The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes

  So these customs go way back; and once they were sanctified by holy writ, they took on authority and rigor. Yet even sacred texts are not immutable: “There has been much breaking and bending of Quranic admonitions throughout Muslim history.”24 And indeed, women’s status in Arab lands does show changes backward and forward over time—now more liberal, now reactionary. One reads of exceptional figures: queens and princesses who have reigned, even governed (also political leaders such as Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, and Tansu Çiller in Turkey); or of “liberated” women who have lived in the West and brought new attitudes home with them, often to the shock of their more conventional compatriots. One even hears of lords and masters mocked in the privacy of the harem (what is privacy good for?); and one buys a new kind of intimate, best-selling autobiography recounting the abuses of male domination (a call for help and a school for scandal).25

  The historian Bernard Lewis, among others, tells us that “the steady march of [Muslim] women into the public arena, as important players in the economy and increasingly important players in politics, is…irreversible and of enormous significance.”26 Women have the vote now in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran, and even the Ayatollah Khomeini, fundamentalist though he was, never suggested that women should lose that right.27

  I am skeptical. I don’t know what constitutes “important players.” Nor would I anticipate an early transformation of structures that rest on the male-female divider. Halim Barakat, Arab sociologist and novelist, while acknowledging the subordinate status of women, tells us that “change toward the emancipation of women must [will] begin by transforming the prevailing socioeconomic structures to eliminate all forms of exploitation and domination.”28 (If that’s what it takes, we’re talking about the millennium.) Nor would I rest too much hope on the right to vote: for Arab politicians, especially the more conservative, the women’s vote is a useful electoral card. The vote, yes; power, no.

  Arab Muslim men, it seems to me, have been largely unmoved by these small innovations and pockets of resistance. For one thing, the lessons are blurred by the readiness of many (most?) women to accept and defend the old ways.* For another, gender privileges will not be taken; they must be surrendered. It is male opinion and behavior that matter (the men run the show), and their quasi-unanimous sense of superiority is little affected by occasional feminist challenges. The men will not be converted or intimidated by miniskirts in Beirut, only scandalized and confirmed in their sense of women’s dire, demonic corporality.†

  The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent,** but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men‡ One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment. One cannot call male children “Pasha,” or, as in Iran, tell them that they have a golden penis, without reducing their need to learn and do.29 To be sure, any society will have its achievers no matter what, if only because it has its own division of tasks and spoils. But it cannot compete with other societies that ask performance from the full pool of talent.

  In general, the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity. To be sure, other societies depreciate women and adulate men. No one is pure. Think of Latin America with its machismo, or Japan with its male bonding and fatherless homes.30 Even the so-called advanced societies of the West can do better in this regard. But if we view gender relations as a continuum running from nothing to full equality, the Muslim countries, and especially the Arab Muslim countries, would bottom out the scale. The women are humiliated from birth. The message: their very existence is a disaster, their body a sin.31 The boys learn that they can hit their sisters, older and younger, with impunity—as I have seen one do, in public, before the eyes of his unprotesting mother. The sister did not even defend herself. Bad for the girls, but just as bad for the boys.

  Is such a failing somehow inherent in Islam? No. Islam is multifarious. Global in its reach, it embraces a diversity of societies (and parts of societies) and cultures. It also contains within its sacred writings many lessons, some of them contradictory, which can be used to almost any purpose. The political scientist Fouad Ajami reminds us how, when the Muslim Brotherhood condemned Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, the Egyptian government promptly got the University of al-Azhar in Cairo to declare the treaty in harmony with Islamic law.32 Interpretation varies, then, with time, place, and constituency.

  Even so, one must not niggle or rule out generalization. This is a favorite line of defense by Muslim apologists, embarrassed by laws and institutions that are not thought “progressive,” and quick to cite exceptions and variants. But Muslim societies do have common characteristics that rest on a shared faith. That both the Middle Eastern state and its opposition appeal to Islam for justification and support tells volumes about the authority of religious discourse. Islam is the argument that carries, and it carries backward as easily as forward.

  One defence would dismiss the regressive influence of Islam by pointing to Muslim economic, spiritual, and intellectual openness in an earlier golden age. If they could do it then, the reasoning goes, they can do it now.* One would like to say yes, but for two reasons. First, the scope of competition and level of performance required is far greater now than it once was. The meaning of “modern” has changed drastically, far more than Islam. (Such an argument is like saying that because the British used to produce tennis champions, they should be able to turn them out today.)†

  Secondly, failure to keep up generates its own immune reactions. In this regard, the huge oil windfall has been a monumental misfortune.33 It has intoxicated rulers, henchmen, and purveyors, who have slept on piles of money, wasted it on largely worthless projects, and managed to exceed their figuratively (but not literally) limitless resources. Even Saudi Arabia cannot balance its books. In the process these spoilers have infuriated the Muslim poor, who in turn have sought an outlet for rage and outrage in fundamentalist doctrine.

