10
WOMEN’S SONG: DESTINATION FREEDOM

The Arab world is about to take off.

This is not a prophecy. It is a woman’s intuition, and God, who knows everything, knows that women’s intuition is rarely wrong.

It is going to take off for the simple reason that everybody, with the fundamentalists in the lead, wants change. The fact that they propose to go forward by going backward doesn’t alter the fact that they ardently want change. There is a very strong wish in this corner of the world to go elsewhere, to migrate collectively to another present. Foreigners perhaps do not feel this, but every morning I wake up with the radio at my ear and think: anything can happen; perhaps everything will change between one minute and the next.

By plunging a knife into the sore spots—dependence, lack of democracy, powerlessness—the Gulf War shattered something deep within us. I have thought a lot about what that might be, and I have come to the conclusion that it smashed the multiple circles of cold fear that have pressed on us. What worse could happen to Arabs than what the war produced—the whole West with all its technology dropping bombs on us? It was the ultimate horror. When you have gone through an experience of horror—and all those who have experienced deep depression know it—you emerge free of fear. Not that you are rid of it, but you have conquered it. The Arab world, paralyzed by all the fears that this book explores, has finally with this war had the opportunity to live through them and emerge from the experience, a bit shaky perhaps, but with the firm conviction that making the perilous jump into the unknown is the least dangerous thing that could happen to us.

A sense of hurtling toward the unknown is already reflected in good-natured daily chitchat: “Ma zal ^cayish?” ("Are you still alive?") replaced “Hi, how are you?” during the war. Everyone now knows that for an Arab, surviving means changing, exploring those dimensions of life that have been muzzled— ^caql (reason), individual freedom, ray (judgment), and especially khayal, that power of imagination that will assure supremacy in the world of the future. But although Arabs are amazed in this post-Gulf War era at the possibilities opening up to them, women already began their resolute and perilous march toward the realm of freedom some decades ago. Why, I will be asked, did women form this audacious avant-garde? Because we had nothing to lose except our fears, our masks, and all the crippling effects of segregation and confinement.

Women are eager to plunge into adventure and the unknown. The symbol of that eagerness is the Palestinian Mother Courage whom we see every day on our television screens, standing firmly in the street, neither intimidated nor filled with hatred toward the Israeli soldiers whom she scolds as though they were teenagers who have trouble relinquishing adolescence to become adults.

Arab women are not afraid of modernity, because for them it is an unhoped-for opportunity to construct an alternative to the tradition that weighs so heavily on them. They long to find new worlds where freedom is possible. For centuries, confined and masked, they have been singing about freedom, but no one was listening. Muhammad al-Fasi, a Moroccan scholar, had the idea of collecting some of the songs that circulated in the harems of Fez during the 1930s. Many spoke of forbidden passions, of nocturnal rendezvous, of crazy escapades, and some ridiculed the effectiveness of locks and chains. Others celebrated the bird who played false when given the chance:

Tir! al-tir!

Bnit lu shabak hrir

Ma nwit ytir

Ba^cd ma wallaf.

Birdie! Birdie!

To keep it I built a cage of silk

And never thought it would fly away

After letting itself be tamed.1

Women never let themselves be tamed. Men believed that a person could become accustomed to confinement. But women were waiting for the right moment, the moment of difference with dignity, of participation and dialogue, and that moment has arrived.

THEY HAVE ALREADY LEFT, AND THE IMAMS ARE WORRIED

Women have already taken flight

Pale and grave, they are performing the pilgrimage that their grandmothers dreamed of for so long: to dance without a mask, with eyes riveted on a limitless horizon.

They are afraid, they stumble and feel weak—how do you move about when chains were your programmed destiny? But the call of the open sea is irresistible.

They fall down and get up again; they educate themselves and kick over the traces. How can you roam when a cage was to be your future?

At the beginning, both frightened and frightening, they petrified men. Then, as the years rolled by, the men, recovered from their consternation, began to listen to the women who were singing about roaming and were longing for the obliteration of boundaries. Such a strange song it was, seeming to mistake itself for that symphony of the universal that the foreign West was intoning like a hymn to the galaxies. Harems exist anymore only on postcards or in the palaces of a few emirs who have enough money to re-create a gimcrack version of those of Baghdad of the Golden Age. The rest of the men are beginning to feel almost at home in this apocalyptic renaissance where power is to be found in moving forward and not in the past. According to the Syrian poet Adonis, in the abyss that modernity represents, the Arab man must change and rethink himself in cosmic terms, including the possibility of being as nebulous as the wind:

He comes defenseless like the forest,

And like a cloud he cannot be held back.

Yesterday he carried a continent

And moved the sea.

Uncertainty is his country,

But his eyes are numberless.

