Today, particularly in western media, Arab women are often portrayed as people discovering new identities and a sense of liberation through their exposure to western culture and law.
Conversely, critics of the modern Arab woman use the term “westernized” in a negative sense as meaning having lost their cultural identity.
The “modern” Arab woman is characterized as a person quite distinct from her “pre-modern” sister, frequently depicted as a “pitiful creature” enmeshed by ancient laws and traditions, living in the shadows without rights or power. This dangerous historical disconnect with its distorted characterization of Arab women was skillfully challenged by eminent scholar, Dr. Amira Sonbol, a tiny powerhouse of a woman, who spoke to a packed lecture hall of students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, on the subject of “The modern Arab Women: Discourses and Alternative Narratives”.
The event, chaired by Professor Stephen Chan, professor of International Relations at SOAS, formed part of the Qatar Foundation UK Lecture series.
Dr. Sonbol, a tenured professor at Georgetown University, Maryland, USA specializes in the history of modern Egypt, Islamic history and law, women, gender and Islam. For the past eight and a half years she has been based at Georgetown University, Qatar, at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, which serves as a bridge between academic communities in the United States and the Gulf region in the area of international relations. She commented that being based in Qatar has given her a valuable perspective on her work, and expressed her admiration for the vision of Qatar Foundation and its contribution to human development.
Sonbol cautioned that dividing Arab women’s history into modern and pre-modern raises serious problems and has important political repercussions. She urged scholars to bring to light a more “realistic” history focusing on “lived realities”. Her own research, using mainly archival and court records, has she said, been a revelation into the daily realities of life lived by so-called pre-modern Arab women.
“I distinguish between how women actually lived, and discourses that speak about how women should live,” she explained. She added: “Because women lived at various class levels and discourses represent class affiliations and power relations as well as theological interpretations, we are really looking at a diversity of situations, continuities and disjunctures.”
Sonbol in the course of her research found vivid testimonies to the lives of women as craftsmen and traders in markets all over the Arab world: Women who owned and worked grinding mills, produced and sold cheese and ghee, owned olive orchards and ran olive presses. In the Gulf it was women who undertook the setting up and dismantling of tribal tents and helped in the building of homes. Some worked on pearling boats and in some cases dived for pearls. They provided the major labor for herding camels, watering and grazing and took on jobs in the marketplace selling or shop-keeping.
Women, she explained, far from being housebound and passive members of society were in fact very active in the labor force. So, she reasoned, it cannot be said that Arab women today are assuming totally new roles and identities — in fact, they are part of a long tradition that has been disrupted by strictures that have been placed on women in recent history.
Ironically, she noted, it was the introduction of new laws and modern systems, such as modern banking, which put a brake on women’s enterprise. Women were forbidden, for example, under modern banking rules from opening bank accounts in their own names, and forced to open accounts in the names of husbands or brothers. This also had an impact on property ownership. Sonbol cited Afaf Marsot’s study of late eighteenth century women in Egypt, in which it was pointed out that some 40 percent of all property in Cairo was owned by women at that time. But with the new banking regulations, this figure fell to less than 2- percent by the end of the 19th Century.
Sonbol made a very interesting observation about her research into Shariah court records. “The law applied in these courts was based on the Shariah by ulama (legal scholars), and we do not see them passing judgment about women and work or women in the public sphere. This is very important because many of the issues that are brought up today by Islamists regarding women did not seem to have been issues of concern to Shariah courts during the pre-modern period,” she said.
She made an interesting point about fuqaha, experts in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). “Fuqaha were mostly interested in their own society, in the middle classes and middle class morality. The standards they detailed were meant for their own wives and sisters and members of their wider circles. Members of the fuqaha class were mostly of the middle classes, upwardly mobile, worked closely with elites and envisioned a life for their families that considered women’s work as an indication of poverty and ‘lower-classedness’.”
