A Lecture at Damascus University about The Role of Arab Women in this era of Time

By: Dr. Butheina Sha'ban

Date: Sunday, July 9, 2006

Venue: Engineering College Auditorium, Damascus University

Introduction by Ehab Hamed:

Throughout Arabic history, women enjoyed much respect and admiration, and played an effective and influential role in the events of their times.

Today, with the intensifying situation in the Middle East and the resulting heightened pressure against our nation, the role of women is becoming even more important. All this is occurring amid complicated circumstances and increasingly irreconcilable interests between two worlds; one that possesses a civilization, natural resources, human potential and optimal investment of this potential, and another that possesses power and technology and is seeking the means to exploit other peoples' resources and potential.

We have with us today an Arabic woman who has dedicated a large part of her life to combating grievances and injustices against Arab women. She began her political life as an interpreter for the immortal President, the late Hafez Al-Assad. It was from here that she accepted a new and different professional challenge, assuming the post of External Information Director at the Foreign Ministry.

Thanks to her commendable efforts in serving the cause of peace, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She was awarded the Prize of `Distinguished Arab Woman in the Field of Government Service' by the Arab League in the same year.

Our distinguished guest is also a university professor who has written several articles, studies and books in both Arabic and English, attempting thereby to build a sustainable bridge between East and West.

On your behalf and on behalf of the Executive Bureau of the Syrian Students' Union I would like to warmly welcome Dr. Butheina Sha'ban.

Dr. Shaaban

I would like to thank Professor Ehab Hamed for this introduction, and allow me, on your behalf, to thank Mr. (I would rather say friend and brother) Ammar Sa'ati, Head of the National Union of Syrian Students for this nice invitation to be with you today at this difficult time for our nation. I would like to thank you all for taking the trouble to come, even at this critical time of the day. I am sure every one of you has a lot of work to do. I would also like to express my joy and happiness for being here at Damascus University - it always makes me feel extremely proud. I feel very strongly, affiliated with this University as a student, a professor and a writer.

I have chosen to speak about the current challenges facing Arab women, and the role we play in this respect, hoping you all feel the significance of this subject; women and men alike. I want here to cite examples passed down to us from our grandmothers, who considered women's liberation a cause that was equally important for men and for women. This is in fact a distinctive feature that makes the Arab Women's Liberation Movement different from similar movements across the globe. I have read much about our grandmothers, who worked side by side with men to further the cause of women's liberation; sharing family, children, and social responsibilities. Therefore, I hope none of us would take this subject as one that concerns women alone, but as a subject of interest to women, men, society and the state alike. And above all else, this is a theme of nation and civilization.

Before going into the main body of my lecture, I would like to make some brief comments about the struggle fought by Arab Women down the road towards emancipation and liberty.

It is not true that women's liberation in the West started in the 1960s or 1970s. I have researched this topic in both 19th and 20th century Arab media, and I found that Arab women contributed extensively to the efforts made at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in respect of the cause of women's liberation. Just imagine that prior to World War I; there were some 25 magazines on the subject of women's liberation. Those magazines were owned, published and distributed or circulated by women. Men stood beside these women, all those who worked in this field, including Nazira Zeinudin and Huda Sha'arawi to name just two, had fathers, brothers, husbands or friends, who supported them. Therefore, the efforts made by women towards liberation were undoubtedly and to a very large extent contributed by men.

A large number of novels, essays and books in the Arabic literature were written by Arab women. Their works covered a diverse range of subjects including the relationship between East and West and East-West dialogue. In 1892, a Syrian girl, wearing traditional Syrian dress, visited American universities and called on the West to liberate its women, because at this time, Arabic women felt they were in a more advantageous position in terms of women rights. At the same time, Zainab Fawaz Al-A'milyia wrote an open letter to American women who had passed a resolution at a women's conference saying that a woman's role was limited to the home and raising children. Zainab; from the Mount A'mil region in the Lebanese mountains, wrote to the United States asking them to be fair and equitable to women, to give them the political, social and scientific role they were supposed to play, and not just let them stay at home and raise children.

