Beyond the Veil
Page 10
PART TWO
Anomic Effects of Modernization on Male–Female Dynamics
4
The Modern Situation: Moroccan Data
I have outlined a theoretical model of the traditional Muslim concept of female sexuality based on Ghazali’s ideas of Muslim marriage. I now would like to use his description of the Muslim family not to evaluate the historical changes in that family, but to understand the present situation by contrasting it with an ideal type. I will compare Ghazali’s ideal family with Moroccan reality as revealed by the data I have collected, in order to illustrate the trends shaping modern male-female dynamics.
I collected my data in Morocco during the summer of 1971. At first my main concern was how to go about investigating the changes occurring in male-female relations. I casually asked about fifty people (roughly half males and half females), ‘What do you think is the main change that has taken place in the family and in women’s situation in the last decades?’
Almost everyone I interviewed mentioned, at one point or another, sexual desegregation. The idea was presented in different ways: ‘women used to be protected’, ‘women didn’t use to go everywhere’, ‘women used to stay at home’, ‘there used to be more order, women were strictly controlled’. But the underlying idea was always the same. So I decided to concentrate on the dimension of male-female dynamics in which the changes seem to have been particularly noticeable the use of space by the sexes.
I wanted to get two kinds of data, some describing family life in both traditional and modern settings (where the wife holds a job outside the home or has free access to the outside world) and some describing the present tensions in Moroccan society relating to sexual interaction. I opted for lengthy interviews with women to get the first kind of data. For the second, I used letters from a religious counselling service on Moroccan state television which receives hundreds of letters every day from citizens with problems. I was allowed to borrow 402 of these letters.
The Interviews With Women
Because of the theoretical nature of my research and the scope of what I wanted to investigate – sexual desegregation – I decided to limit my field of observation as much as possible. I selected data concerning one numerically tiny stratum of the Moroccan population: the urban petty-bourgeoisie. Despite its size, this grouping has played an important political role in other Arab-Muslim societies and is likely to do the same in Morocco.
I conducted about a hundred interviews, lasting twenty to thirty minutes each, with women selected according to categories pertinent to my research (traditional women, modern women), before proceeding to in-depth interviews. These, conducted during the summer of 1971, lasted between two and six hours each and required between two and six sessions depending on circumstances (presence of in-laws, noise level, mood of the person being interviewed, presence of adult women able to look after small children during the interview, etc.). The categories ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ cover a range of differences in age, education, employment, and so on. Tables 1 and 2 below (see p. 104) list some differences between traditional and modern women and supply the age and marital status of the fourteen women with whom I conducted in-depth interviews; the jobs of the modem women and of the men supporting the traditional women are also given.
In order to examine the trends of modernization more closely I tried to interview mothers (traditional) with their daughters (modern). I succeeded only four times in realizing this combination. The women concerned are indicated in the tables by the same last initial. The interviews were non-directed and lengthy, conducted in the normal rhythm of a ‘gossip’ exchange.
I concentrated on just a few interviews as sources for quotation in order to increase readers’ familiarity with the individuals described. Within each chapter I used information from one interview as much as possible. For example, the interviewee coded ‘Fatiha F.’ was the main source for the mothers-in-law and not only because Fatiha is a wonderful conversationalist – also because the contradictions of the relation mother-son-wife reached almost archetypal dimensions in her case.
A systematic reading of (or rather listening to) the tapes of the interviews revealed two major differences between the lives of traditional and modern women. For the traditional women sexual segregation had been very strict all their lives. For the modern women sexual segregation had been strict only during puberty, when they were made aware of the importance of their behaviour to the family honour. The modern women did not feel that sexual. segregation was an important factor in their lives now.
The other major difference between the traditional and modern women was their perception of who was the most important person in their daily lives, which person they had the most intense relationship with. For the traditional women it was their mother-in-law. For the modern women it was their husband.
That these are the major differences suggests a link between the institution of sexual segregation and the important role in the family traditionally accorded the husband’s mother. But I had no clue as to the nature of the link until I had done a content analysis of the letters to the counselling service.