However, this sensibility toward women in his immediate circle did not prevent the faqih officiating at court cases in which feisty women came to dispute their rights to market place spots (altercations which often involved scuffles with both female and male traders). Pre-modern Shariah court records also show women keen to exert control over the circumstances of their marriages, place of residence and marital support.
Sonbol spoke about the impact of nineteenth century legal codes. She explained that when the modern states built new separate Shariah courts they did not apply precedents from pre-modern Shariah courts. The logic of the court system, the philosophy behind Shariah law and the flexibility it provided to the public and the qadis (judges) were curtailed. Common practices at the heart of a system, which had been organically linked to the society it served, were replaced by particular laws suitable to nineteenth century nation-state patriarchal society. These laws worked against the weaker members of society, namely women and children, even while making the legal system more streamlined, homogenous and efficient. “The modern state created a multi-court system in which personal status and family were itemized under religious law,” said Sonbol.
The scholar added that it is important for legal distinctions to made between women and family. “The inclusion of both together in most legal codes in the Islamic world has been a method of denying women full citizenship rights. Seeing a woman as enjoying equal rights as a citizen is always limited by including a line “according to the Shariah,” she observed.
Sadly, Sonbol noted, it is also a fact that, while women have made great advances, a large number remain part of an undocumented and unrecognized labor force. Many women, she said, continue to be unrecognized; particularly the no-wage work of women in fields and factories belonging to families all over the Arab world.
After the lecture, some of the students and academics gave their reaction.
Khulood Al-Zadjali, an Omani studying for a post-graduate degree in Computer Science at University College London (UCL), said that she had been particularly inspired by the message delivered by Sonbol that women must strive to secure rights. “If you want your rights, you have to get your rights. No-one will give them to you. I truly believe that,” she commented.
Zarqa Parvez, studying for an MSc in State, Society and Development at SOAS, also paid tribute to her former professor. “She helped me a lot with my research and a lot of my research was inspired by her. I think such a talk is needed in the western world that has such pre-conceived notions of what Arab women are — notions that in my experience are not positive and far removed from reality. For a scholar like her to come here and present reality and give first-hand experience of her work and what goes on in the Arab world is very enlightening,” she said.
Dr. Nasser Kalawoun, a London based author and researcher on the political economy, originally from Lebanon, said: “She gave credibility to earlier historians and fuqaha: she isolated the times during which the rules were erected against women. I agree with her that Muslim women had rights — which they lost for whatever reasons — and they can retrieve these rights through reinterpretation or revival of some of the sources.” He added: “I would have expected her, as a woman, to have a prejudice toward women — but she did it in a humanitarian way and she showed the wealth of resources: how to read them in a better way, avoiding two traps, namely either dismissing them (the sources) outright, or revering them without looking at them.”
Yomn Al-Kaisi, an Iraqi/Palestinian studying for a BA in International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London, commented on Sonbol’s analysis of the characterization of pre-modern and modern Arab women. “That was a very important assessment because we tend to have an oriental image of an Arab woman — not interacting, being passive — and today, especially in light of the Arab Spring, we tend to say, ‘Oh — Arab women finally going for their rights!’, and actually both scenarios are completely orientalist, and to be honest, quite sexist. We need to have more open discussion, particularly on the historical context, because we tend to block out certain parts of history. The lecture shed light on the Mamluk period, Shariah law and the courts; I think these are powerful tools, which we can use to reinforce points of contention today.”
Meanwhile, Annehen Miriam Holst, a law graduate from SOAS who has studied Islamic Law, with a Danish/German/Egyptian background, said: “The point about how women were very active and involved in business, and even formed business cooperatives and owned property in the per-modern period, and how, somehow, the role of the woman changed, and how that affects our modern picture of Arab women — gives us room to rewrite what an Islamic modern women is; that is something we need to research more by reading the archives.”
Dr. Stephen Chan, chair of the event, said that he thought it would be very valuable to invite Sonbol back to SOAS to conduct a series of lectures where she could further expand on her valuable insights.
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