T´s thread
En mayo presenté en Madrid la edición española de mi libro “Les Sindbads Marocains” ante un círculo de 30 periodistas españoles. Las preguntas que me hicieron se referían todas en conjunto a los temas del velo y del terrorismo. De lo que en la actualidad representa la pregunta más importante en el mundo árabe no parecían tener la menor idea: de al-fitna raqmiya, del caos digital. El problema central que ocupa actualmente tanto a las elites como a las masas, a dirigentes como a vendedores ambulantes, a a hombre como a mujeres del mundo árabe, es la producción del caos digital por medio de las tecnologías de la información y por internet en particular. Porque destruye el hudud, la frontera dada por dios que divide el universo en la esfera segura y privada que garantiza a mujeres y niños protección, y el espacio público en el cual los hombres mayores desarrollan supuestamente su poder con ánimos de resolver los problemas. Últimamente incluso los imanes recomiendan que no sigamos pensando en la defensa del hudud, sino que debamos centrarnos en la creación de una cultura ética del nomadismo, en la cual se generará el orden a partir de la responsabilidad personal. Fatema Mernissi, Von arabischen Frauen die Häfen bauen. Alte Navigationskünste als Orientierungshilfe im digitalen Chaos, Le Monde diplomatique, 16/11/2005 8Original in english. My translation)
“Cuando una mujer decide usar sus alas, se enfrenta a grandes riesgos.” No solo estaba convencida de que las mujeres tenían alas, sino también que dolía no usarlas. Yo tenía trece años cuando murió. Se supone que debía haber llorado, pero no lo hice. “La mejor manera de recordar a tu abuela –me dijo en el lecho de su muerte- es que mantengas la tradición de contar mi fábula preferida de Sherezade, la de La mujer del vestido de plumas’. “Me aprendí aquella fábula de memoria. 'el mensaje principal es que todas las mujeres deberían vivir su vida como si fueran nómadas. Deben mantenerse alerta y estar siempre listas para marcharse, incluso cuando son amadas. Fatema Mernissi, El Harén en Occidente, Espasa Calpe, Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), 2000.p.14. En las miniatura, igual que en la literatura, los hombre musulmanes representaban una mujer tremendamente activa, mientras Matisse, Ingre y Picasso mostraban siempre mujeres desnudas y pasivas. Los pintores musulmanes imaginan a las mujeres del harén cabalgando a gran velocidad, armadas con arcos y flechas y ataviadas con ropajes recargados. En las miniaturas musulmanas se muestra a la mujer como una compañera sexual evidentemente imposible de someter. Llegué a la conclusión de que los occidentales tenían razones para sonreír cuando evocaban su harén. ¿Qué idea tan extraordinaria, esta de encerrar a unas mujeres para disfrutar con ellas! Mientras los hombres musulmanes se sienten inseguros dentro del harén, ya sea auténtico (como los harenes imperiales, descritos en las crónicas históricas) o imaginados (miniaturas, leyendas, poesía), los occidentales se describen a sí mismos como héroes confiados sin miedo a la mujer. En definitiva, la dimensión trágica tan presente en los harenes musulmanes (el miedo a la mujer, la inseguridad masculina) parecía no existir en el harén occidental. Fatema Mernissi, El Harén en Occidente, Espasa Calpe, Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), 2000, pp.28,29
“Viajar es la mejor manera de aprender y de hacerte más fuerte”, me dijo un día mi abuela Yasmina, que era analfabeta y había vivido en el seno de un harén, el hogar tradicional en el que las mujeres tenían prohibido franquear las puertas, cerradas a cal y canto. “Cuando conozcas a un extranjero, debes poner toda tu atención para tratar de entenderle. Cuanto mejor entiendas a un extranjero y mejor te conozcas a ti misma, te conocerás más y serás más fuerte.” Para Yasmina el harén fue una prisión, un mundo en el que se les negaba a las mujeres el derecho a salir. Para ella viajar y tener la oportunidad de cruzar fronteras era algo así como un privilegio sagrado, la mejor ocasión para dejar de sentirse débil y vulnerable. Fatema Mernissi, El Harén en Occidente, Espasa Calpe, Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), 2000, p.11.
