The Women's Problem in the Arab East

There is no doubt that a study of woman cannot be a comprehensive study if it confines itself to the aspects we have grown accustomed — or rather, that writers have accustomed us — to treat whenever they take up her subject and examine it. I shall therefore keep away from that side of the inquiry, and study woman from an angle I might call "the social philosophy of woman," or, to speak more exactly, "the philosophy of woman's life from the psychological and social standpoint," and the relation of this life to the child's upbringing and to the life of man and of the nation.

Before I clarify and analyze some of the problems that arise out of the problem of woman, I must divide her conditions into three categories:

1 — The enslaved woman, who sees in enslavement a natural condition — indeed, who sees every other condition as nothing but a mistaken one. This belief has been planted in her from her earliest years and has become so deeply rooted that to uproot it from her has become a difficult matter. It is no secret that environment, whether inside the home or outside it, is the fundamental agent in rooting it within her and imposing upon her the mentality that results from it.

2 — The emancipated woman: she who scarcely exists in our circles. For do we know her, or perceive any presence among us of her — that woman who has cut through whatever stands as a barrier between herself and life, and has launched herself forth, not from the single cage of her environment but from all its cages together; who has set out to soar in the air of this life, free save for the legitimate restraints she imposes upon herself, or which freedom imposes upon itself so that its dignity may remain protected? She looks upon life with a sound, healthy gaze, fearing no harm behind it, because that gaze carries from her soul only the purest of meanings, and because the bond between her and this life stands firm. She has understood that life, even if it deals unjustly with her, must in the end grow gentle — nay, that she herself, by her capability and her good management of affairs, must bring it to this pliancy. Is not life at her very core, and she at the very core of life? There is no fear for her from it, then, so long as she has penetrated to its depths and succeeded in demolishing the barriers that rise between them.

3 — The enslaved woman who is in between. Her condition, too, divides into two kinds. The first inclines toward the enslaved, and we call her the half-enslaved: she whose soul is divided between two forces. She feels, without knowing it, this enslavement; but the unconscious in her thrusts the feeling back, so that she considers such a thing a sin — nay, a departure from the sacred and familiar order. It is not for her, then, to feel these fetters or to complain of them, since tradition has laid them upon her; and their gravity, no doubt, has been such as to lead her environment and other environments to raise them to the rank of the sacred. To complain of them thereafter is rebellion — nay, unbelief and heresy.

The second draws near the emancipated woman in one respect and stands far from her in others; we call her the half-emancipated: she who has freed herself from the fetters of outward appearances yet has remained, in her soul, enslaved to the most violent of moral fetters, those most dangerous to her inner life and her future; who has remained, in her mind and her thinking, a captive who imitates and does not create, and who does not draw life, and thought about this life, from her own inner spring.

■

Now that we have divided the conditions of the Arab woman into three categories, let us return to examine some of the problems that arise out of her problem. The first of these is the problem of the home, and the first of the difficulties that spring from it is the difficulty of divorce and polygamy. The harm done by these two evils touches not only the material side of the life of woman and of the young generation; it touches a graver and weightier side — it touches the morals of both woman and man, the personal and the social alike. I shall try to make the reason for this plain.

In our people there are faults and vices which we discover day after day, and to which experience guides us. I do not consider these faults and vices anything but traits it has come to bear by force of the corrupt conditions that have succeeded one another upon it. The human soul, at its beginning, knows neither good nor evil, and does not distinguish a virtue from a vice; it is rather the effect upon it of environment and its ways, the kind of spiritual direction it receives, its contact with life and with people, and the various factors — poverty and wealth, anxiety and stability — which combine to lead it down many paths: all these factors together cast over the soul one of the colors of life and stamp it with a particular, definite stamp. If our nation's faults outnumber its virtues, and if the scale of its inclination to evil outweighs its inclination to good, this does not mean that the metal within it can hold nothing but the inclinations of evil and vice. These have piled up upon it over generations and years, and it has not yet been granted to anyone to remove them from it and expose it to the sun, that it might be cleansed of their filth.

