A Middle Eastern woman is a closed chest. She carries all her feelings, pains, agonies, fears, frustration, thoughts and desires locked up inside her. She’s learned through ages to keep all these emotions into herself and never to reveal anything but what others expect her to reveal. Everything she does has to pass through the filter of society and inherited traditions. No matter how the world turns around she must rest glued to her place, locked up inside her old rusty closet. Women pass on this tradition from one generation to the next. They make sure that any sign rebellion would meet its end inside its cradle. A little girl growing up in the Middle East will always have the word 3eeb in her primary vocabulary. Almost everything is 3eeb (Shame). She can’t laugh out loud. She can’t play with boys. She can’t talk when older people are having a conversation. She can’t be as physically active as boys of her age. She can’t hang out with friends. She can’t look at her naked body. She can’t ask questions about physical or sexual issues. She can’t comment on any answers she happens to receive for these questions. She can’t consider her self an equal to her brother… An endless list of prohibitions blocks her way to experience, knowledge or even enjoying her innocence. She learns, very early in life, that she is a woman in the making. She has to follow the footsteps of her grandmother and her grandmother’s grandmother, no matter what the calendar says.
The blurry zone where religion mixes up with customs and traditions makes it so difficult for her to put her chains into question. She can tell where one end and the other one starts. The patriarchs of society have been so keen on this, that they carefully made sure none of their women would escape their cage. To give old social traditions and customs the authority of religion has proven to be handy through the ages. Hence, they got more tangled into one another, so that members of the society would consider them one and the same.
In earlier Bedouin societies the idea of female inferiority was so appealing, that even when they converted to Islam, they weren’t willing to give that one up. They actually found ways around the holy text which would secure their existing advantages while putting more restrictions on females. And there are no limits to what a group sharing benefit can do to exercise their power over inferiors. And sadly, the message of Prophet Muhammed had fallen into the wrong hands. Although the prophet utterly refused the act of collecting his speech, they still did it. Not that only, but they gave this collection, which followed the oral tradition and depended on the effort of scholars, an authority which resembled that of their Holy Book, the Qur’an. This gave them the advantage of adding whatever they want to impose on society, especially the vulnerable members: women, and passing it as a religious rule. Hence you find all religious institutions battling for the holiness of the Sunnah, and its total sacredness, almost forgetting (intentionally) that these were merely the talk of a human being, used in his daily life for different purposes (advising followers of what used to be a new religion, chatting with his friends, recounting what he does in his daily life… etc.). But still, they were passed on without questioning.
Yet, when this tool of manipulation was at the threat of being questioned (due to people who were not wise enough while adding their own words, they got over-indulged and added things that were totally against any religion or even code of manners) those preservers of truth got into trouble. They were forced to admit that some of these sayings were made up and were falsely attributed to the prophet. Ehhm!.. So how can we differentiate? Well, they came up with the genius idea of the Science of Hadith, or “Hadithology”, which states that if the Hadith can be traced to somone who had actually lived during the time of Prophet Muhammed, then it is not proven to be right. But the thing remains that they admitted that there are those who messed up with the Sunnah. All the same, they still struggled for the sacred nature of Sunnah (Words of Prophet Muhammed).
Well, the forefathers left a goldmine for their sons (from controlling the meaning of the holy verses to using the sayings they attributed to the Prophet). Now, the next move was to make those women themselves hold on to their chains and never attempt to break free. It is the same mechanism used by Great Britain when they invaded African countries and made its inhabitants become their salves. The British colonialism was clever enough to convince those slaves that they were born slaves. They made them believe that it is a bless that they now found masters who can take care of them, because slaves can’t think for themselves. They even turned their colonialism into a crusade of some kind, where the mission was to bring civilization to these savage lands. The idea of “The White Man’s Burden” was so popular and found its believers among the colonists themselves. The “burden” was that of educating and civilizing the barbarians. It turned intro a sacred mission, just like that of the Arab men, who want to protect women from themselves. So now we have ”the Arab Man’s Burden.”
Women in their turn grow with this feeling of being second class humans. They need men to lead and control them or they won’t be able to live. A woman is not complete until she gets married. If she didn’t get married in a timely manner, then it is her fault. She must then find herself a man to escape the daggers of her society. Even if she is financially independent, she still must get a man to protect her. Protect her from what? You name it: herself, other men, society, rumors, loneliness, the devil, anything. The most important thing is to have a man, full stop. And when she makes a hasty decision and ends up in divorce, it becomes her fault again. If she endures and lives miserably, psychologically and emotionally ruined, it is praiseworthy. She becomes the wise woman who cared more about protecting her family. What family? How can a sound family be formed in a home whose founders don’t stand one another? What family can be raised by a mother that hates her life and even herself? A mother who feel cursed for being born a woman.
As a woman’s world is shattered, she becomes more vulnerable, even more welcoming to ideas that stress her inferiority and her sinful nature. Maybe she’s paying the price for Eve’s original sin. She totally surrenders to any forces. And instead of raising up her children to have a different and better life, she raises them to worship their chains. She wants her son to become an authority figure, just like her father and her husband, and teaches him that roughness and love of control are masculine. He is forbidden to show his feelings. Tears are for girls. But he is allowed to mix up with guys and hang out with them to become independent. If he flirts around with girls, she smiles and says “The boy has grown up.” If he smokes, she may rebuke him in the beginning, but he knows she will let him smoke in the end. But when it comes to her daughter, she raises her to be submissive and controllable. She has to cover herself up, stay at home, get the highest grades at school, obey every order, and never ever talk to a boy. She may think it is a way of protection. If the girl got used to the rules she will fit in better with society. And maybe because she wants to relive the pain again through her daughter, as a kind of reassurance that women do not deserve a better life.
Generation to generation and a Middle Eastern woman is all the same. She may get the highest education, use the internet, travel abroad, but she stays locked up in her prison. The shackles of her culture and upbringing are all the same. Her female body, which is just an accident of fetus formation, defines her whole life. And as long as all her sex endures in silence, she is more and more reluctant to rebel. It is the rule that when one slave rebels he gets all the whipping. But it takes a revolution of the masses of the oppressed to make a real change and enforce new rules. So when will our revolution come?
