The universe of the umma is communal; its citizens are persons who unite in a democratic collectivity based on a sophisticated concept of belief in a set of ideas, which is geared to produce integration and cohesion of all members who participate in the unifying task.
Conflict Relationship
A social relationship will be referred to as a ‘conflict’ in so far as action within it is oriented intentionally to carrying out the actor’s own will against the resistance of the other party or parties.7
The citizens of the domestic universe are primarily sexual beings; they are defined by their genitals and not by their faith. They are not united, but are divided into two categories: men, who have power, and women, who obey. Women – who are citizens of this domestic universe and whose existence outside that sphere is considered an anomaly, a transgression – are subordinate to men, who (unlike their women) also possess a second nationality, one that grants them membership of the public sphere, the domain of religion and politics, the domain of power, of the management of the affairs of the umma. Having been identified as primarily citizens of the domestic universe, women are then deprived of power even within the world in which they are confined, since it is the man who wields authority within the family. The duty of Muslim women is to obey (as is very clear in the Muduwana and in Malik’s al-Muwatta, from which it is inspired and on which it is based). The separation of the two groups, the hierarchy that subordinates the one to the other, is expressed in institutions that discourage, and even prohibit, any communication between the sexes. Men and women are supposed to collaborate in only one of the tasks required for the survival of society: procreation.
In fact, whenever cooperation between men and women is inevitable, as between the members of a couple, an entire array of mechanisms is set in motion to prevent too great an intimacy from arising between the partners. Sexual segregation thus fuels, and is fuelled by, the conflicts that it is supposed to avoid between men and women. Or better, sexual segregation intensifies what it is supposed to eliminate: the sexualization of human relations.
The Seclusion of Women
In order to prevent sexual interaction between members of the umma and members of the domestic universe, seclusion and veiling (a symbolic form of seclusion) were developed. But paradoxically, sexual segregation heightens the sexual dimension of any interaction between men and women.
In a country like Morocco, in which heterosexual encounter is the focus of so many restrictions, and consequently of so much attention, seduction becomes a structural component of human relations in general, whether between individuals of the same sex or between men and women.
I have concentrated my discussion here on heterosexual relations, but our understanding of sexual identity cannot be complete without studies clarifying the interaction among individuals of the same sex. A society that opts for sexual segregation, and therefore for impoverishment of heterosexual relations, is a society that fosters ‘homosocial’ relations8 on the one hand and seduction as a means of communication on the other. Seduction is a conflict strategy, a way of seeming to give of yourself and of procuring great pleasure without actually giving anything. It is the art of abstaining from everything while playing on the promise of giving. It is a childish art in that the child has a vital need to protect itself, but for an adult it is the expression of an often uncontrollable emotional avarice. It is very rare that an individual who has invested years in learning seduction as a mode of interchange can suddenly open up and lavish all his (or her) ‘emotional treasures’ on the person he has finally chosen to love.
In a society in which heterosexual relations are combated, emotional fulfilment is inhibited. As we are taught to fear and mistrust the other sex, and therefore to relate to its members through seduction, manipulation, and domination, we become mere puppets who extend the games of seduction, acceptable during adolescence, into our relations as mature men and women.
The hedonistic enhancement of the beauty of the human body seems to have been a pronounced Mediterranean characteristic of Morocco which Islam failed to curb. Body adornment with both jewelry and cosmetics is an integral part of socialization. Even men, at least the generation now in their sixties, used to wear cosmetics to darken their eyelids (khol) and lips (swak) for religious rituals and festivals. Islam took an unequivocally negative attitude towards body ornamentation, especially for women.9 It required pious women to be modest in their appearance and hide all ornamentation and eye-catching beauty behind veils.
And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers or husband’s fathers, or their sons or their husband’s sons, or their women, or their slaves, or male attendants who lack vigour or children who know naught of women’s nakedness. And let them not stamp their feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornment. And turn unto Allah together, O believers, in order that ye may succeed.10
According to Ghazali, the eye is undoubtedly an erogenous zone in the Muslim structure of reality, just as able to give pleasure as the penis. A man can do as much damage to a woman’s honour with his eyes as if he were to seize hold of her with his hands.
