The Mediterranean in addition to being a
crossroads of civilizations and cradle of multi-
ple events has also been a space embracing pa-
triarchal societies and the place chosen by the
One God to manifest himself in his three con-
secutive versions: Judaism, Christianity and Is-
lam. Linked to this, and as the 14th century
North African protosociologist Ibn Jaldun first
observed, the Mediterranean basin has equally
been the setting of the dialectic between the
tribe and the city, identified respectively with
two different rival forms of life: the nomad-
rural (
umran al-badawa
) and the urban-sed-
entary (
umran el-hadara
).
All these elements (religion, patriarchy,
tribe, city) and their interaction have contrib-
uted to determining the dominant family or-
der in the Mediterranean, the basic cell of
socialization of the patriarchal structure be-
tween men and women from a very early age.
And this should help us understand that it is
basically social, economic, political factors
which have influenced and determined patri-
archal family relations, and that, moreover,
such a framework is not the exclusive preserve
of Muslim societies but rather the anthropo-
logical evidence shows that this has been the
predominant social for m for millennia
throughout the Mediterranean area.
1
Patriarchy
and Islam
Gema Martín Muñoz. Professor of Sociology of the Arab and Islamic World,
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
In fact, the patriarchal order prevailing in
the region preceded the birth of Islam, and
even this, in accordance with what is estab-
lished in the Koran, introduced elements that
weakened the patriarchy as well as a social citi-
zen model aimed at destroying the tribe which,
however, Islamized societies eluded in many
ways.
The Koran pays great attention to indi-
vidual and family relations which must gov-
ern all the members of the
umma
(extraterri-
torial community formed by all Muslims)
establishing a close link between religion, fam-
ily and community as basic pillars of social
cohesion.
The existence of a text that, while creating
a new religious creed, legislates and regulates
the society that adopts it, has offered the fun-
damentalists of all eras the foundation on
which to base themselves to reject social trans-
formations and consecrate the immobility of
the personal status of women, giving rise to
the controversy about the true role that the
sacred text concedes to women and is the ob-
ject of an acute controversy in the Muslim
world, particularly current today.
For some, those Koran suras in which the
will to correct abuses which women were sub-
ject to in pre-Islamic society is expressed show
1. Germaine Tillion,
La condición de la mujer en el área mediterránea, Barcelona, Península, 1993.
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38
Patriachy and Islam
the radically different character of Islam with
respect to the iron pre-Islamic patriarchal
structure, this being reason enough to inter-
pret and legitimate modern understanding of
equality between the sexes. This will is ex-
pressed in the Koran text when it establishes
the consent of the woman to matrimony, in its
manifest will to discourage the practice of
polygamy and repudiation,
2
in declaring her
right to property, education, and even in the
opinion of some to work in accordance with
the
hadiz
: “Men have a part of what they have
acquired; women have a part of what they have
acquired.” To this would be added the “femi-
nist” behaviour of the Prophet and his wives,
one of them even coming to actively partici-
pate in politics.
For others, the relationship of superiority
and inferiority that the Koran establishes with
respect to the man and the woman (“men are
a grade above women” II, 228) has been
enough to consecrate the situation of dis-
crimination, reclusion and segregation to
which the Muslim woman has been con-
demned and it is desired should go on being
condemned.
The truth is that in the Koran, revealed over
20 years (612-632), we see two very differen-
tiated stages: that of Mecca – city of the
Prophet – and that of Medina – where he had
to take refuge and win supporters to spread
the new message. And it is in the first Meccan
suras where the most innovating dispositions
with respect to the woman are condensed, cor-
responding to the most “revolutionary” and
militant period in the preaching of Islam,
while the later and most conservative suras,
the Medinese, correspond to the second period
of settlement and government.
In accordance with the chronological se-
quence, the Muslim lawyers resolved this ap-
parent contradiction through the concept of
nasj
(abrogation) considering that the second
revoke the first. Today the conservative Mus-
lin sectors cling obstinately to this traditional
interpretation, while the reformists call for the
inversion of the priorities.
3
In fact, Arab tribal society Islamized while
it tried to preserve the profoundly patriarchal
structure predominant in the region for mil-
lennia giving priority to those Koranic pre-
scriptions that best fit the prevailing social
and family model. This model is perpetuated
secularly in the name of a Tradition that
achieved its immutable status through its
definition of “Islamic”. Later, now in the
modern era, it will be institutionalized at
multiple levels of society (legal, educational,
political, economic...) in the framework of
some nation-states of neo-patriarchal concep-
tion, where the patriarchy extends through-
2. In this sense, it is believed that for the rooted pre-Islamic patriarchal society the prohibition of institutions such as
polygamy and repudiation would have meant an extreme measure, and perhaps for this reason Islam does not prohibit
them but regulates and hinders them, as well as warning against them. Repudiation is defined in the Koran as «the legal
act most hated by God»; with respect to polygamy it is affirmed that equal treatment must exist in all senses on the part
of the husband towards his wives, “something which is known to be impossible.”