Why do we see lying, deception, evasiveness, and the preferring of private interest above everything — why do we see these traits and others spread through our nation to a frightening degree? Why do we find in the sons of our people an inclination to treachery, deceit, and hypocrisy? Is it because thus they were made, and thus life willed them to be? Such a belief, in this age of ours, must be counted naivety — nay, stupidity. These vices are neither foundations nor roots; they are branches of crooked roots and results of corrupt conditions. The free, candid man who grows up in a free, candid environment and lives among a free, candid company has no need to resort to treachery, deceit, and hypocrisy, or to make of them a method of his life and of the ordering of his relations with people. He lives, by force of his own condition and the conditions of his environment, free and candid, so long as everything around him is free and candid — and the reverse holds in reverse. But he who is born and raised in an environment founded upon the rules of lying and deceit and other kinds of vices — he who is born and grows up in such an environment, and lives among a company affected by it and yielding to it to the utmost limits of its influence, cannot grasp the meaning of the candid, free life that no treachery and no hypocrisy corrupt. He therefore grows up evasive and treacherous, because the milieu in which he lived, and the company whose life he shared and whose ways he followed, taught him no method of living but this method, and guided him to no road but this road.

This problem, the problem of the home, has many causes. And since we are now concerned with woman, let us examine those of its causes that arise from the corruption of her condition. Divorce may be among the strongest causes of this condition, for it, together with polygamy, is among the most serious social questions that afflict the life of the young generation and instill in it the moral poisons that stand between it and sound inner development; for the difference of mothers usually breeds the worst inclinations and tendencies in the souls of children. You may ask: and what is the reason for that? The reason is plain and clear: the child who grows up and is raised far from his mother grows up divided in soul, troubled in mind and thought. There is no motherly tenderness for him to take refuge in whenever he feels the inner need for that tenderness; instead there is harshness facing him wherever he turns. So he seeks out the alleys and evil companions in flight from it, and these in turn work their work upon him, training him little by little in wickedness and breathing into him all those vices I have mentioned. He lies inside the home and dissembles, because the situation in that home compels him to lying and dissembling — whether through the mother's ignorance of the child's psychology and her poor conduct toward him, or through that mother's absence from him and the presence of another woman bound to him by no tie. He lies outside the home too, and dissembles, because he knows that the situations of all those he meets outside the home and mixes with resemble his own: they too lie, deceive, and dissemble. Then he prefers his private interest above everything, because the environment around him — the home included — has not found its way to the road that breeds confidence in his soul and leads him to breed it in the souls of others; rather, every one of its ways with him is well-nigh a cause of doubt and suspicion. The badness of conditions inside the home has led to the corruption of conditions outside, and the corruption of those conditions has ended by bringing us to this result: a nation formed of individuals and individual interests, not of communities bound together by common national interests. And if such communities do exist, they live for themselves, scattered here and there, each one folded in upon itself, not joined to the rest by those natural laws of life and society from which the solidarity of nations and their union spring. The individual in our country does not consider himself a part completing the whole which is society; rather he considers this society one of the parts of the universe which must, when interest requires, submit to that "whole" which he himself constitutes.

As for the effect of divorce upon the psychology of woman, its import is greater and its danger weightier. At the beginning of this study we divided the conditions of the Arab woman into three categories, and we saw from this division that there is the enslaved woman, the emancipated woman, and the enslaved-free woman who is in between. A little observation makes us see that the great majority of the women's classes in our country is made up of the first category — that is, of the enslaved. We have analyzed her psychology and made plain that the pressure of the yoke which the social milieu imposed upon her by force, and then the succession of years upon it, have extinguished in her every feeling of self and of dignity. And how should she think of her situation, or her condition, or her being — which oppression has erased and severed — so long as the feeling from which thought is born is itself severed within her?

