The thirst for power is a male disease as Bruce Carleton, an expert on evolution, argues. Males are the ones who established the military institutions and shaped the destiny of societies with a hierarchical system. Males mutilated the human journey by shaping it with their male perspective. With this perspective, one turns into a mythical creature such as the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey. It was the patriarchal system, which pushed women to the margins of society. This is a universal problem. For example, when a women in China talks about herself in the first person she uses a word synonymous with slave.
On the other hand, as the historian Will Durant states, women started the agricultural revolution that ended the “hunting and gathering” stage of human history. Thus, women led humanity into civilization, which brought forth cities, dense populations, specialized craftsmanship and the division of labor. But it was the patriarchal system, which created wars and tyranny in this latest stage of human development.
One should note that tyranny is first established within the family environment, which produces an individual who cannot voice her or his opinion. This tyrannical atmosphere manifests itself on a bigger scale in the political sphere in which it can continue its oppression of individuals who are already trained to be silent within the family institution.
The female is the one who bears children, gives birth and protects life. She does not wage wars. When she does, it is in an attempt to imitate the dominant patriarchal system as was the case with Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir.
According to Daniel Goleman, author of ‘Emotional Intelligence’, emotional intelligence is a deeper kind of intelligence than the IQ. He argues that women surpass men in this form of intelligence because the female brain has a denser neurological structure. Statistics today show higher levels of achievement in education among female students.
Peter Farbe, author of ‘Human Kind’, mentions in his book that the research of Dr. Meed shows that “The human culture is responsible for creating the physical and intellectual differences between the two sexes”. Farbe then comes up with a fascinating idea that females should dominate since “it is the fair sex which has a longer life expectancy, better health than men and is less prone to accidents”. But what actually happened through human history is quite different.
The female body becomes a political stage for man’s tyranny and the place from which he declares himself a guardian of women since they are incapable of knowing what is best for them. Malik Bennabi explains this in his book ‘Conditions of Renaissance’. He explains the battle around the female body as a question of whether to cover it or to uncover it. He says both viewpoints, although apparently very different, come from the same dynamics of male dominance.
Dimensions of the problem go beyond the Arab world although Arab women receive a poisoning dose of it. In Britain, for example, women did not get the right to vote until 1912. Unfortunately this is still the case in many areas of the world today.
To understand the root of the problem of human oppression at any level, including the gender level, we need to look for the cause in the oppressed and not only in the oppressor. When this rule is applied to the case of women, the question is why has women accepted oppression for so long? It is the weak that create the powerful. Women are no exception to this rule and, therefore, contribute to the making of this bad legacy. Islam came to usher in a new way of thinking by abandoning the relations of power and dominance. The first believer in Islam was a woman and the first martyr too was a woman. During the Iranian revolution 1979, women took to the streets along side the men to march in demonstrations of millions and her chador did not keep her from martyrdom.
(Summarized and translated by Arwa Jalabi)