He strides into the abyss

And is like the wind.2

Arab women do not always say what they are thinking, but these men who are striding into the abyss and are like the wind are more than ever the lovers of whom they have dreamed—nomads of modernity, traveling light, seeking no country, for moving forward is their tribe.

It is not true that our mothers were happy with our fathers, wrapped in their own certitudes. My uncle Hajj Muhammad would overturn the table and threaten to pronounce the formula of repudiation every time Aunt Kanza put a little too much salt or pepper in the couscous on Fridays. She wept on the day of his death, and she keeps his memory alive and nurses it, but did she love him? Can you love a man who is always right because the law binds the wife to marital obedience? Everyone knows that men who are uncertain of themselves, who are feeling their way, are the most attractive. Young Arabs know it, and love affairs are only the better for it. What is certain is that women have decided to listen no longer to khutaba (sermons) they have not had a hand in writing. They are ready for takeoff. They have always known that the future rests on the abolition of boundaries, that the individual is born to be respected, that difference is enriching. For them, the San Francisco charter is neither a novelty nor a breakthrough. It is just the formulation of a dream that losers have always cherished, like a talisman that protects them.

Meanwhile the imams, who have proclaimed for centuries that marital ta^ca (obedience) is a duty, are fuming. Obeying the husband means obeying God. The word ta^ca which appears in contemporary civil codes, reproduces in the harem blind obedience to the caliph. The imams are irate because if domestic ta^ca is challenged by weak women, how can men be expected to lower their eyes in deference to the leader? The modesty of the Arab woman is the linchpin of the whole political system. Entire chapters in the collections of Ha-dith (sayings and actions of the Prophet) dictate to us how to braid our hair, how to lower our eyes, and how to slip on modesty like a camisole. The sermons continue today. A new book on the dangers of mixing the sexes, published at great expense in Cairo, offers to the believer for 95 dirhams ($10) a seven-hundred-page tome, “Dress and Adornment: The Purifying Tradition,”³ whose author has collected all that the fiqh (religious knowledge) orders women to do regarding such crucial questions as how to wear the sarwal, the wide-legged pantaloon so common in the Muslim world, how to pluck the eyebrows and depilate the skin, and the rights and wrongs of wearing rouge, and finally includes a very important chapter on footwear. No, certainly not all men are ready for takeoff, for the journey toward uncertainties, toward plural modernities, toward cities without protection, because they get paid too much oil money for preserving the benefits of the hijab and the virtues of obedience.

The ancestral violence against those who refuse to obey is being mobilized this time not against the Mu^ctazila or the Sufis, long buried, but against those who have taken up their chant, women who want a city without ramparts, where children blossom in the abode of change and find their roots in the only traditions that are still valid, those of the odyssey of the stars.

As for the violence in the ancestral cities, it was women who were its most quiet victims and most silent scapegoats. The caliphs never respected them. From the moment any crisis began, it was women and wine that were condemned. For centuries women and wine were regarded as the source of all our troubles.

THE CALIPHATE AND WOMEN: CRISIS AND VIOLENCE

Banning mixing of the sexes and advocating the separation of men and women as the measure to alleviate all political crises is far from being a novelty in Muslim political history. It is a tradition, even a state tradition. Opposition forces claim past practice as the basis for treating women with contempt. A Muslim sovereign in a crisis, facing hunger riots or a popular revolt, immediately has recourse to the traditional measures of destroying the stores of wine and placing a ban on women leaving their homes, and especially on their using the same means of transportation as men, reducing them to a state of immobility in capitals like Cairo and Baghdad which are traversed by great rivers. Wine and women—here we have the Gordian knot of the crisis. Tathir, the ritual purification of the social body, requires the destruction of the first and the confinement of the second. The recent violence against women which we have seen in Algeria, like the burning of the house of a feminist activist in Annaba on November 15, 1989, is in the purest caliphal tradition.

Al-Hakim, the Fatimid caliph who ordered his mathematician to regulate the waters of the Nile, turned to other, more realizable, measures to calm the masses when the waters continued to fall and the failure of crops provoked enormous inflation.4 In year 405 of the Hejira he decided to act, ordering Egyptian women to be shut in: “In that year al-Hakim forbade women to leave their houses at all; he forbade them to go to the public baths and put an end to manufacture of shoes for women. Many opposed his orders and were killed.”⁵

Some decades later, in year 487, a similar scene took place in Baghdad. The caliph al-Muqtadi, the twenty-eighth ruler of the Abbasid dynasty, exiled women singers and women of ill fame from the city: “Their houses were sold and they themselves sent into exile; people were forbidden to go to the public baths without a mizar [loincloth]. . . . Sailors were also forbidden to transport men and women together.”⁶ When the anger of a prince against women abated but the populace was still tormented by economic insecurity, the measures against women were often made part of a “package” of prohibitions. These prohibitions, such as banning certain food and drinks, as futile as they were bothersome, introduced into the city the thing that frightens Muslims the most: the making violence banal. The link in historical memory between crisis, calamity, and tathir is very strong and has persisted throughout the centuries, right up to the present. Shaykh ^cAbbas Madani, one of the leaders of the Algerian fundamentalist movement, is convinced that it is women and wine that are at the bottom of the economic and political troubles that are shaking his country:

Our religion enjoins us to take counsel. The Prophet, may health be his, said: “Religion is counsel". ...So we have tried in all circumstances to consult with our brothers, to work together for the well-being of this community and this country. . . . We have seen moral calamities that have no connection with religion or with the traditions of the Algerian. Consumption of wine has become legal; mixing of the sexes in schools, lycees, and universities has led to the proliferation of bastards. Depravity has spread, and we see that women no longer cover themselves but display their bodies with makeup and naked for all to see both indoors and outdoors. Where then is the dignity of the Algerian man after his honor has been publicly flouted?⁷

The reform program of a leader who makes this kind of analysis of his nation’s problems is very simple: box women in and ban wine!

Curtailing women’s freedom to move about, thus immobilizing half of the umma, far from being a negative, fits in comfortably with any Muslim sovereign’s reform measures. This theory of crisis and crisis solutions constantly recurs in Muslim history in the Muslim West and in the East. According to al-Murakushi, one of the most brilliant historians of the thirteenth century, women’s emergence into the streets and onto the political scene destroyed the powerful Berber dynasty of the Almoravids, whose western empire extended from Spain to North Africa. Al-Murakushi depicts the last sovereign of the dynasty as powerless before the rising tide of religious opponents, who proposed like the fundamentalists of today that the state adopt a policy of conformity and unity. They were called al-muwahhidin (those who unify). Animosity toward women was a key part of their propaganda. Al-Murakushi summarizes the crisis thus:

The situation of the Commander of the Faithful grew very shaky around the year 500 [of the Hejira]. The manakir [sins] increased in number. This happened because the important persons of the dynasty behaved like despots . . . women took charge of public affairs; they were given power. . . . Andalusia was in a state of revolt and threatened to return to its previous state [that is, to Christianity].⁸

The Almoravids, who were from the Sahara, where nomadic life still gives women a prominent role in the survival of the group, had a more respectful attitude toward women. These Almoravid women, like Zainab, the wife of Yusif Ibn Tashfin, the founder of the dynasty, played an important part in politics.

Seven centuries later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the extraordinary writer Ahmad Amin, author of the trilogy Fajr al- Islam (Dawn of Islam), Duha al-Islam (Morning of Islam), and Zuhr al-Islam (High Noon of Islam), a monumental attempt to synthesize fifteen hundred years of history, repeats the same refrain, maintaining that time and again women have been the gravediggers of dynasties: from the moment they became visible in society, the dynasty and Muslim order foundered. The fundamentalist opposition movements that extol the veil are reactivating this age-old connection.

It is these centuries of misogyny, cultivated as tradition in the corridors of caliphal despotism, that Muslim women are now challenging. They are compelling the faithful, baffled by the cosmic changes that assail them from every direction, to do what just three decades ago was considered utterly farcical: to regard women as equals. They are demanding the renunciation of the ideal of the homogeneous city, carefully divided into two hierarchical spaces, where only one sex manages politics and monopolizes decision making. The emergence of women means the emergence of the stranger within the city. It means a painful but necessary learning process for the majority in a society where al-hisn, “the citadel,” which supervises and controls, is still the law. Al-muhsana is one of the legal terms for a married woman; she is protected by her marriage, which is like a hisn. The civil codes reproduce in every article the picture of a family in the image of the caliphal palace, where ta^ca is required and the will of the leader overrides that of all others.

The battle of the 1990s will be a battle over the civil codes, which women challenge as contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and which the authoritarian states defend as sacred. By propelling women out of the house into the streets through education and paid work, modernity has perverted the ideal homogeneous city, pushing it into dangerous territory where unmasked, irreverent women speak an unknown language. The equality they demand, say the supporters of caliphal, despotic Islam, is a foreign, imported idea. These women are traitors, allies of the West and its philosophies, like the Mu^ctazila and rationalists of yesteryear who tried to import Greek ideas.

Women have been, are, and will continue to be the targets of intimidation and violence, whether from regimes in power or opposition movements that hark back to the past. It happened in Pakistan in the 1980s; it is still going on in Iran; and today, at the beginning of the 1990s, it is happening in Algeria. Tomorrow the same thing can happen elsewhere. The reason is simple: women are the only ones who publicly assert their right to self-affirmation as individuals, and not just through words but also through actions (e.g., unveiling and going out).⁹ Today they constitute one of the most dynamic components of the developing civil society. Although up to the present they are still politically unorganized, they have succeeded in infiltrating one of the citadels which was long forbidden to them: formal education. Education, with high school and university diplomas, is women’s new acquisition. Until now all that women were taught to do, from housework to carpet weaving, was devalued and poorly paid.

