Autumn 2010
by Gema Martín Muñoz
Photo: Jordan's Princess Rania
Western prejudices about Arab society and Islam have tended to cloak major social shifts in the Arab World. Gema Martín Muñoz says that smaller families and the changing role of women are major forces to be reckoned with.
Arab “reality” is multiform, diverse and many-sided. It is not a homogeneous whole that follows common rules inherent in its religion and culture. It is, on the contrary, a kaleidoscope of situations, developments and transformations, where political, economic and social factors interact with culture and religion, although these last two don’t necessarily determine outcomes. Arab countries and societies often have an image of being rigid and resistant to change because they are seen from the outside through the lens of their ruling regimes, which mostly resist development and change.
But this image does not reflect the reality of Arab societies. On the contrary, an enormous dynamism is opening doors to many types of change, albeit at different speeds and in complex, contradictory ways when change from below is held back from above. It’s a premise that is particularly important when looking at the situation of women in the Arab world.
The predominant image of Arab women is of a passive, exotic and veiled victim-woman who reacts to events instead of actively participating in them. She is an impersonal “communitarised” woman surrounded by stereotypes that feed cultural prejudices. But such simplistic ideas are in fast conflict with a reality that is much more complex. These conceptions are fixed in time and place, yet empirical evidence shows that on the contrary deep mutations are taking place that are changing everything, despite the power of patriarchal structures and equally potent reactionary forces. Arab societies are engaged in a process of intense and irreversible change in which women are playing a crucial role.
The supposed immobility of the Arab and Islam world doesn’t correspond at all to reality. Demographic change along with social and economic factors affecting education and work are forcing a profound change on the traditional family model, and this is now observable in even the most vigorously conservative states. This change has already produced a positive transformation in the role of women and in relations between sexes in Arab societies, and will continue to do so. Arabs live, needless to say, in the same timeframe as the rest of the world, even if they are affected by such peculiarities as the weight of religious norms in the rules governing family life. This influence is not in any case specific to Islam and this “resort to the religious” serves only to slow down, not to block, social developments that now seem inevitable. Research carried out by myself and a broad interdisciplinary group of academics (Sophie Bessis y Gema Martín Muñoz (coords.), Mujer y Familia en las sociedades árabes actuales. Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra, 2010) shows that although the rates of change may differ, and their forms and results diverge, fundamental changes in women’s conditions are general throughout the Arab world.
The pressures and demands of the modern world are undisputable, and they’re also widespread. Differences in schooling levels between boys and girls have lessened everywhere – even if at greater or lesser speeds. And in many Arab countries more girls than boys are now in secondary and higher education. This is a development that shows parents consider the education of their daughters to be just as important as that of their sons. Increased ages for marriage and declining fertility result directly from the teaching and use of contraception. The Maghreb region may lead in this regard, but the phenomenon is observable across the whole Arab world. All the surveys show that young men and women want to study and have a job before they marry. And more and more also want to choose their own partner.
During the last half century there has been a massive entry of women into the public arena, influenced most certainly by the intense shift to urbanisation in all Arab countries as that has enormously increased levels of waged employment among women. Arab countries' massive change from rural to urban societies is one of the greatest transformations they have ever experienced, and it has altered family structures, reducing them in size to something much closer to the ‘nuclear families’ of the West. This new family model now has so much force behind it that it is imposing itself on rural society too, where the decline of the agrarian economy is being matched by a strong shift towards smaller families in just the same way as in urban areas. This change in the family model sometimes occurs at slightly different speeds across the Arab world, but often it is occurring simultaneously in town and country.
These changes have, not surprisingly, led to a redistribution of power between old and young, and between men and women. We are now witnessing a progressive loss of power by representatives of the patriarchal order, and that is being reinforced by a profound shift from the extended family to more nuclear ones. And the increased weight in society of young people and of women today represents a fundamental trend in the contemporary Arab world’s evolution.
But these changes do not necessarily mark a break with the past. The many realities and different forms of ancient and modern development that arise in all the countries studied reflect local compromises with tradition and with patriarchal laws, and different rates of adjustment between old and new ways of life. Local conditions reflect various negotiations and strategies to sidestep existing norms without transgressing them frontally. The changes are notably weaker and more complex in countries like Palestine and Iraq, not only for intrinsic reasons but also because of the grave conflicts they have been undergoing.
The dynamics of change in Arab societies are rarely accompanied by change in the political climates of their states. The Arab region today has strong dynamic societies but is made up of states whose governance has rarely adapted to change, but rather reflects complex and very different realities. Most states resist transferring the processes of social transformation into their own legal framework. They fear, with reason, that extending freedoms and developing individual autonomy within the family, and so weakening patriarchal authority, could have repercussions in the public arena and produce a questioning of the ideological basis of state power. The result is widespread invocation of religious norms, and to a lesser extent references by governments to tradition as a way of legitimising the continuation of patriarchal rule. “State feminisms” are generally more demonstrations of rhetoric or political symbolism, concerned primarily with projecting an international image, than they are a real motor for change.
The process of change may be deep-seated, but it is not linear. Its progress is uneven because it encounters strong forces of inertia and resistance. Arab societies are, however, undergoing intense, fundamental and inevitable change that is quite independent of uneven regional conditioning. The region's political authorities, no less than families themselves, will be forced to accept the inconsistencies of the traditional model when it comes to the transformation of the condition of women. This is also a change that affects many others, so it must be analysed from within the Arab perspective and also from outside.
The situation of women is one of the main benchmarks that the outside world, and particularly the West, uses to assess the Arab world. But such assessments tend to focus on the supposed immobilism that derives from Islamic norms. This focus on the “women-Islam” tandem obscures a better knowledge of the real changes that are taking place. This predominant view of Arab societies often stifles outsiders' ability to break free of their firmly held beliefs that Islamic society confines all Arab women in the same way, when in reality they experience very different conditions. This sort of stereotypical vision prevents us from seeing and evaluating the deep changes taking place in Arab societies, and risks blinding us to how transformation of women is changing Arab societies. The western world thus risks depriving itself of an important key to understanding the Arab world as it is today, and will be tomorrow.
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