SOURCE: Tétreault, Mary Ann. “The Family Romance of Islam.” Middle East Journal 48, no. 2 (spring 1994): 357-62.

[In the following essay, Tétreault draws upon the psychoanalytic notion of “family romance” to elucidate Mernissi's analysis of Islamic culture, political organization, and women's oppression in Islam and Democracy.]

Islam and Democracy is an artfully forged argument for the necessity of nations in the Middle East to introduce democratic processes and the readiness of their peoples to participate. It is also an analysis of why governments and religious elites in Middle Eastern states are so opposed to democratization, and how they ally themselves with elites in the developed world to prevent political reform. Even more than in her previous books, which address the problems of realizing human freedom in modern Islamic societies,¹ Fatima Mernissi relies in this work on the literary techniques of poets and prophets. Parables and emblematic events run like silk threads through her work, providing the warp that sustains a rich and highly textured picture of the mutual, interdependent construction of human beings and a world civilization.

Two equations occupy the center of Mernissi's analysis. One is familiar to readers of her other works—the position of women in a society is a measure of the rights of the individual in that society. This is an observation that also has been made by philosophers such as Charles Fourier, from the northern shore of the Mediterranean, as well as others, like Mernissi herself, whose roots are on the southern shore of that sea. Unlike Fourier, Mernissi goes beyond the assertion that women's rights reflect a willingness to concede the humanity of a disadvantaged group. She also understands that a democratic society is one that is composed of individuals, rather than families with their traditionally sanctioned hierarchies and relegation of women to passive, serving roles.

The second equation defines the second gulf war as a counterattack—at least temporarily successful—against the upsurge of popular pressure to introduce democracy that swept the Middle East in response to the fall of totalitarian governments in Eastern Europe. Here Mernissi's argument is even more complex, permeated by the ethos of Arab nationalism as well as a colonial experience that has shaped the consciousness of so many in the region. The first equation is successful in demonstrating her thesis because her stories clearly reflect reality even though her argument is not linear. The second is more problematic, not only because of the complexity of the argument, but also because it diverges from the method as well as the spirit of the rest of Mernissi's feminist analysis.

Lynn Hunt suggests that a nation is defined not simply as a people who share a territory, but rather as a people who share a collective political unconscious. A nation's understanding of the political order is reflected in family romances, shared “images of the familial order that underlie … politics … [and are] structured by narratives of family relations.”² What Mernissi describes throughout her book is the family romance of Islam. It is figured in narratives that combine images of the walled city and the veiled woman in a romance of security achieved through the construction and maintenance of boundaries between different categories of human beings.

The idea of boundaries, of hudud, was present in [the Abbasid caliph] al-Mansur's paradise [Baghdad] … because his ideal of a well-organized Muslim community was based on the recognition of boundaries to separate and control differences. … To guarantee maximum security … he ordered that the market be transferred outside the circle [enclosing the city] so that the ungrateful, seditious populace would stay far from the palace. … Women who walk in the streets without the hijab, unveiled, are seen as out of bounds. … They are considered defenseless because they have left the boundaries of the harem, the forbidden and protected space, but also because they have ventured into areas that are not theirs.

(p. 7)

The family romance is not remote from the politics of state and society. Hunt tells her readers that in revolutionary France the politics that culminated in the king's beheading were prefigured and accompanied by narratives in which the image of the good father was replaced by images of absent or despotic fathers. Many of these romances incorporated stories about the wicked mother, mitigating the father's neglect. This prefigured the success of the revolutionaries in constructing a new government of men modelled as a relationship among brothers—but not sisters, who carry the stigma of the wicked mother. The latter became the scapegoat saddled with the sin of revolution.

