Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  “She would turn to me and say, ‘You are going to transform this world, aren’t you? You are going to create a planet without walls and without frontiers, where the gatekeepers have off every day of the year,’” Mernissi recalled.16

  At the time, the Middle East offered few feminist role models for its women. Indeed, the groundbreaker was arguably a man.

  Qasim Amin was an Egyptian judge, cofounder of Cairo University, and an activist in Egypt’s nationalist movement. He is also considered the father of Arab feminism. He wrote The Liberation of Women in 1899 to argue that the education and liberation of women were pivotal in ending British colonial rule. In The New Woman, published in 1900, he then boldly condemned Arab societies for their attitudes and treatment of females. The book resonates with a single word—slavery.

  The woman who is forbidden to educate herself save in the duties of the servant or is limited in her educational pursuits is indeed a slave, because her natural instincts and God-given talents are subordinated…. The one who is completely veiled—arms, legs, body—so that she cannot walk, ride, breathe, see, or speak except with difficulty is to be reckoned a slave.17

  It was much harder for women to campaign for their rights. Among the early critics was Aisha Taymour, an Egyptian born in 1840 who was never able to leave the harem. She spent her life penning angry poems against the veil in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—languages otherwise largely useless since she could not leave her confinement to speak them in public.

  Zaynab Fawwaz grew up in a Lebanese village. Through self-instruction and the men she married, she eventually became a noted literary figure. In the 1890s, she wrote a 500-page volume of women’s biographies entitled Generalizations of Secluded Housewives.

  Hoda Shaarawi was married at thirteen and lived sequestered for years in an Egyptian harem, yet she dared to gradually challenge convention. She organized the first lectures for women, founded the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women, led women’s street protests against British occupation in 1919, campaigned successfully to have the age of marriage raised to sixteen, and, in 1923, dared to publicly remove her veil. Shortly before her death, in 1947, she founded the Arab Feminist Union.

  In the 1950s, Mernissi’s mother was dogged about her daughter’s future. She prodded her husband to allow Mernissi to go on to high school, then college, and next to the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work. Mernissi ended up working on a doctorate at Brandeis University, where she began to write about the Middle East’s harem culture—and, more to the point, how to break out of it.

  Along the way, Mernissi told me with a chuckle, she also got her own radio.

  Mernissi was in the last generation born into the traditional Moroccan harem and the first to break out of it. She soon emerged as one of the most audacious feminists in the Arab world.

  Mernissi has grown into a defiantly flamboyant woman. I first met her in the mid-1990s. She generates energy, speaks in long, rambling, stream-of-conscious sentences that cover many subjects in a single breath, and is usually an idea or two ahead of most people around her. She is as sure of herself as any woman I’ve ever met. She is larger-than-life physically, too. She has high cheekbones and a long leonine nose; her hair is a mass of frizzy curls, rinsed in warm, auburn henna. She dresses in the deep, bright colors of Morocco, rich dark red, burnt orange, or dark violet. She is usually adorned with big jewelry, long dangling earrings, a chunky Bedouin necklace, and large rings. She wears neither scarf nor veil.

  Her modest apartment in Rabat is filled with Berber carpets and big pillows. But when I visited her in 2006, what struck me the most were the big windows.

  “Yes,” she laughed, “I paid a lot to have this view. I love to see the sky. I have to see it, especially the moon.”

  Liberated from harem traditions, Mernissi now has the certainty of a convert. She has poured her obsession into a torrent of books that are the essential feminist primers in the Middle East. The Forgotten Queens of Islam chronicles the lives of fifteen female rulers in the medieval Islamic world—from Asia to North Africa, from Queen Arwa of Yemen to the sultanas of India and Persia—to refute misogynist claims that it is un-Islamic for women to lead. The Political Harem: The Prophet and the Women tackles the taboo subject of human sexuality.

