Arab feminists are not succeeding because the majority of Muslim women are silent and afraid of change. Furthermore, often they have to fight not just the law, but those Muslim women who feel their only way to gain respect in society is to become radical and cover up from head to toe. When attempts are made for some equality and justice in the lives of women, we often hear the “good” conformist Arab Muslim women say, “No, we are happy this way.” Some who say that are sincere. Those who are truly content are the few who have professional or oil-rich husbands who have the power to keep them well protected and treat them well at home. But that is certainly not the condition of the larger majority of the population, especially the poorer masses.
Feminism also fails in Egypt and other Arab countries because it is regarded as a creation of the West, but Muslim women can and should forge their own brand of feminism. Too often Arab women equate female independence with a narrow and negative perception of the West. They judge Western values from the Hollywood movies that portray an insane, violent American society rife with sexual excesses, drugs, and crime. That is their only window onto American life. They do not understand the justice, integrity, equality, and honesty of Western culture. They do not see the virtues in everyday American families, the hard-working, law-abiding, decent American communities living largely peacefully in diverse religious and racial harmony.
Change is resisted because it is feared that it would come at the expense of men’s honor or women’s chastity. Resistance to progress then results in stagnation, and an entire Muslim region becomes largely dysfunctional—politically, economically, socially, and culturally.
To complete the picture of the dynamics of the Muslim family, we have to address the negatives of being a Muslim man who holds all this power over his female relatives but has to endure the injustice, humiliation, and insecurity of living under the brutal totalitarian regimes of the Middle East. This political reality also has an effect on family life and the treatment of women. This chain of oppression and brutality operates between all levels of social classes, from top to bottom. Muslim men create and also live under dictatorships such as that of Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, the Taliban, and Muammar Gaddafi. That is very different from Western men who create their own destiny within a system of democracy that allows them to benefit both financially and socially from hard work, dedication, and loyalty to family.
In the minds of many Muslim men in the much-feared Arab street, their rights on earth do not come from their creator, Allah, but from the dictator whom they have learned to appease for survival. It is amazing how the most radical religion on earth has a population that seems to fear their leaders more than Allah. We have all seen the pictures of torture of men by Saddam Hussein. Tragically, there is much more that goes unreported in many other Muslim countries. The supposedly educated men and women who control the Arab media are participating in suppressing such stories. Sadly, perhaps women symbolize a man’s only chance for honor. For Arab men’s personal honor is daily snatched from them by the brutality of the outside world, where they have to deal with abusive bosses, police who demand bribes under threat of jail, and all manner of other extortionist government bureaucrats. Dictators like Saddam understood this dynamic and acted upon it to get men’s confessions by having their wives and daughters raped during the interrogation process. That is the worst punishment you can give an Arab man. Saddam took away these men’s only connection to some honor and self-respect embodied in their wives and female family members.
Is it any wonder that Muslim men desperately cling to their women’s honor, submission, and obedience? Taking away sharia marriage and divorce laws from men without reforming the oppressive dictatorial system under which they must live would bring down upon them an unbearable sense of failure.
Muslim men of power and wealth carry their authoritarian control at home into the workplace. Arab bosses are commonly rude and even brutal to subordinate workers, to a degree that goes far beyond typical Western workplace complaints. During a construction project in my home in Egypt, I once saw the contractor slap one of the workers on the face. Others workers surrounding urged him to control himself and not return the slap. The worker did not strike back; his livelihood was in the hands of his boss. The end result is that workers have to compete to please the boss and even step on one another’s rights to curry favor. I often saw in the streets of Cairo young teenage boys or children in menial jobs being beaten by their bosses. They take it because their families need the job for survival. Abused at their jobs, such men have only one consolation; when they get home, they are the bosses.
The chain of oppression then trickles down to the home, with women and children at the bottom of the food chain in a giant machine of oppression from one level of the social structure to the next. Even children cannot escape this cruel system, which perpetuates much anger inside Muslim families. Child abuse occurring within the home is hardly discussed, and when it happens, it’s regarded as “good upbringing.” In Arab society, child abuse is neither recognized nor understood and is never reported simply because there is no interest, even by the police or legal system.
Some of the anger within the family is, in fact, rooted in cultural child-rearing attitudes and practices that on the surface seem acceptable and normal. My grandmother, like all Arab mothers, based her upbringing philosophy on shaming and criticizing children by using the word eabe, which means improper or disgraceful behavior, or the expression ellet adab, meaning lack of proper behavior. We heard these two words all the time from our elders. Many normal childhood behaviors—even laughing out loud—was considered improper. If we giggled, we were told “El dihk men kheir sabab ellet adab,” meaning “laughing for no reason is lack of proper behavior.” This code of proper behavior is enforced by everyone. No one is spared the disapproving microscopic examination by the eyes of Arab society. In Arab society, it is the duty of all adults to shout eabe and ellet adab to the children. The word haram, meaning “forbidden by God,” brought another dimension to shaming. With this word added, it became “God will curse you” if you misbehave. I believe this attitude toward child rearing is one of the underlying reasons why Arabs are so sensitive to criticism and tend to blame others rather than accept responsibility for their actions. As children, those who admitted fault were severely punished. Doing so opened a whole can of worms. Telling the truth and taking responsibility was simply unacceptable. That cultural stricture can have the effect of paralyzing progress. Unique and spontaneous behavior is the basis of innovation and progress, but anyone who did anything out of the ordinary or in any way promoted change or deviation from the norm was called shameful names and ousted from respectful society.