The Counselling Letters
The four hundred letters analysed are a sample of the thousands sent to a counselling service financed and run by the government. It is broadcast daily on the national network, which has, besides entertainment programmes, many community-oriented projects. For example, divorces pronounced by judges on grounds of desertion are announced on the radio, thereby disseminating news to a large number of illiterate Moroccans who would otherwise not have access to this information.
Information On Women Interviewed
TABLE 1
TRADITIONAL WOMEN
MODERN WOMEN
Literacy
Illiterate
Literate
Job
Work within the home
Work outside the home
Sexual Segregation
Very strict
Very loose
Marriage
Arranged by the parents
Woman choses own partner
Age
Born before World War II
Born after World War II (when the nationalists’ influence opened up schools for girls)
TABLE 2
TRADITIONAL WOMEN
Marital Status
Age
Occupation of the Male Supporting Her
Halima H.
Widowed
60
Son–Civil Servant
Hayat H.
Married
40
Husband–Civil Servant
Fatiha F.
Married
45
Husband–Civil Servant
Kenna
Married
50
Husband–Retired Civil Servant
Tamou T.
Widowed
48
Brother–Teacher
Khata
Married
48
Husband–Works in electric company
Salama
Widowed
60
Son–Agricultural Technician
Maria M.
Repudiated
55
Son–Army Officer
MODERN WOMEN
Marital Status
Age
Her Occupation
Faiza F.
Married
22
Laboratory Assistant
Mona M.
Married
26
Teacher
Tahra T.
Single
25
Medical Student (works part-time
Tama
Repudiated
30
Public Relations Officer
Lamia
Repudiated
30
Accountant
Safia
Single
25
Secretary
Cou
nselling has always been important in Muslim life because of the freedom accorded to the individual. There is no clergy, no institutionalized intermediary between the individual and God. Every sensible adult is responsible for his thoughts and deeds. To be a decent believer requires more than anything else the intention to be so – that is, the intention to subordinate one’s acts to the divine law. Whenever the individual doubts his knowledge of divine law, he is supposed to seek guidance from people trained in the matter. The Qadi Moulay Mustapha Alaoui, whose services are free of charge and delivered by radio, is probably the most popular counsellor in the country. He usually groups letters by subject and tries to answer one specific theme each day. The themes emerging in the letters determined their codification and content analysis.
Because of the Arabic formula that heads most letters – ‘From Mr. or Mrs. so and so, from the town of so and so’ – the sex and residence of the letter-writers were usually identifiable. The letters also frequently mention age and marital status. An analysis of the sex, geographical distribution, marital status, and age of the letter-writers appears in Table 3 (see page 107). Whenever the handwriting was too difficult to decipher or the information was lacking, the letter was coded blank.
The coding for the content analysis was suggested by the themes that emerged from the letters. The majority dealt with problems relating to the family. The way I coded the content of the letters is illustrated by some examples of the variables I listed under the heading ‘Pre-Marital Tensions’.
VARIABLE 9: The youth’s decision to marry
Falling in love
Wanting to marry the person of one’s choice
Combination of 1 and 2
VARIABLE 10: The parents’ stand
Parents interfere in offspring’s choice
Parents openly oppose the offspring’s choice
Parents force the offspring to marry a person of the parents’ choice
Combination of 1 and 2
Combination of 1 and 3
VARIABLE 14: Parents’ response to children’s marital plans
Curse
Threaten to curse
Open conflict, son-family
Open conflict, daughter-family
As is evident from the kinds of themes I found, a controversial question in modern Morocco is who chooses the marital partner. Is it the youth or the parents? According to the letters, parents think it their right to choose their offspring’s partner in marriage, and the offspring think it their right to choose for themselves. The traditional Muslim ideas about marriage are in direct conflict with the aspirations and desires of the young generations.
My data suggests, and I believe, that Islam’s concepts of female sexuality and women’s contribution to society (as I outlined them in Part One) still determine the primary features of the Muslim family. The role played by sexual segregation, arranged marriage, the mother’s importance in her son’s life, all seem to be part of a system that discourages heterosexual couple relations even within the conjugal unit.
Modernization, on the other hand, encourages desegregation, independent choice of marriage partner, and the mobility of the nuclear family. That this open clash of ideologies leads to confusion and anxiety is apparent both in the counselling letters and in the interviews with women.
