It is understandable that Muslim fathers and husbands feel horrified at the idea of their own family and sexuality patterns being transformed into Western patterns. The striking characteristic of Western sexuality is the mutilation of the woman’s integrity, her reduction to a few inches of nude flesh whose shades and forms are photographed ad infinitum with no goal other than profit. While Muslim exploitation of the female is cloaked under veils and hidden behind walls, Western exploitation has the bad taste of being bare and over-exposed.
It is worth noting that the fears of Muslim fathers and husbands are not totally unfounded; the nascent ‘liberation’ of Muslim women has indeed borrowed many characteristics of Western women’s way of life. The first gesture of ‘liberated’ Arab women was to discard the veil for Western dress, which in the thirties, forties, and fifties was that of the wife of the colonizer. Speaking a foreign language was often a corollary to discarding the veil, the first ‘liberated’ women usually being members of the upper and middle classes. And here we touch upon another aspect of the difficulty Muslim societies have in adjusting to female self-determination. The Westernization of the first ‘liberated’ women was and still is part and parcel of the Westernization of the Arab-Muslim ruling classes. The fears awakened by the Westernization of women can be interpreted as simply another instance of Muslim society believing that males are able to select what is good in Western civilization and discard bad elements, while women are unable to choose correctly. This is concordant with the classical Muslim view of women as being unable to judge what is good and what is bad.
Another factor that helps in understanding men’s fears of the changes now taking place is that Westernization of women has enhanced their seductive powers. We have seen that the Muslim ethic is against women’s ornamenting themselves and exposing their charms; veil and walls were particularly effective anti-seduction devices. Westernization allowed ornamented and seductively clad female bodies to appear on the streets. It is interesting that while Western women’s liberation movements had to repudiate the body in pornographic mass media, Muslim women are likely to claim the right to their bodies as part of their liberation movement. Previously a Muslim woman’s body belonged to the man who possessed her, father or husband. The mushrooming of beauty salons and ready-to-wear boutiques in Moroccan towns can be interpreted as a forerunner of women’s urge to claim their own bodies, which will culminate in more radical claims, such as the claim to birth control and abortion.
Having described the available models and their negative reception, let me hazard a few speculations on the future of women’s liberation in Muslim societies, based on a projection from the current situation.
It is hardly contestable that there have been substantial changes in Muslim women’s condition. Women have gained many rights that were denied them before, such as the right to education, the right to vote and be elected, and the right to use non-domestic spaces. But an important characteristic of this nascent ‘liberation’ is that it is not the outcome of a careful plan of controlled nation-wide development. Neither is it the outcome of the massive involvement of women in labour markets, coupled with organized. women’s movements. The partial, fragmented acquisition of rights by women in Arab-Muslim countries is a random, non-planned, non-systematic phenomenon, due mainly to the disintegration of the traditional system under pressures from within and without. Muslim women’s liberation is therefore likely to follow a sui generis pattern.
To the dismay of rigid conservatives desperately preoccupied with static tradition, change is shaking the foundations of the Muslim world. Change is multidimensional and hard to control, especially for those who deny it. Whether accepted or rejected, change gnaws continuously at the intricate mechanisms of social life, and the more it is thwarted, the deeper and more surprising are its implications. The heterosexual unit is not yet officially admitted by Muslim rulers to be a crucial focus of the process of national development. Development plans devote hundreds of pages to the mechanization of agriculture, mining, and banking, and only a few pages to the family and women’s condition. I want to emphasize on the one hand the deep and far-reaching processes of change at work in the Muslim family, and on the other hand the decisive role of women and the family in any serious development plan in the Third World economy.
The Family and Women
As shown earlier, one of the distinctive characteristics of Muslim sexuality is its territoriality, which reflects a specific division of labour and a specific conception of society and power. The territoriality of Muslim sexuality sets patterns of ranks, tasks, and authority. Spatially confined, women were taken care of materially by the men who possessed them, in exchange for total obedience and sexual and reproductive services. The whole system was organized so that the Muslim umma was actually a society of male citizens who possessed, among other things, the female half of the population. In his introduction to Women and Socialism, George Tarabishi remarks that people generally say that there are one hundred million Arabs, but in fact there are only fifty million, the female population being prevented from taking part in social responsibilities.4 Muslim men have always had many more rights and privileges than Muslim women, including even the right to kill their women. (The Moroccan penal code still shows a trace of this power in Article 418, which grants extenuating circumstances to a man who kills his adulterous wife.5) Men imposed on women an artificially narrow existence both physically and spiritually.
