous adventures with them so that her sated instincts were no longer moved other than by the excitement of fear, her senses no longer aroused other than by bites from a snake? And the last of her lovers had been a viper that had destroyed her. ...

The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, Fatima Mernissi, first published in 1987, English translation in 1991

This was highly interesting and informative, with even the detailed historical passages regarding the intensely complicated events of Muhammad's succession given with a rare clarity.

I'll stick to broad brushstrokes, and hope those will nevertheless suffice to persuade of the book's interest to, basically, anyone with any interest in Islam.

Mernissi begins with the observation that as late as the 1990s women in Islamic countries are still discriminated against on a vast scale and in ways that have long become unusual in the West (not that her focus is ever on comparisons or Western practices as such).

The justification for that discrimination being traditionally found in the Koran and Hadith, it logically follows that an examination of the relevant sources is necessary even to the opponents of the discriminatory practices. Mernissi undertook the frequently gigantic task of reading through the corpus of Koranic/hadithic commentary (dating from the 7th century onward, with the most important sources being early to mid-medieval), something that few ordinary, i.e. non-scholar Muslims do, the great majority having to consult experts on the very many everyday questions regarding proper Islamic observance.

The first striking lesson of Mernissi's interpretation is how much knowledge, beyond mere literacy, is necessary to judge sensibly about the meaning of the Koran etc. Time and again she tries to rebuild the context in which specific verses were written, to explain the history, the conditions, the character, the most-likely-trends of those involved. In her reading Muhammad emerges as a largely sympathetic character and a revolutionary who had egalitarian ideals for Muslims of both sexes and any station in life.

But, this purported (and, IMO, in Mernissi's argumentation well-founded) aim was greatly contested from the start by the forces unwilling to give up their privilege, as much as by the circumstances of various political moments.

As late as 1984 Mernissi herself was crassly confronted in public, at a conference, by a London-based Pakistani editor who tried to wrestle the microphone away from her as she was delivering a paper on Sukayna, Muhammad's great-grandaughter and all-around remarkable woman who rejected male domination and polygyny, and married (multiple times) only men who agreed to sign a contract drawn by her guaranteeing her independence and, as it were, non-submission.

While Mernissi was talking this man started furiously yelling that Sukayna died at six, ignoring Mernissi's proffered list of references and physically trying to obstruct her speech.

Pretty much the story of the last 14 centuries regarding women's rights in Islam...

Regarding inheritance, which notoriously leaves women with half the amount given to men (one of the less-ambiguous Koranic passages), Mernissi gives an explanation I didn't fully follow, involving the "war-booty" economy. She doesn't argue that this is fair, she just tries to explain how it may have come about, and, consequently, why different social conditions, different times in short, might call for a revision of such an injustice.

Regarding the hijab, there's a long chapter that does a great job of plausibly reconstructing the unfortunate circumstances, contre-temps and outright misunderstandings surrounding the revelation about it. It certainly didn't begin as an idea strictly about women's covering, which is what it's reduced to today. Rather, the relevant verses were revealed at a time when Muhammad wished for privacy with a newly-married wife, but was importuned by wedding guests who could not take a hint. The hijab, or curtain, that "descended" that night was originally the curtain Muhammad pulled between one of his "Companions"--a man (who recorded the verses)--and himself, in the bedroom with the new wife.

The tale gets complicated later on with the goings-on in the city (Medina), still worryingly hostile to the new religion, when certain tribes insist on treating any woman who they think might be a slave as a prostitute, hence ushering the "need" to distinguish between free women (not for fornication) and slaves (who apparently were liable to be jumped on by anyone at any time).

In any case, it seems that the custom imposing on women a full veil (leaving just one eye uncovered) got established in that period, i.e. in Muhammad's lifetime.

In sum, I'm sympathetic to Mernissi's basic thesis that Muhammad meant for slavery and status-discrimination to end and for women to be equal with men. But not just because I think she is convincing; it's also the only direction that allows for peaceful co-existence. As noted before, we always come back to the problem of extreme sacralisation of the text and fundamentalism in Islam. As there is, to believers, no way of relativising Koran as literature, or divesting Muhammad of the status of a perfect Muslim (he is already seen "warts and all"), and least of all of imposing humanistic notions as equally respectable, the only hope for achieving egalitarianism or at least for lessening discrimination, lies in the domain of Koranic interpretation.

A sister to Scheherazade, Assia Djebar, 1987

This is the second volume of a "quartet" and I don't know how it relates and how much it depends on other books. If the characters recur, then it would be advisable to revisit the story on completion.