  This is the saddest part of the story. Islam, like all religions, has its pure and hard core, and in a society of extreme machismo, the combination can be explosive. Hence the quick recourse to violence, for violence is the quintessential, testosteronic expression of male entitlement. Hence massacre of religious opponents in Syria; revolution and suppression in Iran; autocratic despotism in Iraq and the Sudan; poison gas attacks against Kurds in Iraq; genocide in the black south of the Sudan; both random and targeted murder in Pakistan, Egypt, and Algeria.** The Algerian violence tells it all: there we have, not a civil war, but a war against civilians. A favorite murder mode: slit the throat. That saves bullets and brings the killer closer to God.34 Gunmen have killed young women who refuse to ‘marry’ the heroes of the revolution. These thugs see themselves as entitled, first as men, then as soldiers in the cause.

  The most striking aspect of the Algerian fundamentalist campaign is its rapidity—how little time it took to turn the clock back centuries.

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains…boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Orientalists and Essentialists

  Scholarly emotions run high on Middle Eastern matters. Readers and audiences know the answers in advance. Debates, often angry or sullen, are anything but debates. No one is ready to check his gun at the door; it may be needed. Among the casus belli: the Arab-Israeli conflict; European economic imperialism, formal and informal; and Western criticisms (hence slanders) of Arab or Islamic culture, especially the treatment of women.

  In these circumstances, much of the debate has taken the form of name-calling. The purpose (or effect) of these labels is to marginalize or e
xclude the adversary. He is a…(fill in the classifier). Nothing more need be said.

  The most influential of these dismissive strikes has been the invention of “orientalism.” This is the sin of writing about Asia, but especially the Middle East, from the outside, that is, from the standpoint of the condescending, hostile, exploitative West. Attacks on the once respectable fascination with things Eastern go back at least to the 1960s; but it was the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s book of this name (Orientalism) that gave the charges currency and called into question most Western writing on the Middle East.35 The bill of indictment ran as follows:

  1. Studies by outsiders distort the subject of inquiry by turning persons into objects. These objects are by definition ripe for manipulation and domination. For Said, such systems as orientalism are “discourses of power, ideological fictions—mind-forg’d manacles.”

  2. Such pseudo-scholarship tends to stereotype in time and space. “Orientals”—the very designation is a Eurocentric imposition—are the same through the ages, and this essential sameness results from a perdurable Islam that “never changes.” Hence the intellectual fellow-disease of “essentialism.” Orientalists have no room for details, nuances, or texture.

  3. Stereotyping lends itself to racism and prejudice. It separates one group from another, promotes arrogance on one side, resentment on the other. If we could get rid of “the Orient,” we would have “scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions [are] less important than the common enterprise of promoting human community.”36

  One can hardly quarrel with lofty sentiments, but sentiments are not enough. The effort to purge the field of these factitious diseases has become an assault on knowledge. In the first place, the anti-“orientalist” method would exclude indispensable tools of inquiry. As any good comparativist knows, distinctions are the stuff of understanding. The anti-“orientalist” cannot have it both ways—denounce, that is, the pursuit of distinctive characteristics as “essentialist,” while calling for an understanding of intergroup differences. It is this understanding that turns diversity into a sense of common humanity.

  Ironically, those very “orientalists” so roundly condemned here—those philologists, archeologists, and travelers, sand-smitten Westerners in Middle Eastern garb—were desperately in love with the Arab Muslim world. Some of them were searching for paradise lost. To quote from an epigraph to a recent book: “The attraction, the spell of Arabia, as it is so frequently called, is a sickness of the imagination.”37 Today these orientalists are reproved as pretentious, racist imperialists. So much for their romance: no kindly sentiment goes unpunished. They were sincere? So what? Sincerity is the cheapest of virtues.

  Secondly, the reality of nuance does not rule out the light that comes from generalization. Everything, to be sure, is more complex than appears. Every person, every event is unique. Even so, some effort must be made to simplify, to find patterns. Otherwise we have nothing but a grab bag of unrelated data.

  Thirdly, bad news is not necessarily wrong. Substantive observations may cast an unfavorable light, but such evidence must be judged on its merits, not dismissed as a priori falsehood. That way lies self-censorship and dereliction of duty. Much of the anti-orientalist critique boils down to a lawyer’s brief for the defense. Lawyers are paid to do that kind of thing. Scholars have a higher obligation.