A FORCE FOR RADICAL CHALLENGE

One thing that the West, always fascinated by the veiled woman,10 knows little of and the imams know only too well, is that women are certainly no longer cooped up in harems, nor are they veiled and silent. They have massively infiltrated forbidden territory, notably the universities. If in Iran the imams keep close watch on women, it is because women constituted 19 percent of the teaching staff of universities in 1986, while the rate in West Germany for the same year was 17 percent.¹¹ There is no other explanation for the fact that one of the first acts of Imam Khomeini as chief of state in 1980 was to promulgate the law on the hi jab, making the veil obligatory for women who worked in government institutions.¹² The relentless battle of the fundamentalists, whether in the government or the opposition, doesn’t target just any woman. One precise category is aimed at: middle-class women who have had access to education and valorizing salaried jobs. The enemy to be fought is not the female proletariat, the women wearing the traditional djellaba, who are worn out by long bus trips (which they often must take at night in order to be on time) to and from work, and who are underpaid and without union protection. This proletariat interests neither the opposition forces nor the regimes based on the sacred. Their obsession is with the woman who enjoys and exercises all the visible privileges of her modernity: she is bareheaded, with windblown hair, she drives a car, and she has identity papers and a passport in her own name in her handbag. The woman who is so disturbing is not she who is content just to be listed on the family register, who allows her husband to vote for her; rather, it is she who has gained legitimate access to the university and, from the height of her new academic minbar (mosque pulpit), preaches, writes, educates, and protests. It is she who is the target of the fundamentalists, from the most princely to the most popular.

It was women like this who organized the Women’s Action Forum and went into the streets to agitate against the military regime of Zia al-Haq in Pakistan. It was university women like these who surged into the streets in front of the presidential palace in Algiers to demand democracy. They were the first to unmask the despotism behind the socialism of the FLN (National Liberation Front), which under the burnous of chivalry was posing as “revolutionary fighter.” Proletarian women may not be participating in such protests, but their burdens are heavier to bear, what with their many children and the lack of child-care facilities, as well as the long waiting lines for buses. They come along when they can, but it is certainly not they who constitute the leaders. In both cases, that of Pakistan and Algeria, women went into the streets in the last decade to challenge the shari^ca as administered by officialdom, risking being condemned as infidels. And in both cases the leaders of the movements are none other than university graduates who in 1984 were already more than 25 percent of the teachers in higher education in Pakistan and 24 percent in Algeria.¹³

To understand the intensity of today’s violent feelings against the desire of women to liberate themselves, we must recall the keenness with which women threw themselves into education, like drowning persons into an unhoped-for lifeboat. In less than two generations, since the Second World War, they have laid siege to the academic world. The modern university has been more welcoming and less hostile to women. Recognition should be given to the crucial role played by progressive intellectuals, who were the first to help and support them. Contrary to what one might think, the progressive Arab man has always seen the problem of his relationship to women as central to his desire for change; in Morocco the men of the Left were women’s accomplices and confidants in their struggle. Thanks to them, things began to change and the university became a place of hope. For women of my generation higher education was regarded not as a luxury, but as a chance for survival and escape from the widespread contempt for women that characterized the traditional ordering of society a few decades ago. In the 1960s women could neither engage in business nor launch political careers. Only the university and education provided a legitimate way out of mediocrity. Women did not study to be nurses or nurse’s aides; subordinate jobs re-created the domestic scene. Therefore the aim was medical school. In 1987 50 percent of all medical students in Tunisia were women, 37 percent in Syria, and 30 percent in Algeria.¹⁴

The rapidity of change in intersex relations was dizzying if we take access to the university as the index. In Japan, that other traditional and very conservative society, despite the push into the scientific and technological domain after World War II, by 1987 only 10 percent of university professors were women. Even in Egypt, where the virulent fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood is equaled only by the agitation of Egyptian feminists, it was 28 percent in 1986, higher than in the United States (24 percent in 1980) and France (23 percent in 1987).¹⁵

Fundamentalism was born in Egypt at the same time as feminism, and the two have never ceased to exist side by side. For a North African like me, whose mother was illiterate, attending conferences in Egypt is always a renewed surprise: the heroines of feminism are not young things in miniskirts. They are women the age of grandmothers, gray-haired and with quavering voices, but whose remarks are full of vitriol. The Ikhwan al-Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood, came into being in the years 1928 to 1936. At that same time, the Egyptian feminist Huda Sha^crawi was between 1923 and 1947 (the date of her death) the leader of one of the most radical feminist movements in the world, even by today’s standards, a movement that asserted respect for the individual as its basic article of faith.¹⁶ In 1920 Egyptian women had already created an important section within the Wafd party and had gained the support of a significant segment of public opinion.

