The majority of Arab lands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were under Ottoman rule. However, as Ottoman sovereignty declined, European colonialism spread. Modern education was introduced differently to women and men, but not in our oasis.
Modern education disturbed patriarchal patterns of control over women so many fathers did not send their girls to school.
My great-grandmothers, my grandmothers, and my mother lived within the system which ordained the segregation of the sexes and women's seclusion in the home. Bedouin women living in the desert, however, could veil while grazing their flocks.
With the rise of nationalism, the first feminists grounded their growing feminist consciousness in nationalism, but it happened only in the big cities, not in our oasis.
The new pan-Arab feminism was aiming to combat reactionary or conservative moves but the women in my oasis were all going back to the veil, back to the secluded house, back to the walled mud city...
However, there was a lively oral tradition and the women were the custodian of knowledge. Bedouin women in the oasis passed on tribal wisdom in stories they told their grandchildren.
I am really concerned about the importance of this oral tradition and I shall try to collect as many folktales as I can because they are in danger of extinction.
The landscape of my childhood represented four poles, four cultures, four different worlds and I liked all of them!
Every summer spent in the oasis made me think that I was different.
My parents sent me to school at the age of three and I attended the French school until the age of nineteen.
I felt more and more different from my aunts, my mother, my cousins, my grandmothers: I was engaging myself in territories alien to them and I was being estranged. I felt more and more different, with frames of reference they could not share. I was becoming a foreigner in my own oasis.
My father respected learning to such a point that he did not interfere with matters of education. My grandfather and my grandmother and my mother were not happy about this situation.
All they saw was that I was growing to be different from my cousins and it must have increased their sense of exile.
When I was young, I was incapable of describing my life: four poles, four cultures, four different worlds.
Although deprived of my parents homeland, I was living exactly like the people of my oasis. The home environment in which I was raised did not nourish an interest in the outside world. The women in my family left the house only on rare occasions such as family celebrations in the houses of relatives and close friends.
Given the many prohibitions imposed on women, my journey through life was filled with emotional and intellectual struggles. I was not socially liberated and the patriarchal society created barriers to restrict me.
I remember my wedding, the noise and the oasis bustle, the hennaed hands and feet, the whisper among the older women...so many customs and traditions that I did not understand! I was twenty-three years old.
At sixteen my mother was married to my father who was seventeen. At sixteen she was married to my father and moved from her father's house to the house of her husband. It was the custom then for a young bride to live with her in-laws. My grandmother assigned to each young women a day to be in charge of the cleaning and good order of the house. The sons worked in their father's business. The man alone had the right to dispose of the family fortune. He was responsible for the whole family.
Another custom in the oasis was for the daughter-in-law never to leave the house unless accompanied by her mother-in-law, and this only to weddings and funerals.
I believe that in the oasis many suffer from loneliness. There is a kind of iron curtain between men and women and between the generations. The famous solidarity of which women were so proud during the fight for Independence, the national liberation struggle, are far away...Today, men and women are prisoners of their prejudices.
Where are all these women who were equal to men in the national liberation struggle and who shared decision-making both at the political and at the military levels?
So much for Fanon's and others' myth of the Oasis woman liberated along with her country.
Women like my mother remained in the kitchen, bound by the tradition while men had some access to modernity.
We need secular states. Let us dream of secular states. Let us dream of the separation of religion and state. All these silent women gave those in power the time to strengthen and organise and to enforce discriminatory laws against women.
However, this society of ours has become great in the embellishment of superficial appearance.
Males of the oasis, why have you left these females behind for no reason? You deemed it best to separate yourselves in every way? Now look: upon whom does the blame accrue?
"Peace be on the one who follows God's guidance," said my grandmother. I told my grandmother that there was nothing modern about female empowerment in Islam. Muslim women are given an extremely high status in Islam from when it was revealed. We learn from when we were young that khadijah, the Prophet's wife, was so strong and independent. She took care of an entire business on her own and she rejected men who asked for her because they did not meet her standards. She chose who she wanted to marry and the Prophet was younger than her.
Therefore, again the same question: Males of the oasis, why have you left women behind for no reason?
I have always been hostile towards the institution of polygamy. I have always stressed to the women in my oasis that Islam condoned multiple wives only when each received equal treatment, something the religion taught was nearly impossible. But most of the women, like my mother had never been to school: they cannot read the Quran, they cannot write, and they cannot analyse what they cannot read or use their critical thinking.
Oh God, inspire the men of our government to do right because their injustice to women has many repercussions on every member of the society.
Generations of women in my oasis have longed to participate in humanity along with men. The liberated woman is a person who believes that she is as human as a man. Since they are equally human they must have equal human rights.
The liberated woman believes that because she is human she may make mistakes. But her mistakes are no more evil than those of men, of course! There is not a male mistake that is forgiven and a female mistake that is not.
Mother! Your face comforts me as I wander through the roads of my exile!