I wasn't in the mood for Djebar's lyrical, associative, impressionistic style so I don't feel I can do the book justice.

There are two women, Isma who speaks in her own voice, and Hajila whose chapters are told in the second person--it seems Isma is telling her story too.

Isma had, unknown to Hajila, arranged for the latter to become the second wife of Isma's husband. The husband is referred to only as "the man". Isma and "the man" had once been very much in love and have a child together, ten-year-old Meriem. There is also a younger boy, Nazim, whose mother is not Isma. Possibly (there is no hint to this in the book) it was the man's affair with Nazim's mother that ended the happiness in Isma's marriage?

In any case, Isma is looking forward to her replacement by Hajila as to her "liberation". For whatever reason she's not divorcing "the man" but they are not to live in the same town. Meriem doesn't like Hajila and asks to go to live with Isma, which is granted.

Hajila is forced into this marriage by her family's poverty. "The man" treats her like a slavey and governess and she herself appears not to expect anything other. There's no communication between them, Hajila spends her days in housework and talks only with the children. One day, while taking them to the park, she sees a woman playing with a baby. The woman, she thinks, must be Arab, native (hennaed hair), but she isn't wearing a veil, her whole being breathes freedom.

Hajila ventures outside one day when the children are in school, just a short distance, then takes off her veil and her cloak and starts walking around the neighbourhood like that. Just walking on her own in the city, without stopping or talking to anyone, is something epic for someone like her.

After six months reprieve (minus the excruciating sexual fondling she must endure when the man ritualistically calls for his ashtray), the man brutally rapes Hajila. She falls pregnant. The man starts drinking a lot and beats and almost kills her. Isma meets her a few times in the baths.

It's not clear to me whether Isma understands Hajila's miserable position, or whether she thinks she had done the poor girl a favour.

The fate of the characters is left hanging for the next volumes, I suppose.

As you slow down, the woollen veil slips off your head; you try to imagine what you look like, bare-headed, your black hair drawn back. Now your long pigtail, that had been bunched up under the veil, emerges from hiding. You shrink back. Your hands reach for your neck, trembling:
"Out of doors... O Lord! O sweet Messenger of the Lord!"
You walk, you skip. This hawthorn hedge that suddenly appears... you could climb over it easily. On the other side of the street there is a ditch running along a fairly high wall: oh! to be able to look over it and satisfy a mischievous curiosity! You come to a sudden stop; with a dancer's sharp gesture, you shrug one shoulder, then the other; suddenly the woollen cloth falls about your hips, revealing your blouse. The wool of a shroud...

Muslim women not writing but participating in a panel discussion.

U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Afghan Women Speak Out (Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies)

Tue May 18, 2021, 9:30AM - 11:00AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Panelists: Ghizaal Haress, Palwasha Hassan, Fawzia Koofi, Heela Najibullah, Habiba Sarabi

Register

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

WOMEN IN ISLAM, an annual journal available in English and Arabic, is seeking contributions for the 2021 edition. The Journal is published by the SIHA Network (the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa).

Women in Islam explores gender relations in Muslim communities and aims to promote alternative and progressive discourses on Islamic traditions and texts. Focusing on the issues of justice and women’s equality, the journal reflects on the lived realities and current challenges faced by Muslim societies while analysing their interactions with other communities across the globe. With contributions from thinkers, activists, journalists and artists, the journal strives to appeal to a broad audience of readers by presenting complex ideas in an accessible format. Original contributions may include scholarly articles, essays, opinion pieces, profiles of influential figures, interviews, poetry, personal narratives, book or film reviews, cartoons and art. Please note that we do not publish fiction or short stories.

Potential contributors should bear in mind that all submissions must be connected to the overarching theme of women and Islam and that suggested topics must therefore be analysed using a gender lens. The recommended length for articles is 1500 - 2000 words, and may be submitted in English or Arabic.

For the 2021 edition Women in Islam is seeking submissions on the topics below. Please note that this list of topics is indicative and that SIHA is willing to consider any relevant suggestions.

Equality Before the Law: contributions could reflect on statutory and customary laws that discriminate against women in Muslim societies, in particular Muslim family laws, and the existing initiatives to advance gender equality in the law.
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I've finally finished Hanan Al-Shaykh's Women of sand and myrrh, after abandoning it for almost two years. The combination of the horrific, bleak, demeaning, infinitely unjust situations of women in the book (first published in the mid-eighties) with no more encouraging news from those countries even nearly forty years later, defeated me at the time. The reports of rebellion in Iran, for whatever that will turn out to be worth, made me take it up again.