  Her most ground-breaking works challenge traditional interpretations of women’s rights. In The Veil and the Male Elite, Mernissi offers a feminist interpretation of Islam. Most Arab governments have banned it. In it, she argues that the Prophet Mohammed actually sought equality between the sexes and gave a place to women in public life for the first time. In the period before Islam—known as the Jahaliya, or period of ignorance—females were treated brutally. They could claim no rights. They could be sold, stolen, abandoned, or claimed as booty in warfare. Female infanticide was common; unwanted baby girls could be buried alive.18

  Islam revolutionized the treatment of women with new laws. It gave females the right to inherit, divorce, own and operate businesses, have partial custody of children, and pray in mosques.

  “You can’t blame the repression of women on the Prophet,” Mernissi told me. “By comparison, he liberated women!”

  And just how were women of other faiths treated in the eighth century? she asked.

  In Women and Islam, Mernissi applied the mores of the early Islamic era to the present—with a vastly different spin than the region’s conservative sheikhs and imams.

  Women fled aristocratic tribal Mecca by the thousands to enter Medina, the Prophet’s city in the seventh century, because Islam promised equality and dignity for all, for men and women, masters and servants. Every woman who came to Medina when the Prophet was the political leader of the Muslims could gain access to full citizenship, the status of “sahabi,” companion of the Prophet. Muslims can take pride that in their language they have the feminine of that word, “sahabiyat,” women who enjoyed the right to enter into the councils of the Muslim umma [community], to speak freely to its Prophet-leader, to dispute with men, to fight for their happiness, and to be involved in the management of military and political affairs. The evidence is there in the works of religious history, in the biographical details of sahabiyat by the thousands who built Muslim society side by side with their male counterparts….

  We Muslim women can walk into the modern world with pride, knowing that the quest for dignity, democracy, and human rights, for full participation in the political and social affairs of our country, stems from no imported Western values, but is a true part of Muslim tradition.19

  Practices discriminating against women, she told me with dismissive self-confidence, are misinterpretations of the Koran and Muslim traditions added by despots, dynasties, sheikhs and sultans, fundamentalist preachers—and husbands—over the centuries.

  “You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women’s rights in one way or another and only a few that do not. They have seized on those few and ignored the rest,” Mernissi said.

  The first convert to Islam, she noted, was Khadija, a prominent businesswoman who ran trade caravans across the Middle East. She hired Mohammed, eventually proposed marriage to him, and after his revelations became a Muslim. After his death, his third wife Aisha provided roughly one-quarter of the hadith, the traditions of the Prophet that are still considered as authoritative as the Koran in guiding the way a good Muslim should live. Aisha also raised an army, gave fiery speeches, and even went to the battlefield in a litter behind a camel.

  Islam’s original egalitarian values, Mernissi insisted, are actually the best vehicle for change in the Middle East.

  “Equality isn’t a foreign idea and doesn’t need to be imported from other cultures. It is at the heart of Islam, too. Allah spoke of the two sexes in terms of total equality as believers,” she said. Muslim politicians who scream that equality for women is alien to Muslim tradition, she added, are like those who protested a century ago that banning colonial slavery was anti-Islamic.

  It does not bother her that
many Muslim scholars, past and present, interpret Islamic history and the Koran differently than she does. “Men have no monopoly on knowing what is right.”

  The first United Nations report on the status of Arab women, published in 2006, called Mernissi’s work “pioneering” and described her as a “luminary” in the Islamic world.20 Yet the same report also revealed how far Arab women still have to go. More than five decades after Morocco’s public schools were opened to girls, over sixty percent of its female population still could not read and write—even though public opinion overwhelmingly supported equal education.21

  Morocco is not an exception. Across the region, almost one half of all Arab females, almost seventy million, were illiterate in 2006—even though females in the Middle East outperform their male counterparts when given the chance. “Arab girls are the better learners,” the United Nations report concluded.

  In her indomitable way, Mernissi told me that she believes women in the Middle East have at least turned a corner.