I have only my pen and in my loneliness, I remember the vow I made to my pen on the day I said goodbye to my mother in the oasis. The day she knew she would never go back to her house with us: she was divorced.
The day of the departure, my grandmother patted my shoulder with her warm hand, and she said," Don't be scared, my child."
I was as ignorant of the world as I am today of the hereafter. Behind every road is a person who emigrates.
Remember Men of the oasis: "Do not take revenge on your women, Be gentle with them or leave them respectfully."
Women refuse this hold on you. Women make your voice heard.
I am really concerned about the importance of this oral tradition and I shall try to collect as many folktales as I can because they are in danger of extinction.
The landscape of my childhood represented four poles, four cultures, four different worlds and I liked all of them!
Every summer spent in the oasis made me think that I was different.
My parents sent me to school at the age of three and I attended the French school until the age of nineteen.
I felt more and more different from my aunts, my mother, my cousins, my grandmothers: I was engaging myself in territories alien to them and I was being estranged. I felt more and more different, with frames of reference they could not share. I was becoming a foreigner in my own oasis.
My father respected learning to such a point that he did not interfere with matters of education. My grandfather and my grandmother and my mother were not happy about this situation.
All they saw was that I was growing to be different from my cousins and it must have increased their sense of exile.
When I was young, I was incapable of describing my life: four poles, four cultures, four different worlds.
Although deprived of my parents homeland, I was living exactly like the people of my oasis. The home environment in which I was raised did not nourish an interest in the outside world. The women in my family left the house only on rare occasions such as family celebrations in the houses of relatives and close friends.
Given the many prohibitions imposed on women, my journey through life was filled with emotional and intellectual struggles. I was not socially liberated and the patriarchal society created barriers to restrict me.
I remember my wedding, the noise and the oasis bustle, the hennaed hands and feet, the whisper among the older women...so many customs and traditions that I did not understand! I was twenty-three years old.
At sixteen my mother was married to my father who was seventeen. At sixteen she was married to my father and moved from her father's house to the house of her husband. It was the custom then for a young bride to live with her in-laws. My grandmother assigned to each young women a day to be in charge of the cleaning and good order of the house. The sons worked in their father's business. The man alone had the right to dispose of the family fortune. He was responsible for the whole family.
Another custom in the oasis was for the daughter-in-law never to leave the house unless accompanied by her mother-in-law, and this only to weddings and funerals.
I believe that in the oasis many suffer from loneliness. There is a kind of iron curtain between men and women and between the generations. The famous solidarity of which women were so proud during the fight for Independence, the national liberation struggle, are far away...Today, men and women are prisoners of their prejudices.
Where are all these women who were equal to men in the national liberation struggle and who shared decision-making both at the political and at the military levels?
So much for Fanon's and others' myth of the Oasis woman liberated along with her country.
Women like my mother remained in the kitchen, bound by the tradition while men had some access to modernity.
We need secular states. Let us dream of secular states. Let us dream of the separation of religion and state. All these silent women gave those in power the time to strengthen and organise and to enforce discriminatory laws against women.
However, this society of ours has become great in the embellishment of superficial appearance.
Males of the oasis, why have you left these females behind for no reason? You deemed it best to separate yourselves in every way? Now look: upon whom does the blame accrue?
"Peace be on the one who follows God's guidance," said my grandmother. I told my grandmother that there was nothing modern about female empowerment in Islam. Muslim women are given an extremely high status in Islam from when it was revealed. We learn from when we were young that khadijah, the Prophet's wife, was so strong and independent. She took care of an entire business on her own and she rejected men who asked for her because they did not meet her standards. She chose who she wanted to marry and the Prophet was younger than her.
Therefore, again the same question: Males of the oasis, why have you left women behind for no reason?
I have always been hostile towards the institution of polygamy. I have always stressed to the women in my oasis that Islam condoned multiple wives only when each received equal treatment, something the religion taught was nearly impossible. But most of the women, like my mother had never been to school: they cannot read the Quran, they cannot write, and they cannot analyse what they cannot read or use their critical thinking.
Oh God, inspire the men of our government to do right because their injustice to women has many repercussions on every member of the society.
Generations of women in my oasis have longed to participate in humanity along with men. The liberated woman is a person who believes that she is as human as a man. Since they are equally human they must have equal human rights.
The liberated woman believes that because she is human she may make mistakes. But her mistakes are no more evil than those of men, of course! There is not a male mistake that is forgiven and a female mistake that is not.
Mother! Your face comforts me as I wander through the roads of my exile!
I have only my pen and in my loneliness, I remember the vow I made to my pen on the day I said goodbye to my mother in the oasis. The day she knew she would never go back to her house with us: she was divorced.
The day of the departure, my grandmother patted my shoulder with her warm hand, and she said," Don't be scared, my child."
I was as ignorant of the world as I am today of the hereafter. Behind every road is a person who emigrates.
Remember Men of the oasis: "Do not take revenge on your women, Be gentle with them or leave them respectfully."
Women refuse this hold on you. Women make your voice heard.
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