The Greeks created a word that is difficult to excel to describe this mortal hole: they called it Barathra. It was among the Greeks that the aberrant, pernicious coupling of Eros and Thanatos was born. So the most essential part of feminine values, that which implies hollowness, the cavity that complements the male convexity, is rejected with horror. . . . A devaluation of woman inevitably follows.21
One is reminded of Ferenczi’s penetrating analysis of the notion of the sea in his celebrated essay Thalassa. Woman, like the sea, is a gulf that swallows everything up. To be swallowed up by one’s wife is in one way or another to return to the mother’s womb and the profound meaning of the male libidinal drive is the desire to return to the mother.
Today Arab woman is striving to renounce the illusory kingdom of the mothers and is aspiring to an affirmative, positive rule, rather than a mythopoeic one. She no longer wishes to be that derided, ‘broken pisspot’ that the males of the Maghreb have so often called her. She is determined to affirm her ability to give. Live! That is the rallying cry of Arab women today. The emancipation of Arab women is now situated on the only valid terrain, that of sexuality. I give love, therefore I am. Coeo ergo sum. Thus the Arab woman is rediscovering, but to her own advantage, that ethics of experienced pleasure, that sensation of existing through love that the Arabic language admirably terms wijdān.
And yet there is a curious ambiguity inherent in the concept of female emancipation, as if the partners could be dissociated from the question, as if one could emancipate oneself alone! As if Arab man were not alienated by his own masculinity! Authentic female emancipation requires male emancipation.
The sexual liberation of woman requires the liberation of man. That is the price to be paid if the harmony of the couple – and indeed that of society – is to be achieved. On this very precise point attitudes and motivations are very divergent, stretching from a very strict conservatism to a futuristic, avant-garde modernism. For Arabo-Muslim society is still largely male-worshipping, in essence and in its appearances, in its deep structures and in its superficial manifestations. At best women are still perceived as subsidiary creatures. How could it be otherwise, when the traditional models and the models imported for Europe co-operate in maintaining the primacy of the male and when the deep causes that have produced the largely anti-Islamic status ‘accorded’ women continue to be felt, perhaps even more so than in the past?
Women’s true emancipation cannot be total, any more than men’s can. And it is at every level that the battle of modernity must be fought. A modernity that confines itself to one level of everyday experience is no more than a pseudo-modernity, that is to say, a mystification, an alibi, a diversion to avoid true modernization. Indeed since Marx and Freud we know that, from a certain point of view, productive labour is the result of the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle. One may even go further and admit that the more repression there is, the more necessary it is to transform the vicissitudes of instinct into socially productive reserves and, ultimately, the more labour there is. In the end the organization of social life and the civilization that springs from it take over our instincts and canalize our vital energies. In these circumstances, it is to be feared that a liberation that is only sexual may be to the detriment of economic and social liberation. Sexuality would then be merely subterfuge, a flight from the responsibilities that face the Arab conscience at grips with the redoubtable problems of poverty, ignorance, disease, underdevelopment, that is to say, independence and survival.
By demanding a new sexual ethics, Arab women want quite simply to change their function. By demanding a different function in society they are changing by the same token the group’s view of the world. Their determination to emerge into social life brings with it a radical restructuring of it. So the work of liberation is the effective way followed by tens of thousands of Arab women who find in it a means of living positively and to the full. Other transformations are following the same course: the nuclear family, family planning, free choice of spouse, monogamy, divorce at the instigation of the woman. . . . All this is a serious threat to the status of men, without however resulting in the necessary radical rearrangements. This is because the privileges attached to the male condition are not only sexual or matters of prestige. They are political, economic, financial. The sexual exploitation of women forms part, as we have seen, of a more general, wider system of exploitation. How can a revolution be only sexual and avoid the problems of a Revolution that must embrace the sexual and the economic, the political and the cultural? When confronted by universal opposition, a single response is valid: total, permanent Revolution. If this is forgotten, one eventually confuses true and false revolution.
