Women & Islam: Tales from the Road
Islamic Nations
Since the September 11th terrorist attacks, there has been much discussion about the treatment of women in Islamic countries. As an American and non-Muslim, I cannot speak to what it is like to be a woman on a day-to-day basis in an Islamic country. However, having traveled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, I can offer my own personal experience and insights as a window into Muslim culture.
Setting foot into any one of the Islamic countries I have visited leaves no doubt that it is a male-dominated society. Cairo’s cafes and street corners were lined with men idling away the day, giving me the eerie impression that either all the women had been abducted by aliens or that I had somehow entered an open-air prison for men. The women I did see were going somewhere – to the store, to pick up the kids, or back home. They were not congregating in public spaces, for they do not have the socially acceptable freedom of leisure time outside their homes.
Similarly, I went to an international music festival in Morocco, which drew thousands of people from around the country. I felt like I had crashed one giant locker room party with a handful of female tourists thrown in for good measure. When I asked a Moroccan where all the women were, the reply was, “Their families do not allow them out after ten o’clock at night.” The few Arab women present were there with their husbands.
Removing half of the population from the public arena is not a natural state of affairs. Like the ying and the yang, both the sexes are needed to produce a balanced society. The absence of women from shared space creates a strange, testosterone-heavy dynamic, like a seesaw with a pile of bricks on one end and a feather on the other. Without the calming effect of women, men seem to be walking around with a short fuse, the smallest thing leading to inflamed tempers and a yelling match. I witnessed two Moroccan men almost come to blows over one accidentally taking the other’s seat on a bus. Later, when the bus ran out of gas, the driver got into a fistfight with the gas station attendant as soon as we pulled into the station.
With Muslim women largely behind the scenes and out of reach, a foreign woman, even modestly dressed, stands out like a bikini-clad girl skiing down the slopes in mid-winter. On top of that, many Arab men, influenced by American movies and TV, subscribe to the common belief that western women are “easy.” A relationship with a foreigner also holds out the possibility of work abroad. For Muslim men living in countries with high unemployment, this is equally as enticing as the prospect of sex. All of this did not make it easy for my friend and I in these countries. A small task like running to the corner store to buy some bottled water might as well be an uphill marathon for the amount of energy required to fight off the men who constantly surrounded and propositioned us. The seeming inability of these men to understand rejection and take “no” for an answer only further confounded and frustrated us.
Experiencing this constant barrage of male attention over a one-month period gave us plenty of time to discuss the reasons for this behavior. We came up with three theories:
First, because segregated socialization begins at a young age, Muslim boys do not have the means to learn to interact with the opposite sex. By the time the adolescent has grown into a man, his interaction with women has been limited primarily to the female members of his family. Thus he does not have the opportunity to learn dating rituals, part of which is the getting-to-know-
each-other process. That explains why many a Moroccan man felt it perfectly acceptable to ask me to meet him later without first even learning my name. This also explains why that same man kept asking me out despite my repeated rebuffs, and to our second theory. Having not been exposed to rejection from women, he could not recognize it.
Our third theory was that men had become so accustomed to living in a male-dominated society and being the superior sex that women’s feelings and desires became irrelevant. It does not occur to them that it “takes two to tango.” This was why a Tunisian man responded to my consistent rejection of his invitation to accompany us to the beach with, “You don’t understand, it is no problem for me.”
This is not to say that my overall experience in these countries was a bad one. I also met Muslim men who treated me as an equal and, aware of my predicament as a foreign woman, tried to shield me from the unwanted attention I attracted. However, of my entire time spent traveling in the Islamic world, on only one occasion did a woman attempt to talk to me. And even then she expressed her frustration with her lack of freedoms. I find it ironic that the only photo I have seen of pro-US supporters in the Middle East was of all women. It showed me that given the chance to have their voices heard, Muslim women will play the role they were intended to play – that of a balance to the opposite sex, the ying to the yang. And the world would be all the better place for it.