The book combines overlapping narratives from different women leading shadowy existences in an unnamed desert Islamic state with complete erasure of women from public life. Profound unease, boredom, sexual mania press on everyone. It's like the whole place is insane.

A scathing, cruel book--but no more cruel than what women are made to endure.

Lila abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving changed my way of reading al-Shaykh's work, making me wonder how much of her writing is tailored specifically for a Euro/North American audience. A writer like Assia Djebar seems more complex/nuanced, maybe.

>31 susanbooks:

Ugh... don't get me wrong--I think it's good to keep checking our premises no less than our motives. But this sort of accusation is just too easy and common to dignify, it's made routinely against every Arab/Muslim woman who dares to protest. It was made against Huda Shaarawi, it was made against the Algerians who dared be inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, it's being made right now against the women who are burning hijabs in Iran.

I mean, unless she has something specific that shows Al-Shaykh is indeed an unscrupulous character who tailors her books for the Euro/North American audience?

On a first google, everything Al-Shaykh's published has been written and first published in Arabic, except for two recent books. Various titles and/or everything has been banned in various Muslim countries. This kind of notoriety has a steep price, one which I at least wouldn't care to pay for just to curry some imagined favour with the islamophobes.

Reading in translation is never ideal, but to me the two books of hers I read read as deeply felt, moving works of art, not propaganda. Her knowledge of the countries and various ethnicities she writes about is clearly solid, first-hand, carefully differentiated (the Lebanese are not like Syrians who are not like the Saudis etc.) Islam she mentions rarely and never comments on as such. It would be pretty laughable to think that someone like her doesn't understand the melding of religion and culture that makes for such an infernal trap for these women.

And yes, Muslim women do need rescuing--not less and often more than all women do. The only thing more repellent than "white saviourism"? The holier-than-thou fake humility and ill-concealed racism of the attitude that would treat Muslim women (or Muslims generally) as some separate species we cannot fathom and thus best avoid.

No, they are us and we are them, or have been them, or can be them and so on. Moreover, they are my family, my friends, my neighbours, my colleagues, members of the same society. I spent eight years living in Muslim majority countries, and actually not the worst ones--not Pakistan or Afghanistan... And yet, better than most or not, I wouldn't make a dog live like most women there live.

ETA: In case anyone wonders, I didn't detect any call for "white saviours" on Al-Shaykh's side. Ironically, in Women of sand and myrrh one of the women narrators, the only "white" character, is a bored Englishwoman who accompanied her husband to this Saudia-like country, proceeded to have bunches of affairs, and is described wanting and planning to become an Arab man's second wife.

The woman who seems most pro-active in the sense that she has a definite goal which drives her, a wish to start a business, is actually devout. This doesn't seem particularly important for her plans, it's just part of her personality.

I would've agreed with the things you say if I hadn't read the book. It's more nuanced than you'd expect. One of her points is that the stories about women in Islam that sell well in Europe & North America feature things like genital mutilation, the isolation of women, veiling -- all of which are problems (veiling can be more of a choice, depending on the country/situation) but women in Islam share a lot of problems with women in the West, too, and the books by Muslim women that feature those -- books about economic inequality, democratic oligarchy, and racism vis-a-vis the West -- don't do as well or don't get translated at all. It's made me think about literature as propaganda. I didn't agree with everything she said & many times I found myself yelling the exact things you say in my head as I read, but her book changed me & not a lot of books do that.

I agree that I wouldn't want to live in a country dominated by religion. But I'm in the US and we're almost there, so pointing to other countries without looking at ourselves feels deflective.

>33 susanbooks:

I understand, I've encountered the argument before, but it doesn't help to call it "nuanced" if we're talking about a specific target, such as Al-Shaykh. Al-Shaykh isn't responsible for having her work misread or misused. We could get to the absurd conclusion that it would be better if she hadn't written, or no one had read her. Seriously?

And, while I'm not happy people like to read about misery for cheap thrills, to me what matters is the misery. Gory crime being popular doesn't make actual crime less real, less horrific.

pointing to other countries without looking at ourselves feels deflective.

But who says one shouldn't look at themselves? One place having problems doesn't mean no one else does. You deal with what you can.