I truly believe that the anger that is pushing the wheels of Islamic terrorism can be traced back to pent-up anger within the Muslim family. For any reform to be achieved, a good starting point would be the family unit and reforming the Muslim marriage contract giving both men and women equal rights to marriage and divorce as well as instituting monogamy. However, these reforms can be sustained only within a democracy that will end the instability, paranoia, and inequity in Muslim society. A Muslim man’s loyalty to one wife and a true, nurturing family unit to live for will be a stabilizing factor and motivation for loving life and not escaping from it.
Five
The Invisible Wall
In 1970 I was now a young woman, and like most Egyptian single young women, I was still living in my mother’s home. By then we had moved from Heliopolis to Maadi, a nice suburb of Cairo close to the Nile River, a neighborhood with more greenery than the rest of Cairo. Cairo at that time was a dusty city with very few trees. The city was overpopulated and traveling from one area to another was brutal.
My first job out of university was working at the English desk of the Middle East News Agency, a government agency that, among other things, served the foreign press in Egypt. I served as an editor, translator, and censor. Part of my job was to translate government press releas
es from Arabic to English to give to English-language correspondents. In my censorship duties, I was somehow supposed to decide what an English-language foreign journalist was or was not allowed to report. Being naive and inexperienced, I followed a simple rule: If the sentence mentioned anything about the military, I took my pencil and crossed it out. We were all overly cautious about our censorship duties for fear of getting in personal trouble for not catching something. The foreign correspondents were able to work around it by dictating their stories over the phone. At that time there were no fax machines or computers in the Egyptian media.
There were ten of us working at the English desk doing what was essentially the job of one person. This was typical of Egypt at the time. The government tried to mask unemployment by massive overhiring to fill government jobs. This led to boredom, and in most cases gross inefficiency. With many people charged with doing the same work, the work often didn’t get done at all. This is why productivity in Egypt was at such an all-time low. However, at the English desk at Middle East News, we were falling over one another trying to get the censorship work, especially from the most enterprising foreign journalists, because these foreign correspondents were our sources of knowledge, our only window onto the world, even for what was happening in our own country.
The Egyptian minister of information in the 1970s was Youssef el-Sebaee, an old friend of my father’s. When I met him at his office he spoke very highly of my father. He asked me if I would like to travel. Of course I said yes. So he helped further my career by sending me to several international conferences. El-Sebaee was not just a senior government official, he was also a famous novelist. He wrote many romantic novels that later became memorable movies. I remember eagerly reading most of his romantic novels; many made me cry. He wrote with such passion and sensitivity. Due to el-Sebaee’s help, I was able to travel as an interpreter to countries such as the Philippines and Iraq. On my own, I also traveled to London and France, where my older sister then lived. These trips opened my eyes even more to the outside world and other cultures.
All journalists in Egypt were government employees. Being one of them, I learned firsthand about the sad state of Arab media. The Arab media does not inform its citizenry of anything other than what the government allows. I once asked why Egyptian newspapers at the time did not inform the public about the dangers of smoking. The answer from a reputable journalist was that the Egyptian government does not want the public to panic, since smoking was very widespread in Egypt, even among physicians.
On the other hand, Egyptian and Arab media as a whole did all it could to encourage another kind of panic: fear of certain outside forces, namely Israel and Western countries. An outside enemy was necessary to foster Arab cohesion and keep the Arab public preoccupied with news of dangers and threats. Thus, the press kept up a constant bombardment of stories that blamed Israel for all the troubles within the Arab world. The effect was to decrease the pressure and deflect criticism of Arab governments. How can people criticize the government internally when a giant threat is ready to attack our borders?
The public was continually told that the Jews and Israel wanted to conquer the Arab world. Golda Meir was portrayed in Egyptian cartoons as an ugly, blood-sucking woman with dangling breasts, messy hair, and blood dripping from her mouth. All Jews were supposed to look like that—holding bloody daggers after killing little Arab babies.
I once told a fellow journalist that in one of my travels I had met a Jew who “seemed very nice.” The answer was, “You know what happens to those who communicate with Jews outside Egypt. They come back to Egypt in a box.” That scared the hell out of me, the fact that even saying I met a nice Jew could bring such a horrific threat.
