2. P. Slater, The Glory of Hera, Boston 1968, p. 414.
3. Koran, sura 46: 15.
4. Koran, sura 4: 1, sura 31: 14, sura 6: 152, sura 17: 23, sura 29: 8.
5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation of Erotic Life’, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, New York 1970.
6. Dorothy Glisten, The World of the Family, New York 1963, pp. 204-205.
7. Sidi Abderahman al-Majdoub, in Les Quatrains du Mejdoub le Sarcastique, Poète Maghrebin du XVIÉme siècle, p. 180.
8. E. Westermark, Wit and Wisdom, p. 326.
9. Al-Majdoub, Les Quatrains du Mejdoub, p. 180.
10. P. Slater, The Glory of Hera, p. 30.
11. Article 36, Code du Statut Personnel. E. Coffman points out the tactical importance of deference rules in authoritarian relationships, in Asylums, New York 1961, p. 115.
12. E. Coffman, Asylums, p. 41.
Chapter 8
1. The term ‘territoriality’, however, is really too primitive for the phenomenon, which is a sophisticated, manifold use of space. Hall’s concept of ‘proxemics’ is more suitable:
Proxemics is the term I have coined for the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space and a specialized elaboration of culture. [Edward Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York 1969, p. 11
According to Hall, the dangers are great, given the sensuous dimension of any physical interaction, of involving the individuals in an atmosphere of ambiguous signs, unconsciously sent and received.
Man’s sense of space is closely related to his sense of self, which is in an intimate transaction with his environment. Man can be viewed as having visual, kinesthetic, tactile, and thermal aspects of his self which may be either inhibited or encouraged to develop by his environment. [ The Hidden Dimension, p. 63.]
2. In Purity and Danger, Baltimore 1970, Mary Douglas emphasized the links in social structure between the concept of boundaries, the concept of danger, and the concept of power.
3. Ibid., p. 14.
4. In Moroccan folklore women are considered to be the repository of devilish forces: Edmund Doutte, Magie et Religion dans l’Afrique du Nord, Algiers 1908, p. 33; also, E. Westermark, The Belief in Spirits in Morocco, p. 22. The Moroccan psychologist Abelwanad Radi in ‘Processes de socialisation de Fenfant marocain’, Etudes Philosophiques et Litteraires, no. 4, April 1969, attributes to women the responsibility for introducing children to the world of the irrational, of spirits.
5. The term ‘universe’ is used here in the sense P. L. Berger and T. Luckman use it in The Social Construction of Reality, New York 1967.
6. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, New York 1964, p. 136.
7. Ibid., p. 132.
8. To foster ‘homosocial’ relations does not necessarily mean to drive members of a society to practise what one Palestinian sociologist has called ‘homosociality’: the inclination to spend most of one’s time, most of one’s life, with individuals of the same sex. Homosociality entails fear of the other sex, and avoidance or limitation of controls with it. Obviously, homosociality is not peculiar to Arab society. Moreover, any institution or practice that tends to degrade the female body may be considered homosocial, and in this sense the advanced capitalist countries, with their pornography industry, would be prime examples.
9. More specifically, it condemned the practice of wearing wigs, which seems to have been quite common among Arab women in the seventh century (al-Bukhari, al-Jami’ al-Sahih, p. 447 K: 67). Tattooing, also condemned by Islam, is still practised in Morocco, and some of the tattoos have unequivocal erotic meanings. (J. Herber, ‘Tatouage du Pubis au Maroc’, Revue d’Ethnie, vol. 3, 1922.)
10. Koran, sura 24.
11. Al-Ghazali, Revivification, p. 35.
12. Ibid., p. 28.
13. Malika Belghiti, ‘Les Relations Féminines et le Statut de la Femme clans la Famille Rurale’, Collection du Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, Rabat 1970, p 57.
14. The French anthropologist Germaine Tillion (The Republic of Cousins, Al Saqi Books, London 1983) noted that peasant women newly arrived to towns usually adopt the practice of veiling. She found it strange that women who were not veiled before adopted the veil willingly. I think that this phenomenon could be very easily interpreted if one remembers that for the rural woman who has recently emigrated to the town, the veil is a sign of upward mobility – the expression of her newly acquired status as urbanite.
