Beyond the Veil

by Fatema Mernissi

  Similarly, one reason why clients flock to Dr Heba Qutb’s private practice, where the sign on the door announces that she is a ‘Sex Therapist and Marriage Counselor’, is that she hosts her show, ‘The Big Talk’, on the Egyptian satellite channel, Al Mehwar, elegantly veiled.31 Every Saturday night she appears as ‘a pleasant Muslim woman, smiling with conspiratorial charm’.32

  This is why there is a need for all of us, Easterners and Westerners, to come together to probe more deeply these clashing visions of femininity about the women behind the veil. It is worth mentioning, if only to put the French banning of the veil in perspective, that the ‘Muslim population, estimated at more than 5 million, is the largest in Western Europe’, and that ‘according to an Interior Ministry estimate, the veil issue concerns fewer than 2,000 women in a country of 64 million inhabitants.’33 In addition, many of the 2,000 women who choose to hide their faces behind a burqa are not Muslim migrants but daughters of 100 percent French parents.

  I really think that it is time for Europe to shower prizes on the women who decide to agitate in favor of the veil in their countries, because they are forcing that country’s citizens to reflect on the real meaning of freedom and consumerism: is a person who is constantly bombarded by ads a self-managing independent individual? In fact, this is the question that we must all tackle together, Easterners and Westerners, because, as the American humanist Danny Schechter said in his book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal: ‘We are all in the same boat ... and that boat is leaking. Badly.’34 One positive aspect of Islam is that, instead of collapsing into a deep and solitary depression when you feel you are going crazy over conflicting desires, you have the possibility to ask others to assist you. Thanks to the internet and satellite-television, digital technology has made this duty-free, self-therapy dimension of Islam a great privilege for huge numbers of people. This may also be a reason why the West feels its territory invaded by this virtually connected, self-help community.

  A Muslim, a person who decides to have Islam as a religion (din), is ‘a smart (kayis) person who subjugates her or his soul in order to focus on the after-death’, explains Ibn Manzur in his medieval dictionary, which has emerged as a digital success – a Google search of 0.26 seconds gives you 261,000 sites.35 To have a religion is to avoid becoming ‘crazy by falling into the trap of desire (hawa)’ and forgetting about the community’s survival.36 No wonder that the veil, which is a symbol of the urge to control desire by submitting one’s narcissistic tendencies to the community’s demographic need to reproduce itself, has become the obsession of the West, which has a demographic problem of an aging population.

  Since Islam as a religion is the opposite of Jahiliya, which is synonymous with lack of knowledge (‘ilm), to be a Muslim means very simply ‘that you never engage in an act without knowledge’, and this explains the growth of the umma (the Muslim Community).37

  I also suspect that Islam scares the West because modern information technology has inflated the umma into a gigantic, digitally-connected galaxy – a galaxy that dwarfs Western territories.

  The West’s obsession with the veil is in fact a fascination with religion, which came to help men become fathers and curb womb-endowed, sexually aggressive females. It is this sexually aggressive female I described in my book thirty-five years ago, who has emerged as an unexpected actor in twenty-first-century Islam’s digital galaxy. So, all men from both the East and West should unite now, so as to convince this virtually empowered female, veiled or unveiled, to cooperate with them so as to build a brighter future for all.

  INTRODUCTION

  Roots of the Modern Situation

  What was, and is still, at issue in Morocco and other Muslim societies is not an ideology of female inferiority, but rather a set of laws and customs that ensure that women’s status remains one of subjugation. Prime among these are the family laws based on male authority. Although many institutions have been withdrawn from the control of religious law (business contracts for example), the family never has. The seventh-century family laws, based on male authority, were reenacted in modern legislation. The 1957 Code du Statut Personnel1 (which includes all laws relating to the family) is no more than a brilliant transposition of Imam Malik’s graceful and anecdotal al-Muwatta2 into a series of articles, sections, and sub-sections in the concise Napoleonic tradition.

  Since male modernists have recognized the necessity of altering the sexual division of labour, and since heads of Arab-Muslim states have affirmed their condemnation of sexual inequality, it seems appropriate to inquire how, and with what consequences, the emerging desire for sexual equality will be met in modern Arab-Muslim societies.

  In fact, the problem seems insoluble. Women’s liberation is directly linked to the political and economic conflicts rending modern Muslim societies. Every political setback generates a new necessity to liberate all the forces of development in Islamic nations. But paradoxically, every political setback inflicted by infidels generates an antithetical necessity to reaffirm the traditional Islamic nature of these societies as well. The forces of both modernity and tradition are unleashed in a single stroke and confront each other with dramatic consequences for relations between the sexes.

  Let us examine more closely how this conflict works itself out symbolically in matters of policy in Morocco. Morocco claims to be modern, Arab and Muslim. Each one of these three adjectives refers to a complicated nexus of needs and aspirations, more often contradictory than complementary, which gives the modern Muslim way of life a powerful impetus and a specific character.