The animosity of the fundamentalists toward feminists in the Arab world is due to the fact that there are two groups that have profited from modern education: men from the countryside and lower classes, and city women of the middle and upper classes. These two groups make up the new middle class that was created in recent decades through free state education. Conflict between the two is natural; it is one of the new forms of class struggle that has developed in the very dynamic Arab world. The interests of these two groups are different, and it is to be expected that each struggles to impose its world vision. The problem is that the fundamentalists act with the complicity of the state, while women struggle alone, with no protection even from the divine—for the fundamentalists claim a monopoly on speaking in the name of God. What we are seeing today is a claim by women to their right to God and the historical tradition. This takes various forms. There are women who are active within the fundamentalist movements and those who work on a reinterpretation of the Muslim heritage as a necessary ingredient of our modernity. Our liberation will come through a rereading of our past and a reappropriation of all that has structured our civilization. The mosque and the Koran belong to women as much as do the heavenly bodies. We have a right to all of that, to all its riches for constructing our modern identity.

Reducing women fundamentalists to obedient bystanders is to badly misunderstand the dynamics of the religious protest movement. We have seen the importance of concepts like haqq (right) and ^cadl (justice). Even if at the beginning women recruits were there to be manipulated, in many Muslim countries today—for instance, Iran and Algeria—we see the emergence of a virulent feminist leadership within the fundamentalist parties. We don’t have to fall victim to stereotyping. We must remain vigilant and keep open, analytical minds, as have the Iranian sociologist Nayereh Tohidi and the whole group of women experts who recently attended the conference “Identity, Politics, and Women.” Their conclusion was that even within the ranks of the fundamentalists, feminist challenge is emerging and causing surprises.¹⁷

Parallel to their access to the academic worlds, Arab women in general and Egyptian women in particular (first within the nationalist movement and later as independent voices, like Huda Sha^crawi) energized a feminist movement inundating the press with pamphlets and articles and profoundly changed attitudes.¹⁸ We probably owe to them the speeded-up decision to grant women the right to vote and the statement of the rights to education and work which was inserted in the first draft of the Charter of the Arab League in the 1940s. During the 1970s the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi played an important role as the first to open discussion among Arabs about authoritarian relationships and about sexuality as the special domain of violence. Millions of young people devoured books by these feminists. Although they were of course banned, this only increased the demand for them and taught us to practice the politics of the “tireless pen"—that is, the more the police ban, the more must be written. When a woman’s work is censored, she must not let herself be discouraged. Instead of writing five pages a day, she must produce six or even seven. The objective is to overwhelm the censor with the amount of reading he has to do to “keep up.” Frequent imprisonment by various regimes did not daunt the courage of Nawal. The journal she edited, Nun, and the association she organized, Solidarity of Arab Women, have both recently been banned, the first before the Gulf War and the second just after.

The great surprise of the 1980s, however, comes from Saudi women. Despite the strengthening of surveillance and the almost prisonlike atmosphere in which they live, many have succeeded just since the 1970s in getting university degrees. In Saudi Arabia, 32 percent of university professors in 1986 were women.¹⁹ The universities, of course, are segregated, but that hasn’t stopped Saudi women from hiding beneath their veils doctoral degrees from great academic institutions, often British or American. A woman with a doctorate, even though she is still condemned in Saudi Arabia to the veil and seclusion, is not like an illiterate woman relegated to the kitchen. Modern education introduces a new dimension and changes the authority relationship between a woman and her group. This is the only explanation for the outcry of the imams against the handful of Saudi women who broke the ban on driving and drove around the streets of Riyadh at the wheel of their cars during the Gulf War.

Although women have succeeded in entering all kinds of professions, it is their presence in the domain of the university which has allowed them, given the very nature of the profession, to devote free time to research and writing. The impact of women writers, as journalists, editors of journals, authors, and especially novelists and playwrights, is enormous.²⁰ Unlike what I hear in publishing circles in the West, feminist literature and books written by women sell very well, and the majority of the buyers are men. The Arab world values women’s writing, and many women novelists appear year after year on the best-seller lists. The books of novelists and essayists like the Egyptian Salwa Bakr, the Palestinian Liana Badr, and the Lebanese Ghada al-Sammam and Hanane el-Cheikh, and of poets like the Kuwaiti Su^cad al-Sabbah and the Syrian Hamida Na^cna^c—to name just a few—are always available in kiosks and compete well throughout the Arab world with the “oil culture,” the made-to-order conservative propaganda. The journal Shahrazad, whose editor is the Libyan Fatima Mahmud, and which is published in Cyprus and distributed throughout the Arab world, gives its readers the sharpest analysis of the conflict between women and the conservative forces.²¹ While debate on the woman question in the journals of the Left is still the prisoner of endless ideological debates and stilted language, these writers’ clear style, their simple, direct exposition of what is wrong and what needs changing, and their lack of pretention counts for much in women’s success.