Najib Maḥfūdh shows in his magnificent trilogy that the relation between the sexes in a monopolistic society (mujtama‘ iqtā‘ī) can only be a relation of consumption (‘alāqa istihlākiyya). Bain al-qaṣrain’s principal hero, Aḥmad Abdeljawād, envisages the relationship between the sexes only as a pure relation of pleasure. As Ghālī Shukrī, who has appreciated how correct and penetrating these analyses are, says:
Man has deprived woman of her will, and therefore of her being and of her existence, when the social order deprives her of the means of realizing herself and proving her existence. . . . In a monopolistic society the relationship between Aḥmad Abdeljawād and his wife can be no more than a relationship of consumption, since she is no more than a woman, an appetizing sweetmeat. Even the norms of the beautiful derive from this principle. When the woman is reified, she can no longer be valued except in terms of weight. . . . Weight is not a measure of being, but of the body. So, in a monopolistic society, the beauty of a woman is measured in terms of fat. . . . The most beautiful woman is the fattest, the one who has most flesh on her. Ultimately she is something one eats, sucks, consumes.22
We find here a fundamental feature of oral eroticism. It is no accident if it re-emerges here in the midst of our modernity. Rather it has the permanence of a model. In fact, women wish to change their function. Without radical changes in social structures, a woman still cannot do so: in the eyes of her male partner she has not yet ceased to be what she has always been. The image that others have of us is not without importance!
Najib Maḥfūdh’s hero, Aḥmad Abdeljawād, says as much. Of course, he is only giving voice to a very widespread opinion.
‘If you love so many women,’ an old sheikh told him, ‘why don’t you do as your father did and marry twenty times and never take the path of disobedience to God?’ Abdeljawād replied with a giggle: ‘My father was almost sterile, though he married again and again. He only produced me, but the patrimony was dispersed between myself and the four wives who were in his possession when he died – not to mention the innumerable food pensions he had to hand out to left and right during his lifetime. But I’m a father of three sons and two daughters. I can’t allow myself to have more wives and dissipate what little God has given me. Let’s not forget, O sheikh, that the beauties of today are the concubines of yesterday whose buying and selling God tolerated. And after all God is clement and pardons our sins.’23
Abdeljawād certainly stresses the economic basis of sexual life. Modern financial difficulties mean that one must keep to one wife so as not to reduce still further an already small patrimony. But a single wife does not mean a single sexual partner!
The obsession with the anti-wife has survived until modern times and the sexual pseudo-liberation of man is dependent on her. How far we are from the ‘authentic’ revolution of true sexual emancipation! What a divorce there is between the sexes on this point! If there is a rupture between the generations of women, the continuity between the generations of men is only too real.
Najib Maḥfūdh saw this very clearly in his fine trilogy. One day, Abdeljawād’s son, Yāsīn, is in an hotel of assignation when he recognizes the voice of his own father. Yāsīn, who sees women in exactly the same way as his father, is delighted to hear him singing a
nd dancing in female company in the room next door. The son discovers the truth about his father. He is overcome by a feeling of great joy. He forgets everything except his own joy – as if he had just made the best discovery in his life. He is overcome by enormous love and admiration for his father. And he tells himself: ‘Congratulations, father! Today I have really discovered you! Today is the day of your rebirth within me. What a wonderful day! What a wonderful father! Before now I was an orphan. . . . I am proud of you.’24 It is no accident if the son communicates with the father precisely in an hotel of assignation, since it is the anti-wife, much more than the mother, who creates strong, deep links between the generations of men.