This territoriality (the confining of women) is in the process of being dismantled, modernization having triggered mechanisms of socio-economic change that no group is able to control. Philip Slater, in his studies of societies based on sex-antagonisms, came to the conclusion that such systems are manageable only ‘under conditions of strong ties and residential stability’.6 Morocco’s family structure and tradition of residential stability are disintegrating with the increase of individual salaries and the breakdown of the corporate family system, at least in the urban middle class. The majority of traditional women interviewed lived with their husbands’ parents at the beginning of their married lives. Then, for ‘no reason’, that is, with no open hostility, the extended family broke up. In two cases, the reason advanced was quarrelling between son and uncle. But a century ago quarrels did not break up Moroccan families. A more likely reason is the ability of the son to earn an adequate salary independent of his father and uncle. Having his own income, he is now able to break away. The fact that the state, the most important employer, requires a certain mobility from its civil servants is an important element in the destruction of the old family structure. Unnecessary confusion and anxiety stem from the fact that the government supports the traditional ideology and enforces it as law, while its economic plans and programmes promote a different reality. The new reality is shaking the traditional structure, increasing role confusion and conflicts, and bringing greater suffering for the individuals involved, regardless of sex.
One of the results of the break-up of traditional family life is that, for the first time in the history of modern Morocco, the husband is facing his wife directly. Men and women live more closely and interact more than they ever did before, partly because of the decline of anti-heterosexual factors such as the mother-in-law’s presence and sexual segregation. This direct confrontation between men and women brought up in sexually antagonistic traditions is likely to be laden with tensions and fears on both sides.
The future of male-female dynamics greatly depends on the way modern states handle the readjustment of sexual rights and the reassessment of sexual status. In Morocco the legislature has retained the traditional concept of marriage. The ancient definition of sex statuses based on division of labour according to sex was reenacted as the basis of family law: Article 35 defines the man as the sole provider for the family. He is responsible not only for himself but also for his able-bodied wife, who is consequently defined as economically dependent, her participation being limited to sexual services, reproduction, and housework.
To define masculinity as the capacity to earn a salary is to condemn those men suffering from unemployment (or the threat of it) to perceive economic problems as castration threats. Moreover, since the Code defines earning a salary as a man’s role, a woman who earns a salary will be perceived as either masculine or castrating. If the privileges of men become more easily accessible perceived accessible to women, then men will be perceived as becoming more feminine.
By emphasizing the link between masculinity and economic success for men, the Moroccan Code reactivates traditional patterns of self-esteem whereby a man’s prestige depends on his wealth, at the very moment when economic problems are making it difficult for a growing majority of Moroccans to amass wealth. The authority of males, traditionally embodied in their ability to provide for their families, is seriously jeopardized by their present situation. Moroccan males now have great difficulty achieving traditional masculine recognition:
There is no power but in men
There are no men without money.7
Modernization, in these terms, clearly appears to be a castrating phenomenon. By emphasizing the traditional definitions of masculinity, the state encourages ambivalent feelings in men, both toward the inactive women for whom they cannot provide and toward the active ones they experience as castrators. The ambivalence aggravates the traditional fears of devouring females latent in all patriarchal cultures. The Moroccan male is increasingly encouraged to look upon himself not as a multi-dimensional person, but primarily as a sexual agent, and it is from sex that he is encouraged to expect gratification, prestige, and power. Moroccans are allowed to boss their wives and children, but if they dare to raise objections to economic and political conditions, their initiatives are severely discouraged and often violently repressed. The complementarily of an authoritarian political structure and. the authoritarian power of the husband and father seems to be a feature of transitional societies unable to create an effective development programme to face change with effective planning. In Morocco the events of the past decades have brought about a serious erosion of male supremacy which is generating greater tension between the sexes, at least in this transitional period. Surprisingly enough, the serious blows to male supremacy did not come from women, who have been reduced to helplessness by their historical situation, but from the state.
The State as the Main Threat to Traditional Male Supremacy
In spite of its continuous support for traditional male rights, the state constitutes a threat and a mighty rival to the male as both father and husband. The state is taking over the traditional functions of the male head of the family, such as education and the provision of economic security for members of the household. By providing a nation-wide state school system and an individual salary for working wives, daughters, and sons, the state has destroyed two pillars of the father’s authority. The increasingly preeminent role of the state has stripped the traditionally powerful family head of his privileges and placed him in a subordinate position with respect to the state not very different from the position of women in the traditional family. The head of the family is dependent on the state (the main employer) to provide for him just as women are dependent on their husbands in traditional settings. Economic support is given in exchange for obedience, and this tends to augment male-female solidarity as a defence against the state and its daily frustrations.
The word ‘sexist’ as it is currently employed in English has the connotation that males are favoured at the expense of females. It is my belief that, in spite of appearances, the Muslim system does not favour men; the self-fulfilment of men is just as impaired and limited as that of women. Though this equality of oppression is concealed by the world-renowned ‘privileges’ of the Muslim male, I have tried to illustrate it by showing how polygamy and repudiation are oppressive devices for both sexes. The Muslim theory of sexuality views women as fatally attractive and the source of many delights. Any restrictions on the man’s right to such delights, even if they take the form of restrictions on women alone (seclusion, for example), are really attacks on the male’s potential for sexual fulfilment.