To look at somebody else’s wife is a sinful act. . . . The look is fornication of the eye, but if the sexual apparatus is not set in motion by it [if the man does not attempt to have sexual intercourse], it is a much more easily pardoned act.11
When the Prophet was asking God to protect him from the most virulent social dangers, he asked for help in controlling his penis and his eye from the dangers of fornication.12
The theory that seclusion in Islam is a device to protect the passive male who cannot control himself sexually in the presence of the lust-inducing female is further substantiated by verse 60 of sura 24, which explains that elderly women (supposed to be unattractive) can go unveiled. Belghiti’s survey of rural women, among whom seclusion is the prevailing mode, reveals that the restrictions on women’s movements do not apply to elderly women, who consequently have a greater freedom.13
The seclusion of women, which to Western eyes is a source of oppression, is seen by many Muslim women as a source of pride.14 The traditional women interviewed all perceived seclusion as prestigious. In rural Morocco seclusion is considered the privilege of women married to rich men.15
Harems, the ultimate form of seclusion, were considered even more prestigious, since they required huge economic assets. One of the women I interviewed, Salama, lived most of her life as a concubine in a harem. This is unusual even by Moroccan standards, and her experience contrasts sharply with that of most women. Because women are not allowed to leave a harem, sexual segregation is more successfully realized there than in the average, monogamous family. Successful seclusion of human beings requires considerable economic investment, because services must be provided at home for the secluded. Other women, who must go out to shop or go to the baths, are under many restrictions outside the home.
The Deseclusion of Women: on the Street
Traditionally, women using public spaces, trespassing on the umma universe, are restricted to few occasions and bound by specific rituals,16 such as the wearing of the veil. The veil is worn by Moroccan women only when they leave the house and walk through the street, which is a male space. The veil means that the woman is present in the men’s world, but invisible; she has no right to be in the street.
If chaperoned, women are allowed to trespass into the men’s universe on the traditional visits to the hammam, the public bath, and to the tomb of the local saint. According to my data, visits to the hammam used to be bi-monthly and to the saint’s tomb not more than once or twice a year (usually the 27th day of Ramadan). Both required the husband’s permission. The chaperoning was entrusted to an elderly asexual woman, usually the mother-in-law.
Traditionally, only necessity could justify a woman’s presence outside the h
ome, 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 to 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 streets. One expression for a prostitute is rajlha zahqa, ‘a woman whose foot is slipping’. The Pascon-Bentahar survey revealed that when a rural youth visits a town he assumes that any woman walking down the street is sexually available.17
Women in male spaces are considered both provocative and offensive. Since schooling and jobs both require women to be able to move freely through the streets, modernization necessarily exposes many women to public harassment.18
In The Hidden Dimension, Edward Hall made two perceptive remarks about the use of space in Middle Eastern, Arab-Muslim societies. First, ‘there is no such thing as an intrusion in public. Public means public.’19 It is not possible for an individual to claim a private zone in a public space. This seems quite true for Morocco and has a particular bearing on women’s presence in the street, as one might guess.
Second, space has a primarily social rather than physical quality. The notion of trespassing is related not so much to physical boundaries as to the identity of the person performing the act.20 A friend, for example, never trespasses, while a foe always does.
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. A woman in a traditionally male space upsets Allah’s order by inciting men to commit zina. The man has everything to lose in this encounter: peace of mind, self-determination, allegiance to Allah, and social prestige.
If the woman is unveiled the situation is aggravated. The Moroccan term for a woman who is not veiled is aryana (‘nude’), and most women who frequent schools or hold jobs outside the home today are unveiled. The two elements together – trespassing and trespassing in the ‘nude’ – constitute an open act of exhibitionism.
Whether the indictable act consists of words spoken, gestures conveyed, or act performed, the communication structure of the event often consists of an individual initiating an engagement with a* stranger of the opposite sex by means of the kind of message that would be proper only if they were on close and intimate terms. Apart. from psychodynamic issues, exhibitionists often spectacularly subvert social control that keeps individuals interpersonally distant even though they are physically close to each other. The assault here is not so much directly on an individual as on the system of rights and symbols the individual employs in expressing relatedness and unrelatedness to those about him.21
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.22 A similar incident was reported to have taken place near a refugee camp in Lebanon.
A female Palestinian militant was performing her task as a sentinel. She was posted in a deserted spot a few yards away from the camp, her machine-gun on her shoulder, when a Lebanese civilian who noticed her came by to make a proposition. When the woman rejected his advances with indignant words and gestures, the man got angry and said, ‘How do you want me to believe that a woman standing alone in the street the whole night has any honour?’ The woman is said to have turned her gun towards her suitor and told him, ‘I am here in the street soiling my honour to defend yours because you are unable to do it yourself.’23 In spite of its revolutionary setting, the anecdote reveals that the female militant shares with the male civilian the belief that her being alone in the street is dishonourable. Her reflex was to justify her presence in the male space, not to claim her right to be there.
