Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World by Fatima Mernissi, Mary Jo Lakeland
Authors: Fatima Mernissi, Mary Jo Lakeland
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Introduction
The Gulf War: Fear and Its Boundaries
The Gulf War is over. The soldiers have long since returned to their bases. But for many people, and I am among them, this war is one of those things that have no end, like symbolic wounds and incurable illnesses. To be sure, life goes on. You are surprised to find yourself singing in the springtime, putting a flower in your hair, trying a new lipstick. Life continues, apparently as if nothing had happened—except that occasionally, in an unfamiliar country in the course of a morning reverie in a strange bed, something cracks, and feelings and ideas coming from elsewhere burst into consciousness. Then you realize that you have been tattooed somewhere with a nameless fear. A cut has been made, barely a scratch, but all the more indelible because it is buried in the dark zones of childhood terrors.
The first time this sort of thing happens you don’t talk about it, even to your closest friends. You try to forget it. You quietly sip your coffee with the cultivated sensibility of those whose lot in life is precarious, who develop a sort of apprehension about dreams, especially dreams that fade too quickly. You touch the strange bed to make sure it’s real; you go to the window and try to make the foreign city yours by studying the streets. Little by little, however, you notice that you travel less and less in order to avoid things foreign, and remembering your dreams becomes more and more difficult. You accept this state of things in the hope of finding peace and quiet, until the next incident, when even your own bed is transformed into foreign territory.
The most desperate outcry against the war was from women throughout the world, and especially from Arab women. A perhaps unnoticed detail, which nevertheless constitutes a historical breakthrough, is that during this conflict women, veiled or not, took the initiative in calling for peace—without waiting, as tradition demanded, for authorization from the political leaders, inevitably male. In Tunis, Rabat, and Algiers, women shouted out their fear louder than all the others; they were often the first to improvise sit-ins and marches, while the men could decide to do something only after drawn-out negotiations between various powers and minipowers. I participated in Rabat in dozens of meetings that spontaneously brought together intellectuals of all stripes to take a position against the war. When it was suggested that we go as a group to deliver a three- or four-paragraph communique to a foreign embassy or address a statement to a head of state, I was often astonished to see unfurled an unbelievable sequence of legal, diplomatic, and strategic ramifications of what seemed to me to be a rather simple gesture. Such ramifications would never have come to my mind, for as a woman the fact of being excluded from power gives me a wonderful freedom of thought—accompanied, alas, by an unbearable powerlessness.
Why did Arab women, usually silent and obedient, cry out their fear so strongly in that interminable night that was the war? Did they, whom the law officially designates as inferior, instinctively understand that that violence—presented as legitimate, and with the blessing of the highest authority defending human rights, the United Nations—would unleash within the Arab world other kinds of violence and legitimate the killing of others?
Did they shout because they felt, like sheep on the c id al-kabir (feast of the sacrifice), that that violence, directed by the priests of democracy and human rights, the Western heads of state and the high officials of the United Nations, augured an era of other rituals, rituals that would be more archaic and devastating than ever, that would hark back to other traditions, other ceremonies?
The lot of a woman in an Arab society that is at peace is precarious enough. But that lot is shaky indeed in an Arab society put to fire and sword by foreign forces.
How completely horrifying,
The Gulf War: Fear and Its Boundaries
The Gulf War is over. The soldiers have long since returned to their bases. But for many people, and I am among them, this war is one of those things that have no end, like symbolic wounds and incurable illnesses. To be sure, life goes on. You are surprised to find yourself singing in the springtime, putting a flower in your hair, trying a new lipstick. Life continues, apparently as if nothing had happened—except that occasionally, in an unfamiliar country in the course of a morning reverie in a strange bed, something cracks, and feelings and ideas coming from elsewhere burst into consciousness. Then you realize that you have been tattooed somewhere with a nameless fear. A cut has been made, barely a scratch, but all the more indelible because it is buried in the dark zones of childhood terrors.
The first time this sort of thing happens you don’t talk about it, even to your closest friends. You try to forget it. You quietly sip your coffee with the cultivated sensibility of those whose lot in life is precarious, who develop a sort of apprehension about dreams, especially dreams that fade too quickly. You touch the strange bed to make sure it’s real; you go to the window and try to make the foreign city yours by studying the streets. Little by little, however, you notice that you travel less and less in order to avoid things foreign, and remembering your dreams becomes more and more difficult. You accept this state of things in the hope of finding peace and quiet, until the next incident, when even your own bed is transformed into foreign territory.
The most desperate outcry against the war was from women throughout the world, and especially from Arab women. A perhaps unnoticed detail, which nevertheless constitutes a historical breakthrough, is that during this conflict women, veiled or not, took the initiative in calling for peace—without waiting, as tradition demanded, for authorization from the political leaders, inevitably male. In Tunis, Rabat, and Algiers, women shouted out their fear louder than all the others; they were often the first to improvise sit-ins and marches, while the men could decide to do something only after drawn-out negotiations between various powers and minipowers. I participated in Rabat in dozens of meetings that spontaneously brought together intellectuals of all stripes to take a position against the war. When it was suggested that we go as a group to deliver a three- or four-paragraph communique to a foreign embassy or address a statement to a head of state, I was often astonished to see unfurled an unbelievable sequence of legal, diplomatic, and strategic ramifications of what seemed to me to be a rather simple gesture. Such ramifications would never have come to my mind, for as a woman the fact of being excluded from power gives me a wonderful freedom of thought—accompanied, alas, by an unbearable powerlessness.
Why did Arab women, usually silent and obedient, cry out their fear so strongly in that interminable night that was the war? Did they, whom the law officially designates as inferior, instinctively understand that that violence—presented as legitimate, and with the blessing of the highest authority defending human rights, the United Nations—would unleash within the Arab world other kinds of violence and legitimate the killing of others?
Did they shout because they felt, like sheep on the c id al-kabir (feast of the sacrifice), that that violence, directed by the priests of democracy and human rights, the Western heads of state and the high officials of the United Nations, augured an era of other rituals, rituals that would be more archaic and devastating than ever, that would hark back to other traditions, other ceremonies?
The lot of a woman in an Arab society that is at peace is precarious enough. But that lot is shaky indeed in an Arab society put to fire and sword by foreign forces.
How completely horrifying,
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