In
the traditional Arab mindset, men who do not fit the conventional ideal of
manhood are regarded as inferior.
November 2007
The feminist cause in the Arab world has
generally progressed less than in the west, particularly in the last few decades
of rapid western emancipation. But in the bid to invent the new Arab woman, her
complement, the new Arab man, has flown beneath the radar.
While independence-seeking Arab women often
have clear and positive role models to aspire to in their quest for
emancipation, the men in their lives are often left swimming against the tide
of popular perception.
Over the years, I have met legions of Arab men
who resist female emancipation not out of any abstract objection to gender
equality but out of peer pressure and fear of what their families, workmates or
neighbours will think of them.
Where progressives have failed to capture the
imagination of the masses, conservative mythmakers have worked tirelessly to
idealise and idolise the vision of invincible, insurmountable manhood. With
some brilliant exceptions, television soap operas tend to be the Arab world’s
strongest bastion of traditionalism and overt, unsubtle moralising,
particularly during the fasting and feasting month of Ramadan.
One hit series which has taken the Arab world
by storm was the Syrian soap opera Bab el-Hara (Alleyway Gate). Set in
French-mandate Syria
between the two world wars, it paints a sentimental and nostalgic picture of a
society peopled by brave and gallant men and their dutiful and obedient women. Director
Bassam al-Malla said he intended
to create nostalgia for “a world with values, honour, gallantry ... and the revolutionary
spirit”.
But the world Bab
el-Hara attempts to recreate never existed in the first place. “The series
conceals all those women who had a political and cultural presence in the
Syrian street at that time,” writesJuhayinaKhalidiya, in a feminist critique of the TV programme,
published in as-Safir newspaper (in Arabic). She notes
that expunging such revolutionary women from the narrative is, first and
foremost, unfair to their legacy.
In addition to the undoubted insult to women,
the gap between the Arab man, the “average Mo”, and the myth is bound to breed
feelings of inadequacy. The chasm between this on-screen fantasyland and
reality is a yawning one. In the more secular Arab countries, women make up
their fair share of the labour force, hold top professional and political
positions, often perform better academically than their male peers and refuse
the deferential role their grandmothers and great-grandmothers took for
granted.
This gap between ideal and reality carries
echoes of England
from the 19th and up to the first half of the 20th century.
In his book The English, Jeremy Paxman
writes that British men were “uneasily aware of the injustice of denying women
a full role in society”. As if commenting on Bab
el-Hara, he notes that: “The stronger the challenge [to the male order], the
more vociferous the evangelism about how the family was the cornerstone of the
safe and ordered society.”
In contrast to the idealised “real men” of the
past in Bab el-Hara, another hit Ramadan series
distorts the contemporary reality by depicting the modern man as weak,
indecisive and dominated by the women in his life.
Yehia el-Fakharani,
one of Egypt’s
most accompolished actors, abandoned his normal roles
of the sophisticated lawyer, MP or professor, to play that of a 60-year-old
mummy's boy in “YetrabafiEzzo”.
In the series, his character, Hamada Ezzo, is completely dependent on his mother for direction
in every aspect of his life. “This kind of negative character is one of the
causes of our falling behind the technologically advanced nations ... We see
his type frequently in our midsts as Egyptians and
Arabs,” the London-based Arabic daily, al-Hayat,
quoted el-Fakharani as saying.
He went on to express his belief that the
coming generation had to be more hardworking and conscientious to keep up with
the times and not depend on past glories. While it is hard to fault this
sentiment, the choice of a man living under his mother's thumb as a parable for
the times is telling.
Apathy, disillusionment and lack of drive and
motivation are holding back Egyptian society. But this soap is an odd way to
inspire the young generation. If that was truly the writer's aim, why not,
instead of fixating on a nearly-retired man’s subservient relationship with his
mother, challenge the rigid and stifling pecking order that keeps the young
from reinventing society or the prejudices that keep the female half of the
population from fulfilling their full potential?
In real life, Yehia
el-Fakhrani is quite an admirable picture of the
modern man, a middle-aged “metrosexual”, which makes
his pandering to this warped view all the more confounding. He is gentle,
caring, considerate and tolerant, while the women in his life are intelligent
and successful. His wife, for instance, wrote a critically acclaimed TV drama
chronicling the reign of King Farouq.
As long as conservative circles continue
successfully to equate female emancipation with male emaciation, the quest for
gender equality will stall. Although Arab cinema and literature have carried
plenty of examples of modern, progressive men, particularly in the 1960s and
1970s, the problem is that these tend to be quite westernised, and hence alien
to your average Arab man on the street.
What we need are mainstream, “average Mo” role
models who demonstrate that believing in gender equality squares with being a
man, and that empowering women also empowers men and society as a whole.
