Now that Arab women are pouring into the streets by the million, men discover with dismay that they, not women, were the captives of the harem dream.
Interpretation
The quote highlights that the perceived power and control men believed they had in society is challenged by the emerging strength and agency of Arab women.
Fatema Mernissi's quote emphasizes a significant societal shift where Arab women are actively participating in public life, countering traditional views of femininity and masculinity. It suggests that men, who once believed themselves to be dominant, are realizing that their understanding of power was misguided; they were the ones bound by outdated ideals, akin to captives in a 'harem dream', rather than being the authority figures they thought themselves to be.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech highlighting the progress of gender equality in the Middle East.
To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.
A woman can walk miles without making one single step forward. As a child born in a harem, I instinctively knew that to live is to open closed doors. To live is to look outside. To live is to step out. Life is trespassing.
Educated women armed with computers have defeated extremists by denying them a monopoly to define cultural identity and interpret religious texts. No extremist can say that women are inferior to men without being made a laughingstock on Al Jazeera. Islam insisted on equality between everyone.
You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women's rights, and perhaps four or five that do not.
If women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
It is most unusual to return to a place that has changed in ways you yourself have altered.
While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.
Every generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.
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