By citing these examples, I want to say that we still do not know our history the way we should really do, and that it abounds with such wonderful stories. Sadly most of these human stories are missing from our educational textbooks. That explains why students are often unaware of the role played by women and the contributions made by women throughout the ages. In a book I wrote about Arab woman novelists, I noted that Arab women had written novels two decades ahead of any similar attempts by men. We were always told that Mohammad Hasanain Heykal was the first writer of the modern Arab novel. His novel `Zainab,' was published in 1914. The fact is that Zainab Fawaz and Afifa Karam were writing novels before the close of the 19th century. In 1914 there were already more than twenty novels written by Arab female authors. Unfortunately, this also has not been incorporated into our official historical records. I say this to show just how much work we still have to accomplish by way of doing justice to our history, literature, and society.

I would like now to focus on four key points. The first point is the image of Arab women in the West; the second is the image of Western women in the Arab world; the third is the image of Arab women in the Arab world and the fourth point is the status of Arab women in history, literature and politics, the huge contradiction of that status in light of the prevailing image of woman, and some of the causes of that contradiction. I shall wrap up with the current challenges facing Arab women, ways in which we can tackle these challenges, and the national and pan-Arab needs for doing so.

***

In the year 2000, I taught at Michigan University in the US where I was a professor teaching Arabic Women's Studies and Middle Eastern Studies together with a colleague named Ginnis Terry. Part of the syllabus taught there was my book “Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk about their Lives,” which had been published in English in 1991. When American students realized I was an Arab who had written a book in English and who was teaching them from an American curriculum (I think I love teaching. I don't want to talk about myself, but I do love teaching and I like my students), one of them asked me: “Are you the first Arab woman to earn a Ph.D. and become a university professor?” I answered: “In the 1970's I was taught by Syrian women and they were all university professors."

Throughout my life, I had met women - in the countryside, at school or at university, whom I considered to be my idols. So I asked this particular student: “Where did you get your ideas about Arab woman from? Where did you get the concept - as an American student - that an Arab woman doesn't know how to read or write or is not proactive?” His answer was: “from cartoons”! “When I was a little boy I had that image of Arab women,” he told me. “It was about the primitiveness of the Arab region, and about the desert and women's inability to act and react.” He then added: “Later I complemented cartoon films with Hollywood movies, and the image projected about Arabs was negative. There was no other way to imagine an Arab woman. Everything around me in movies and media generated a negative image of Arab women.”

There is certainly a long history narrated from an Orientals point of view that does much injustice to Arab women. As I said earlier, the image of Arab women is being targeted. I would like to share this fact with you. I happened to encounter two children playing a computer game. They were enthusiastically trying to shoot an Arab who fell off a plane as a terrorist. That was in Syria.

These were games designed in the US, and yet they are imported for our young children, who enjoy killing an Arab because he is a terrorist. Have the makers and importers thought about the image that would form in the minds of those little children regarding their belonging, their identity and the cause of Pan-Arabism?

The elements that form the negative image of the Arabs and Arab women in the West are manifold and complicated. They are juxtaposed from the Arab side with impassivity in the Western arena and an absence of a well-considered policy aimed at refuting the negative image held in the minds of so many Western people.

I really understand and appreciate the action taken by Venezuelan President Chavez last year when he launched a South American TV station that produces news and tries to air a true picture of South Americans. He has since opened a film studio to produce films, picturing South Americans as real people, not as drug dealers or mafia groups; the way they are always portrayed in Hollywood. I want to say that this poses a big challenge for us as regards Arab women's image in the West. It is not true to argue that there is no room for action and for changing that image. There is indeed ample room to do that, but doing that entails ideas, funds and effort, and above all else requires faith in one's own identity and sense of belonging. Such a thing also demands a belief that action can bring success, not only for us but also for our future generations.

The image of Arab women in the West is negative for the most point, and the Zionist media tries to consolidate and keep that image alive in the minds of all people. We are all to blame for failing to change that distorted image.

