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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.

7-especial.p65

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38



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.

7-especial.p65

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42



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.

7-especial.p65

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43



Meriam Bouderbala, without a title.

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