  As a modern state Morocco is a member of the United Nations and signed the Declaration of Human Rights which stipulates, in Article 16 concerning family regulations: ‘Men and women, regardless of race, nationality or religion, having reached the age of puberty, have the right to marry and establish families. They have equal rights with regard to marriage, in the marriage, and in the event of its dissolution.’

  However, as a Muslim society affirming its will to keep the family under traditional Muslim law, Morocco promulgated a code that, whenever possible, dutifully respects the seventh-century shari’a (‘divine law’). Article 12, for example, reestablishes the traditional institution of guardianship, according to which it is not the woman who gives herself in marriage, but a male guardian who gives her to her husband: ‘The woman does not herself conclude the marriage act, but should have herself represented by a wali [guardian] whom she designates for this purpose.’ Article 11 stipulates that the wali should be male. Another glaring violation of the Declaration of Human Rights is Article 29, which forbids a woman to choose a husband from outside the Muslim community. The marriage of a Muslim man to a non-Muslim woman, however, is not forbidden. The differences in rights and duties in marriage are so extreme that they are stated in two different articles: Article 35, ‘The Rights of the Wife towards Her Husband’, and Article 36, ‘The Rights of the Husband towards His Wife’.

  The actual situation in modern Muslim Morocco will appear incoherent to anyone looking for the secure and comforting logic of Cartesian ‘rational behaviour’. But if we discard childish frames of mind and try to grasp the complexity of a situation in which individuals act and reflect on their actions, responding to the disconcerting demands of the world around them, then what seems incoherent becomes intelligible in its existential context. This approach is particularly important in analysing male–female dynamics in modern Morocco, where the hopes, fears and expectations of men and women are increasingly numerous and contradictory. I will scrutinize three of the imperatives of modern Muslim life that have an immediate bearing on the family structure and relations between the sexes:

  The need for sexual equality: the Muslim male feminist movement as an effort to change the sexual division of labour.

  The need to be Arab: Arab nationalism as a survival reflex in the face of Western domination.

  The need to be Muslim: religion as the comforting cradle of a co
smic ideology.

  The Need for Sexual Equality

  The feminist movement was an expression and byproduct of Arab-Muslim nationalism. Qasim Amin (1863-1908) and Salama Musa (1887-1958) considered the liberation of women as a condition sine qua non for the liberation of Arab-Muslim society from the humiliating hegemony of the West. By liberation of women they meant complete equality with men in all spheres of social life. In his book Woman Is Not the Plaything of Man,3 published in 1955, Salama Musa dismissed the Western example of women’s liberation as particularly misleading because it did not, according to him, elevate the woman from the status of a female to the status of a human being. He urged his society to turn instead towards China and other Asian nations as better models of liberation. But here I am not so much interested in the content of the feminist movement’s programme as in its genesis and causality, its instrumental aspect as part of the strategy for liberation.

  A prime characteristic of Arab-Muslim society is its obsession with the West and the West’s power to dominate others: ‘Easterners and Westerners differ in many things . . . Among their differences is the fact that Westerners, in general, dominate the Easterners and deprive them of their cotton, rubber, copper, oil. And they beat them whenever they try to rebel.’4

  One of the pillars of Western domination, according to the feminists, is its productiveness: ‘Production in Europe and the United States is considerable and this is due to the fact that in those countries both men and women are involved in the process of production.’5 Consequently, one of the causes of Muslim weakness is the fact that only half the nation works and produces. The other half, women, are prevented from taking part in production: ‘Among the weaknesses in a society is the fact that the majority of its members are not involved in a productive work process ... In every society women constitute half the population on average. To condemn them to be ignorant and inactive occasions the loss of half the society’s productive potential and creates a considerable drain upon the society’s resources.’6

  To educate women and prepare them to take part in production is therefore a necessity if the East is to rival the West in power and productivity. Qasim Amin dismissed as idiotic theories, the notions that women do not have the same capacity and intelligence as men. He affirmed that ‘If men are superior to women in physical strength and intelligence, it is because men were engaged in work activities that brought them to use their brains and bodies and therefore to develop them.’7 He argued that once women were given the same opportunities the differences would quickly disappear.

  But to include women in education and production implies sexual desegregation, and in 1895 many believed this to be against Islam and its laws: ‘Many people still believe that it is not necessary to educate women. They even go so far as to think that to teach women how to read and write is against the shari’a and a violation of the divine order.’8

  Amin tried to show that women’s seclusion and their exclusion from social affairs was due not to Islam but to secular customs ‘which prevailed in nations conquered by Islam and did not disappear with Islam’s teaching.’9 He affirmed that those secular traditions had been reinforced by reactionary, secular political regimes throughout the Muslim nations’ history. Therefore, to change institutions that coerce women into seclusion and ignorance was not in any way an attack on or a violation of Islam. In Amin’s argument, Islam becomes the most liberating of religions towards women: ‘Muslim law, before any other legal system, legalized women’s equality with men and asserted their freedom and liberty at times when women were still in the most debased condition in all the nations of the world. Islam granted them all human rights and recognized their legal capacity, equal to that of men in all matters . . .’10