Her point is about publishing & what people in the West want to read. Since I've read her book I've noticed that dozens of novels about women in Muslim countries begin with genital mutilation. Her point is 1) GM is horrible; but 2) that's an easy way to demonize a religion for readers unfamiliar with Islam, most of which is against this practice. She's not saying that GM doesn't happen & that it shouldn't be stopped; she's saying, where are the less exoticized texts about women protagonists fighting for equal pay for equal work, running for office, saving themselves rather than waiting for the UN or some outside force to come in & save them. Her point is that Muslim women are active agents & that in far too many novels published in Europe & N America, they are portrayed as passive victims. These novels encourage white saviourism. Al-Shaykh should still tell her stories, of course, but they shouldn't be overwhelmingly typical of the sort of lit available to us from those countries.

These wild accusations bear no resemblance to the books I've read. In neither of the two novels mentioned in this thread does Al-Shaykh even mention genital mutilation, nor does she present Muslim women as totally passive victims. And, again, her novels were FIRST published outside Europe and North America, in the language in which they were written, FOR the audience she clearly holds foremost, the Arab-reading one.

Your idea of the role of Islam in her books (or the two books I've read and discussed here) is also totally off the mark. As I said, she mentions it rarely and never as religion-as-such, because it doesn't matter, it's not THE problem, as anyone who has observed the multiple versions of practical Islam around the world can attest to. The problem, unsurprisingly, is complicated. To my mind, the complexity of the situation comes across very well in these two books, in fact one of the reasons they seem so heavy is that not only are there no easy solutions, the pathways to ANY sort of change are so difficult.

Al-Shaykh should still tell her stories, of course, but they shouldn't be overwhelmingly typical of the sort of lit available to us from those countries.

This is really patronising. Again, what you or that woman claim about her books (assuming again it's specifically about her books, something I'm still not clear on) bears no resemblance to the books I've read. And the fact that it's still white and/or non-Muslim women who are deciding whose books pass muster and whose don't is laughable in itself.

Wow, "wild accusations." It's a scholarly book published by Harvard University Press. We've always had respectful discussion between the members of this group. I'm sorry to see it degenerate. Maybe you should read books that don't always exactly match your opinions. As a university professor, it's my job & it keeps me learning a lot.

I fail to see what you find patronising. You are aware that books from the Islamic world that get translated into Western languages are a select few, right? And that patriarchal capitalism in the form of publishing companies decide what we should be able to see? If that alone doesn't make you suspicious, you're a different person than I thought you were. No doubt that's patronising, too.

As for white women making these arguments, the author is Palestinian.

>37 susanbooks:

I have exhausted what I have to say about Hanan Al-Shaykh and the two books of hers I've discussed here. You keep skating from calling her out specifically (she "tailors" her books for some supposed Western audience's taste; she shouldn't be the "typical" author...), mixing in stuff that, as I said repeatedly, does not occur in her books--genital mutilation, blaming Islam... In fact, and this may be entirely my fault, I don't understand what it is precisely you want to debate here. Islamophobia is bad? Agreed. People shouldn't read about others' misery simply to make themselves feel better about themselves? Agreed.

You are aware that books from the Islamic world that get translated into Western languages are a select few, right? And that patriarchal capitalism in the form of publishing companies decide what we should be able to see? If that alone doesn't make you suspicious, you're a different person than I thought you were. No doubt that's patronising, too.

Well, it's at least freaking bizarre, although far be it from me to try to persuade anyone to keep a good opinion of me. I didn't ask for your good opinion and possibly I don't deserve it. That said, take a moment and look at your own arguments here and this one too. If Hanan Al-Shaykh getting translated is suspect on its face, why isn't everyone else who gets translated equally suspect? Are you aware that there is a rift between liberals (in cultural sense) and conservatives in Muslim societies that spills over into the West too?

At least I'm not making myself the final arbiter of who should be read and who shouldn't. If you'll only trust or promote literature from devout hijabis, welcome, knock yourself out. Anyone is free to discuss whatever other books they like.

The books I'm discussing here are those I've accumulated over the years, more or less haphazardly. If the majority fits (that is, at least doesn't go totally against) my secular bent, it's not because I'm unaware the other sort exists, but because this is the side that is weaker and increasingly endangered. Even so, if you took the trouble to read the thread from the beginning, you may note that not a single book so far was anti-Islamic, quite a few of the characters involved are devout Muslims, and several promote comprehensive progressive interpretations of the Qur'an and the hadith.

Your reference is certainly pertinent, interesting, and as I said from the beginning, the general argument can't be faulted. I'm interested to see what exactly she says about Al-Shaykh so I will look for it, thanks.