  “It’s very simple, really. I reduce everything to information,” she said, tossing her hennaed head. “Historically, only the king and his advisers had information, and beyond that everything was rumor. But technology brought us access to information. In 1991, I got a satellite dish. It brought CNN, but it was also the year of the first Arab satellite stations, and suddenly all the boundaries between private and public, between palace and street, and all the other dichotomies vanished.

  “In A Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade told the stories at night, as the daytime was the period of men’s power. Women had influence only in the night. Now, Scheherazade can speak at any time! There’s no more separation of day and night. And the number of women on television—it’s amazing,” she continued.

  “The change that took centuries in the West took only a decade in the Third World because of technological advances. And no one can stop it. When I brought a fax here from Paris, I put a scarf on the machine when the telephone guy came to put in a line. But six months later, the government couldn’t ban the fax.

  “You know,” she mused, “I recently asked the young woman working for me what she likes to do as a pastime. She told me she listens to tapes to learn French. She was almost illiterate, but with technology she is becoming self-taught. She chats on the Internet.

  “Women ten years younger than I am,” Mernissi said, “are from another planet!”

  Family harems may have largely disappeared, but the rules that spawned them have not. Most Middle East countries still have two sets of separate and often conflicting laws. One set governs society; the other dictates to women.

  After it became independent in 1956, Morocco adopted many French laws inherited from colonial rule. Article Eight of its constitution, for example, stipulates that men and women “enjoy equal political rights.” In 1957, King Mohammed V also unveiled his eldest daughter—though not his wife—in public to signal that the next generation of women need not be hidden away.

  At the same time, however, the new government passed a separate set of laws to codify traditions that had governed private life for centuries. It was the king’s compromise: He adopted certain civil and criminal laws to modernize. But under pressure from traditional clerics who wanted a complete restoration of Islamic law once the French left, the king also agreed to enshrine in the law Muslim cultural practices about personal life.

  In Morocco, the second set of laws is called the Moudawana, or Code of Personal Status. It relegated females to haremlike status.

  The two sets of laws meant that women could vote under the constitution, but remained lifelong minors under the Moudawana. Fathers, husbands, brothers, and even sons were their legal guardians. Females needed written permission to open a business, obtain a passport, or leave the country. A woman could be divorced at the whim of her husband, without a reason, by simple public repudiations without going to court—and even without her knowledge. An unmarried woman who gave birth was sentenced to six months in jail, and the baby was put in an orphanage.

  Often referred to simply as “family law,” the Moudawana has been the biggest legal impediment to empowering women.

  In the 1980s, an iconoclastic Moroccan dissident named Latifa Jbabdi decided to take on the Moudawana. It became an epic battle. I first heard about Jbabdi in a footnote on page thirty-seven in Mernissi’s memoir. I finally met her in 2006. She is a striking woman, tall and big-boned but largely unadorned. Her jaw is strong; her brown eyes are piercing. She dresses with handsome femininity. She was in a blue suit with soft pinstripes, and a silk blouse. She was wearing no makeup and no jewelry beyond small stud earrings, and her short, brown hair fell in a natural wave. She, too, lived in Rabat.

  If Mernissi is phase one, then Jbabdi is phase two.

  Jbabdi started out as a communist in the 1970s. As a teenager, she organized strikes by high school students and factory workers.

  “We dreamed of revolution,” she told me. “We wanted a rupture with the past. It was the seventies—the traumatic time after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and during the Vietnam War and dissent worldwide.

  “We even raised money for Angela Davis,” she chuckled.

  Jbabdi read Lenin and Sartre and, for a while, attended meetings of a secret communist cell. “I was looking for a magic formula to change the world. But this group of old men was too Soviet. When it rained in Moscow, they took out their umbrellas in Morocco,” she said, laughing again. “They focused on the elites. It was not what I was looking for to help the working class.” She soon dropped out and joined an emerging group of leftists.

