Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (31 page)

1.
Muhammad al-Fasi,
Chants anciens des femmes de Fes
(pirated edition published in Morocco, n.d.), p. 38, quatrain 43. The original in Arabic is entitled
Rubayat nisa
Fas
(Casablanca: Dar Qurtuba, 1986). The author reports that the original French version was published in Paris in 1967.

2.
Adonis,
Chants de Mihyar le Damascene,
trans. Anne Wade Minkowski (Paris: Sindbad, 1983). The original in Arabic was entitled
Aghani Mihyar al- Dimashqi
(Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1988).

3.
Muhammad
^c
Abd al-Hakim al-Qadi,
Al-libas wa al-zina: al-sunna al-mutahhara
(Cairo: Dar al-Hadith, 1988).

4.
Al-Maqrizi,
Al-Khitat
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqafa al-Diniyya, 1987). Al- Maqrizi died in year 845 of the Hejira.

5.
Abi al-Falah
^c
Abd al-Hayy Ibn al-
^c
Imad al-Hanbali,
Shazarat al-dhahab fi akhbar man dhahab
(Beirut: Manshurat Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida, n.d.), vol. 3, p. 173.

6.
Ibn al-Athir,
Al kamil fi al-tarikh
(Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-
^c
Alimiyya, 1987), vol. 8, p. 494. Ibn al-Athir died in year 630 of the Hejira.

7.
Algerie Actualite,
April 23-May 1, 1989.

8.
Wahid al-Murakushi,
Al-mu
^c
jib fi talkhis akhbar al-maghrib
(Casablanca: Kitab, 1987), p. 260. The author was writing in year 621 of the Hejira.

9.
Algeria is one of the countries where this heightened violence against women is most spectacular; one can read about it almost any day in the newspapers.

10.
The French and German publishers of my books always insist on having the word “harem” on the cover and a photo of a veiled woman. When I protest, they tell me that this makes it sell better, even if the contents of the book contradict this image. It is time to unveil women on the covers of books that sell in the West. Archaic attitudes don’t exist on just one side of the Mediterranean.

11.
UNESCO Statistical Yearbook,
1989, pp. 3251 (Iran), 3258 (Germany).

12.
Farah Izari, article on the women’s movement in Iran after the revolution, trans, from Persian into Arabic by Hala Shukr Allah and published in
Al-mafa al jadida,
no. 2, July 1986, p. 25.

13.
Figures for Pakistan are from
UNESCO Statistical Yearbook,
1989; for Algeria see Nourredine Saadi,
Legislation et condition feminine en Algerie: bilan des discriminations a I’egard des femmes,
report in the UNESCO Grand Programme 1, “Reflexions sur les problemes mondiaux,” September 1989, p. 47. An expanded version of this report entitled
Femme et loi en Algerie
was published in 1991 by Editions le Fennec (Casablanca) in its series Femmes Maghreb 2000.

14.
UNESCO Statistical Yearbook,
1989.

15.
Ibid.

16.
See the memoirs of Huda Sha
^c
rawi,
Harem Years,
trans, and introduced by Margot Badran (New York: Feminist Press, 1987). The English edition was published by Virago Press in 1986.

17.
Copies of papers presented by the Iranians Nayereh Tohidi, Val Mogadan, and Mohammed Tavakoli-Targhi, the Algerian Doraya Cherifati Merabtine, the Pakistani Khawar Mumtaz, the Nigerian Aicha Imam, and the Tunisian
^c
Aliya Bafoun can be requested from WIDER (World Institute for Development), a research center at the University of the United Nations in Helsinki. The proceedings of this conference, which was held in October 1990, should be published, and perhaps plans have been made to do so.

18.
On Huda Sha
^c
rawi, see Badran (trans.),
Harem Years.
For an idea of the impressive Arab feminist movement at the beginning of the century see
^c
Umar Kah- hala,
a
^c
lam al-nisa
al-
^c
arabi wa al-Islam
(Famous Women of the Muslim and Arab Worlds) (Beirut: Mu
assasat al-Risala, 1982), 3 vols.

19.
UNESCO Statistical Yearbook,
1989.

20.
A recent study of the influence of women’s writing is Khalida Sa
^c
id,
Al-mar
a, al-taharrur, al-idba
¹
(Woman, Liberation, Creation) (Casablanca: Editions le Fennec, 1991).

21.
Some works by these writers have been published in English translation; see, for example, Hanane El-Cheikh,
The Story of Zahra
(London: Quartet Books, 1980); and Liana Badr,
A Compass for the Sunflower
(London: Women’s Press, 1989). The address of the journal
Shahrazad
is 56 Griva Dhigeni Street, Li- massol, Cyprus.

22.
Kahhala,
a
^c
lam al-nisa

23
. The Moroccan historian
^c
Abd al-Hadi Tazi, in
Femmes celebres de l'occident musulman
(Casablanca: Editions le Fennec, 1991), shows that the number of educated women held steady even in North Africa until the nineteenth century, when it steadily declined, compared to what it had been in Muslim Andalusia, for example, in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.

24
. Proxy voting, which was strongly contested by Algerian women on the eve of the legislative elections in December 1991, was reconsidered, and husbands are now allowed to vote on behalf of their wives only in exceptional cases.

25
.
UNESCO Statistical Yearbook,
1988.

26
. Ouahes,
Science et technology,
p. 19.

27
. The outcry against mixing of the sexes cannot be understood if demographic changes are minimized, especially the trend toward later marriages, which, resulting from a combination of factors such as access to education, the decline of the extended family (requiring more people to earn their own living), the economic crisis, and unemployment, leaves single young men and women believers without a “fortress.” Studies on marriage, especially recent demographic investigations, show that age at marriage is rising sharply in most countries of the Muslim world; see, for example, M. Chanine,
Women of the World: The Near East and North Africa
(Washington, D.C.: USAID, 1985). Whereas most women in Arab countries used to marry before the age of twenty, today not only are the majority of girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen not married (93 percent in Tunisia, 86 percent in Lebanon, 72 percent in Syria, 70 percent in Morocco), but many between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine are still single as well. A quarter of Lebanese single women fall in the latter age group; the proportion is 17 percent for Tunisia, 14 percent for Egypt, and 13 percent for Iraq. The same pattern can be found among men. In Egypt, for example, where a few decades ago men got married as early as possible, 43 percent of single men are now between twenty-five and twenty-nine years old, and 17 percent between thirty and thirty-four. In Tunisia 49 percent of single men are between twenty-five and twenty-nine years of age, and 16 percent between thirty and thirty-four; in Lebanon more than half the single men are between twenty-five and twenty- nine, and a quarter between thirty and thirty-four. Moroccan statisticians, who are usually as phlegmatic as any Englishman, speak in terms of catastrophe when they look at figures on the delay of marriage; see
Situation demographique regionale au Maroc
(Rabat: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Demographiques, Ministere du Plan, 1988), pp. 138ff.

28
. George Corm,
Le Proche Orient eclate
(Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

29
. D. Nur
^c
Abdallah,
Al-petrole wa al-akhlaq
(Oil and Values) (N.P.: Editions Dar Doha, 1990); see especially the chapter “
Al-mar
a fi al-mujtama
^c
al-petroli”
("Woman in the Oil Society").