The
spirit of the 1960s touched the Arab world too, but rapidly faded away.
September 2007
As the Summer of Love faded into winter, Jimi Hendrix released Axis Bold as Love in December 1967. One of the tracks
on this treasured album, which ranges from the funky and ethereal to the moving
and melancholic, is the soulful and sad ‘Castles made of sand’.
Legend has it that Hendrix was inspired to
write this meditative song by the beautiful Moorish forts in the sleepy and
picturesque Moroccan port town of Essaouira which he, and before him Orson Welles, helped transform into a magnet for
the hip and happening. Led Zeppelin were also drawn to
Arab sounds and culture.
And the infatuation was mutual. Even mainstream
Arab musicians started to experiment with western guitar riffs and synthesised
sounds. In the 1960s and 1970s, millions of young Arab men and women followed
the currents of western fashion: the then rebellious Beatle’s mop-tops (which
earned them the Arabic epithet khanafis
“beetles” from their bewildered elders), miniskirts, sleeveless dresses, long
hippy hair, tight flairs, even tighter shirts with
wings for collars.
But why is it that now, in the 21st
century, those early shoots seem to have failed to bloom? Part of the problem
is that, as Hendrix would put it: “castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually”.
The sexual liberation of Arab youth has been
held back mainly by the pincer movement of economics, family, religion and a
post-colonial identity crisis. Lacking the affluence and democratic space of their
western counterparts – and the discredited “old world” that was destroyed in
the World War II – their rebellion against “the system” was often half-hearted.
Contrary to popular belief, perhaps the most
feared institution in the Arab world is not the state, but the family. Although
the most progressive end of the spectrum is open-minded and gives the young the
room to be what they want, millions of Arabs live in both terror and respect of
their family.
At university in Cairo, the liberal circles I socialised with
went to discos, parties, rock concerts and bars, and many had an open-minded
attitude to sex and drugs. But most of them hid it from their parents – and
their families pretended not to know what they were up to – leading to a dual
existence.
The side effect is that, rather than taking
pride in their permissive lifestyle, many young Arabs feel an underlying sense
of shame; that what they do is ultimately wrong. It also encourages social
hypocrisy and dishonesty – “do what you want but don't openly question the
system” is the general attitude. And that is also why rebellious youth too
often grow up into a conventional adulthood, perpetuating the same silly values
and contradictions. Personally, I – and some close friends – have tried to
“live” our liberal values. For instance, when I wanted to live with my
girlfriend in Cairo,
I refused to engage in the sham that others agree to and pretend to be married.
And even in liberal Lebanon
old attitudes seem to die hard. In HekehNiswan (Women’s Talk) – the Lebanese
version of The Vagina Monologues, one of the characters complains that: “Men
here look at everything that’s female, no matter what she looks like or what
she’s wearing. They all want to stop for a woman waiting for the bus or the
taxi to see if maybe she’ll ride with them. Sometimes I feel like I’m all just
breasts and a ...”
A bewildered Arab female blogger asks: “If men are so weak in the
sexual area and so easily swayed by the sight of an ankle or a bit of hair or
the view of some diffused body contour ... would it not be simpler and more
Islamic for the men to stay at home and cover their eyes and faces?”
The souring of the Arab secular experiment did
not help matters. Despite massive strides towards personal liberation in the
1950s and 1960s, Arab secular regimes were tough on dissent and clamped down on
the opposition. After the disastrous 1967 defeat, the Islamist counterculture came
out from the wings and, with the confidence that comes with having God on their
side, began to push the secularists more and more underground. In Egypt, the
economic excesses, inequality and corruption of the 1970s, gave the Islamic
current even more support.
But the progressives never went away – they
just became more sidelined and cowed. However, a few brave voices kept the
flame going, such as the filmmakers Muhammad Khan and YousryNasrallah in Egypt, MoufidaTlatli in Tunisia and Ousama
Muhammad in Syria, to mention a few.
And sex has increasingly become a political
weapon. While the relationship between the west and the Arab world in the
post-colonial era has long been an uncomfortable one, in recent years the quest
for Arab pride has moved from emulation of the west to opposition of it. And
one major battlefield is sexuality. This politicising of sex (or the absence of
it) has long struck me as weird. For some reason, conservatives have singled
out sexual permissiveness as one of the most devastating weapons of mass
destruction. This “decadence” has been blamed for everything from military
defeat to poverty and scientific backwardness.
Only this week, Jordanian Islamists were up in
arms at the government’s decision finally to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of
all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. “This is a US-Zionist effort ...
to strip the nation of its ‘aqidah’ (creed/faith) and
culture, and to destroy the Muslim family,” railed Zayd
el-Kelani, who heads the Islamic Labour Front,
according to the daily al-Quds al-Araby.
“The key, perhaps, to our social liberation is
liberation from historical circumstances first. The post-colonial scapegoat is
timeless in Arab society,” one Lebanese student wrote for a university paper.
Some people see the forces of sexual tolerance
regrouping in the form of a number of taboo-breaking books and films, such as
the Yacoubian Building in Egypt,
as well as others in Tunisia,
Morocco and Lebanon.
Even ultra-conservative Saudi
Arabia has not been spared.
“There has been a recent spate of Saudi novels
discussing sexual issues, which is understandable given the context of gender
segregation and tight social controls in an ultra-conservative society like
that of Saudi Arabia,” Andrew Hammond, author of Popular Culture in the Arab
World, told me.
Opinion is divided over whether Lebanon’s
export of scantily clad pop divas that dominate Arab satellite TV, such as Haifa, and more conservative Egypt’s own ‘Ruby revolution’, is a sign of changing sexual
attitudes among the young or whether it is a form of visual steam control.
“The pattern in general is of creating
‘bubbles’ of sexual liberation or freedom, such as Dubai,
Egypt's Sharm
el-Sheikh, Tunisia’s Hammamat, Lebanon”" Hammond notes. “I think the lines are now
drawn. Islamists have pushed back the tide as much as they can. It will be
perhaps years before one side recedes or pushes further the boundaries.”
But where emulation of the west failed to bring
about sexual liberation, a more Islamic path shows promise of perhaps reaching
the same outcome eventually. Islam has traditionally been open to the
recreational aspects of sex and a quiet, sexual revolution in Islamic garb may
be occurring, fuelled partly by economic necessity. Egypt has been hit by a tidal wave
of ‘urfi’ or informal marriages, often entered into
between boyfriends and girlfriends to give their sexual relationships a sheen of legitimacy.
There has also been the gradual emergence or
re-emergence of temporary marriages. The Shia’ahavemut’a, a time-limited
marriage contract, and zawaj al-misyar
(‘marriage in transit’) is emerging in some Sunni countries, including Saudi Arabia.
Sexual liberation has failed to make it through
the front door but it could still find a back way in.
For other articles in the Summer of Love
series click here.