15. M. Belghiti, ‘Les Relations Féminines’, p. 58.
16. Women are especially restricted when in a space they should have a right to: the mosque. in Morocco they may use only a specified area, usually a narrow, marginal, dark corner behind the male space. Although the Prophet allowed women to go to mosques, their right to be there was, during Islam’s fourteen centuries of existence, frequently in doubt and is often still subject to the husband’s authorization. (Al-Bukhari, al-Jami’ al-Sahih, p. 453, K: 67, B: 115.)
17. P. Pascon and M. Bentahar, ‘269 Jeunes Ruraux’, p. 63.
18. My own experience has been that women are more or less harassed depending on the socio-economic features of the place they are walking. Harassment is more systematic in small and medium-sized than in large cities. It is more intense in the poor neighbourhoods and slums of Rabat and Casablanca than in the middle-class areas of these same cities. It also varies according to the legitimacy of the reason you are on the street: harassment is less intense at a post-office queue than it would be if you succumb to the desire to have an ice cream or some chips in a cafe in a poor neighbourhood. Of course, there are some situations that concern only minorities. In those cases the mechanisms are more difficult to grasp, such as, for instance, the harassment of women who drive cars, which seems to be governed by a completely different system of references. Your chances of being harassed seem to be greater if you drive an old small car than if you are in a big gleaming machine.
19. E. Hall, The Hidden Ditnension, p. 156.
20. Ibid., p. 163.
21. Erving Coffman, Behaviour in Public Places, New York 1966, p. 143.
22. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, New York 1967, p. 53. It is interesting to note that Fanon thought the incidents were ‘funny’. For a man with Fanon’s sensitivity to segregation and preoccupation with revolutionary assertion of human rights, his remark is puzzling to say the least.
23. Personal communication to the author.
24. Chérifa Alaoui el-Mdaghri, ‘Le Travail féminin: cas de la Fonction publique au Maroc en 1980’, Ecole Nationale d’Administration Publique, Rabat, cycle supérieur, no. 11, promotion 1980-81.
Chapter 9
1. On the situation of the labour market, see A. Agouram and A. Belal, ‘Bilan de I’Economie Marocaine depuis l’independence’, BESM, XXXII, p. 116. According to the authors, unemployment in urban centres reaches 30% to 50% and hits 60% in rural areas. They emphasize the impact of this situation on the future by showing that while the number of labourers increases each year at a rate of 3%, the number of jobs increases at a rate of only 2%.
2. Code du Statut Personnel, Dahir no. I-57-343, in Bulletin Officiel no. 2354, 6 December 1957.
3. Emile Durkheim, ‘L’Education Morale’, in Selected Writings, edited by A. Giddens, Cambridge 1972, p. 174.
4. Mao Tse-Tung, in Bruce Shaw’s abridged version of Peking’s authorized edition of Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, New York 1970.
5. A decision to abolish pre-existing privileges, mainly those based on sexual differences, is a very daring decision on the part of any regime, and more so on the part of a new regime. It is a very unpopular step indeed. The Chinese Communist regime had to face and deal with the resistance the male Chinese Population posed to such measures. See C. K. Yang, Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village, Cambridge, Mass. 1965, particularly Part I, ‘The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution’.
6. 1950 Marrriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, Article 9.
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7. Code du Statut Personnel, Article 35.
8. Personal communication from qadis and lawyers, supplemented by observation in Rabat’s Sadad court during February 1974.
9. A brief sketch of the history of the education systems promoted by the French protectorate in Morocco is in John Halstead’s Rebirth of a Nation: The Origin and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism 1912-1944, Cambridge, Mass. 1969, pp. 98-114.
10. André Révérand, Un Lyautey inconnu, Paris 1980.
11. Fatima Hassar, ‘The Special Problems of Young Women and Mothers with Regard to Their Families and Professional Careers’, read at the International Conference of Parents Associations, 22-28 July 1962. Published by the Ministry of Education, Rabat.
12. Allal al-Fasi, The Independence Movements in Arab North Africa, p. 413.
13. Fatima Hassar, ‘Special Problems of Young Women’, p. 86.
14. Le Maroc en Chiffres, 2nd ed., Rabat 1971, p. 25.
15. Muhammad Lahbabi, Les Années 80 de notre Jeunesse, Casablanca 1970, p. 55.
16. Le Maroc en Chiffres, p. 25.
17. An ever-rising number of young researchers are choosing to work on the impact of female access to education and jobs and on family relations, in particular a group of about thirty people calling themselves the ‘Groups de Recherche Scientifique sur la Femme, la Famille, et l’Enfant au Maroc’, located at the law school in Rabat.