My modest aim in this research is not to irritate the reader by claiming to have uncovered the truth about the new male-female dynamic that has emerged in modern Moroccan society. I leave truth to those who seek certainty. My own feeling is that we move forward faster and live better when we seek doubt. If I manage to induce readers to doubt their prejudices and stereotypes about relations between the sexes, then I will have succeeded beyond my hopes. The qualitative analysis is not intended to flood the reader with statistical truths, which are in any case at anyone’s disposal at the offices of the census department in Rabat. No, qualitative analysis ought to have the opposite effect: not to fortify your certitudes but to destroy them. It is understandable that a good number of walking dead may not appreciate that.
Information About Letter Writers
TABLE 3
SEX (indicated in 369 letters)
Number
Percentage
Female Writers
160
43
Male Writers
209
57
GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGIN (indicated in 298 letters)
Number
Percentage
Writers from Big Cities
210
70
Writers from Elsewhere
88
30
MARITAL STATUS (indicated in 175 letters)
Single
46
Widowed
4
Married
48
Marriage Broken (Unspecified)
2
AGE (indicated in 107 letters)
Teenagers (Under 20)
45
Young Adults (Between 20 and 25)
39
Adults (Over 25)
8
Elderly (When the writers describe themselves thus)
8
Moreover, as a researcher, whether in the domain of theory or in the analysis of particular material, I claim the inalienable right to make mistakes. Just as readers have the right to disagree, to draw different conclusions. The objective is to arouse discussion about our behaviour toward the other sex, and about the political implications of that behaviour. By ‘political’ I do not mean the democratic infrastructure (how parliaments, parties, and trade unions, for example, allow for the spread of democracy); I have in mind rather the relations we establish with the people closest to us, with whom we share the greatest interests and weave the most intense and most intimate human relation possible – in other words, the people with whom we share domestic space. It is quite inconceivable for a human being who does not cherish democratic relations in a domain considered non-political, like the household (in which life’s essential functions are enacted: eating, sleeping, love-making), to seek it in the high ground of democracy, the party cell or the parliamentary chamber.
It is essential that the nature of democratic male-female relations be clarified. This basic question concerns all of us and is particularly vital for me, a woman living in a Muslim society.
5
Sexual Anomie As Revealed by the Data
Relations between the sexes seem to be going through a period of anomie, of deep confusion and absence of norms. The traditional norms governing relations between the sexes are violated every day by a growing majority of people without their incurring legal or social sanctions. One such tradition is sexual segregation, the systematic prevention of interaction between men and women not related to each other by either marriage or blood. Sexual segregation divides all social space into male and female spaces.
The overlap between male and female areas is limited and regulated by a host of rituals. When a man invites a friend to share a meal at his house, he knocks on his own door and in a loud voice asks the women ‘to make way’ (‘amlu triq). The women then run to hide in dark corners, leaving the courtyard free to be crossed by the stranger. The guest will remain with his host, seated in the men’s room. If he needs to go to the toilet, the ritual of ‘amlu triq is staged again, preventing the taboo situation of interaction between strangers of different sexes.
Similar rituals surround the trespassing of women into male spaces, which until recently was limited to a very few occasions such as a visit to a saint’s tomb, to the public baths and to relatives at births, deaths and marriages. The veil is an expression of the invisibility of women on the street, a male space par excellence.
According to my interviews, sexual segregation was seen as a natural part of life by women in their fifties, but merely as an option for women now in their thirties. Women’s right to traditionally male spaces is far more institutionalized or even accepted, whether at the level of laws or underlying ideolog
y. The anomie stems from the gap between ideology and reality, for more and more women are using traditionally male spaces, going without the veil, and determining their own lives. The anomie created by the fissures between ideology, belief, and practice is well illustrated in the following letter received by the religious counselling service.
CASABALANCA, 18 MAY 1971
LETTER 88
To his highness, Professor Moulay Mustapha Alaoui
Sir,
Nowadays the majority of people go to swim in the sea, they go to beaches during the summer months. Men, women, boys, and girls meet and mix together. They also mix with Christians and Jews, everyone looking at everybody else’s nudity. Is this permissible in a Muslim society? I asked this question a long time ago. I did not hear your answer on the radio. Could it be that you did not receive it?