The call for the return to the hijab which intensified during the 1980s is a reaction to women’s activity and agitation on the cultural front. The animosity of the conservative forces must be seen within the context of the dissemination of these women’s works in a society that is accustomed to the idea that the illiteracy of women is traditional. The religious authorities, who were very active during the nationalist struggle, rested on their laurels after independence. But they were suddenly startled awake in the last decade by the most salacious, monstrous gharib (stranger) ever seen or heard: an educated woman, unveiled, agitating in the street in the name of the Charter of the United Nations and against the shari^ca of officialdom.

Aswat al-gharb (voices of the West) is how the conservatives label this phenomenon: alien forces are here among us, in the city. Women take off the veil, and what is seen? A gharib face, strange like the West. The result is that they are nonplussed and confused. One of my colleagues, who likes me very much, after fifteen years of working side by side with me at the Universite Mohammed V, has still not succeeded in accepting me as a local; he always calls me Fatima Swidiyya (Fatima the Swede), even in August when, after months at the beach, I am black as an olive. The “monstrous- ness” of the modern woman, as compared to the traditional model, lies not so much in her access to knowledge as in her claim to be a citizen, challenging the government by referring to the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Educated women have always existed in the Muslim world, especially in the upper classes, where they often specialized in the study and teaching of religious texts. ^cUmar Kahhala devoted a large part of his four-volume work on famous Arab and Muslim women to them.²² Female illiteracy, even in the well-off classes, is one of the characteristics of the decadence that led to colonization.²³ What is new today and constitutes a break with the past is that women are posing their challenge as a problem between them and the state, a contract to be renegotiated. This is certainly a fundamental revolution. Traditionally the state ignores women, except in times of crisis, when it fiercely attacks them.

Muslim women do not have a government that protects them. This is the basis of their tragedy during this very slow transition from the despotic medieval state to the modern state. For them, the modern state has still not yet been born. They are battling by themselves, and all the violence against them, beginning with that of the government, is permitted and even legitimized since the personal status laws make inequality a sacred matter. This explains the insistence of the Algerian fundamentalists on proxy voting, which has permitted them to vote on behalf of their wives during recent municipal elections.²⁴ Modernity means the emergence of women as citizens, and this emergence suddenly transforms the nature of the state. The worst danger women face is unemployment, which threatens to engulf them in the coming decade. What will be the effect of the Gulf War on women’s chances to negotiate democratic relationships, and what is the responsibility of the West as victor in the region and the dominant power in its new economy, in Mr. Bush’s New World Order?

THE EFFECT OF THE GULF WAR ON WOMEN: UNEMPLOYMENT, OIL, AND THE HIJAB

Unemployment is the gravest threat to stability in the Arab states. One of its causes is the annual rate of population increase—one of the highest in the world, 3.9 percent. From 1985 to 1990, the Arab population increased from 188 million to 217 million. It grew by 29 million in just five years! It is predicted that between 1990 and 2000 there will be an increase of 64 million, putting the Arab population at 281 million by the end of the century.25

Women, as half this population, (108 million in 1990, almost equal to the population of France and western Germany combined)—most of whom are under twenty-five years of age—represent a large army of job seekers. Already in 1990, two Arabs out of three were twenty-four years old and under.²⁶ This group numbers 167.5 million, of whom half are adolescents. When we talk about Arab women, therefore, we are not talking about mature, settled women; we are talking about 83 million job seekers who will marry late because, like young men, they are concerned about their futures and want to get an education first. Whereas early marriage used to be the rule, today the Arab world is seeing a spectacular delay in the age of marriage,²⁷ and since this trend was neither anticipated nor codified, there has been an increase in out-of- wedlock births. The Algerian leader Shaykh Madani, who is a sociologist, knows the statistics well. By calling for the return to the hijab, the fundamentalists delegitimize the presence of women on the labor market. It is an extraordinarily powerful political weapon.

The hijab is manna from heaven for politicians facing crises. It is not just a scrap of cloth; it is a division of labor. It sends women back to the kitchen. Any Muslim state can reduce its level of unemployment by half just by appealing to the shari^ca, in its meaning as despotic caliphal tradition. This is why it is important to avoid reducing fundamentalism to a handful of agitators who stage demonstrations in the streets. It must be situated within its regional and world economic context by linking it to the question of oil wealth and the New World Order that the Westerners propose to us.