H´s thread
When someone says to us that´s enough education it discourages us and pushes us backwards. We are still new at educating our daughters. While there is no fear now of competing with men because we are still in the first stage of education and our oriental habits still do not allow us to pursue much study, men can rest assured in their jobs. As long as they see seats in the shool of law, engineering, medicine, and at university unoccupied by us, men can relax because what they fear is distant. If one of us shows eagerness to complete her education in one of these schools I am sure she will not be given a job. Malak Hifni Nasif, know by the pseudonym Bahithat al Badiya (seeker in the desert) ,1886-1918, Cairo, Egypt: “Bad Deeds of Men: Injustice, 1909” in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.231.
For the nineteenth-century diarist, the incipient fears associated with entering the space of the harem, coupled with the potentially dislocating experience of travel to a foreign country, provided the conditions by which the British woman was confronted with an experience of radical alterity. The feared loss of control was often encapslated in a description of an unlocatable gaze in the harem, indicating that entry to the harem could be a profoundly dislocating experience, one of being out of place. This phenomenon can be explored in reference to the Lacanian gaze. Rather than the harem being a managable space that confirmed the subject, this experience threatened its destabilization. A key aspect of this experience was the notion of a power vested elsewhere, its precise source unlocatable and its manifestation nuclear, which is aking to Lacan´s concept of the gaze.The Lacanian double dihedron schema, which diagrams the relation between the eye and the gaze, challenges the perspectival system of vision that is premised upon the illusion of an alignment between the two and is aplicable to the harem diary scenario. Lacan´s model demonstrates the radical rupture of the eye by the gaze. Constituting the subject via the opaque screen, the gaze is both radically exterior and simultaneously its internal blind spot. […] Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, Tha Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, p. 84.
[…] Men claim they have suprerior intelligence saying there have been more men of genius than women. They forget that only when people use their gifts do they develop. That is why poor men who have spent their lives as cooks or tailors have not excelled in the arts or sciences. How can we expect, therefore, to find women whose energies we have restricted to taking care of their homes and whose knowledge is confined to this sphere excelling as geniuses? Nabawiya Musa (1890-1951), Zigazig, Eastern Delta, Egypt. “The Difference between Men and Women and Their Capacities for Work (1920)”, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999 pp.263,264.
The harem had been a mirror by which Western women could assess and assert their own independence. Eighteen- and early-nineteenth-century travelers, believing that harem women had lives free of cares and that they could go about at will, veiled against unwanted attention, thought of the harem as a role model for freedom. From the 1840s on, travelers tended to suggest that harem women were enslaved. They compared their own ability to travel freely and their own occupations and found them worthier than those of harem women. Barbara Hodgson, Dreaming of East, Western Women and the exotic allure of the Orient, Greystone Books, Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley, 2005, p. 129. In May 2005, I listened attentively to the questions of the 30 journalists my Spanish publisher scheduled in Madrid to promote the translation of my book "Les Sindbads Morocains". From their questions, which all dealt with the veil and terrorism, it was clear that they had no clue about the strategic issue mobilizing the Arab World : al-fitna raqmiya (digital chaos), the destruction of space frontiers by the new Information Technologies (IT). The key problem giving anxiety fits to elites and masses, to heads of states and street-vendors, to men and women in the Arab world today is the digital chaos induced by IT such as the internet and the satellite which has destroyed the hudud, the space frontier which divided the universe into a sheltered private arena where women and children were supposed to be protected, and a public one where adult males exercised their presumed problem-solving authority. 1. Digital Chaos: It is no longer "to be or not to be" but "to navigate or not to navigate" (...) It is this kind of mind-blowing civilizational shift happening in the Arab world where men are finally embarking on becoming skilled digital nomads instead of crying about the frontiers' collapse and dreaming of harems for their wives - that I tried to share with the Spanish journalists obsessed by the veil and terrorism during my Madrid encounter in May 2005. Although the Spanish city of Gibraltar is just 13 km away from the Moroccan port of Tangiers, I realized that Spaniards had no idea about the revolution the information technologies have produced in our part of the world. And one reason for that is the fact that in Madrid's plush hotel which advertised itself as satellite-connected, I could not connect to my favorite Al-Jazeera or to any one of the 200 pan-Arab satellite channels beaming now in the Mediterranean. At one point, I tried to illustrate this change by sharing with them the extraordinary emergence of women I saw in the Arab Gulf during a visit to Bahrain in March 2005. I tried to describe to them Mai Al-Khalifa, a historian who in less than a decade, has created modern spaces such as museums and cultural centers that encourage dialogues between the sexes and the generations. I tried to explain that focusing on this unexpected emergence of women in the oil-rich Arab Gulf is more significant an indicator than the veils of the Moslem migrant community, but the Spanish journalists were trapped in their own veil and terror. (...) Fatema Mernissi: Digital Scheherazade, The Rise of Women as Key Players in the Arab Gulf Communication Strategies, Excerpts from the longer English manuscript, Rabat, September 2005 In www.mernissi.net/books/articles/digital_scheherazade.