I don't know why you keep saying this is about al-Shaykh. I said that since I read Abu-Lughod's book, I've been suspicious of al-Shaykh's work & that of some other writers. I don't even remember if Abu-Lughod mentions al-Shaykh specifically. Why you want to bring this back continuously to one writer is baffling.

Where I said I only promote lit from "devout hijabis" (which, wow!) escapes me. As I said, I'm discussing a work from Harvard University Press by a Palestinian woman. She's an anthropology professor at Columbia. The only other writer I've mentioned is Assia Djebar & I did so to praise her. She's a secular feminist writer who did not wear the hijab, tho why whether one does or not should affect my decision to read her books is beyond me.

And where did you say the idea couldn't be faulted? You came out of the gates swinging like I had insulted your family. You gave no ground, simply insulted me.

You've made all of this up on your own.

For now on, I guess, if you post about liking a book, we should all cheer obediently along. I thought we were here to exchange ideas.

By the way, I teach postcolonial lit, so I don't need your hints on Islamic politics.

I'm assuming there's a genuine misunderstanding here that's worth clearing up.

>39 susanbooks:

I don't even remember if Abu-Lughod mentions al-Shaykh specifically.

!

Well, good to know.

I'm all out of comment on this--and could have spared the previous if that had been stated all the way in >31 susanbooks:, instead of:

Lila abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving changed my way of reading al-Shaykh's work, making me wonder how much of her writing is tailored specifically for a Euro/North American audience.

If you can't see why this is a direct accusation that Al-Shaykh "tailors" her books for a western audience... we're near or in a semantic neverland, where we must question the meaning of every "is". Please read that sentence again as it may appear to someone not in your head. If instead of "how much" you had written, say, "whether", I'd have understood you were talking about a possibility. This way it read like certainty-sure she "tailors" her books specifically to Western taste, the only question is "how much"!

Why you want to bring this back continuously to one writer is baffling.

Because that's the writer I discussed directly before you posted and that's the writer you said in your post "tailors her work" for a Euro/North American audience. So, yeah, how is it surprising that I thought you were talking about something directly relevant to her, about her work? Again I invite you to read your >31 susanbooks: to see how one might think you were talking about Al-Shaykh specifically.

I hope this is cleared up now.

tl;dr

Well I haven't read Hanan al-Shaykh since college, and I don't remember much about it but all the books I have by her are now next on the TBR list.

Lovely. No doubt all those who fear "devout hijabis" have enjoyed this conversation. I had hoped if you had weighed in, >42 southernbooklady:, it would be in some other fashion. This is not the place it once was. I'm out.

>42 southernbooklady:

That would be interesting. I keep wondering if I'm guilty of conveying some distorted vision of her books. It's true I don't write what I'd considered full "reviews", and given my trauma regarding the topic, I guess I can sometimes write "emotions" rather than critical opinions.

But the salient point (IMO) is that Al-Shaykh actually HASN'T been shown to "tailor her books"--I can't stress how heavy, how ugly, I find this sort of accusation, how appalling to see it made so casually, as if it's OK to offend her, regardless of facts.

The rest is just a mess that confuses and angers me but given that Susan announced both that she won't read my posts and that she's out, I don't see there's any point in dwelling on it.

I tried twice to end the misunderstanding constructively. I said above (at least twice) that the general argument Susan introduced from abu-Lughood's book is important, can't be faulted. I never thought anyone following this thread would think otherwise. My mistake--which I can't help but see as unavoidable--was that I thought there was something directly referring to Al-Shaykh, which I tried and failed to square with my impressions of her books.

>44 LolaWalser: That would be interesting. I keep wondering if I'm guilty of conveying some distorted vision of her books. It's true I don't write what I'd considered full "reviews", and given my trauma regarding the topic, I guess I can sometimes write "emotions" rather than critical opinions.

Who doesn't?

My college studies were in Russian and Middle Eastern Studies, at a Jesuit College. It has taken me an unconscionably long time...years and years...to grasp how all-encompassing the Western colonial/imperialist view was in my professors, and how much it skewed what I was taught. So during the pandemic I've set myself to the task of re-reading and re-evaluating things I took for granted thirty years ago. I was always a little too inclined to defer to the teacher in any given classroom. I have to say, now a lot of them read like completely different books. But really, I'm just a different person.