The image of Western women in the Arab countries is not much better. In my book “Both Left and Right Handed: Arab Women Talk about their Lives” I met many women from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Algeria. I asked each and every one I met: “What is your opinion about liberated women in the West?” They all had the same answer: “We do not want to imitate the Western women in their liberation.” “We have our own way.” Of course I do not have any objection vis-à-vis this argument, and I believe Arab women do have their own trends in life; trends that fall in line with their culture, identity, and civilization. But the problem is that Arab women, and perhaps men as well, have opted to visualize Western women as emancipated from all manners and ethics, and that they are even responsible for the rise in the rates of divorce in the Western society. We tend to blame them for family breakups and disintegration in the West.

Where have we got that picture of Western women from? How could an Arab who has never traveled abroad form that picture about women in the United States, for instance? First and foremost that image is formed by American movies, which often portray American women as uncaring mothers; women who are selfish, and may go anywhere and do anything to satisfy their self-centered attitude. We have not created or invented that image. Western culture has not only done harm and injustice to Arab women; it has harmed Western women as well. Movies about Western women do not provide a bright picture of them, whether in the West or here in the East. In other words, women have been manipulated as a tool in films, in media and in writing. Rarely in the West or in the East have women been able to draw their own pictures, write about themselves and define their own images. Women are not assigned this duty.

There are people with pre-planned concepts, motives, and perhaps political ideas - assuming that socio-cultural academic theatre has no political intentions. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there has been a crusade targeting the image of Arab women and whatever Arabs and Muslims in general stand for. There is a media machine that every day shows negative images of Arab civilization, Arab culture and Arab women, a machine that targets Muslims and Christians, men and women. Importantly, the significance of the issue of women today lies in the extent of attention accorded to it. In the West, women receive a huge amount of attention. If women's status laws were amended, or if women were allowed to play a more proactive role in the Arab world, the West would notice such developments much faster than if those developments were just concerned with men. This means that there is an opportunity at present for women to stand up and occupy an active role on the Arab scene, not only in their own countries, but also to play a part in improving the image of Arabs in the West. All this can be achieved through determination, sound use of financial resources, and conviction.

Perhaps one of the most important and dangerous misconceptions our enemies have instilled in our minds is that the Arabs are incapable of doing anything. The US in particular, as well as to a lesser extent the remainder of the Western arena is very much monopolized by Israel's supporters. This misconception about Arabs also says that no matter how hard we may try, we cannot change others' opinions. It further argues that the opinion of those we may change remains of little or no importance, as the opinion of those people critical to the situation will remain unchanged. This is indeed a myth and does not stand to reason at all.

We can do things that explain our identity, our cause, and our civilization. Today whenever I read Western media, I find many rising voices in the West, demanding restoration of the legitimate rights of people in Palestine and in Iraq. These voices include all faiths: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim and many others. There are many people who are willing to support our cause, but we have to take our cause to them. Do not imagine there is a person on Earth who enjoys hearing or watching a mother, a daughter and a son getting killed, as happened yesterday to a Palestinian family. The Israelis killed a Palestinian woman, together with her 6-year old daughter and her son. Tragically that picture does not reach the US or Europe. There are times our news does not reach them at all. It is our duty to carry the pictures and the news right to the homes of the Western world, to show them what is happening in our region. Human concerns and worries are the same. And even though there are radical groups that try to sow the seeds of hatred and discord against Arabism and Islam, the vast majority of people aspire to see justice and peace prevail. They vehemently support right wherever it is. The problem is exacerbated by the image of Arab women in the Arab countries. This is partly responsible for the projected image of an Arab woman in the West. In the Arab countries, if a woman succeeds and is able to be an achiever and a creator, she is very often seen as the exception, rather than the rule. If a man fails, he represents himself and not all men. If he succeeds he will be representative of all men. Hence the problem when the presence of women is not obvious, and when she is not playing a support role for other women as well. When all of that happens, a false image of women's abilities and qualifications will prevail. There lies the real contradiction between the envisaged picture and the reality on the ground in our countries. A visit to the Syrian countryside (I belong to that part of our country and was born and bred there) reveals a distinguishing feature of our society. In the countryside women work; have a say, enjoy rights, and exist everywhere in society. Where then has that picture of an Arab woman, portrayed as having no leading role or ability to work, with a relegated position come from? Even at the time I was studying for my Diploma in English - this is my experience - I found that every year we had eight girls and two boys only. The number of female students with a graduation rate of 60% and above was double that of boys. Girls always scored the highest marks in the English Department.