3. One of them, the Sudanese Mahmud Mohamed Taha, was condemned to death and executed by President Numeiri
because of his reformist methodology.
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Quaderns de la Mediterrània
39
out the social structure in such a way that the
power of the father at the heart of the family
is translated to society, becoming the power
of rulers, and to religion, where power be-
longs to God. Thus, God, the father and the
ruler share many characteristics in patriar-
chal societies.
4
As Hisham Sharabi affirms:
“Both between the ruler and the ruled, and
between father and son there are only verti-
cal relations: in both scenarios the paternal
decision is an absolute decision, transmitted,
both in society and the family, through a
forced consensus based on ritual and coer-
cion.”
5
From Countryside to City
Without doubt, traditional society and family
behaviour are being transformed in many as-
pects as a consequence of the processes of
modernization experienced through this cen-
tury. However, given the perpetuation of pa-
triarchal culture in the modern Arab state,
these changes have taken place outside any
conceptual framework and any legal reform,
being basically the inevitable product of what
we could call “socioeconomic imperatives”:
rural exodus, emigration, consumption, town
planning, globalization... In consequence, both
the depth of the social changes and their spa-
tial scope cover a highly differentiated pano-
rama and with great disparities according to
whether we are dealing with the urban or ru-
ral sphere, one class or another, one country or
another.
Perhaps the greatest difference is in the
enormous distance between the countryside
and the city. It is in a city where the step from
the extended family to the nuclear family, from
the numerous to the reduced family is taking
place, and it is where the traditional status of
the woman is changing and the patriarchal
hierarchies are being eroded because it is
where the three main factors of social change
are being developed: education, access to sala-
ried work and birth control.
Fruit of the industrialization and moderni-
zation of economic activity, since the seven-
ties the Arab city has favoured the decline of
the old “large family”, substituting it with
more reduced groupings where the couple and
their children are the cell of reference. Thus,
in the 1976 census Egyptian nuclear families
represented 77.5%, in Syria 52% and in Jor-
dan between 60% and 70%.
Fruit of the industrialization and
modernization of economic activity, since
the seventies the Arab city has favoured
the decline of the old “large family”
The participation of the woman on the re-
munerated work scale is another undoubtedly
very important factor but it is not being as
determining as that of town planning and that
of schooling, given that the indexes are still
weak, above all in the case of married women
and because it is professional work, for which
a university qualification or diploma is needed,
which has emancipating effects on the woman.
As we have seen, the urban family is the
most exposed to change, but it is also that
which, consequently, is diversifying most, the
result of the different levels of rupture with
the traditional model.
4. Gema Martín Muñoz, “La igualdad entre los sexos y la cuestión de los derechos humanos y del ciudadano en el
mundo árabe”, in Gema Martín Muñoz (comp.),
Mujeres, democracia y desarrollo en el Magreb, Madrid, Pablo Iglesias,
1995, pp. 3-18.
5.
Muqaddima li-Dirasat al-muytama‘ al-‘arabi (English version: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1988).
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40
Patriachy and Islam
The
extended neo-patriarchal family,
the
paraconjugal family,
the
conjugal family
and
the
single parent
family
(formed by widows
and their children) are the four great types of
family that exist today in the city. In the first
three, the economic and cultural factor has
great weight when differentiating themselves
when managing their fertility and their rela-
tionship as a couple.
Without doubt, the importance of the eco-
nomic and educational factors stand out when
marking the distances that separate the dis-
tinct types of family. In fact, this reality only
makes the distance that separates one class or
another deeper, adding itself to those already
existing between the urban and rural world.
Depending on whether you belong to the mod-
ern urban, traditional or the urban-rural popu-
lation (the latter two categories being in the
majority compared with the former) patriar-
chal family behaviour will be more or less al-
tered.
The problem lies in the great disconnec-
tion, if not confrontation, between these dif-
ferent social divisions that the city encom-
passes, the consequence of an accelerated and
uncontrolled urban explosion (in its three ru-
ral quarters fifty years ago, Arab populations
are today mostly urban representing 52% of
the total population).