It might well be argued that the Muslim system makes men pay a higher psychological price for the satisfaction of sexual needs than women, precisely because women are conditioned to accept sexual restrictions as ‘natural’, while men are encouraged to expect a thorough satisfaction of their sexual needs. Men and women are socialized to deal with sexual frustration differently. We know that an individual’s discontent grows as his expectations rise. From the age of four or earlier, a woman in Moroccan society is made aware of the sexual restrictions she has to face. The difficulties a Moroccan male experiences in dealing with sexual frustration are almost unknown to the Moroccan woman, who is traumatized early enough to build adequate defences. In this sense also the Muslim order is not ‘sexist’.
Future Trends
In the short run the reduced power of the head of the family produces tension in the family such that resentful males are likely to compensate by oppressing their wives and children. But in the long run, it is likely to generate increasing male-female rapprochement in the face of the common and increasingly similar preoccupations of their daily reality. It can lead, as it already has in the case of young couples, to greater collaboration between husband and wife and a strengthening of the conjugal unit in the face of the system’s shortcomings.
We have seen that the only model for a conjugal unit available in a Muslim society dictates how men and women should relate to each other. The relation in a traditional family is a master-slave relation where love is excluded and condemned as a weakness on the part of men. The separation between love and sex is clearly illustrated by another model of male-female relatedness, this time taken not from institutions, but from literature: the model of Udrite love.8 Udrite love is a variety of romantic love very important in Arab literature. It enjoys endlessly renewed fame through the poems sung by the most famous Arab singers, broadcast by the mass media. The characteristic of the Udrite lover is that he never has sexual intercourse with his beloved, and since in Arab-Muslim society marriage is synonymous with blessed sexuality, the Udrite lovers never marry. Countless obstacles from within and without stand between them for ever, keeping their unsatisfied bodies burning with a ‘spiritual’ flame. For centuries this has been presented as the highest form of love, where the soul triumphs over the flesh, the spirit over the body, refinement and sophistication over animality (spirit, soul, refinement, and sophistication all being linked with the absence of sexual intercourse). The model of Udrite love is now being attacked as a sick way of loving a woman. It is quite revealing that the most vehement attacks on Udrite love have come from male writers, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm9 and Tahar Labib Djedidi.10 Both men – the first through a psychoanalytical, the second through a linguistic approach – come to similar conclusions. Tahar Djedidi argues that Udrite love is the expression of an economically and politically impotent community, the Banu Udra, who were deprived of their traditional tribal privileges with the growth of the centralized Muslim Empire.11 For Jalal al-Azm, Udrite love, which implies that a man can love a woman only if he avoids sexual intercourse with her, is the distorted conception of love in a sexually oppressed society. Udrite love could exist only outside the conjugal unit; the wife, by definition, could never be the object of such love.
These recent analyses of Udrite love support my own conclusion, based on my analysis of traditional conjugal models, that modern Muslim societies have to face the fact that the traditional family mutilates women by depriving them of their humanity. What modern Muslim societies ought to strive toward is a family based on the unfragmented wholeness of the woman. Sex with an unfragmented human female is a glorious, not a soiling and degrading act. It implies and generates tenderness and love. Allegiance and involvement with an unfragmented woman do not distract men from their social duties, because the woman is not a marginal tabooed individual; rather, she is the centre, the source, the generato
r of order and life.
Islam’s basically positive attitude toward sexuality is more conducive to healthy perspectives of a self-realizing sexuality, harmoniously integrated in social life, than the West’s basically negative attitude toward sexuality. Serious changes in male-female conditioning in Western countries imply revolutionary changes in society which these reformist countries are determined to avoid at any cost. Muslim societies cannot afford to be reformist; they do not have sufficient resources to be able to offer palliatives. A superficial replastering of the system is not a possible solution for them.
At a deeper level than laws and official policy, the Muslim social order views the female as a potent aggressive individual whose power can, if not tamed and curbed, corrode the social order. It is very likely that in the long run such a view will facilitate women’s integration into the networks of decision-making and power. One of the main obstacles Western women have been dealing with is their society’s view of women as passive inferior beings. The fact that generations of university-educated women in both Europe and America failed to win access to decision-making posts is due in part to this deeply ingrained image of women as inferior. The Muslim image of women as a source of power is likely to make Muslim women set higher and broader goals than just equality with men. The most recent studies on the aspirations of both men and women seem to come to the same conclusion: the goal is not to achieve equality with men. Women have seen that what men have is not worth getting. Women’s goals are already being phrased in terms of a global rejection of established sexual patterns, frustrating for males and degrading for females. This implies a revolutionary reorganization of the entire society, starting from its economic structure and ending with its grammar. Jalal al-Azm excuses himself at the beginning of the book for using the term ‘he’ throughout the book while in fact he should be using a neutral term, because his findings are valid for both men and women.12 As a social scientist he resents being a prisoner of Arabic grammar, which imposes a sex-defined pronoun.13 But not many Arab males yet feel ill-at-ease with sex-biased Arabic grammar, though a majority already feel indisposed by the economic situation.
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