Now when I recall the creative and talented women I taught during the early 90s I discover that they have disappeared from the scene: got married and had children, and that's it, as though marriage itself is a career. Just as marriage is not a career for men, neither is it so for women. Marriage is a natural thing, and having children is also natural, as well as being a social and cultural responsibility. But it is never a profession for a woman to get married and stay at home. When I raised my children, my neighbors used to blame me for leaving my young daughters and for traveling. They argued that I was endangering their future, because a child needs much care and attention and a mother who stayed at home would therefore produce excellent children.

Now, more than 24 years later, I may say that that argument proved to be untrue. I believe a child needs a model to emulate, rather than a mother to sit with them around the clock. Children need exemplary parents. In other words if you tell your child not to lie, and you have your self lied, they will know you have lied and will lie again. But when the child realizes that you are honest and true, they will always be honest and truthful. Children do not only learn what we say to them. They are intelligent creatures. They learn to do what we, as parents, do. My daughter graduated this year and was ranked first at the Faculty of Architectural Engineering, thanks totally to her personal dedication. This is proof that a mother can have a career and still produce successful children. In fact studies have shown that a child who has a working mother enjoys higher spirits than one with a mother who stays at home. The reason is that if you keep any person at home for 24 hours, they are more likely to develop a sense of depression which is swiftly passed to young, impressionable children.

I believe Syria is among the leading countries in the world in terms of supporting the employment of women. I do not think there are any laws in the world that allow workplaces to have a nursery attached for working mothers to have their young children nearby throughout the day. These special nurseries are designed for female employees, who opt to take their young kids with them and keep them at the nursery during working hours and take them back home when they finish. Besides this, there are affordable nurseries with transport to pick up and drop off the children while their mothers are out at work. Believe me this facility is not available in many rich countries across the world. These laws were enacted by the late President Hafez Al-Assad and were aimed to encourage women to get out and go to work. He had very famous sayings about these issues. He said “a society must not work with half its members, but must rather work with full power and all its members.”

The status of Arab women and their political struggle is a vitally important issue. I had the chance to speak to many women who lived during the French occupation of Syria, and I came to know that Arab women played a highly active role in resisting the occupation. In fact they often played a role that men could not. In other words, women were in a complementary partnership with men. When I speak about women and men, I never talk about who is better, or who does better or more. Women and men play two different roles. These roles sometimes meet and sometimes differ, but there is no difference as to who is better or who is worse except in the way they play the roles given to them. For example during the Syrian revolution against the French mandate, women used to invent and innovate to help the revolutionaries and support their efforts. A woman used to take her child with her and keep the child's doll stuffed with money and gold coins to deliver to the revolutionaries. A milkman used to come to women to carry their messages to the revolutionaries stationed at Al-Ghouta. There were hundreds of similar experiences. Algerian women told me (their conversation is included in my book) about how a woman wearing her traditional clothing would enter a hospital and help a man or another woman out through another door. Algerian women struggled for more than 20 years before the French colonialists realized what a decisive role woman played in the struggle for Algeria's liberation. This is all part of our history which as yet remains unrecorded, and we must work to incorporate it into our history books. This will offer young boys and girls an opportunity to appreciate the human side of history, and to find in it good examples and guidance. Such stories will enhance their faith and firm belief in their country, identity and culture.

The image of Arab women even in the Arab countries is different from the role they are really playing in their respective countries. If we go now to any place or institution, we would see that Arab women are playing an important role in the management of state establishments. Unfortunately, when the issue moves up to a higher circle, we find that women's representation goes down. This is not due to their inability to perform, but can be attributed to a host of factors that hinder their access to that upper circle. The most important point to note is that men must have the conviction that women have a complementary role to play, and that she must play an important role in social and national life.