Thus, the phenomenon of urbanization
has been linked to the constitution of great
metropolises (normally the capital) where the
bulk of the urban population is concentrated,
without having created the necessary plan-
ning conditions and where the growth has not
been linked with advances in agriculture or
in industrialization or in economic develop-
ment. Therefore, urbanization has been the
cause of the rupture of social relations in the
city, where highly differentiated models are
experienced. The city, therefore, does not
manage to become a pole of integration of
the national space.
The Harem and the Veil
The reclusion of the woman goes back to
Greek gineceo, was continued in the Byzan-
tine period and was imitated by the Abbasid
caliphs as an aristocratic sign to differentiate
the women of the court, whose space was the
palace, from the plebeians who went to the
street to undertake tasks inappropriate for the
nobility, such as shopping, market... It was later
that the harem was interpreted as a means to
protect feminine chastity.
Harem (
harim
) comes from an Arabic root
which means “sacred”, “inviolable”, “prohib-
ited”. If harem is understood as the classical
conception of the institution that, forming part
of the harem, designates the chambers re-
served where women reside, we could say that
its existence has been and is almost anecdotal.
The development of an enormous literature
on the influential and powerful harem of the
Great Turkish Ottoman Sultan, in the court
of Istanbul, and the disproportionate represen-
tation of the harem by European Orientalism
(travellers, painters...) has inflated an institu-
tion that responds more to the exoticist Orient
recreated from the West than to the reality of
some Arab and Muslim societies where har-
ems have always been infrequent.
Another question is whether the notion of
harim
is interpreted as a quality characteristic
of the woman that converts her into something
prohibited to all those men outside the tradi-
tional family. Then we can say that it still pre-
vails.
This concept that defines the wife as
hurmat al-rayul
(the sacred thing of the man)
is directly related to the question of safeguard-
ing the family honour. Honour comes from the
legitimacy of the man, which makes the vir-
ginity of the daughter, sister or wife its best
guarantee, from where comes its sacredness
and its location in the private space rather than
the public.
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Quaderns de la Mediterrània
41
In a family conception in which the group
or the community predominate over individu-
ality, virtue is inexorably at the service of the
honour of the group. This is why in the tradi-
tional society the woman only acquires iden-
tity through masculine intermediation (be-
longing to a clan or lineage in which she is
“the daughter of ”, “the wife of ” or “the
mother of ”).
In a family conception in which the group
or the community predominate over
individuality, virtue is inexorably at the
service of the honour of the group
In the rural environment, the families and
the respective kinship are known by all the
inhabitants of a community and function as
protectors and guardians, which is why in these
reduced urban spaces the veil has never been
a garment to wear often among women. In
fact, the veil has traditionally been a garment
of the city. The great urbanization weakens
patriarchal social controls of protection of the
honour of the woman because urban anonym-
ity does not allow her to be automatically iden-
tified as “daughter of ” or “wife of ”, as hap-
pens in small towns; and as it is a social model
where the legitimacy of the person outside the
group is not recognised, the femininity exhib-
ited in the urban anonymity is reduced to a
sexual object. Therefore, the veil emerged in
the city as a symbol of negotiation of fron-
tiers between the private and the public space
and as a social regulator that gives access to
the woman to the latter.
However, far from the superfluous inter-
pretation that associates the veiled woman with
submission and the unveiled with liberation,
the world of dress is today a diverse world full
of symbols that have to be decoded correctly
and that, normally, particularly have to do with
the different spaces and with the different gen-
erations. In this way, between the
haïk
or
niqab
veil (traditional) and the
hiyab
veil (modern
Islamic version)
6
there is a sociological lan-
guage that expresses the difference between
the new generation and the preceding one,
between those who study and go out and the
secluded, between those who affirm and those
who submit. For example, the girl who today
voluntarily puts on the
hiyab
rejects the tradi-
tional veil of her mother because it is a sym-
bol for her of ignorance, superstition, reclu-
sion; in other words, all that which has been
thrown off thanks to studies, to education: the
hiyab
permits them to also make visible their
rupture with the elders, and through this af-
firm that their submission to God comes be-
fore their submission to man.
In this sense, one should bear in mind that
in Muslim civil society it is not only the femi-
nist currents, following the western model,
which are carrying out a process of rupture
with respect to traditional society, but that,
from Islamic cultural self-affirmation, a new
generation of women are transforming their
own role in society and their space of action.