She is still far from such thoughts, and her life is nearer to the life of beasts than to the life of a human being. Indeed, how much this life — nay, this soul — resembles the mechanical machine, from which nothing issues except mechanically, not humanly! And why is that? Is it because this poor enslaved creature was born only to be enslaved, and exists only to be an instrument of amusement and servitude? Or is it because the claim of those who preach that she was created only for this amusement and servitude has seeped into her by contagion and worked its way through her until it became, in her, a creed? How many unexplored regions and gifts there are in woman's soul which life has not yet uncovered, because of woman's distance from this life and from its circumstances and conditions! And how many benefits society could have drawn from these gifts, had it been granted them to come out into the light and show themselves in some of the fields of life! But the kind of life she has lived for generations has effaced them in her and buried them in unknown darknesses of her soul, and has made her, and her environment, consider the bond between man and woman from one side only. Do not say this is partisanship for woman; say rather that it is a defense of a human dignity which has the right to be protected — nay, to be held sacred — in every human being, whether man or woman. In defending her personal dignity I ask of man nothing but justice toward this creature who possesses nothing of her right in our country, and who has no power and no strength except through him. Why is the Eastern woman ignorant of the meaning of candor and of freedom of soul? Why does she lie, and resort at times to treachery, deceit, and other such methods? Is it because she is created with these traits, or because the injustice of the environment and its cruelty have driven her to these methods? Picture to yourselves the existence of this woman — an existence liker to the existence of beasts than to the existence of a human being. Picture how the mentality of society, its manner of upbringing, and its conditions have stood between her and life, and imposed upon her kinds of living that degrade human dignity and bring it near the abyss. She lives and exists, but the kind of life she lives urges the noblest natures toward pestilence and corruption. She is beaten and degraded, and crime is sometimes committed against her; even the judiciary — I mean the Syrian judiciary — inclines, in its interpretations and its tendencies, to seek out discretionary grounds for the one who commits a crime against her when honor is the motive of the killing. It is true that the interpretation of foreign courts seeks mitigating grounds for one kind of crime, the crime of passion; but woman's share of that indulgence is no less than man's share of it — it is applied to her as it is applied to him.

In the face of this oppression, then, the Eastern woman is compelled to resort to lying and hypocrisy in order to save herself from it. She is thus neither free nor candid, and does not grasp the meaning of free candor, because the kind of life she lives is neither free nor candid, and because the conduct of the man of the lower class, and of part of the middle class, drags her down toward the abyss of morals instead of raising her to their summit.

Then why does woman slip so easily in our country? Is it because her natural disposition inclines her toward this slipping, or because the fundamental supports of morals are lacking to her? She slips through her deprivation of all the moral nourishments that polish her humanity and lift her soul above the circle of instinct into the spiritual air. She is deprived of a sound upbringing and of all that branches from it — inner and moral refinement, and then spiritual direction; deprived of the great shaper, nay, the greatest teacher of man in existence, by which I mean social life and the knowledge of people. And it is natural that man should dispose of woman's life however his whims and desires please, after he has monopolized it so completely: a single word from him can, between one hour and the next, transform her life and turn her conditions upside down — either banishment from her children and her shelter, and hence an unknown fate and a life whose lot is misery and vagrancy; or banishment from her shelter and the shouldering of a burden she knows not how to shoulder, while society prepares for her no sufficient means with which she might seek help in carrying it. The environment wrongs her, and society casts her out, because economically she is not free.

Such is the condition of woman in most circles of the country; I have pictured it in the briefest of outlines, and a little observation and reflection will guide our eyes to the human tragedies of frequent occurrence in our land. And when observation guides you to these tragedies, do not call the causes of her decline by names that carry nothing of their meanings but the sound — now that you have laid hold of the buried knot and grasped its secret.

As for how we may preserve our nation from social decay and chaos: we may achieve it by imposing compulsory education upon the young of both sexes; by applying the newest and most effective methods of education in the kindergartens; by founding shelters for the childhood cast adrift in the alleys, and undertaking its care and protection; and then by applying a law that fixes the conditions of divorce and forbids polygamy except in compelling circumstances, and lays the severest penalty upon whoever violates it. For if divorce is a necessity which the two parties, or one of them, cannot in certain circumstances do without, that does not mean that man should monopolize the right to dispose of it. ("The most hateful of lawful things to God Most High is divorce.")