Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (26 page)

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
^c
rawi) 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
^c
ad al-Sabbah and the Syrian Hamida Na
^c
na
^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
^c
a
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.
^c
Umar 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?

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
^c
a,
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
^c
adala
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.

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.