How women are reshaping the post-9/11 Arab world
Alex Laughlin
The Washington Post
The post-9/11 Arab world, a region seemingly defined by crisis reporting, inspires emotional responses from many in the West. Frequently it’s dismissed as one built upon the subjugation of women, who, veiled and hidden from view, are forbidden from traveling, going to school or enjoying many of the “liberties” of women in the West.
Rather than define the conversation in such stark terms, Katherine Zoepf’s new book, “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World,” (Penguin Press, Jan. 12, 2016) allows Arab women to speak for themselves.
“Excellent Daughters” is an attempt to demystify these Western assumptions of womanhood in the Arab world. As a woman, Zoepf is granted unique access to the lives and stories of Arab women — many of whom, for the first time, find themselves negotiating contemporary interpretations of gender norms with centuries-old values rooted in Islam.
These values dictate the structure of these women’s lives, but Zoepf’s deeply personal investigation into the small but radical acts these women commit not only illuminates the choices these women make every day, but also subverts many of the assumptions Western readers make about the Arab world.
We had the chance to ask Zoepf a few questions about her reporting process. What you’ll find below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
You make a concerted effort in the book to be clear and transparent about confronting your own biases while reporting, and I think that really reflects the experience of the reader as well. We come into the book with expectations and judgments about what it means to be an Arab woman, and you wrestle with those same expectations.
American reporting on the Arab world tends to be focused on crises of various kinds. Good reporting on war and political crisis is obviously important, but I think our focus on these stories can have a distorting effect on our view of the region.
As a journalist and as a Westerner, how do you maintain an attitude of cultural relativism while reporting on these communities with social norms that our own cultures would immediately dismiss as oppressive to women?
I don’t think of myself as a cultural relativist, and in the book I describe my struggles to report on practices that I found appalling, and clearly wrong. But I do think it’s important to examine the context in which these practices developed. When you do that, it often becomes clear that people’s acceptance of these practices isn’t necessarily as illogical or contrary to their own interests as it might first appear. In the book, for example, I describe Saudi women who defend the guardianship system, which requires adult women to get their male guardians’ permission for many basic activities, like traveling or seeing a doctor. Women’s attachment to this system shocked me at first. But what I’ve had to understand is that sometimes, in the context of their society, this might be the easiest or safest way for these women to live their lives.
That was something I noticed while reading your book — in a lot of cases, it seemed that Arab women would appeal to conservative values as a means to a more progressive end.
I found this phenomenon fascinating, and I noticed it in many parts of the region. In Syria, young women attending Islamic schools told me that, as they became more devout and stricter about their religious observance, their conservative families trusted them more, and gave them a greater degree of freedom. In Saudi Arabia, I met activists who argued for women’s right to drive on the basis that a woman should not have to be in a car with a male driver. I tried to convey my conflicted feelings about these things in the book.
It’s crazy how we have these assumptions and judgments about Arab culture and women, and it seems so bizarre — like why would you want your parents to arrange your marriage — but then I thought, it’s not like we don’t have attitudes about marriage and sex in the U.S. that aren’t just as bizarre!
Yes, exactly. In the case of arranged marriages, some young women I spoke to said they pitied Americans for having to choose their own husbands. Some of these women were having deep conversations with their parents starting at the age of 11 about what they want, and they trusted their parents to choose good husbands for them. Many happily married women had very sweet and moving stories about the moment when their husbands came to their fathers to propose, and they saw them briefly while their marriage contract was being discussed. When I first heard them, I was startled at the way that they’d constructed romantic narratives around arranged marriage. Later on, I thought, is this really all that different from stories we tell about love at first sight?
Source: www.washingtonpost.com