Mernissi reminds the reader that the psychic link between the boundaries confining the veiled woman and those protecting the walled city has operated for “centuries of misogyny” (p. 156). Like the family romance of the French Revolution, the family romance of Islam also casts women as scapegoats. Their autonomous passage from the harem into the larger city is repeatedly identified as responsible for civil disorder—“it is a tradition, even a state tradition” (p. 154). This explains why the normal response by Muslim rulers to civil unrest is to shut women away. The utility of this strategy is more than ideological—it is also structural. By forbidding women to leave their homes, this apparently symbolic restoration of boundaries is, in reality, a curfew that gets half the umma off the street. In times of high unemployment it also gets rid of half the potential workforce. Further, it enables Muslim sovereigns to mobilize allies from among religious fundamentalists. Mernissi recounts numerous stories, from the time of the Fatimids to 20th-century Iran and Algeria, to show that the subjection of women is a standard technique for reimposing the status quo ante.

But ante what? In today's world, Mernissi writes, the feminists' link between the liberated woman and the liberated society is stronger than the caliphs' link between the secluded woman and the secure city.

Women are the only ones who publicly assert their right to self-affirmation as individuals, and not just through words but also through actions (e.g., unveiling and going out). Today they constitute one of the most dynamic components of the developing civil society.

(p. 157)

Mernissi argues that civil society, the space where individuals define themselves as autonomous beings, is part of Islam's rationalist tradition, which began with the Mu'tazila philosophy (pp. 32-4). Imams and caliphs were threatened by the Mu'tazila notion of good governance as depending on the consent of reasoning believers even more than they were threatened by the prospect of violent rebellions spearheaded by more militant dissidents. In response, leaders condemned the Mu'tazila philosophers on the grounds that they were propagating a foreign ideology inimical to Islam.

The ritual condemnation of foreign innovations continues today with modern political and religious leaders insisting that democracy is another foreign invention that must be rejected. Yet the condemnation of foreign innovations in the name of Islamic values curiously is limited. As Mernissi points out, it does not extend to technology: telephones, televisions, tape recorders, or other

marvelous, indispensable little objects. … Opposition movements, whatever cause they espouse, use them widely to push their propaganda. There is no political debate about their being foreign, and no political party, especially not the serious fundamentalists, are calling on us to choose between religion and the telephone. But this is the case with the notion of democracy.

(p. 52)

Although the argument against democracy is couched in terms of religious values, Mernissi argues that the issue is not religion but interests. “The faithful battle each other every day to have access to” automobiles and telephones for their own convenience, even though one could argue that these foreign imports strengthen foreign corporations and foreign governments at the expense of the interests of the customers (p. 53). Some of the faithful, particularly the educated middle classes, also see democracy as a convenience that promotes their interests, but others see it as threatening to theirs. “Considering the intensity of the opposition to democracy, which sometimes results in violence, they must believe that their very survival is in danger” (p. 53). Mernissi's analysis of differences of interests relating to democracy is not confined to individuals alone, but extends to political regimes as well. Some regimes reject democracy as an innovation contrary to identity and religious traditions, while others embrace it. “However, all of them use the automobile and the telephone. …” (p. 53).

A reaction against democracy, Mernissi argues, is not a rejection of innovation. It is a reaction to the fear that boundaries are breaking down and threatening the security of the social order, the same fear behind the movement to keep women veiled and secluded. In the minds of individual men, she says, this is really a fear of death:

… individuals are born of women, they die and become dust. Paternity has meaning only for a man who thinks himself immortal, who sees himself as part of a succession of generations. … Because the child born of the womb of the woman is mortal, however, the law of paternity was instituted to screen off the uterus and woman's will within the sexual domain. … The children born of the uterus of a woman … belong to their father, and he is certain of gaining Paradise if he submits to the divine will.

(p. 128)

In the minds of authoritarian political leaders and the mosque of Islamist reaction, there is a real fear of being deposed, of losing one's power to upstart elements of the same ungrateful, seditious populace that al-Mansur consigned to the space outside his city walls. It is also a fear of the memory of the fate that Islam's dissenters met at the hands of tyrants.