B´s thread
[Friends] urged me heartily to stay home. They painted the most attractive pleasures in glowing colours. One day I could put perfumed soaps into the wardrobes, I could create new kinds of marmelades and sauces; the next day I could be supreme head in a battle against flies, hunt for moths, I could darn socks…The afternoons would be devoted to the sermons of preachers of fashion, to the offices of the cathedral and to the delicate conversations between women where, after having slit the throats of their closest, they refresh themselves in chatter about toilettes, pregnancies and breastfeeding. I knew how to resist all of these temptations. –Jane Dieulafoy, 1887. Barbara Hodgson, Dreaming of East, Western Women and the exotic allure of the Orient, Greystone Books, Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley, 2005, p87-88.
The harem had been a mirror by which Western women could assess and assert their own independence. Eighteen- and early-nineteenth-century travelers, believing that harem women had lives free of cares and that they could go about at will, veiled against unwanted attention, thought of the harem as a role model for freedom. From the 1840s on, travelers tended to suggest that harem women were enslaved. They compared their own ability to travel freely and their own occupations and found them worthier than those of harem women. Barbara Hodgson, Dreaming of East, Western Women and the exotic allure of the Orient, Greystone Books, Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley, 2005, p129.
Most visitors were impatient with the idleness. Amelia Edwards met women in a village north of Luxor who were “absolutely without mental resource; and they were even without the means of taking air and exercise. One could see that time hung heavy on their hands, and that they took but feeble interest in the things around them”. […] Some visitors went so far as to question whether Eastern women were of the same species. German traveler Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn wrote that the women of the harem she visited in the early 1840s were dull-witted, and that “a woman without intelligence is no longer a woman, but, alas!…she becomes simply une femelle.” Barbara Hodgson, Dreaming of East, Western Women and the exotic allure of the Orient, Greystone Books, Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley, 2005, p117.
My question:
Is the image of the other, of any other, still a mirror we need for assessing our own (cultural/gender) identity? Do we need the projection of the other (opressed) women to feel free? Do we travel to put the mirror in a different context, or do we travel to get away from our own?
N´s thread
In Lucinda Darby Griffith´s diary of 1845 there is a most unusual lithograph entiteled “The interior of the Hharee´m of Mochtah Bey”. Despite the awkwardness of the amateur artist´s work, this sketch conveys the exoticism of Cairene interior, with its mashrabiyah screens, cooling fountain, and sumptuously cushioned interior peopled by exotically attired Ottoman women. As such, this illustration conforms to the European stereotype of the harem. There is however, one significant incongruity, namely, the inclusión of Griffith in bonnet and crinoline seated on a chair at the right. All eyes are directed towards the newcomer to the harem whose difference is so marked by her attire. Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, Tha Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, p. 80.