  When the traditionalists set out to prove the opposite, they had a rather easy task. Sheikh Ibn Murad, in a sweeping attack on a Tunisian modernist who wrote a book asserting that the liberation of women does not contradict Islam, labelled the modernist an agent of Catholic priests paid to destroy Muslim society.11 He proceeded to establish that, indeed, Islam believes in sexual inequality: ‘The meaning of marriage is the husband’s supremacy . . . Marriage is a religious act . . . which gives the man a leading power over the woman for the benefit of humanity.’12

  In this century the husband’s supremacy has been seriously undermined by the effects of modernization, which has gradually thrust women out of their homes and into classrooms, offices and factories. Although sexual desegregation in Morocco has been slow and was for decades solely an upper-class urban process, it nevertheless affected the society’s sexual balance seriously enough to provoke renewed claims that Islam and its laws are the everlasting guiding light in sexual matters.

  The Need to be Arab

  The need to reaffirm the essentially Arab nature of society, with Islam as the source of society’s ideals, is dismissed as unimportant by some theoreticians of modernization. Daniel Lerner, for example, makes his task as a social scientist rather simple. After first equating modernization with Westernization, he affirms that Westernization is sweeping Baghdad and Cairo. ‘Underlying the ideologies there pervades in the Middle East a sense that old ways must go because they no longer satisfy the new wants ... Where Europeanization once penetrated only the upper level of Middle East society, affecting mainly leisure-class fashions, modernization today diffuses among a wider population and touches public institutions as well as private aspirations with its disquieting “positivist spirit”.’13

  Lerner wrote these lines in 1958, two years after the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on the Egyptian nation, at a time when demonstrations in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Aden affirmed their sympathy with Egypt as an Arab nation victimized by aggression. If Lerner had listened for fifteen minutes to any Arab-Muslim radio station in the Mediterranean, he probably would have given more credit to the ‘underlying ideologies’ and accorded more importance to the itchy ambivalence the word ‘Europeanization’ provokes in both the ‘leisure class’ and ‘the wider population.’ Fortunately for social science, he noticed that ‘a complication in Middle East modernization is its own ethnocentrism – expressed politically in extreme nationalism, psychologically in passionate xenophobia.’14

  But I believe that Arab-Muslim ethnocentricity, dismissed by Lerner as a complication, is one of the most meaningful features of modernization. Being Arab and being Muslim influences institutions and sexual interaction alike.

  A peculiar feature of the concept of being Arab is that many people and nations who never thought of themselves as Arab have claimed to be so since the Second World War. Nowadays being Arab is primarily a political, not a racial, claim. According to Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egyptians before the thirties took great pride in being Egyptians, the inheritors of the civilization of the ancient pharaohs, and they emphasized their difference from Arabs.15 The predominantly Berber origin of the Moroccan population is no secret and was used for demagogic purposes by the French colonizers interested in aggravating indigenous divisions. The division between ‘Berbers’ and ‘Arabs’ was a handy one.16 But many countries, like Egypt and Morocco, found they needed to unite as Arabs in the face of Western domination. This they did, in their distress, under the banner of Arab nationalism.

  The political and cultural meaning of being Arab is clearly expressed in Allal al-Fasi’s analysis of the options open to Morocco in the forties: ‘Morocco must, in order to live and prosper, join a bloc of nations. Two such blocs are open for her choosing: the French Union, whose form has not yet crystallized, and the Arab Union, which has become an actual reality. In the promised French Union, Morocco will find herself – judging from past experience – in the utmost difficulties, because there is a conflict of interests and beliefs between her and France . . . Morocco is convinced that she would not be happy within this colonial union, but would remain as a storehouse for raw material and as a hatching ground for soldiers to serve France. Morocco’s adherence to the Arab Un
ion, on the other hand, would bring Morocco within this Eastern family, to which she has belonged for ten centuries and from which she had been excluded for reasons beyond her control . . .’17

  In 1945 the Arab character of Morocco was far from evident, and Allal al-Fasi had to plead his cause to persuade the first members of the Arab League18 to define Arab in such a way that not-so-Arab Morocco could fit the definition.19

  History has proved Allal al-Fasi to be correct in his predictions. His party’s wishes became those of the Moroccan state. Morocco, as an independent nation, became a member of the Arab League on 1 October 1958. It affirmed its Arab identity in the Loi Fondamentale de Royaume (June 1961), which became the basis of the 1962 constitution:

  ‘Article 1.

  Morocco is an Arab and a Muslim country.

  ‘Article 2.

  Islam is the official religion of the state.

  ‘Article 3.

  The Arabic language is the official and national language of the state.’

  The Need to be Muslim

  By affirming its claim to be Arab and Muslim, Morocco expressed a view of the world based on specific aspirations and drawing its ideology from specific sources. If to be Arab implies a political and cultural choice, to choose to be Muslim implies a particular global vision of the world and a specific organization of institutions in general and of the family in particular. Islam is not merely a religion. It is a holistic approach to the world, characterized by a ‘unique insistence upon itself as a coherent and closed system, a sociologically and legally and even politically organized entity in the mundane world and an ideologically organized entity as an ideal.’20 We will now see what being Muslim implied for the Moroccan family.