The gharb (West), by constantly talking about democracy, brings before our eyes the phantom ship of those who were decapitated for refusing to obey. It also brings to the surface the struggle between the pen and the sword: that is, the struggle between, on the one hand, the intellectuals, the qadis (judges) thirsting for justice, the Sufis thirsting for freedom, and the poets who tried to express their individuality; and, on the other hand, the caliphs and their shari'a, their very authoritarian reading of divine law.

(p. 19)

The second gulf war introduced massive discontinuities in Islam's family romance. The war transgressed boundaries in threatening ways but, rather than opposing the trespassers, Muslim leaders supported them against the wishes of their own populations, adding to the confusion. One discontinuity was created when father/uncle leaders replaced brother Saddam with a stranger, the West, specifically the United States as represented by George Bush. This kind of discontinuity could be subsumed under traditional tales of tyrants and rebels, taghiya and kharijites, and mobilized against the transgressing heads of state:

… the Arab press and slogans depicted them … as pharaohs forgetful of the rahma that Muhammad's Mecca promised the world … The financial details of the princely budgets were revealed and the flood of petrodollars invested in arms was duly exposed. … The medina was caught up by the full force of the sacred and by economic confusion that could only end in the condemnation of tyrants.

(p. 112)

A second boundary transgression also could be turned against the bad patriarchs, but this time to the benefit of Islamist rather than secular opponents of transgressing Arab regimes. The erasure of the boundary between Islam and the jahiliyya—the time of ignorance before Islam—was accomplished by introducing lethal weapons into the land of Mecca and Madina: missiles, “sometimes fired by young women with angelic faces beneath their combat helmets” (p. 115). Mernissi argues that the female troops crystallized Arab reactions to the war being led by the stranger against the brother, by evoking fears of an undisciplined past whose theology was dominated by violent mother goddesses.

Whether the jahiliyya is behind us or before us is a question that recurs in the press. What have Arabs done to Allah which is so horrible that we are harrowed within and shamed, scorned, and bombarded without? The word jahiliyya, spread all over the media during the Gulf War, signified and condensed the problem that Islam came into the world to solve: the problem of violence.

(pp. 120-1)

The most horrifying transgression of boundaries, however, was the shattering of the logic of the boundary itself—the assumption that any walls or any veils could ensure the security of the city and the people.

The war proved that all Arab cities, including present-day Baghdad, can offer us many different fantasies but not boundaries. Our cities have been stripped of boundaries. … Where is one to find a sense of security on a planet where even the “defense of freedom,” as Mr. Bush calls it, can mobilize high-tech violence as lethal as it is mobile? Is it by chance that a house without security is called 'awra, “naked,” like a woman without a hijab … ?

(p. 7)

This realization, that modern weapons have left no safe place anywhere in the world, was every bit as shocking when it came to Americans following the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union. Then the realization touched off a nuclear arms race of terrible proportions and a rash of client and proxy wars that recreated the violent and equally displaced conflicts that undergirded the so-called hundred-years peace in 19th-century Europe. Now that hudud have disappeared for the Arab nations as well, will jahiliyya return?

Mernissi hopes that the threat of a new jahiliyya will stimulate a search for a new Arab order, one that embraces rather than rejects the erasure of boundaries, including the boundaries dividing one Arab state from another, as the creation of a larger human space. Such an order would harness the political economy to the benefit of every Arab citizen—indeed, to the benefit of every world citizen—rather than to that of despotic leaders of territorial states. Global communications could create a world society of individuals living without national boundaries, just as women going out into the medina obliterate the boundaries dividing the leaders from the people, and the people from one another. The achievement of this new order is crucially dependent on the redistribution of oil wealth from the Arab “haves” to the “have nots.” Yet this too is a solution embedded in interests, just as are the positions of the imams and caliphs who reject democracy.