And Yāsīn makes the same discovery when, twenty years later, he is to find himself, once again, cheek by jowl with his youngest brother in another brothel. And there, too, beyond the generation gap, there is the same type of communion, around the anti-wife.25
Najib Maḥfūdh’s fiction is a wonderful illustration of a fact too often ignored, namely, that the failure of women’s liberation derives from the quasi-morbid inability of the male partner to throw off the mirage of the anti-wife and to rediscover the fundamental unity of the eternal feminine. This is unavoidable since sexual liberation cannot have the same significance for both sexes. What for the woman is a refusal becomes for the man all too easily a fight. Arab man is still obsessed by the anti-wife whom he seeks in every possible form: dancer, film star, singer, prostitute, passing tourist, neighbour, etc. The dissociation of the ludic and the serious examined above still continues, then, and acts as a stumbling block to the sexual emancipation not only of women but also of men. The Arab male, apart from a few exceptions, of course, is still not ready to give up his will to power. Despite appearances to the contrary, male imperialism still continues to maintain almost intact the essential element that is the cause of women’s problems: sexual dimorphism.
As a consequence the Arab woman who adopts modern ways all too often merely changes her role and emancipation too frequently consists in exchanging the role of wife for that of anti-wife. After all, what does everyone dream of, if not money, pleasure and joy? Does the ultimate in emancipation and sexual liberation amount to being free to have relations of pleasure with men?
The ethical reference to the framework of nikāḥ implied respect for a number of values including purity, sensuality, justice and marital affection. That reference and those values are being lost. Sexuality is today less and less part of an overall system whose coherence and limits I have tried to examine. It used to belong to a totalizing, lyrical vision of fife, to an ethic of marital affection. However limited the practical import of the Islamic ethic may have been, it did at least exist!
Today sexuality runs the risk of finding itself increasingly deprived of any reference. Furthermore it often takes the form of a protest against the system of traditional values regarded as archaic, antiquated, inflexible, worm-eaten and dead. Among our students and young people generally, it would seem that the seriousness of sexuality is increasingly denied and that more and more an ‘ethic’ of amusement is taking its place. Sexual inhibitions are less and less operant, it is true, but the plenitude of a meaning to be found behind an act for which one assumes responsibility is being more and more lost. The sexual act is becoming facile, brief, straightforward and joyless.
For many, western eroticism, endlessly turned out by the powerful media of mass communication, is becoming an exclusive end in itself. Striptease, advertising, nudity, ‘sexy’ clothes, pop music, drugs . . . this is the new imported ‘ideal’ offered by modern ‘civilization’ which, far from affirming sexuality, is desacralizing it and killing it. We should ponder the words of Vladimir Jankélévitch:
Be in no doubt, the overwhelming, suffocating eroticism into which we are being plunged and which serves, like the motorcar, holidays, bars, to stupefy mankind, that eroticism is neither a cause nor a consequence of the aridity of modern life, it is that aridity itself. . . . Where there is no joy, no sincerity, no passionate conviction, no spontaneity, there is room for the industrialists of eroticism. Eroticism and violence are the two alibis of a time profoundly deprived of love that finds in sexual excitement some pitiful compensation for its incurable aridity.26
A new danger lies in wait for the Arabo-Muslim societies: the ethical void, cretinization through sex, systematic infantilization. The negation of traditional references is certainly a necessary stage in our history, but the negation of those references is still a reference. The great risk is precisely non-reference. The easy models of sexual behaviour, imported from North America or Europe, relentlessly diffused through all the mass media, do not help us to find much meaning in sexuality. And our young should reflect on the remarkable words of Henry Winthrop:
True freedom and personal authenticity require intellectual and moral depth. . . . An authentic morality, sexual as well as non-sexual is always an obligation that one imposes upon oneself. One must regard others as subjects and not as objects. The new sexual freedom and the cult of nudity are a way of escaping from our responsibilities towards our fellow human beings and of avoiding I-Thou relationships in human affairs. The new sexuality is above all egocentric. . . . The sexual partners are often, strictly speaking, strangers in the night, and very often in broad daylight too. But, above all, in this new sexuality, the partner is regarded as an object, not as a subject.27
Of course the sexual crisis in the Arabo-Muslim countries is part of a world-wide sexual crisis. For many Arab men and women this is a factor for liberation. But it is to be feared that for many others it is rather a flight into sexuality.
