Fuzzy Signals

Courageous Arab Thinkers

Two interesting things – one macro and the other micro – concerning women in the Arab world.

Check out Tom Friedman's column "Courageous Arab Thinkers" in The New York Times today (October 19, 2003). It's about the release of the second Arab Human Development Report. which "explains how the deficits of freedom, education and women's empowerment in the Arab world have left the region so behind that the combined G.D.P. of the 22 Arab states was less than that of a single country – Spain." The implications of these findings? These pressures of development, which get real when economic prosperity starts to slip, are forcing even conservative countries like Saudi to reconsider its political structure (hence the recent decree allowing municipal elections) and social norms about women. The most desirable future wife these days in Saudi, according to Friedman, is now a women with a job! I found that rather amusing, especially in a country that still has a problem with women driving. Poetic justice often arrives just when you think it won't. But I suppose this can be seen as the beginning of a self-correction, one of those positive feedback loops, in what was turning out to be a maladaptive cultural and economic system. Which brings me to the next data point...

On NPR's Fresh Air program, I listened to an interview with Elizabeth Rubin (October 15th, "Rebuilding Iraq"), a freelance journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. Rubin has spent a lot of time reporting from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq. Two things stood out for me in the interview. First, she spent a great deal of time living quite intimately with Islamic women, sleeping in the same room, etc. Some of these women were full-fledged Burka-wearing members, that is, women who were practicing the most extreme interpretation of Islam. During these experiences she was amazed just how much they talked about sex. Even amongst their male relatives, there were many sexual innuendoes, jokes and even role-playing. I also heard, in another place, that incidents of lesbianism (or other forms of female-to-female intimacy) are common in these cultures as well. All of this shouldn't be surprising, but it still is because we have certain preconceptions and biases of what living that life is like. Some of these guesses might be right and justified – e.g. it can't be fun wearing that black thing in the heat of summer – but other views might be off the mark or just plain wrong. So I always get a kick out of hearing stories like these, little anecdotes that force us to nuance our thinking a little. All the talk about sex, well, when we think about it from a human perspective, regardless of cultural milieu, this makes total sense. This is a classic example of displacement activity: if one aspect of human expression is repressed or controlled, it pops out somewhere else, often in unexpected ways. I need to review "Motherhood" by Sarah Hrdy, the celebrated evolutionary anthropologist who surveys mothers across species, with a special focus on upper primates, which of course includes us. She makes a compelling case that whenever women's reproductive rights are controlled by males or the societal structure, some percentage of the female population always find "workarounds" to these prohibitions or constraints, even if it means highly risky actions and behaviours. There might be something similar going in the extreme end of Islamic society. So that's a hypothesis worth exploring some more I think.

Rubin was also asked what it was like being a female reporter in an Islamic environment. Most of the time, it was fine, she said because in their eyes Western women fall outside of their traditional gender categories, so the normal rules don't apply. Western women are perceived as being more like men rather than "their" definition of what a woman is; that we are something akin to a hermaphrodite – a social oddity, somewhat pitiable in fact, because we are denied the full experience of living as our sex should. I had a similar experience, albeit not that extreme, when I worked in Asia. They (my male clients, colleagues, etc.) couldn't place me in their social structure and hierarchy, so "they" treated me (mostly) as if I lived outside of it. This perception had humorous, often bizarre, and occasionally traumatic consequences in practice, but more about these stories another time (Remind me about the Yellow Submarine story!)

At the end of the day, I think there are many more advantages in living the life modern white, western woman do; and freedom to span social boundaries and categories offers up a boon of creative and existential opportunities. This is very clear to me. But at the same time, there is something enviable, even just for a brief moment, in the black and white universe the extreme Islamic communities have created for gender relations, a world where the roles and boundaries are more clear, and who you are (and should be) is given a firm framework from which to grow and develop. Their framework I believe is a distortion of Islam and objectionable on many levels. So I'm not saying I agree with it. But what I am saying is that our free wheeling way has its downsides too. Creating that identity framework from scratch is not always easy, and there are some psychological costs even if they are not always obvious or conscious.

Posted by nicole at October 19, 2003 07:31 PM