F: I am a Feminist - M: "You are Off-Track!"

Well, not necessarily. Feminism could be a healthy way of thinking... if it promotes collaboration rather than conflict. I have been reading a few articles about feminist scholarship in Muslim and Arab Middle Eastern countries, and I've just noticed the "bitterness" of the life that feminists have to experience. They are being insulted and accused of profanation and deviation,portraying them as haters of both Arab and Islamic cultures, and as troublemakers whose final target is to provoke heated talks about the notion of gender.

In our Middle Eastern, traditional culture, a feminist is thought to be a brainwashed individual who was basically duped by the western ideology and stream of thoughts that pictures the oriental woman as a slave to men, living in harems, wearing thick veils around their faces and bodies, and deprived from her rights as a human being. A thought that promises her now – by following the feminist track, and joining their voice to that of liberating women from the claws of patriarchy – a dignified status for herself and for every female being.



Fatima Mernissi is one of the leading feminists in Morocco as well as in the Middle East, and she wrote many books treating the issue of gender in Morocco and in the Arab cultures at large. One of her favorite heroines – and mine too – is Sheherezade. For Fatima Mernissi, this subtle and eloquent female character is a model to follow, because of her early and revolutionary awareness of the power of the narrative, and of her outstanding knowledge and skills to address the audience. She managed to deploy her narrative skills, and subvert the king’s mind-set, and to transform his determination to take revenge from women, by reducing them first to a mere object of mannish sexual satisfaction and then by exterminating them right after.

Sheherezade has also played an important political role because she changed the voice of supreme authority. i.e. the king himself. She- did not have the intention to entertain the king so long that he would give up the idea of killing her. She had an even more powerful design to change him, and twist the fate of humanity on the whole. She understood that the extermination of women would lead to the total destruction of human race, and a way to stop this massacre was to re-educate the king, to change his mindset, and make him see the fallacy of his thoughts in the mirror of his own mind.

Sheherazade was not that irresistibly beautiful belly-dancer who carries the charming secrets of the oriental female sensuality, nor was she that simple entertainer who made use of the age-old female skill par excellence that is narration. She was an exceptionally clever, well-informed and confident woman, who understood both the educational and political role of narration. She feared not the supreme power and authority of the blood-thirsty and misogynist king over her, and instead of letting the fear of being deflowered and then pitilessly butchered overcome her, she mustered all the courage in her, rallied all the intellect she had, and took the decision to tame the beast that dwelt in the king, by instructing him over again that evil and good coexist, and that women can be either evil or good as many other creatures and things in existence. For this aim, she made use of the wisest accounts of what went before in bygone times and nations, the very accounts she had compiled through her readings.

What I would suggest here is not to resist or refute patriarchy, rather redefining and rectifying it. Looking for the problem with patriarchy, should be yet based on the existing fundamentals of our own culture – the Islamic culture. We – who say are feminists – should start from there, and subtly incorporate our approach to male-female relationships in every area of our lives. All the good exists in questioning and giving a critical view of things that surround us, let alone the factors that are supposed to guide and show us the way. Being a feminist should bear no insult to our culture, it should, instead, contribute to promoting our manners and conduct, to open our eyes on the misleading notions we have on ourselves and on the others. It should dust off the dangerous "erroneous ideas" about gender, whose danger dwell in their capability to reduce the potential of some of us at the expense of morphological - and not an essential- difference. At the end, it should teach us that being either male or female must not be a reason to overvalue or underestimate ourselves…