In so far as the integration of Eros in the social is no longer occurring either according to traditional norms thought to be out of date or in terms of adjustments internal to the social structures, themselves in crisis and transition, in so far as imitation and acculturation are defeating any serious reference to the meaning of sexuality, one may well speak of a veritable ‘counter-socialization’ of Eros. By that I mean that the exercise of the flesh is no longer a prayer, a quest for harmony, a desire for affirmation. It is an alibi, a distraction, a soporific, in short a flight. Traditional society exalted love in mythifying it. In the delicate phase that our society is at present going through, it is to be feared that ‘modern love’ and ‘liberated sexuality’ may turn out to be no more than pure mystification. Studying the question objectively and without prejudice we must admit that the vision of the world that accorded such a place to eroticism can do so only by ceasing to give political, economic, social and cultural problems the importance that they deserve. This is already largely the case in industrial societies, where mass eroticism has lost its attractions. It is also to be feared that sexual pseudo-liberation is ah too often for Arab men and women merely a way of avoiding their other responsibilities in public life. An authentic liberation must not be exclusive or lose sight of the intense effort that must be made with a view to restoring the true values of labour. Sexuality is certainly an important aspect in any revolutionary enterprise. In no way has one the right to reduce them to one another.
Authentically understood, the sexual revolution to which our young people legitimately aspire has the merit of drawing attention to the need to produce new cultural, ethical and religious values. But a flight into Islam is no more salutary than a flight into sexuality. The Muslim world is also undergoing a religious crisis: a crisis of faith in the first instance. To a youth disillusioned, confused, humiliated, poor, hungry and sick, present-day Islam does not seem to bring the right message. This is because, unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam has made little use of the enriching, innovating contribution of the human sciences, linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, etc. Islamology is proving incapable of providing adequate spiritual nourishment. Islamic pastoral care has remained practically unchanged for centuries. It is still content, at best, to condemn ‘disorders’, ‘anarchy’ and ‘atheism’, or to anathematize heretics. The renewal of Islamic the
ology is today a prime requirement. It is the objective study of the Arabo-Muslim societies that brings out this need for elucidation of the religious. For, on the contrary, there is a flight into religion, just as there is a correlative flight into sexuality.
There is a total crisis in the relations of the Arab with himself, with nature and God. The Arabo-Muslim societies caught up in processes of more or less rapid social change, just emerging from colonial domination, still in the grip of imperialism and Zionism, still waging an inadequate and uncertain battle against underdevelopment, constitute a model of what Georges Gurvitch called ‘effervescent’ societies. They are subject to centrifugal and centripetal movements of destructuration and restructuration at every level of life, political, economic, or socio-cultural.
It is in this precise context that we must situate the sexual crisis and the religious crisis; both merely reflect an anomic situation. Everything is measured in terms of explosion: the demographic and the urban, the educational and the liberalization of morals. After being for so long the world of moderation, the Arabo-Muslim world has become the world of excess; excess of need, excess of life, excess of the social, excess of being. There is a crisis, a total crisis of the Arabo-Muslim consciousness. And it is this crisis that is indicated by the difficulties experienced by sexuality in defining itself in a context in which modernism is apprehended both as a refusal of an unabolishable yesterday and as a determination to live a tomorrow that is rather too slow in coming. J. Berque has already analysed this ‘rupture of traditional man’28 and that opposition, not unfortunately always dialectical, of an ancient, organic qadīm and a historical, new jadīd.
In that search for lost norms there is a quest for the authentic on the basis of the potentialities offered by a modernity that conceals within itself a thousand and one new resources. The exploitation of nature, rational modes of production, aesthetic creation, the apprehension of others, the understanding of the world, of life and of existence, all this is transformed by contemporary science and philosophy. . . . And certainly for many the future is already emerging on the horizon, the light at the end of the tunnel is already visible.
Sexuality in Islam Page 30