For the nineteenth-century diarist, the incipient fears associated with entering the space of the harem, coupled with the potentially dislocating experience of travel to a foreign country, provided the conditions by which the British woman was confronted with an experience of radical alterity. The feared loss of control was often encapslated in a description of an unlocatable gaze in the harem, indicating that entry to the harem could be a profoundly dislocating experience, one of being out of place. This phenomenon can be explored in reference to the Lacanian gaze. Rather than the harem being a managable space that confirmed the subject, this experience threatened its destabilization. A key aspect of this experience was the notion of a power vested elsewhere, its precise source unlocatable and its manifestation nuclear, which is aking to Lacan´s concept of the gaze.The Lacanian double dihedron schema, which diagrams the relation between the eye and the gaze, challenges the perspectival system of vision that is premised upon the illusion of an alignment between the two and is aplicable to the harem diary scenario. Lacan´s model demonstrates the radical rupture of the eye by the gaze. Constituting the subject via the opaque screen, the gaze is both radically exterior and simultaneously its internal blind spot. […] Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, Tha Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, p. 84.
C´s thread
If we think that giving birth to girls is something undesirable as some of us do, is it the decision of the woman to do so? Why isn´t the man blamed as the woman is blamed? Why doesn´t the woman ask for a divorce and marry another man so that she can bear boys? If one of the spouses clings to this fallacy, it could be that the other would adhere to it as well. They are equally able to be right or wrong in this matter.In our home life there is much to concern us. We have archaic practices that should for reform. Men should not occupy our time, and thoughts complaining about there work. I think they are subject to the injustice of the government on the one hand, and the difficulty of making ends meet on the other. They find no one to take revenge upon except us. I do not believe that there is any opponent who is weaker in weaponry than us, and less vengeul. Oh God, inspire the men of our government to do right because their injustice to the nation has many repercussions on us. It seems that we have not received anything more than men receive except pain. This reverses the Quranic verse that says, ‘One man´s share shall equal two women´s shares.’ Malak Hifni Nasif, know by the pseudonym Bahithat al Badiya (seeker in the desert), Bad Deeds of Men: Injustice, 1909, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.136. (Translated from Arabic by Margot Badran and Ali Badran
Specialised work for each sex is a matter of convention. It is not mandatory. We women are now unable to do hard work because we have not been accustomed to it. If the city woman had not been prevented from doing hard work she would have been as strong as the man. Isn´t the country woman like her city sister? Why then is the former in better health and stronger than the latter? Do you have any doubt that a woman from Minufiya (a town in the Delta) would be able to beat the strongest man from al-Ghuriya (a section of Caro) in a wrestling match? If men say to us that we have been created weak we say to them, ‘No, it is you who made us weak through the path you made us follow.’ […] Now I shall return to the path we should follow.
If I had the right to legislate I would decree: 1.Teaching girls the Quran and the correct Sunna. 2. Primary and secondary school education for girls, and compulsatory preparatory school education for all. 3. Instruction for girls on the theory and practice of home economics, health, first aid, and childcare. 4. Setting a quota for females in medicine and education so they can serve the 5. Allowing women to study any other advanced subjects they wish without restriction. 6. Upbringing for girls infancy stressing patience, honesty, work and other virtues. 7. Adhering to the Sharia concerning betrothal and marriage, and not permitting any woman and man to marry without first meeting each other in the presence of the father or a male relative of the bride. 8. Adopting the veil and outdoor dress of the Turkish women of Istanbul. 9.Maintaining the best interests of the country and dispensing with forign goods and people as much as posible. 10. Make it encumbent upon our brothers, the men of Egypt, to implement this programme. Malak Hifni Nasif, Lecture in the Club of the Umma Party, 1909, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.136. (Translated from Arabic by Margot Badran and Ali Badran)
Knowing how to read and write is not to be considered an independent science. It is a mode of communcation. When two people comunicate while they are apart from one another, they do it through writing, which is like conversing as if they were near one another. A person who knows how to read and write is not considered educated except if he has taken it as a way to attain kowledge. Regrettably in Egypt we are ignorant of this and we automatically consider the woman who knows how to read and write to be an educated person. If she does something wrong we blame it on her education saying that education corrupted her morals. God knows that that woman is ignorant and commited wrong through her ignorance. She found a way to communicate with those outside her presence and expressed herself in this way revealing inappropriate thoughts coming to her through ignorance and arrogance. In this she is worse off than the woman who does not know how to read and write because she can record in her own hand something shameful that cannot be erased in the future. On the other hand, the woman who does not know how to read may say something improper, but it will be soon forgotten because it is not written down. Nabawiya Musa (1890-1951) Zigazig, Eastern Delta, Egypt. “The Effect of books and Novels on Morals (1920)”, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.261. (Translated from Arabic by Margot Badran and Ali Badran)