18. Fatima Mernissi, ‘Historical Insights for New Population Strategies: Women in Precolonial Morocco’, UNESCO, Paris 1978; also Mernissi, ‘Développement capitalists et perceptions des femmes daps la Societe musulmane: les paysannes du Gharb’, International Labour Office, WEP 10-4-04-90, Geneva, May 1981.
19. Moroccan economists and statisticians, like their European and Latin American colleagues, generally classified most rural women, who work fourteen hours a day, as ‘women at home’ and therefore inactive. Happily, many Moroccan economists and statisticians are young and open-minded; they are now reviewing their categories of labour in general, and of female labour in particular. See Cherkaoui Abdelinalek’s book on ‘social indicators’ (Casablanca 1981), especially chapter 3, on ‘inquiry into urban employment’ conducted in 1976.
20. All data in this section is taken from volume II of the Recensement Général de la Population et de l’Habitat, 1971, unless otherwise noted.
21. Ibid., p. 12.
22. ‘Enquete sur 1emploi urbain’, Rabat Bureau of Statistics, 1976, p. 13.
23. Recensement Général de la Populaltion, 1971, vol. 2, p. 6.
24. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, New York 1970, p. 60.
25. Ibid., p. 31.
26. Ibid., p. 55.
27. See Honour and Shame, the Values of Mediterranean Society, edited by J. G. Peristiany, Chicago 1966. Peristiany’s introduction is a concise description of the psycho-social mechanisms operating under the concept of honour. One feature of these mechanisms is that the men in such societies do not have a source of self-esteem within themselves but only attached to subjects outside themselves.
28. The political, professional, and economic frustrations of men are often the object of inhibitions, of more or less conscious censor mechanisms. The case of a young (thirty-year-old) employee at the planning ministry is unfortunately fairly typical: he had serious problems gaining promotion and threatened his wife, a medical doctor, with divorce because she ‘will not obey me’. Even the qadis (judges), who are used to conjugal conflicts, were surprised by this paradoxical instance of a young husband who had married an ‘employed woman’ trying to make her obey. ‘I don’t understand’, said a young qadi of the Rabat court, ‘why men who choose to marry a woman who works and gets a salary just like them insist on the obedience that is due them.’
29. J. Whiting and I. Child, Child Training and Personality, New Haven 1953, p. 276.
30. W. Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 32.
31. In interviews with young female employees from the urban middle class conducted between 1975 and 1980, I found many who reported that when the couple visited the husband’s family, the husband, out of ‘respect’, insisted that his wife share his mother’s bed. Many Moroccan men carry around photographs of their mothers in their wallets and monotonously and repeatedly inform the women they are seeing with ‘serious intentions’ that mother is the woman they love most in the world. During the summer of 1982 a thirty-year-old woman lawyer in Casablanca received a marriage proposal from a charming 34-year-old colleague of hers. When she asked him, ‘Why me?’, he replied ardently: ‘I chose you from the first day I saw you in court, because you look so much like my mother. You’re a carbon copy . same eyes, same size, . . . I The young woman politely declined his offer and he never understood why he had been rejected. Many of the divorces that come before Moroccan courts are brought on by the mother-in-law. A systematic study of the phenomenon would be interesting.
32. Ana qarran daba (‘Now I’m a cuckold’) is a formula pronounced by an annoyed husband whose wife is not home at the usual time.
Conclusion
1. Mariarosa Della Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol 1972.
2. ‘Communism in Marriage’, article by David Riazanov, published in Moscow in 1926, reproduced in al-Mar’a wa al-Ishtiraqiya (Women and Socialism), translated and edited by George Tarabishi, Beirut 1974 (second edition), pp. 33-70.
3. Dr. Salwa Khammash, al-Mar’a al-Arabiya wa’l-Mujtama al-Taqlidiya (Arab Women and Traditional Society), Beirut
1973, particularly chapter V (the relation between the sexes) and chaper VII (the position of the wife).
4. George Tarabishi, in his introduction to Women and Socialism, p. 13.
5. The article states: ‘Killing, wounding, and beating are excusable if they are committed by a husband against his wife and/or her accomplice at the moment that he surprises them in flagrante delicto committing adultery.’
6. Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera, p. 73.
