We received this letter from a young Arab woman who highlights the level of corruption in some of the despotic regimes in the Arab world, and how this affects the whole of society and in particular women. As she stresses in her letter, “strikes all over Egypt were led by women, working-class, poor women”, in spite of the role that is reserved to them in society.
Dear Marxist.com,
It is easy to fall victim to an oversimplified and superficial understanding of the chauvinist culture in the Arab World. Regarding this topic, liberal feminists in the West think that religious and cultural conservatism are the only factors at play. So they ignore much of the political and economic factors that influence countries in the Arab World. It is almost irrelevant to try to contrast the progression of feminism in the Arab world, a region ruled by militarist dictators and oil rich hereditary monarchists, with that of the West, bourgeois states with democratic institutions.
When a country is ruled by a military dictatorship based on capitalist principles, it is a state with a dual identity. It has a government that wishes to control the freedoms of all the people, but also one that cannot control the basic pillars of society, such as the economy. It seems to be unable or unwilling to provide the people it controls with any means of security. This loose, controlling state runs on mere corruption and political repression. Political corruption takes some time before it spreads to societal corruption. People at first become indignant with state sponsored crime but they get used to it. Getting used to this repression does not mean that they cannot relate to a system without the corruption and repression.
A region such as the Arab World has been going through a constantly increasing cycle of corruption, or as I call it the progression of negative politics. States boast of this progression, claiming it’s a leap forward to catch up with the so called “civilized world” by which they mean the West. The progression of Negative politics can manifest itself through worker layoffs in privatized industries or anti-terrorism laws that resemble the Patriot Act but which are used more frequently by the state to abduct activists. So in short the only progressions that Arabs have seen have been those of negative politics. So with all the accumulated repressive and corrupt policies, corruption starts to leak into every sector of society and then it starts to take over humans. The people realize and hate the fact that they have become corrupt but they understand that they would be crushed, if they weren’t.
Nostalgia for the greater times is felt, because the people become sick of the corruption. They try to maintain however much of an autonomous identity they can. The people then subconsciously hold on tightly to everything they see connected to the past. I, here, say “people” because it is both men and women who contribute to this virtual culture… So there is an instinctive feeling, which they may not mirror consciously, that any progress in society would be that of negative politics. So this discriminatory attitude is a defense mechanism of an oppressed society that has ceased to recognize any change as good. A worker at the factory would tell you that the government celebrated his layoff as an important step for economic growth; that the policeman’s heavy loaded rifle was said to be for the “protection” of the people; that unaffordable and long-queued clinics are a symbol of a functioning economy. That worker would probably view this world in an Orwellian sense, such as “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Dictatorships in general, tend to indirectly (or directly) encourage discrimination within their people. It is usually much easier to “divide and conquer”. This cannot be more apparent than in the Middle East. So governments sponsor religious discrimination, ethnic discrimination, class discrimination, sex discrimination, etc, etc. It is easier to rule a country and impose your oppression on them when they are stuck in a cycle of an illusory superiority.
The Societal attitudes in countries like Egypt or Syria make this idea more viciously obvious. Religiously speaking, The Prophet Mohammed PBUH said, "With Allah, the most detestable of all things permitted is divorce." So at least for all Arabs, except Orthodox Christians (most other Christians can divorce or at least annul their marriage), divorce was always religiously permitted, but it has always given a woman a certain image or a lower status in society. If she had children, she was condemned and judged by everyone for not putting her “children’s best interest” at heart. This societal persecution of divorced women make many abused wives think a hundred times before asking for a divorce and a million times more before actively seeking one. Our society thinks that if divorce becomes easier to attain, it would be a corrupting force in society. They do not view the issue in the sense of giving women the right to free themselves from abuse but they see it as element breaking the typical institution of the family that has always existed. Superficially speaking, one could just argue that Arab culture is socially conservative but this would not be giving the issue its proper weight. A woman free of marital control is a scary idea for them, not because they wickedly want to repress women. They see that as an example of a societal block dissolving; they want to protect the last thing the government won’t fight them for protecting. A woman’s misery or many women’s miseries is just collateral damage or a reality of life worth paying to keep “the family” still alive.
The very existence of marriage in the Arab World has become only about breeding. The corruption of this institution is directly linked with the corruption of human beings within the dictatorships. Marriage, nowadays, has less to do with personal compatibility let alone love. And women are almost always victimized emotionally, physically, or intellectually. Marriage is a contract between three elements, the husband to be, his in-laws to be, and the bride. A contract based on the perceived notion of “the natural evolvement of life”. So a family of corrupted persons forms, and they as much as possible try to keep the hierarchy of the family alive (of course, women are at the bottom of the hierarchal pyramid). The members of the family could acknowledge their own corruption because they see it increase proportionally to society’s corruption. The idea of family, along with its hierarchy, gives them the illusion that there is one thing about their life that has not been altered by the governmental corruption and thus it’s the purest thing in their life. So the dysfunctions of it are either acknowledged but not taken seriously or tabooed. Women’s status in society declines constantly as Arabs try to blindly hold on to institutions whilst ignoring their essence. Marriage was beautiful before it became a business deal. Women have suffered for it a lot, and men had to live their lives with the guilt of bringing an unhappy and conformist life to a woman and children.
In all this, women have also, unfortunately, accepted and tolerated their role as victims. In the Arab World there are many feminist thinkers but almost none of them are activists promoting their cause. I am not putting the blame onto them, because I am almost certain that the so called “liberal feminists” would not dare speak out or carry on an activist stance if they had lived in a dictatorship. In 2008, strikes all over Egypt were led by women, working-class, poor women. When our society starts moving away from this defense mechanism and when the corruption and the poverty would be too great to stand any longer. The people will demand the democratization of the country, and with democracy people could reverse the wheel of the progression of negative politics. With democracy people would actively and clearly view which morals they choose to obey and which to break.