  Jbabdi spent more than a decade being tailed, harassed, or hunted by Morocco’s security forces for her dissident activities and strike mobilizations. Once she hid in a Christian cemetery for twelve days, relying on a graveyard worker to bring her bread and tea. Another time she hid in the mountains.

  “We lived like wild animals,” she told me, matter-of-factly.

  Eventually captured, she was in and out of prison from 1977 until the early 1980s. Occasionally, she was detained preemptively until a protest strike was over. Her worst stint was six months in Casablanca’s notorious prison. Torture was routine; she was blindfolded the entire time.

  “They erased completely your femininity. They gave each of us a man’s name,” she recalled. “I was called Saeed.”

  Jbabdi was released on medical grounds for heart trouble; she received a pacemaker while still in her twenties. She remained on parole until she was granted an amnesty in 1990.

  As she continued to push for political change, however, Jbabdi again grew frustrated with her political allies.

  “There was a generation of young women born on the eve of Morocco’s independence or shortly afterwards. We really believed we were equal, but even progressive parties and unions weren’t open to the issue of women’s rights,” she told me. “They all proved to be misogynist.

  “That,” she added, “is when we came up with our own initiative.”

  In 1987, Jbabdi founded the Union of Feminine Action to confront the taboo of family law.

  “You can’t have a constitution that says we can be elected to parliament and decide the direction of the country, but under the Moudawana we have to have a guardian and can’t make basic decisions on the most intimate issues of our lives,” she told me.

  In the Middle East, where mosque and state are still deeply intertwined, the Moudawana is the essence of the conflict between modernity and tradition, secular and religious. Unlike civil or criminal law, family law is based on interpretations of the Koran, which is quite specific on subjects ranging from a woman’s menstrual cycle to suckling a baby and the taboo of incest. Conservative clerics argue that, as sacred text, the Moudawana cannot be altered because it is the literal word of God.

  The Moudawana’s holy origin has made the status of women the most intractable issue of change in the Middle East.

  Jbabdi had to start from scratch. The Union of Feminine Action launched a newsletter
that evolved into a magazine. It lobbied lawmakers. It held workshops for women in cities, villages, and shantytowns across Morocco to explain that poverty, domestic abuse, illiteracy, and dependence on men for the most basic decisions were tied to the Moudawana.

  “Illiterate women and mothers and housewives came to our meetings in the poorest homes of a shantytown, and when we explained how the Moudawana ruled their lives, a lot of them started knocking on doors too,” Jbabdi told me. “Many became even more active than we were.”

  To prove growing support for their cause, the movement launched a petition to demand change. By 1990, it had accumulated one million signatures—forty percent of them from men.

  But the petition also sparked the first serious backlash. Conservative clerics preached against the Union of Feminine Action in mosques, appealed to the prime minister to ban it and punish its members, called for police to block the women’s activities—and even issued a fatwa condemning Jbabdi to death.

  “We were getting death threats all the time,” she said. “It’s hard to make progress when you’re worried about your life.”

  In 1992, King Hassan intervened. In a nationwide television broadcast, he acknowledged that women had legitimate complaints, agreed to meet with them, and pledged to amend the Moudawana.

  He also admonished the clerics, “Do not mix religion and politics.”

  A year later—after consulting with an all-male panel of senior clerics—the king announced reforms. They were few and modest. Among them: Brides had to consent to marriage. Husbands needed a wife’s permission to take other wives.

  More important was the principle. “The Moudawana was no longer so sacred. It could be debated and changed, like any other law,” Jbabdi explained. “We had opened the door.”

  Peaceful change rarely comes with a single act or decision, particularly in the Middle East and particularly on women’s rights.

  Jbabdi persevered, as did a burgeoning array of women’s groups that had sprung up among the middle and lower classes. She also adapted her tactics. As a former communist, Jbabdi initially blended Marxist ideas, the tactics of Western feminists, and the principles of international laws, including the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.