7. Al-Majdoub, p. 144.
8. Dr. Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Fi’l-Hubb aa’l-Hubb al-Udri (On Love and Udrite Love), second edition, Beirut 1974, pp. 92 ff.
9. Ibid.
10. Tatar Labib Djedidi, ‘La Poésie Amoureuse des Arabes’, Algiers 1974.
11. Ibid., pp. 76, 134, 140, 142.
12. Sadiq al-Azm, pp. 110-111.
13. Ibid., p. 28.
14. Abdallah Laroui, ‘La Crise des Intellectuels Arabes’, paper read at colloquium in Louvain, 1970, published in La Crise des Intellectuels Arabes, Paris 1974.
15. George Tarabishi, introduction to Women and Socialism, p. 13.
Index
Abdallah: death of, 82; family of, 81–2
Abdallah, Dr Mohamed Hassan: writings of, 10
Abdel-Malek, Anouar: 24
Aden: 24
Aisha: family of, 64, 67, 69
Aisha Kandisha: belief in, 53
Alaoui, Qadi Moulay Mustapha: purpose of, 105
Algeria: Droit Musulman (1830), 31; War for Independence (1954–62), 159
al-‘Ali, Salah Ahmad: refusal to admit existence of pre-Islamic customs expressing female sexual self-determination, 78
Allio-Marie, Ms Michèle: background of, 16; former French Minister of Defence, 16; French Minister of Justice, 16
Amin, Ahmed: The Dawn of Islam, 13
Amin, Qasim: 21–3, 41–2; view of Islam as liberating force for women, 23
Amin, Samir: The Arab Economy Today, 96
Amina: family of, 83; opposition to polygamous marriage, 83
‘amlu triq: ritual of, 110
Amr, Dubaa Bint: family of, 67
Amr, Salama Bint: family of, 81
Anas, Imam Malik Ibn: founder of Malekite school, 33
al-Aqqad, Abbas Mahmud: 44, 48, 69; Women in the Koran, 42–3
Arab League: members of, 25
Arabic: 122; heading formula of letters, 105
al-asala: concept of, 96
Asma: 64–5
al-Azm, Sadi
q Jalal: criticisms of Udrite love, 191–2
Babylon: ruled by Hammurabi (1796–1750 BC), 11–12
al-Baghdadi, Ibn Habib: 9, 85; Kitab al-Muhabbar, 78, 81, 83–4
Bahrain: 24
Bakr, Abu: first Caliph, 83–4
Bashir, Muhammad Ibn: family of, 88
Batn: use of term, 91
Beeston, A.F.L.: 85
Belghiti, Malika: 114
Berber: 25; Moroccan population, 24
Bida’: concept of, 150
Bukhari, Imam: 8, 71, 88–9; concept of mut’a marriage, 89; Sahih, 13, 78
Byzantine Empire: first siege of Constantinople (670), 93
Caliph Umar: proposal of marriage to Atika Bint Zaid, 71
China: 21, 165; Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China (1950), 165–6
Christianity: 45, 54, 170; concept of individual, 37
Costa, Mariarosa Della: 181
al-Dahhak, Fatima Bint: solicitation of marriage to Prophet Muhammad, 64
Dahia: 66
Din: concept of, 10
Djediddi, Tahar Labib: criticisms of Udrite love, 191
Durkheim, Émile: theory of anomie, 110-11, 164
Egypt: 66; Al Mehwar, 16; Cairo, 24; Information and Decision Support Center, 15
Engels, Friedrich: writings of, 183
Europe: 22
al-Fasi, Allal: 25; drafting of ‘Arab Charter’, 170
Fatima: 83; family of, 82
Fatwa: issue of, 15
Feminist movement: influenced by Arab-Muslim nationalism, 21
Fitna: 50, 127; concept of, 41–2; fear of, 65; identification of women with, 52, 65
France: 7, 25, 167; government of, 7; Interior Ministry, 16
Freud, Sigmund: 44, 47; theories of, 45–7, 49; theory of female sexuality, 49, 51–2, 54; view of bisexuality, 46; view of foreplay, 50–1
Ghazali, Imam: 101, 122, 124, 155–6; concept of individual’s task, 56; interpretation of Koran, 10, 43; justification for polygamy, 58–9; The Revivification of Religious Sciences 38, 44; view of difference between male and female sexuality, 47–8, 50, 54; view of foreplay, 50–1; view of marriage, 44, 127; view of qaid, 43
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