As a matter of fact pictures, of woman do overlap, be it woman's image in the Arab world or in the West. There are always people in the West who magnify the negative aspects of Arab life, absolutely disregarding the positive and bright. In other words we are not able to export to the West the best about us, because the West, or those elements of it that have no respect for Arab identity, or who are targeting Arab identity, opt to project the worst that we have.

One day I was delivering a lecture at the Foreign Relations Council in Washington, and my eyes fell upon a copy of The Times magazine with a picture of a woman on the cover, captioned as Syrian. She was all covered in black except for her eyes. I recalled that I had seen that picture in Syria, and it was an Iranian woman visiting the Shrine of Ruqiya in Damascus. Present at the lecture was the chief editor of The Times. I held up the magazine and said to him: “This picture is not of a Syrian woman; it is a picture of a woman visiting a shrine in Damascus. You seldom see this picture in Damascus because a Damascene woman is completely different from what you are trying to show your readers.” So there is a selective approach about showing Arab women and their culture. Unfortunately, there is no substantial and concerted effort to forestall such selective moves. That is exactly the role we must now play.

I don't want to take too much more of your time, and I'll conclude now with some thoughts on the challenges confronting us today. These challenges are faced today by Arab women in the occupied Syrian Golan region and Palestine. They are also faced by Iraqi women, and I believe our women and children bear the brunt of the deadly consequences of occupation there. Women in these occupied regions are struggling to keep life going and bearable. They are enthusing people with the will to stand firm in the face of a fierce campaign against our identity, history and land.

We must not turn our eyes away whenever a picture of a martyred Palestinian child or women sold like slaves in Iraq appears on TV. We must ask ourselves: What should we do? We have got to do something. Each and every one of us must do something.

Six Palestinian students once noted down their daily memories in Ramallah and recorded their daily sightings of what was happening to their town. They later traveled to Europe and started telling their stories and daily encounters to people in Europe. Within a short time span, that simple, spontaneous effort became a famous work in Europe, because it honestly reflected the daily suffering faced by the population of that town. The Israeli media tries all it can to obscure the daily suffering of our women under occupation. They try to deny the press access to these stories. Therefore, to bring these stories to the fore is a matter of great importance.

You may have noticed that the names of our martyrs are not mentioned in the daily Arab press. Instead, only figures are provided such as “10 or 20 martyrs were killed ….etc.” We only get figures, as though those falling in the line of duty were not people, and did not have mothers, sisters, wives or families. It is high time we abandoned that abstracted news reporting in favor of a more humanized approach. That is exactly what the Israelis have been trying to prevent. Israel is trying to deprive the Arabs of anything that could trigger off a proactive response within themselves. The news report goes “three Palestinian resistance men were killed.” Resisting whom? The newspaper reporting the news fails to complete the sentence and say the Palestinians killed were resisting the Israeli occupation troops, and that resistance is a legitimate act. Even Arab TV networks reporting fighting with Israeli forces speak about “clashes.” When a couple of days ago Israel killed 24 Palestinians, some TV stations reported that they were killed in `clashes and confrontations.' But we watched on TV the Israeli warplanes drop missiles on unarmed civilians. What kind of clashes and confrontations were those?

Such is the language used by the Israeli media to report the news. Arab press and TV networks resort to these reports, saying “quoting sources…” In other words we, the Arabs, are not the source of the news that concerns our land, our lives, and our martyrs. This is another element of our failing, which we must correct at this crucial time.

There is so much we can do; we can promote Arabism; our language, our poetry, our identity, our civilization. That is what we are supposed to do. Woman has always been a weaver of civilization, passing her humanistic product from one generation to another. I believe that improving the image of Arab women and ensuring their rights at home, and taking our cause outside of the confines of our homeland is a matter of paramount importance at this stage. This emanates from the fact that the West today is concentrating on women's performance and work. Therefore, we must seize this opportunity not only to do justice to those living under occupation, or to those women prisoners of war and detainees in the jails of occupying forces. There are more than a hundred mothers in such a situation today. There are even mothers who gave birth in prison, with their infants deprived of milk or food, yet their stories were muted and could not be taken to the world.