The cast of characters in Mernissi's family romances are as significant as the stories themselves. They are filled with children and grandmothers, kings and commoners, and oppressors and oppressed. One narrative in particular reveals that placement of the author's boundaries between the good and the wicked is influenced by preferences not simply for a particular social order, but also for a particular hierarchy of identities. This is the parable of the ambiguity of fear, illustrated by the differences in the fears of the amir, his chauffeur, and the female members of his family.

Associating democracy with fear certainly multiplies the ambiguities and increases the uncertainties. This is especially true if we remember that in a certain country—let us say Kuwait—the fear experienced by the emir is not the same as that felt by his wife and daughters. The emir's chauffeur—who is, let us say, a Palestinian—has different fears from his master's and also from those of the palace servants. … Each one, depending on his circumstances at the moment, feels and names the fears that beset him.

(p. 51)

This is a parable about the ambiguities in values and the emotions associated with them, as they are experienced by persons whose interests and capabilities differ. It also concerns who the oppressor and oppressed are—which are the good family members and which are the wicked, which ones manipulate the fears of the others to their own benefit. The wicked father amir is also a source of fear to the wife and daughters and equally, although differently, to the dependent Palestinian chauffeur. This division is apparent even though the distance between the amir—of Kuwait—and the others is not so sharply drawn as it could have been—not just “wife” but “wives,” and in such profusion, although always within Quaranic bounds, as to be embarrassing for his apologists as well as a source of fear to his wives and daughters.

Other characters in this family romance also have been omitted, along with the embarrassing extra wives. Given the inclusion of people al-Mansur would have consigned to the space beyond the city walls—the palace servants, “who are likely to be Pakistani, North African, or Filipino”—one can only wonder at the exclusion of the Kuwaitis, the sons in this family. Mernissi only gives one son figure, the Palestinian chauffeur; could this be a fable where a cousin takes the place of the sons of the family, who are not only disinherited but also “disappeared?” Missing as well are the wife and daughters of the Palestinian chauffeur. These women are presumably oppressed by poverty, but their omission from the story disguises the reality that they are also oppressed by the same family dynamic that evokes fear in the hearts of the wife and daughters of the amir.

There is another parable, one that is not recounted explicitly, but that nevertheless resonates throughout the pages of Mernissi's book. This is the parable of the prodigal son. As a child, it was always irritating to this reviewer that this bad boy could come home to a celebration complete with a fatted calf, while the good son—who had obeyed, stayed, and worked for his father—was relegated to a servant's role. One feels this same irritation with Mernissi's subliminal parable. Her prodigal son is, of course, Saddam Hussein. His sins are not ignored, but they are discounted; the implication is that, in some sense, these sins were washed away by the damage inflicted by the stranger Bush. Saddam's kinship and narrative relationship to the amir of Kuwait, however—the son who took care of his family rather than dissipating all his resources in foreign adventures—is nowhere in evidence. Yet this is the relationship whose secrets underlie the solution to the threatened jahiliyya. As such, it requires at least as much careful analysis as the other relationships recounted in the family romances with which this book abounds.

It is not only the unwillingness of tyrants and imperialists to grant the individuality of oppressed citizens and subordinate nations that impedes democratization in the Middle East. Democratization is equally impeded by the unwillingness of individuals to grant the same humanity to all their brothers and cousins as they grant to those for whom kinship coincides with affinity or alliance. The romance of the dominant father and domineering elder brother has not yet been replaced in the culture of the region by a narrative that Mernissi herself identifies as equally representative of Islamic ideals—equality among all brothers of the family. Like the French fraternité, Islamic ideals of equality among brothers have been expressed as excluding women from autonomous roles. Yet, in the absence of equality among brothers, equality between them and their sisters and cousins is also unlikely. Violence as a response to injustice thus remains, like the childhood monster Lalla Haguza, hovering as a constant threat to the peace and order of the medina and the world.

Notes

1. Most particularly Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, tr. by Mary Jo Lakeland, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991).

2. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. xiii.