Men have spoken so much of the difference between men and women that they would seem to be two seperate species. With due respect for the views of men I would like to state my own to remind them of something they may have forgotten. Human beings are animals governed by the same rules of nature regarding reproduction, growth, decline, and desth. The male animal is no different from the female except in reproduction. If it were true that the instincts of the male cat were different from the instincts of the female cat it would also be true that there would be a difference between man and woman in mental gifts. No scientist has claimed that the female cat likes to jump and play and devours mice while the male cat is reasonable, serious, and does not hurt a mouse or steal meat. Both male and femal mice are said to have the same characteristics. Likewise, nobody has said that the male dog is honest and intelligent and the female dog dishonest and stupid. Both male cats and dogs have stronger muscles and larger bodies than female cats and dogs, but otherwise they are no different.[…] Men claim they have suprerior intelligence saying there have been more men of genius than women. They forget that only when people use their gifts do they develop. That is why poor men who have spent their lives as cooks or tailors have not excelled in the arts or sciences. How can we expect, therefore, to find women whose energies we have restricted to taking care of their homes and whose knowledge is confined to this sphere excelling as geniuses? Nabawiya Musa:. “The Difference between Men and Women and Their Capacities for Work (1920)”, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.263-264.
In Lucinda Darby Griffith´s diary of 1845 there is a most unusual lithograph entiteled “The interior of the Hharee´m of Mochtah Bey”. Despite the awkwardness of the amateur artist´s work, this sketch conveys the exoticism of Cairene interior, with its mashrabiyah screens, cooling fountain, and sumptuously cushioned interior peopled by exotically attired Ottoman women. As such, this illustration conforms to the European stereotype of the harem. There is however, one significant incongruity, namely, the inclusión of Griffith in bonnet and crinoline seated on a chair at the right. All eyes are directed towards the newcomer to the harem whose difference is so marked by her attire. Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, Tha Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, p. 80.
For the nineteenth-century diarist, the incipient fears associated with entering the space of the harem, coupled with the potentially dislocating experience of travel to a foreign country, provided the conditions by which the British woman was confronted with an experience of radical alterity. The feared loss of control was often encapslated in a description of an unlocatable gaze in the harem, indicating that entry to the harem could be a profoundly dislocating experience, one of being out of place. This phenomenon can be explored in reference to the Lacanian gaze. Rather than the harem being a managable space that confirmed the subject, this experience threatened its destabilization. A key aspect of this experience was the notion of a power vested elsewhere, its precise source unlocatable and its manifestation nuclear, which is aking to Lacan´s concept of the gaze.The Lacanian double dihedron schema, which diagrams the relation between the eye and the gaze, challenges the perspectival system of vision that is premised upon the illusion of an alignment between the two and is aplicable to the harem diary scenario. Lacan´s model demonstrates the radical rupture of the eye by the gaze. Constituting the subject via the opaque screen, the gaze is both radically exterior and simultaneously its internal blind spot. […] Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, Tha Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, p. 84.
C´s thread
If we think that giving birth to girls is something undesirable as some of us do, is it the decision of the woman to do so? Why isn´t the man blamed as the woman is blamed? Why doesn´t the woman ask for a divorce and marry another man so that she can bear boys? If one of the spouses clings to this fallacy, it could be that the other would adhere to it as well. They are equally able to be right or wrong in this matter.In our home life there is much to concern us. We have archaic practices that should for reform. Men should not occupy our time, and thoughts complaining about there work. I think they are subject to the injustice of the government on the one hand, and the difficulty of making ends meet on the other. They find no one to take revenge upon except us. I do not believe that there is any opponent who is weaker in weaponry than us, and less vengeul. Oh God, inspire the men of our government to do right because their injustice to the nation has many repercussions on us. It seems that we have not received anything more than men receive except pain. This reverses the Quranic verse that says, ‘One man´s share shall equal two women´s shares.’ Malak Hifni Nasif, know by the pseudonym Bahithat al Badiya (seeker in the desert), Bad Deeds of Men: Injustice, 1909, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.136. (Translated from Arabic by Margot Badran and Ali Badran
Specialised work for each sex is a matter of convention. It is not mandatory. We women are now unable to do hard work because we have not been accustomed to it. If the city woman had not been prevented from doing hard work she would have been as strong as the man. Isn´t the country woman like her city sister? Why then is the former in better health and stronger than the latter? Do you have any doubt that a woman from Minufiya (a town in the Delta) would be able to beat the strongest man from al-Ghuriya (a section of Caro) in a wrestling match? If men say to us that we have been created weak we say to them, ‘No, it is you who made us weak through the path you made us follow.’ […] Now I shall return to the path we should follow.