It is our duty to reveal this suffering to the world and to say that the Israeli soldier is not a hostage but a prisoner, because he was taken from his tank in occupied territory. The real abductions are those hundreds of women and children from Palestine and the Golan, who were taken from their homes and whose voices are still kept from the world.

We should not lose hope, even in these difficult times, because we are the children of an ancient civilization with a long, proud history. This nation has seen many invaders pack and go because of our nation's resistance and resolve. A week ago, President Bashar Al-Assad inaugurated the first phase of restoration works at the Citadel of Damascus. That Citadel was a jail for revolutionaries during the French mandate. The occupation ended and the Citadel still stands to immortalize those revolutionaries. We should think along these lines. What does Israel have to do more than it already has? It can kill and destroy, but it can never shake the firm belief ever alive in the Arab hearts that Palestine is their prime cause. It can never break our resolve to fight until Palestine, the Golan and Jerusalem are liberated. We can all act when man respects woman; when woman loves man; when men and women close ranks to liberate our nation.

Thank you very much

(A number of questions were asked by the university students. But these were not noted down due to sound problems.)

From the Question and Answer session

Dr. Shaaban:

Allow me to start with the last question, because it was the reason why I titled my book “Both Right and Left Handed…” That means that when woman went out for work, she had to use both hands right and left to catch up (laughter). She wanted to finish her work outside and inside. I wrote the book in 1988, and I thought then that in 2006 such a question would be irrelevant, because our society will have long bypassed this concept and laid down solid foundations for woman's work. But this in fact is a cosmic problem. That is why I said at the outset that men will have to reach a conviction about the role of women. That is a social tradition which has no relation to religion or identity. This is more or less the case even in Western countries. If we look at the Islamic religion, which some Western groups accuse of restricting the rights of women, we find that even in the time of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) women used to send their babies out to the desert to wet nurses. In other words, women were not required to breastfeed their babies unless they wanted to.

Laws and traditions are affiliated to religion but in reality they are not linked to it. Take for example the subject of inheritance. Many in the West protest the Glorious Koran's allotting males twice as much as it does females. Of course the Koran has regulated this process on the basis that man's responsibilities include securing a house, raising children, and spending on the family and even on aunts if they do not have a supporter. In this context a male receiving twice as much as a female is fair and equitable. In other words the share a woman gets from inheritance is hers and she will not be responsible for anything.

The problem does not lie in giving women the same share as men. The problem arises when she is denied any of her rights at all. In rural regions there are women who do not inherit anything whatsoever, because the landed property belongs to `Sha'ban's household' for instance. So how can we give it to `Ramadan's household?' People argue that it is not possible. The inheritance must go to the `Sha'ban's household.' These traditions represent the real problem. We have to struggle against such negative attitudes and work to detach these negative traditions from religion. The Islamic religion has no link to these negative traditions. This is evidenced by the fact that the major religions in Syria; Muslims and Christians, have similar traditions: the same engagement traditions, marriage traditions, and inheritance traditions. These are socially inherited traditions and are not linked to religion.

Government institutions should undertake the role of social education at nurseries and kindergartens, given Syria's leading experience in this domain. We have been doing this since the 1970s, but today we need to expand, materialize and change our original concept, and above all we need to update school curriculum because until recently our young children were taught from reading text books that contained expressions such as: “mama is cooking and papa is out in the field.' Now this concept has changed.

 Back to the first question, that brother asked me: “what is the solution?” In my opinion we should not think that the solution lies with the government or the state. Every one of us possesses the solution. That is what I meant when I said every one of us should do something or take the initiative. He should come up with an idea and seek ways to materialize that idea. The secret of advancement of Western societies is that when someone is walking in a park and they see a flower and they don't pick it, they don't do that for fear of a police officer. They do it because they know someone else would come and say to them: “Why are you picking a flower which is public property, national property and community property?”