I also learned that Arab unity was just a myth and a facade. Arabs did not really like one another. At the same time that Arab media was trying to portray Arab unity to the rest of the world, endless political crises, mutual antagonisms, and media wars between Arab governments and leaders continually erupted. Arab countries fenced themselves off from one another despite their slogans and songs proclaiming Arab nationalism and unity. Egyptians were not well treated by oil-rich Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia. And when these Arabs visited Egypt, many in our country regarded them as foreigners from backward radical Muslim countries who covered their women from head to toe.
Although Saudi Arabia and most of the oil-rich Gulf nations had the economic strength to absorb large numbers of other Muslim populations, and, in fact, relied on them as workers in their oil industry, there was no inclination to accept them into their society. Herein lies a great hypocrisy that continues to this day. While the religious schools of such countries as Saudi Arabia teach the children from the poor, less-developed Muslim countries that all Muslims are brothers, they are not accepted as such. The oil-rich Arab nations are quite obsessed with maintaining “ethnic purity.” Many Egyptians who worked in Saudi Arabia and Gulf states complained that they could live and die in Saudi Arabia and never be given citizenship and always be treated as a foreigner. The Gulf War exposed such undercurrents in Kuwaiti society. Thousands of Palestinians have been living in Kuwait for several generations, providing the necessary hard work in the oil fields, but they have not been granted Kuwaiti citizenship and have no hope of achieving it. The same could be said about the modern-day Yemenis working and living in Saudi Arabia for generations. Interestingly, if those migrants had instead decided to seek work in the United States decades ago, their offspring would have been “full-blooded Americans” already. The Palestinians living within the borders of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries for generations have been denied citizenship or the rights that would include. This of course has contributed to the conflicts, stalemates, instability, and volatility of Middle East politics that continues to plague the world. That is by design.
In addition to traveling abroad, I learned about other cultures through befriending foreign students and visitors. Many times while at American University, I took American students to see historic neighborhoods and to eat at typical Egyptian restaurants so they could partake of our culture. I suppose I picked up this attitude from my mother. She loved to entertain visitors from other countries and put on elaborate feasts for them. My sister had been a foreign exchange student in America, and when some of her American friends came to visit Egypt, we entertained them in our home and showed them our country.
So, quite naturally, when through my work I met a very kind American man who was interested in Egyptian ancient history, I invited him over to meet Baba Abbas, the family friend who had functioned as a surrogate father for me as I was growing up. Baba Abbas knew a great deal about ancient Egyptian history and had many interesting books, so I wanted my acquaintance to have a chance to talk with him. As soon as the American left, Baba Abbas immediately told me that my friend was definitely a CIA spy. I felt extremely offended because he was in effect telling me that my American friend was in Egypt for evil reasons. I felt that Abbas was attempting to make me doubt my friendship with a person from another country and culture.
Baba Abbas’s paranoia over Americans and foreigners in general was not uncommon in Egypt. Young Egyptian men who befriended a foreign Western woman were warned that she could be an Israeli agent. Every foreign man was “CIA” and every foreign woman was an “Israeli agent.” Once, when my American friend and I took a taxi in Cairo, the taxi driver looked us with an accusatory expression. His eyes were saying, How dare you go out with an American infidel man? I have heard stories of taxi drivers asking Egyptian women customers who got into the cab together with a man actually asking such questions: “Who is this man? Is he your husband?” In the Muslim world your business is everyone else’s business. Even a taxi cab driver who is a total stranger feels justified at being concerned about the relationships between his female and male customers.
A friend at work had a Coptic boyfriend. Both were around twenty-six years of age. She told me of a very bad experience they’
d had in a hotel in Port Said. They had taken separate rooms in a hotel while visiting the city. But when she visited his room once, the police knocked at the door and arrested both of them. The scandal almost ruined her reputation.
That story hit home with me because I too had a Coptic boyfriend and could not imagine the horror of something like that happening to me. I knew we had to be very careful. We were planning on getting married as soon as he was finished with his military service. He was planning on converting to Islam so we could be married, and we would move to America to join his family, many of whom were already in California. But we had to put our plans on hold until he finished his military service.
My friendships, any friendships—with men or women—were suspect. Throughout my travels I noticed that in foreign countries women gathered and formed groups and organizations to work on a shared goal. Those goals could be political, recreational, or social. That did not exist in Egypt or the Arab world. Some men made decisions for their wives on whom and whom not to befriend. I often heard stories of husbands prohibiting their wives from associating with this or that woman because she looks this or that way, or did not wear proper clothes.
As a young woman, I felt that I was locked in a box, living to satisfy someone else’s criteria of morality and social behavior. I was only to befriend Egyptians, preferably Muslims and women like me, and even those friendships presented problems. For instance, we were not to mix socially with people in lower and poorer classes. That kept my choices of friendships very limited. Any relationships outside the family were supposed to be superficial and more formal.
Now They Call Me Infidel Page 11