If I had the right to legislate I would decree: 1.Teaching girls the Quran and the correct Sunna. 2. Primary and secondary school education for girls, and compulsatory preparatory school education for all. 3. Instruction for girls on the theory and practice of home economics, health, first aid, and childcare. 4. Setting a quota for females in medicine and education so they can serve the 5. Allowing women to study any other advanced subjects they wish without restriction. 6. Upbringing for girls infancy stressing patience, honesty, work and other virtues. 7. Adhering to the Sharia concerning betrothal and marriage, and not permitting any woman and man to marry without first meeting each other in the presence of the father or a male relative of the bride. 8. Adopting the veil and outdoor dress of the Turkish women of Istanbul. 9.Maintaining the best interests of the country and dispensing with forign goods and people as much as posible. 10. Make it encumbent upon our brothers, the men of Egypt, to implement this programme. Malak Hifni Nasif, Lecture in the Club of the Umma Party, 1909, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.136. (Translated from Arabic by Margot Badran and Ali Badran)
Knowing how to read and write is not to be considered an independent science. It is a mode of communcation. When two people comunicate while they are apart from one another, they do it through writing, which is like conversing as if they were near one another. A person who knows how to read and write is not considered educated except if he has taken it as a way to attain kowledge. Regrettably in Egypt we are ignorant of this and we automatically consider the woman who knows how to read and write to be an educated person. If she does something wrong we blame it on her education saying that education corrupted her morals. God knows that that woman is ignorant and commited wrong through her ignorance. She found a way to communicate with those outside her presence and expressed herself in this way revealing inappropriate thoughts coming to her through ignorance and arrogance. In this she is worse off than the woman who does not know how to read and write because she can record in her own hand something shameful that cannot be erased in the future. On the other hand, the woman who does not know how to read may say something improper, but it will be soon forgotten because it is not written down. Nabawiya Musa (1890-1951) Zigazig, Eastern Delta, Egypt. “The Effect of books and Novels on Morals (1920)”, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.261. (Translated from Arabic by Margot Badran and Ali Badran)
Men have spoken so much of the difference between men and women that they would seem to be two seperate species. With due respect for the views of men I would like to state my own to remind them of something they may have forgotten. Human beings are animals governed by the same rules of nature regarding reproduction, growth, decline, and desth. The male animal is no different from the female except in reproduction. If it were true that the instincts of the male cat were different from the instincts of the female cat it would also be true that there would be a difference between man and woman in mental gifts. No scientist has claimed that the female cat likes to jump and play and devours mice while the male cat is reasonable, serious, and does not hurt a mouse or steal meat. Both male and femal mice are said to have the same characteristics. Likewise, nobody has said that the male dog is honest and intelligent and the female dog dishonest and stupid. Both male cats and dogs have stronger muscles and larger bodies than female cats and dogs, but otherwise they are no different.[…] Men claim they have suprerior intelligence saying there have been more men of genius than women. They forget that only when people use their gifts do they develop. That is why poor men who have spent their lives as cooks or tailors have not excelled in the arts or sciences. How can we expect, therefore, to find women whose energies we have restricted to taking care of their homes and whose knowledge is confined to this sphere excelling as geniuses? Nabawiya Musa:. “The Difference between Men and Women and Their Capacities for Work (1920)”, in Badran, Margot; Cook, Miriam (edts.): Opening the Gates. An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.1999, p.263-264. 
Entradas
