History of the Arab Woman

by Leslie Farmer

In the last part of the eighth century, in the reign of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, the marketplaces of the Abbasid empire buzzed with rumor. The rebellious sect of the Kharijis in Iraq was up in arms and its forces under Layla—poet, beauty and rebel leader—were giving battle again and again to the troops of the Caliph.

In 1970, over a thousand years later, the suqs of the Arab world again ran with talk of a Layla. This time it was a young woman with an enigmatically lovely face and a background of teaching school and of guerrilla training with one of the most extreme Palestinian commando groups. This Layla had forced one plane to land in Damascus in 1969 and now had attempted to seize another en route to London—tough political gestures which again drew world attention—if also condemnation—to her cause.

In the more than a thousand years between the two militant Laylas, rare indeed were the Arab women who took such an active part in their people’s history. Even more so than the generality of western women, from medieval times almost up to the present, Arab women have lived out their lives in the shadow of men.

From earliest recorded history human society has been patriarchal, women confined mainly to the home and the nearby fields, treated as the property of their husbands, and generally forbidden the society of men outside their families. The lands which are now part of the Arab world inherited this historical pattern, though women occasionally broke it to the extent of ruling as independent monarchs—the Queen of Sheba, Egyptian queens acting as regents, and the famous and tragic Zenobia of third-century Syria.

In the societies of the eastern Mediterranean which were to form the roots of western culture, the patriarchal tradition also persisted. The nomadic Hebrews were strongly patriarchal, in the city-state of Athens, the “freewoman” took no part in public life and was perpetually under the guardianship of her father or husband. And the attitude of writers and theologians of the early Christian church was often inspired rather literally by the tradition of Eve created from Adam and a paradise lost. In fact, the epistles of St. Paul, who shaped the new faith, and masses of early church writings fairly breathe misogyny: woman is useful solely for procreation; outside that she functions only as a temptation to sin and had best stay at home when she is not going to church.

In the Arab world, the triumph of Islam in the seventh century basically codified the position of women with its laws of spiritual and civic conduct. It banned female infanticide, limited polygamy to four wives, forbade sexual relations outside marriage and spelled out women’s rights in marriage and inheritance. But part of this codification was to place women, in unequivocal language, below men: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property” (in support of women). (Surah IV, v. 34). Some modern Islamic writers and thinkers believe that, taking the Koran as a whole, women are given an equal-but-different status rather than an inferior one. But most Muslim laymen and scholars, living, it should be remembered, in an already patriarchal civilization, have taken such verses the way many Christians take the story of the Creation and the Fall: literally.

Even so, up to the 10th century, veiling and seclusion were not generally practiced. During the Abbasid era, two royal princesses went off in chain-mail to fight the Byzantines, Arab women composed poetry and music and vied with men in cultural salons and competitions, Harun al-Rashid’s wife Zubaydah appeared at caliphal receptions in all her jewels and brocades, and in Muslim Spain ladies danced the zambra with their suitors. But with the exception of some women in agricultural communities, Bedouins, and a few women who ruled behind the caliphs, veils, seclusion and subordination had become general by the end of the 10th century and over the next millennium would remain so.

In the western world, during the same millennium, women were not faring much better. During the Middle Ages, despite a temporary elevation in their status when chivalry was in fashion, the legal position of women—especially with regard to property rights—declined. In the Industrial Age, as princely courts disappeared, the status of women who had been appreciated and encouraged in those courts waned. The same fate was in store for working women as guilds, in which they wielded some power, were replaced by factories. Cultivated hostesses in French salons did continue to receive the intelligentsia, but in the same era working class English women were toiling long hours in unhealthy factories and some English countrymen claimed the right to sell their wives. As late as the Victorian Age, despite challenge from rebels like George Eliot and Florence Nightingale, an Englishwoman could not attend a university, and could be sure that in divorce even the most erring husband would automatically take the children. The same erring husband could legally beat his wife, keep her at home for weeks on end and spend all her money.

There were exceptions. Working women in England, unlike upperand middle class women, had a certain social freedom, not unlike that enjoyed by women in the colonies of North America. There the scarcity of women on frontier and farm and the necessity for cooperation and companionship in rough, often isolated conditions, tended to modify the patriarchal traditions of the Old World.

By mid-19th century the anti-slavery struggle in the United States had begun to awaken American and English women to their own legal and social disabilities. In 1837, Mt. Holyoke became the first American college to admit women. The women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, was only the first of many such meetings. In the United States and England women’s legal disabilities gradually faded and married women’s rights over their own property increased. Gradually women began in increasing numbers to enter professional life then, finally, to push for the vote. Actually, women were first given the vote in New Zealand (1893); Australia and Scandinavia followed. Russia (1917) beat both England (1918) and the United States (1920). France, Italy and West Germany didn’t give the vote to their female citizens until the 1940’s and Switzerland still doesn’t.

Worldwide today, it is still difficult for a woman to go on to higher education, to obtain equal pay for equal work, or to reach the top in any field no matter what her ability. Legal discrimination has also been slow to recede: before 1965 a French husband could dispose of all his wife’s assets as he liked unless she was gainfully employed—but she could not work without his permission. In Spain a decade ago if a man caught his wife in flagrante and killed her out of hand, the worst punishment he could expect would be a short term of exile.

On the brighter side, in 1970 the world had three women premiers (none in a western nation) and two Japanese women successfully scaled 24,857-foot Annapurna in the Himalayas; the year before America’s National Council of Churches elected its first woman president, the first woman jockey raced on a recognized race track and six women scientists were scheduled, for the first time, to work out of an American base in the Antarctic. Women in the United States and Britain furthermore, have in the Women’s Liberation movement forged a formidable weapon that promises even more change.

In the Arab world, the position of women saw little of such changes until the 20th century. But the relatively few decades since then have seen a positive explosion of women’s education throughout the entire area, the end of the “classical” harem, a substantial decline in polygamy, the gradual recession of the veil, the granting of the vote except in the Peninsula, and, in the major cities, the easing of restrictions on social mixing of the sexes and the rise of the Arab career girl.

Even these changes have touched the lives—and consciousness—of relatively few. The most important improvements in the status of women are just now beginning, and the most difficult to effect will not be in government-provided facilities or in legal provisions, but in attitudes—attitudes that are the more stubborn because they are rooted not only in Arab civilization but in civilization itself. To obtain full equality for women in the Arab world as in the western world, the change that must still be made is in the minds and hearts of men.