I can’t be sure, but I think it was Cinema Bassman in downtown
Amman, or maybe The Rainbow by the First Circle that racked up all those
dinars. Because if there was a blockbuster Arab style, it was I Want a Solution.
Faten Hamama and Rushdy Abaza (I never forgave this gorgeous
man for playing such a repellent character) are at war in Cairo’s courts. She,
a translator--urbane, educated, bourgeois--wanted a divorce. He, a
diplomat---urbane, educated, bourgeois--would not grant it to her. And so, the
law, the courts and their men lock hands and dance to the tune of Abaza’s
wrath. For Hamama’s Durriyah,
in the end, there was no solution.
It was 1975. I was too young to register the resonance in
Durriyah’s plight. And, anyway, who in the lull of those leafy Amman days would have thought that the victims languishing in those
corridors of prejudice spoke for the predicament of an entire gender? That’s
why, for many an Arab woman, the
movie’s message was just as disturbing as it was simple: pick a nasty husband
and, in the flutter of an eyelash, all those buffers--education, money,
career, a good family name…—that separate privilege from want could dissolve
like so much froth. It’s not that women from all walks of life suddenly, in their aggrievement,
become one, but that they, in that courthouse, become a sisterhood of a sort in
the trenches.
It’s not surprising then that Arab feminists, in the shadow of
a towering Arab state, would aim for the laws whose very effect (if not intent)
is to strip them from those
buffers. Back in those days it seemed like all the system and its
courts needed to do is catch up with life. In spite of considerable societal
resistance, by the early 1970s, Durriyah was a growing presence everywhere in
the urban jungle. The reasonable bet was that if the statutes changed, so would
society’s reluctance to make more way for her.
Decades on, the bet is all but lost. Instead of successfully
pushing for more space and breaking new ground, Arab women have spent the past
half-century doing their bit for man, God and country on the battlefields of
culture and identity, painstakingly negotiating their role in an increasingly
hostile public arena.
To boot, you can scour the personal status laws of the entire
region in near futile search of a real dent. All Arab countries have signed the UN’s CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against
Women), attaching to it riders designed to exempt precisely those laws that
pack such discrimination. Every other Arab constitution contains clauses that
enshrine equality between women and men, except where personal status laws
apply.
Legal codes, from Morocco to
Jordan, boast rape laws that offer an out-of-jail ticket for a rapist should he
marry his “stigmatized” victim. As for honor killings, haddith wala tassal (don’t even ask)! Next to these loud injustices
are the profuse divorce and child custody cases where actually fair Sharia laws
(yes, they do exist) are regularly thwarted by courts that have abandoned all pretense of juridical independence
and rigor. They don’t grab headlines but, around here, they don’t need to. Every other week, I
am privy to the wretched tale of a woman I can easily call a friend struggling
against a system whose contempt for womanhood seems to get progressively more visceral.
For samples of this truth, 2014 has been quite kind to us. In the span of two months, Jordan, Iraq and
Lebanon—each of which is home to a different type of governance—have revealed
the drastic degree to
which corruption, factional politics and parochialisms have eaten into the authority and integrity of the
Arab civil state, mostly vitally the judicial institution.
From Jordan’s Higher Appeals Sharia Court: ruling number
348/4102-91837, dated March 2, 2014, which overturned a lower court’s verdict
for the wife in a marital dispute. Reason? The testimony of the female witness
is inadmissible because “she is not veiled.” In protest, The Jordanian Woman’s
Association wrote:
The ruling…rejects the
testimony of unveiled women because it deems them “lewd,” according to the
fatwa on which the decision rests. But in spite of the ruling’s claim that it
relies on the precepts of Islamic jurisprudence [Jordan subscribes to the
Maliki school], the only evidentiary support it could cite was the preface of a
book by Sheikh Youssef al Qaradawi.
(For the uninitiated, the ever so whimsical Qaradawi is the
religious scholar most dear to Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood’s hearts.)
Thus, in one swoop, the good judge violates the constitutional rights
of unveiled Jordanian women and opens the rule of law to the very colorful world of our dime a dozen Qaradawis
and their fatwas.
From Iraq’s cabinet: the draft Personal
Status Jaafari Law, dated February 25, 2014. Should it pass the soon to be
elected parliament, here’s what Iraqi women can look forward to: a new legal
female age for marriage of nine
(article 16), down from 18 as set in the 1959 family law that still governs
Iraq; the husband’s permission should they want to leave home (article 101);
sex whenever the husband wishes to have it (article 101); no financial support
if they are under age, as in sexually unready, or seniors, as in old hags (article
126); unconditional polygamy (article 104).
From Lebanon’ parliament: the Law Against Domestic Violence,
dated April 1, 2014, after a six-year campaign and intensive lobbying by rights
groups like KAFA, as in enough. No
need to pick apart the key loopholes and amendments (among them the elimination
of the marital rape clause) whose very purpose is to defang the law. A better
way to appreciate the seriousness of our legislatures about the violence that
threatens Lebanese women of all strata is to watch the parliamentary debate
itself, starting with the words
of Hezbollah member Ali Ammar: “Your excellency, Mr. Speaker, no human being in
this chamber disagrees that a woman is a delicate soul, not a chatelaine.” The mulish sarcasm of a famously
mulish man, to the echoes of his colleagues’ laughter! All in all, 71
parliamentarians, Christians and Muslims alike, who had publically committed to
vote for KAFA’s proposed corrections to the statute, reneged on their vow out
of deference to Lebanon’s traditions and the sensibilities of the church and
mosque.
But what is so special or surprising about patriarchal
interests coalescing to ensure prerogative and control in locales where they
still act as ultimate arbiters of the forbidden and the permitted? After all, the world over,
tensions remain between the demands for women’s rights and patriarchy’s
willingness to cede them.
On the face of it, the sum of this gendered inequity may appear
to be about the dissonance between feminist effort and achievement, between
paper rights and real life protections. But in the case of Arab women, context
tells much more. There is nothing fringe or sectional about our situation. And
there is nothing uncommon about the threadbare defenses on which we can depend
when seeking redress or fending against all manner of abuse. In an environment
that is pervasively rigged against us, we may feel more acutely our quandary,
but ours is, indeed, the quandary of all vulnerable segments of Arab society.
In full sight of widespread economic malaise, bourgeoning unemployment and
poverty, failing educational policies, a sprawling security apparatus and a
crumbling rule of law, you can imagine the number of those who count among the
vulnerable. Surely, three years into the 2011 revolts, you can just as easily
imagine the newfound assertiveness of those, among them women, in pushing for
their citizenship rights.
Understandably,
because many Arab regimes are in uprising mode, most analysts have quickly
developed the habit of neatly splitting the fallen from the humpty dumpties
still stubbornly sitting on the wall. Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon invite us to
rethink such misguided divides.