The West came out of the Gulf War a winner, but along with it Saudi Arabia, the most conservative regime in the Arab world and the one most contemptuous of human rights, emerged not only stronger but also more than ever the determining power for our future. Two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves still sleep quietly beneath the soil of Mecca. It is normal that millions of unemployed Arabs dream of a more favorable distribution of this wealth as a solution to their problems. In parallel with what the Lebanese writer George Corm calls “the irresistible rise of oil tyranny,” Saudi Arabia has inundated these millions of unemployed with Islamic propaganda, whose concepts of haqq and ^cadala constitute an explosive force that so well expresses their feelings of frustration.²⁸

The role or oil in fundamentalism should never be forgotten. The resistance to progressive ideas, financed in large measure by the Saudi oil money that was simultaneously producing an extravagant, princely Islamic culture, gave birth to a rigid authoritarianism closed to rahma. A better term for fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia would be petro-Wahhabism, whose pillar is the veiled woman.²⁹

The lining up of the North African masses against the bombing of Iraq is explained in part by their hostility toward the Saudi regime. This regime, insofar as it is a key piece on the world chessboard, is seen as incapable of managing its oil wealth to create full employment in the region. The Gulf War put a finger on the problem: the absence of democracy, which results in this wealth being managed as a monopoly by a few families. The news reports during the war about the sums paid by Kuwait to the government of President Mitterand to help it get through the crisis were received and commented on in the medinas as the most unjust absurdity, strengthening more than ever the conviction that full employment could be achieved only by democratization of the Arab states.

This war without frontiers has inaugurated the era of responsibility without frontiers. From now on, Arab youths know that the hand cut off in Saudi Arabia can no longer be blamed solely on the Saudi regime, which revealed its weakness during the conflict. Above all, they know that it is not Islam that demands such horrors, but an anachronistic regime that can hide its archaisms only by veiling them with the sacred. At last Islam is no longer guilty of what happens in Saudi Arabia in this New World Order that Mr. Bush urges on us. The American president has taken on ethical responsibility for the region, and along with him Frangois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl and the citizens who elected them in the representative democracies of the West. Whoever consumes Arab oil is responsible.

Paradoxically, the Gulf War showed that oil, which was the basis for this conflict and which up to the present has set off the incessant hostilities that have plagued the area, can bring cultures together and sharpen the sense of responsibility. The West needs Arab oil. We understand that. But are the Westerners ready to understand that it is ethically indecent for them to be the only ones to have the use of it? This war opened the way toward internationalization of responsibility and the possibility for all of us to reflect about other ways of conceiving relationships on this small planet. Let’s look at some scenarios that might create full employment in the Arab Mediterranean area and the security of women, among other things.

SCENARIO 1

Will the oil-needy Western democracies, which have emerged triumphant from the conflict, jump at the unexpected opportunity to push for the democratization of the Arab world? The economic pressure they could exert on the regimes that resist the masses’ demand for democracy is enormous!

Will Western bankers and generals fly to the rescue of Arab women deprived of their rights, as they did for Kuwait? The future will tell how much sacrifice the West is prepared to make for the democracy it has taught us to love so much. The future will tell if the West will be a pioneer in establishing those universal values that it preaches and that we have come to love. The West has been given the opportunity to show us that its noble ideas really are the basis of a civilization that is more advanced, more ethical than any other. In fact, if the West uses its power to install democracy in the Arab world, it will scuttle its own interests, which the status quo, strengthened by the Gulf War, guarantees. For democracy in the Arab world means the passing of power to the millions of young people who dream of using the oil resources for their own advantage.

Will the West undermine the legitimacy of the regimes it has just saved from the storm? Will it support the demands of progressive forces and promote the creation of a civil society that would participate in decision making and demand an accounting of resources? Here lies the challenge posed by this scenario to the great Euro-American peoples, who sing of universalism and their love of democracy.

SCENARIO 2

Or will the Western states only use their influence to maintain the status quo and prop up the legitimacy of the regimes that called on them for help? The priority of buttressing their legitimacy then calls for the regimes to play the fundamentalist card. Women will again be required to wear the hijab, while the progressive forces have to keep quiet and pray. Relying on ta^ca as the basis of politics will become the credo of a tele-petro-Islam transmitted by satellites. This credo will be all the knowledge that youth are entitled to as obscurantism is programmed by the electronic agenda as the modern heritage of Arab youth. The West will in great part be responsible for the avalanche of violence which will descend on all those who call for democracy, with women at the head of the list.

With globalization of the economy and globalization of responsibility, especially in the Mediterranean area, North and South are now tied to each other in fortune and misfortune. European youth are very conscious of this globalization, which looms ahead and frightens them, but which also opens extraordinary visions of solidarity, of rahma, of possibilities for something other than Crusades. Young people in France, Germany, and Italy are worried about what the media call the “Arab invasion.” But will the maintenance of the status quo to keep up the flow of oil and petrodollars, combined with new requirements for visas for Arab travelers, solve the problem? Will the West cling to the idea of universal worth while selfishly consuming Arab oil wealth and closing its borders to Arabs? Can one trumpet universality and erect frontiers at the same time? Isn’t building a Mediterranean economy based on a more equal management of oil which creates full employment and democracy everywhere the best way to stop Arab emigration to Europe? Can the West realize its ideal of one world where all can flourish together while continuing to base much of its economy on the military and space industry that it alone markets, and whose products inundate the world and especially the Arab region?