The Deseclusion of Women: in the Office
The absence of modes of relatedness other than genital encounter helps to explain the form of heterosexual encounters in offices as well as on the street.
The ‘office’ is a recent development in Moroccan history, a legacy of the centralized bureaucracy set up by the French after 1912. After independence, public administration expanded both in terms of offices and posts and in terms of the portion of public resources it swallows. The state is now by far the most important employer in the country. A substantial number of literate working women are in government offices. These women, who often have not finished high school, are typists and secretaries and usually occupy positions subordinate to their male colleagues.24
The situation of the working woman in the office is reminiscent of her position in a traditional household and on the street. These conflicting images are likely to stimulate conflicting patterns of behaviour in men. The boss’s typist, like his wife and sister, is in a subordinate position, and he has the right to command her. Like them, she is dependent on him (more or less directly) for economic survival. He administers her salary, which is given to her because she provides him with specific services. Her advancement and promotion depend on him. It is therefore not surprising if he comes to confuse her with the woman he dominates because of his economic superiority and institutional authority (in other words, his wife), a step many men seem to take with ease. In any event, the drift that occurs in relations between the bureaucrat and his secretary, generated by his confusion of his privileges as a man and his rights and privileges as a bureaucrat, are not limited to sexual behaviour. Max Weber identified this confusion as one of the problems of the bureaucratic system.
The confusion is inherent in any bureaucratic structure, but it assumes a particularly exaggerated character in Third World societies in which bureaucratization is relatively recent. Morocco, of course, already had its Makhzencentral, but that institution lacked the structures, resources, equipment, and personnel that it now commands. The harassment of the woman state employee occurs because she has transgressed the boundaries of the male space par excellence, the administration of affairs of state. The conflict and tension experienced by women who work in the state administration is proportional to the insolence of their intrusion into the sanctuaries of male power.
Women’s increasing encroachment into traditionally male spaces greatly intensifies the sexual aspect of any encounter between men and women, especially in the urban centres. The process of integration of women into the modern circuits of the production system is now quite advanced, however unplanned or even undesired the process may have been. A growing number of women, both educated and illiterate, are invading the labour market and the modern workshops. The aspiration for a hadma mezyana (well-paid job) is now shared by poor illiterate women and their more privileged sisters who have gained access to wealth and education.
When women go to work they are not only trespassing in the universe of the umma but are also competing with their former masters, men, for the scarce available jobs. The anxiety created by women seeking jobs in the modern sector, and thus demanding a role traditionally reserved for men, inevitably aggravates tension and conflict because of the scarcity of jobs and the high rate of unemployment among men.
9
The Economic Basis of Sexual Anomie in Morocco
One can easily imagine the problems likely to result from the determination of women to invade the labour market in a Muslim society suffering from high unemployment.1 A society having difficulty creating jobs for men tends to fall back on traditional customs that deny women’s
economic dimension and define them purely as sexual objects – and to write those customs into law. This is just what happened in Morocco. In 1956-57, at the dawn of independence, a commission of ten men selected from the leading religious authorities and the most prominent functionaries of the Ministry of Justice met and drafted a Personal Status Code which, after some discussion, was adopted and became law.2 Article 115 of that code affirms
Every human being is responsible for providing for his needs (nafaqa) through his own means, with the exception of wives, whose husbands provide for their needs.
The woman’s clear and unequivocal right to work is thus nowhere affirmed in this law, which opts instead for the fantasy encouraged by the traditional image of the Muslim woman, an image that confounds virility with economic power and femininity with the passive status of consumer. The law helps to keep alive this fantasy, which draws its great strength from its own lack of reality. In Morocco, racked by class divisions and constant inflation, the man in the street spends considerable time discussing virtually insoluble economic problems. The image of patriarchal virility compels him to consider himself responsible for providing for his own needs as well as for those of his wife and children, and therefore for finding a salary large enough to do this. But the majority of men never manage to find stable and regular jobs, and the majority of women are forced to look for wage-labour outside the family if they are to survive. Nevertheless and this is the main point I want to look at here – at a time when capitalist appropriation of the country’s best land for production of cash-crops for export to the Common Market is well-advanced, at a time when millions of peasant families can no longer make ends meet and are flocking to the urban centres or leaving to work in Europe, at a time of economic cataclysm, we are still brought up on images straight out of Baghdad during the days of the Arabian Nights, images of men who lavish pearls and emeralds on the women who surround them.
Beyond the Veil Page 15