I do know that in the United States there is a problem in the publishing industry only publishing books by BIPOC writers that fit a certain kind of narrative the industry's gatekeepers "understand" -- that is, "are comfortable with." It's usually something along the lines of how the main character overcomes their terrible situation and after a huge struggle becomes an accepted, successful member of "normal" society. It's called "misery porn" in the industry. Elaine Castillo takes a shotgun to the concept a number of times in How to Read Now (which I still think is a great, in-your-face intelligent rant against liberal complacency!).

PEN America just released a report on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive in publishing. In the section on stereotyping it talks about the pressure from publishers for writers of color to tell a certain kind of story:

Ingrid Rojas Contreras said that while writing Fruit of the Drunken Tree, she was at one point told that she was “sitting on a gold mine” of collective trauma over migration and other painful aspects of the Colombian experience. She said: “Writers of color often have to struggle with that idea—that something traumatic can then be monetized and that it’s a good thing that something bad happened because it gives you material. There’s a hunger for those stories from writers of color, and that hunger comes from a complicated, politicized place. It gets very difficult for a writer to approach that story and to be able to tell it from a place of your own desire to tell it.”

https://pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/

>45 southernbooklady:

I do know that in the United States there is a problem in the publishing industry only publishing books by BIPOC writers that fit a certain kind of narrative the industry's gatekeepers "understand" -- that is, "are comfortable with."

Yes--and there are whole threads about this sort of thing not just right in this group but Reading Globally (where if memory serves I first complained about this--I mean I complained multiple times in multiple places!) and I'm sure I'm forgetting other instances.

However, I think there's a difference between publisher bias in selection of works, and claiming authors are cynically "tailoring" their work (outside genre writing, where writing to type is expected). In particular when this is supposedly done to flatter a foreign audience (to the Arabs I know this would be a deadly insult no matter who targeted whom).

Publisher selection bias means that, say, of the Nobelist's Ivo Andric's work, that most readily available in English is his Balkan-based historical fiction, but much harder to find or simply untranslated (into English) are his many more numerous "urban" stories and novels, to say nothing of his modernist poetry, or essays.

I'm sure there is a large grey area where publishers and editors can influence a work, directly and indirectly. Is Zlata's diary a "construct" because the publishers clearly hoped it would evoke memories of that most famous child's diary, the diary of Anne Frank, and/or because of the 2000+ copies on LT not one seems to be in the original language(s) (I found on the work page, bottom, note Serbian: 1, but if so I missed it in scrolling through the whole list), nor do I know anyone who has read it (or, frankly, heard of it) back home? Yes and no. There's a real little girl who kept a real diary in war-torn Sarajevo, but there's also this marketing object that was sold successfully mainly outside her country. And we can come up with a zillion other "grey" examples where publishers contribute to "creating" a work.

But to go back to an example like al-Shaykh--to me the crucial fact is that her books were written, published and read years before getting translated. In view of the subsequent bannings, her Arab publishers, at least, were heroes. To imply that she and they consciously, deliberately contrived to contribute to the West's supposed taste for "misery porn" is the height of arrogance, that typically Western arrogance that supposes that Western concerns are naturally in everyone's focus, that everyone gives a shit what "the West" wants and thinks.

Let's look at "misery porn" now. I can't think of a more unjust way to categorize books. Its great sin is that it transfers a failing on the side of the readers (the arrogant West) to the authors (the non-Western people we'd actually like to support!) First, the label nevertheless spares those who do routinely make a living of milking the audience's taste for violence against such "miserables" as women and children, but casts suspicion on EVERY author of literary fiction (or I suppose even non-fiction and auto-fiction) from the "non-Western" regions of relative poverty or strife etc.

Just because publisher selection bias may exist, just because publisher's marketing strategy may be this or that, the actual work still exists as a thing unto itself and ought to be judged as such and no more or other.

>46 LolaWalser: Its great sin is that it transfers a failing on the side of the readers (the arrogant West) to the authors (the non-Western people we'd actually like to support!)

The context I've seen the term used is as an indictment against Western publishers, editors, and readers who expect and want these kinds of stories and are unable or unwilling to see a story by a writer of color as nuanced and complex.

I'm looking forward to re-reading al-Shaykh. I read Story of Zahra, in English, as part of a Middle Eastern Literature class. It was a great class but it was taught by a professor whose main interest was Arab/Israeli conflict. All the writers he gave us to read were Lebanese, Egyptian, or Palestinian.

>47 southernbooklady:

The context I've seen the term used is as an indictment against Western publishers, editors, and readers who expect and want these kinds of stories and are unable or unwilling to see a story by a writer of color as nuanced and complex.

That's my experience too--which is why I was taken aback to see it turned against the author.