It is very laudable to want to destroy the “formidable military power” of Saddam Hussein. But this gesture is credible only if the West integrates it into a strategy of demilitarization not only of the region but of the whole planet. Destroying Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity while restocking the arsenals of other countries in the region and investing in Western military industries is certainly not the best way to create a peaceful future.

The Arab countries devote the highest percentage of gross domestic product in the world to arms. Saudi Arabia, for example, commits nearly one-quarter (21.8 percent) of its GDP for military expenses. Jordan and the Democratic Republic of Yemen spend 16 percent, Syria 17 percent. By contrast, France spends 4 percent of its GDP, the former West Germany 3.1 percent, Italy 3.2 percent, Sweden 1.7 percent, Spain 3 percent, Canada 3.2 percent, and Japan 1 percent on weapons.30

How can Arab women hop to overcome opposition in their societies and go out in search of paid work if the economies of their countries are devoting a large part of their wealth to unproductive expenditures like the importation of weapons that don’t even serve any useful purpose, as the Gulf War amply demonstrated? If the West continues to sell arms to the Arab states, women’s chances to work out new relationships within their society will be destroyed because a society suffering from unemployment will not make any concessions to women.

One of the reasons for mounting unemployment in the Arab countries is the debt, a problem inextricably tied to military expenditures. The editors of the Memento Defense-Desarmement 1989 contend that “the net sum of the debt before 1979 could have been 20 to 30 percent lower if the borrowing Third World countries had not bought arms. . . . Around half the arms contracts were directly or indirectly financed by borrowing, which is characteristic of the external debt of developing countries.”³¹ Fundamentalism spread and flourished in the shadow of this famous debt. The editors clearly establish the link between military expenditures and the inflation of the debt by introducing the concept of what they call the “opportunity cost":

The financial assets that would be available for other imports if there had no been arms purchases are called the “opportunity cost.” This concept is based on the fact that for both civil and military imports there is only one source of financing— exports. Rising imports require larger budgets, which at a given moment can be covered only by exports. A government in this case has three choices: (1) reduction in military imports; (2) reduction in commercial imports; or (3) increase in foreign currency provided by loans. Experience shows that it is above all the last option that was chosen.³²

The military option is contrary to the interests of Arab citizens in general, and to those of women in particular. No leftist movement in the Arab world can offer a serious alternative if it doesn’t make the demilitarization of the region a priority. Arab women too must mobilize around the issue of demilitarization; otherwise any hope for an improvement in their lot is vain. The only way for the Arab nations is that of Japan, which allocates just 1 percent of its budget for defense, neither more nor less. Who will be the loser in this business? The weapons factories in the West, and some middlemen. That’s all. Who will be the winner? The whole world, headed by the citizens of the Western countries. For the West to focus on producing something other than weapons would be the best proof of its concern for implementing universal values.

While waiting, we can dream with Julia Kristeva about a future in which the gharib, “the strange” and “the stranger,” will no longer be frightening: can “the stranger,” who was “the enemy” in primitive societies, disappear in the modern world?³³

I am an incurable optimist. There are now unprecedented opportunities for creating a better world. In Third World societies millions of people like me, who belong to groups that only recently were excluded from knowledge, have had access to that manna from heaven since the Second World War. We must not fall into the victim mentality and moan about what a miserable century this is. It is a fabulous century, at least for the countries of the Third World, which used to stagnate in material, political, and cultural deprivation. In countries like mine, many of our doctors and brilliant professors began life as shepherds, and they often recall this fact with a certain pride, especially to communicate to their students a sense of the wonder felt by all those in the Third World who have had access to an unhoped-for education. Let us have fewer weapons and more learning. Then we will have a world that I would love to travel around, a world in whose creation I would be proud to participate. I know there are untold millions of others who want such a world.

Farid al-din Attar, my favorite of the Sufis, dreamed nine centuries ago of a marvelous planet inhabited by fabulous birds that were much like us—who wanted to find themselves, who wanted to travel, but were afraid. Their desire for knowledge, however, was so strong that it transformed their lives. Attar sang of that Sufi Islam that is totally unknown to the Western media. It will probably be the only successful challenger to the electronic agenda, for it offers something the latter can never threaten nor replace: the spirituality that gives wings, opening you up to the other like a flower. A flower is not frightened by a gharib. A gharib might be a Simorgh! And each of us has a Simorgh within us.