I’ve added I Killed Scheherazade by, Lebanese author, Joumana Haddad to the library. The title’s no illusion – Haddad has a flinty anger directed towards a character “nauseatingly cherished by the Orientalists” and turned “into a heroin, the symbol of Arab cultural female opposition and struggle against men’s injustice, cruelty and discrimination”. The essay is addressed at the deeply entrenched views that led to a western journalist commenting to Haddad that “Most of us in the West are not familiar with the possibility of liberated Arab women like you existing”.
“Although I am a so called Arab Woman” Haddad roars “I, and many others like me, are not veiled, subdued, illiterate, suppressed and certainly not submissive”. It’s an idea that the west and particularly self appointed western “feminists” have always struggled with. There tends to be a lazy focus on fabricated harem imagery rather than a celebration of the women that Haddad admires: intellectuals “such as May Ziade, Huda Shaarawi, Etel Adnan, Mai Ghoussoub, Fatima Mernissi, Laure Moughaizel and Khalida Said”; writers “such as Ahdaf Soueif, Alawiya Sobh, Hoda Barakat, Hanan El Sheikh and Sahar Khalifeh”; artists “such as Zaha Hadid, Mona Hatoum, Helen Khal and Ghada Amer”; poets “such as Joyce Mansour, Saniyya Saleh, Nazek Al Mala’ika, Nadia Tueni and Fadwa Touqan”; playwrights including “Jalila Bakkar, Raja’ Ben Ammar, Lina Khoury, Darina El Joundi and Nidal Al Ashkar” and film makers like “Jocelyne Saab, Randa Shahhal, Danielle Arbid, Layla Al Marrakshi, and many many others...”
These sloppy stereotypes aren’t modern – Joyce Zonana’s essay The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of “Jane Eyre” reveals that right from the time that Jane railed against Rochester for his sultanic ways “images of despotic sultans and desperate slave girls became a central part of an emerging liberal feminist discourse about the condition of women not in the east but in the west”. Feminist writers utilised their “conviction that the harem is an inherently oppressive institution” to argue for women’s emancipation in England. They re-cast “objectionable aspects of life in the West as Eastern” and by Victorian times “Prostitution, the marriage market, and the habit of keeping mistresses (figured) as Eastern intrusions into a Western ideal of monogamous romantic love and marriage”.
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| Are these women submissive? (Photo courtesy of Kodak Agfa) |
This still persists. There seems to be a preference towards creating an all mighty hullabaloo about the rights and wrongs of the veil rather than self critique such as questioning why one fifth of FTSE 100 companies have no women on their boards and why only eighteen percent of Westminster MPs are female. There is a terrible amount of meddlers. I’m not saying that it’s right to ignore any abuse of human rights but ignorance leads to a lack of getting it right. An example of getting it wrong was a CNN International report concerned at the departure of Suzanne Mubarak because she had been a “Western Style Feminist”. A feminist , really? Does hosting a few committees and support groups absolve her from her part in a regime that carried out widespread abuse (where women that went into a police station to report rape were frequently raped) and how much was that feminist zeal a way to tick boxes and keep that aid flowing in to be (mis)directed as the family saw fit?
And if we can’t get it right that we need to be big enough to say that we don’t know. People of London dinner parties - unless you can explain the myriad of complex reason that a woman might wear the hijab or might not – please don’t speak as an expert or try to force change. Haddad is clear that the wall must be banged “from inside. ...For it cannot be wrecked, penetrated or torn down from outside”.