  In that regard, one must reject the implication that outsideness disqualifies: that only Muslims can understand Islam, only blacks understand black history, only a woman understand women’s studies, and so on. That way lies separateness and a dialogue of the deaf. It also excludes the valuable insights of outsiders and lends itself to racism. I knew a Boston Brahmin once who could not understand why a student of Italian background would want to work on Christopher Columbus (“I thought Columbus was Italian,” was the student’s reply); and another who was surprised to find an African-American doing Roman history—as though he were any more Roman than the other.*

  Discrimination in such exclusionary fields, moreover, invites a loyalty test: is a given scholar on the right side? This applies both to outsiders, who can “earn” acceptance by right-think, and to insiders, where it overrides even color. Thus an Afro-American historian or politician who does not meet the standards of political correctness is an “oreo”—which is the name of a well-known cookie consisting of a chocolate, cream-filled sandwich.

  In the Middle Eastern anti-“orientalist” camp, the shibboleth is anti-Zionism. Any indulgence for Israel is proof of error and irrelevance, if not worse. Thus Edward Said and followers have worked to exclude and denigrate Bernard Lewis, a leading authority in the field, as “orientalist” and “essentialist,” but also “too close to the Israeli cause to be regarded as capable of impartial judgment.” To be sure, “Lewis has given as good as he has got. Nevertheless, Said’s critique has found a body of support among Western scholars, while it has been echoed with relish by Islamists and others in the Middle East.”38

  On the other hand, some outside scholars qualify because they agree politically with the gatekeepers. So Edward Said makes an exception in Orientalism for a handful of Western scholars—pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, pro-Muslim—who may or may not be right, but are on what he sees as the right side. Motive trumps truth and fact.39

  That way lies censorship by exclusion and indifference. Scholarship and research are the losers.

  Japanese Women Are Talking Tenor40

  The Japanese case would seem to be the exception that proves the rule (everyone knows how macho Japanese men are), and apologists for the treatment of women in Muslim countries, or more accurately, for Arab Muslim culture, never fail to cite it by way of extenuation. If the Japanese could do so well while putting down their women, the argument runs, why label this a handicap in Muslim societies? And indeed, Japanese women have traditionally accepted inferior status, with direct economic consequences. They quit jobs after marriage and rarely reach posts that would put them in charge of men. Their very dress was traditionally designed to hobble them on the pretext of protecting their modesty and accenting their femininity. Their speech was differentiated and encumbered by a polysyllabic burden of deference; their voices were trained and tuned to a panting soprano squeak; their gestures drilled to a caricature of coy, tremulous humility. (Small wonder that Japanese men found consolation in bath-and other houses where they could meet more “natural” partners.)

  Yet this artful female subordination, memorialized in Japanese prints, theater, and samurai films, was far more class than national practice. These were the ways of the nobility and landed gentry, those who could afford to be idle and pay for servants to minister to them. For almost all others, including wealthy commercial families, women had a duty to help manage the household (the ie). This meant not only keeping house and rearing children but also enforcing frugality, engaging in farming and industry, and building prosperity. Indeed, this primary task involved everyone, from husband (and maybe husband’s mother) to little children. Of course the content of the task varied with social status and family income, but this common cause, which blended with the goal of national prosperity and greatness, gave women much more influence than a simplistic view of etiquette would lead one to think.

  In the face, then, of conventional constraints on female behavior and rules for male precedence, the larger interest came first. Whatever the traditional discriminations, the educational authorities under Meiji (1870s on) mandated universal elementary schooling: four, later six, years for girls—enough to ensure literacy and more. Why the girls? Because the aim was modernization and equality with the West. This entailed a generalized ability to read, write, and reckon, and to help children with their lessons. Industrial development would see fathers working outside the home and farm; government and military service would also draw men away. Mothers had to fill the gap. At first, many poor families rebelled against this loss of children’s earnings; school and school supplies
did not come free. Some rebels went so far as to burn schools down. But the sacralization of the home as enterprise, as building block of national wealth and achievement, converted even the laggards. In 1890, only 30 percent of eligible girls attended school; twenty years later, the figure was 97.4 percent.41

  At the same time, women’s actiivities changed to fit the needs of a new economy. More and more of them found jobs outside the home, primarily in light industry (textiles, etc.), where the workforce was 60-90 percent female. These branches produced 40 percent of the GNP and 60 percent of foreign exchange at the end of the nineteenth century.42 How were women wageearners going to rear and teach children? Answer: By leaving work upon marriage and focusing on household and family—unless of course they needed the earnings (a big “unless”). Priorities were the key: country and household first; gender next. As a result, the role of a woman was never simply reproductive. She was more than a vessel. She was a toiler, a consumer, a saver, a manager. And she always, both by right and by necessity, had access to public space. (The contrast here with Arab Muslim societies is striking and crucial.)

  What Japanese women did not have was political rights. They neither voted nor governed, and Japanese men made a point of the justice of exclusion. Politics, to say nothing of military matters, were male by right and calling. (On the other hand, the Japanese military cheerfully accepted women nurses, because they released men for destructive activities.) Not until after World War II did Japanese women get the vote—no different in that respect from French women and quicker than the Swiss. Even so, they play little part in the executive branch. Again, Japan is not very different from other countries.