“Enough with physical attraction! Why should I have to submit to all these restrictions because of it?” The French revolutionary activist Théroigne de Méricourt angrily slammed the door and headed out to the public square in Paris. She wore the clothes of a cavalryman and shouted before a group of women: “The time has come for us to cast off our shameful idleness in which ignorance and male oppression has imprisoned us. Let us return to the time when our mothers fought side by side with men and spoke in public meetings.” One man jeered from the crowd: “What is this? She is breaking the laws of nature—the home is the proper place for a woman.”
Whenever you hear someone arguing that women should not leave the house, drive a car, or mix with men he (or she) almost always justifies his (or her) position with two arguments: first, that women leaving the home presents a distraction and temptation to men, as well as being an opportunity for the spreading of immorality and indecency, and second that a woman’s natural place is in the home.
To avoid “temptation” and preserve the sanctity of their place in the home, women have been veiled and hidden away in their houses for many centuries. This has become the dominant public culture in Saudi Arabia—even propagated on some occasions by women, rather than men. But was the primary motive behind placing restrictions on women and their movements really to avoid immorality? Or is it a remnant of days gone by?
The meaning of fitnah—which can mean “strife” or "temptation"—is unclear and not universally agreed upon. Moreover, treating it as something solid and unchanging defies both time and gender. We must question how it came to be solely associated with women, who alone bore its consequences when it is natural and, to be frank, plainly evident that attraction and temptation is an issue which spans both genders—by necessity its implications for the female are implications for the male as well. So why then have women borne all of these consequences, while men have avoided them altogether? And why were women veiled and covered, while this was a cause for men to gloat, boast and brag?
Furthermore, no-one can argue that attraction is anything but subjective—we do not all agree on what makes a person attractive, after all. It is in our nature as people to disagree, so we must question why one interpretation has placed all these restrictions on women, when even the people behind the restrictions could not unanimously agree on what attractiveness truly is.
I recall one occasion when an Arab mufti wanted to be even-handed on this subject. A TV presenter asked him, “Sheikh, ought women to cover their faces?” The sheikh immediately replied, “Covering the face is merely tradition. A woman is required to cover her hair.”
The presenter was not satisfied with this answer and so asked, “What if she is very beautiful?” The mufti fell silent for a moment and said, “If she is beautiful, a 10/10, then she should cover her face. But if she is only a 5/10, then covering her face would be tradition. But God alone knows how to judge this!” This rationale and others like it demonstrate that "attractiveness" is a very slippery term—it is relative and subjective in such a way that it cannot be pinned down. Consequently, it does not provide a stable platform on which to build codified decisions or rulings in any time or place.
The real irony is that these laws and rules are very effective when applied to heterosexual relationships, considered by some to be “natural,” but are totally ineffective in dealing with homosexual relationships. As such, lawmakers are forced to acknowledge homosexual attraction but are unable to impose veils or restrictions to discourage it. This is true even for the maniacs who ban fathers from sitting with their daughters for fear one may be attracted to the other.
But why has this come about in the first place? The answer is clear, and the pieces of the puzzle all fall into place when we look back to the roots of early Arab society, when the fact that men being physically stronger than women by their very nature counted for much more. Consequently, the public arena fell under the control of men. Men controlled public life and determined the conditions for appearing in public. The presence of this ‘other gender’ posed a distraction for this society of men, and perhaps even represented a threat to male privilege and power.
Women became a meeting place of contradictions. Men wanted women, but also feared them. Therefore they removed women from public life, placed permanent obstacles in the way of their leaving and assured them of the sanctity of their place in the home. And if women did have to leave, they had to comply with a long list of conditions to confine and restrict their activities, to disguise any signs of life. Al-Ghazali wrote that if a woman left the home “she should take on the characteristics of the dead.” But the gravest responsibility was on her husband to prevent her from leaving the home: “Whoever has a wife who goes out and interacts with people with her face visible can never be an Imam . . . and God’s anger with him will never end.” (Ibn Kathir) And so men extended their rule over the conditions under which women could leave the home.
While considering these issues, we can see these arguments repeated in Saudi Arabia within the ongoing discussion about a woman’s right to drive and her right to go out in public on her own. The story of the struggle between men and women is long and will not end in just one day. It has characterized the development of many societies in the past, and represents a constant shifting and continuous effort to find a place of equality between the genders.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