The social profile that characterizes these
women, some of them integrated into the mili-
tancy or Islamist sensibility, is mainly
urban
youths
, (the city and its accelerated process of
urbanization has de-structured the community
order of which the traditional relations be-
tween men and women form part, opening the
social space to the initiative of new groups
where the young play a key role weakening
the authority of the patriarchal and elder
6. The
hiyab is a scarf that covers the head but not the face. This is a substantial difference from the traditional
patriarchal veil which seeks to make the woman invisible in the public space. Moreover, not all women who use the
hiyab
are Islamist militants, many wear it as a symbol of Islamic cultural affirmation and identity, a phenomenon that reaches a
highly numerous generation of youths.
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42
Patriachy and Islam
groups of society) and
educated
youths
(they
have appropriated knowledge and achieved
intellectual autonomy to reinterpret their role
in accordance with “true Islam”).
7
Therefore, the process of re-Islamization
experienced today in Arab societies should not
be given to easy interpretations, as, far from
meaning a simple traditional “turn-back” or
a “manipulation of women by men”, we are
dealing with a phenomenon in which women,
making use of the achievements of moderni-
zation, invest in its two main public spaces: the
urban and the academic, and based on this
make their difference with respect to the pre-
ceding generation.
Their access to the public space is linked to
the voluntary use of the
hiyab
, which is above
all highly charged with cultural self-affirma-
tion which makes them feel they are contrib-
uting to a mission of reconstruction of their
own culture, and allows them to play a social
role that they would only have with difficulty
in their reduced traditional environment.
Consequently, their adoption of the
hiyab
is not done as a symbol of traditional trans-
mission of the religion but rather as a sign of
their re-appropriation of Islam as cultural
identity. The veil, therefore, reappears with
strength as a phenomenon characteristic of the
great cities and of the women with training
and studies.
From the surveys and interviews carried
out with the new veiled women of Islam, it
emerges that among the variety of argumen-
tations in favour of the use of the
hiyab
(pro-
fessionals, feminists, nationalists or anti-impe-
rialists) the religious argument
stricto sensu
almost never comes alone nor occupies the first
place in the discourse of these women. In fact,
it is above all their will “to be present in soci-
ety” which, in practice, is linked with the wear-
ing of the
hiyab
.
8
It is above all their will “to be present in
society” which, in practice, is linked with
the wearing of the hiyab
Another important factor is that this “exit”
and public “visibility” happens
without con-
flict,
either physical or moral, despite the fact
that their mothers are normally traditional
women dedicated to the domestic space and
maternal tasks. The opposition to family au-
thority is difficult to exercise when this rup-
ture with tradition is done in the name and in
favour of Islam. This gives these women a le-
gitimacy which is difficult to confront in a fam-
ily environment where Muslim values nour-
ish and legitimate the social model. In this way,
social change, itself object of resistance and
scandal, filters into the customs more easily
because it is done in function of a practice con-
sidered legitimate.
All this takes us to bear in mind that as these
women access the public space a transforma-
tion takes place that forces the frontiers of the
private space; and the more women develop
strategies of individual life the more they will
cast doubt on the prohibitions to go into the
exterior space and the more they will forge
their own identity redefining the relations
between men and women.
7. Gema Martín Muñoz, “Mujeres islamistas y sin embargo modernas”, in Mercedes del Amo (ed.),
El imaginario, la
referencia y la diferencia: siete estudios acerca de la mujer árabe, Granada, Universidad de Granada, 1997.
8. Diane Singerman,
Avenues of Participation. Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1995; Laetitia Bucaille, “L’engagement islamiste des femmes en Algérie”,
Maghreb-Machrek,
no. 144, 1994; Dalal el-Bizri, “L’ombre et son double. Femmes islamistes, libanaises et modernes”,
Les Cahiers du
CERMOC, no. 13, 1995; Hinde Taarji, Les voilées de l’Islam, Paris, Balland, 1990; Nilüfer Göle, Musulmanes et Modernes.
Voile et civilisation en Turquie, Paris, La Découverte, 1993; Fariba Adelkhah, La revolución bajo el velo. Mujeres islámicas
de Irán, Barcelona, Bellaterra, 1996; Djedjiga Imache and Inès Nour, Algériennes, entre islam et islamisme, Edisud, Aix-
en-Provence, 1994.
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Quaderns de la Mediterrània
43
The truth is that given the weak support in
Arab countries for the feminist movements that
call for rights of women following the west-
ern model, one can wonder if the path from
Islamic militancy for being more pragmatic
will not in the end be more efficient.
In any case, all this only shows the com-
plexity of the social dynamics currently
underway in Arab and Muslim societies and
the inappropriateness of the widely held vi-
sion of the Muslim world as an immobile uni-
verse where everything happens through an
Islamic determinism inclined to fanaticism
and regression.
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43
Meriam Bouderbala, without a title.
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44
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