|
|
 |
Cultural challenges facing Arab and Western women
Paul Balles*
7 August 2007
Paul J. Balles considers cultural-specific harassment of women, comparing on the one hand the challenges facing Arab and Western women in Bahrain and, on the other, those confronting Arab women in the West. He says that, in either case, women need to recognize and deal with cultural differences.
It’s 5 p.m. and three Arab ladies/girls are walking briskly along the roadside. I can’t tell whether they’re ladies or girls because they’re wearing abayas with the hijab. A little further along the same road, two more Arab women, also covered, walk vigorously along.
The road doesn’t have much traffic; and if any of the drivers wanted to kerb crawl and harass these women, they could. But they don’t. These women know that they’re safe to walk together getting their exercise.
Once every few months, a complaint appears on the letters page or in a local magazine berating Bahrain’s kerb crawlers. They’re always portrayed as bothersome louts with little or no regard for the sensitivity of the ladies they hassle.
The distress felt by these writers is perfectly understandable. They even talk about how conservatively they dress when out walking. However, some of them have said, sarcastically, that they would probably be harassed even if they wore an abaya, simply because they were Western women.
While it’s true that some Arab men do prefer Western women, that’s not why kerb crawlers hassle a woman walking alone along a road. They follow and tease the woman – even if she’s dressed conservatively or in an abaya because she’s alone. They would do the same if an Arab woman in full cover walked alone. To men with appetites that can be stimulated by shop mannequins, any woman walking alone is what in the West would be called a “street walker”.
Street walkers in the West dress invitingly, and often they approach men. The last time I was in Hawaii, I was approached six or seven times while walking along the main street in Oahu. In Amsterdam, I had three offers in one evening’s walk along a canal. In the West, women who want to get picked up by the equivalent of kerb crawlers go to singles bars to advertise themselves.
Here in the Arab world, a woman walking alone is an invitation to play, no matter what she wears or where she comes from. It’s a cultural thing. Learn it, ladies; understand it, and adapt. Women have two choices here: (1) dress conservatively and take a friend or two along and you won’t be bothered, or (2) get used to being approached and harassed by kerb crawlers.
Arab women have their own problems of harassment in the West. In France, Turkey, Germany, Holland, England and Spain they’ve been told not to wear the hijab or veil, for one supposed reason or another. In France and Turkey, it has been the secular nature of the state. In Britain, face to face contact was required for communication in the schools. The Netherlands introduced a ban against face-covering veils or niqab on cultural prohibitions attributed to “state neutrality”. In Germany women in burqa or chador are forbidden to drive motor vehicles.
The rejection is pretty much an Arab-bashing thing, considering the fact that no one complains about Catholic nuns wearing their version of the hijab. The community I grew up in had many women immigrants from Croatia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary who wore headscarves. Though they were a bit more colourful than most hijab, they served the same purpose. Nobody complained.
What can Arab women who find themselves threatened by those who oppose the hijab do? Like Western women in Arabia, they also have two choices: (1) they can stop wearing the hijab in cultures that don’t accept it; or (2) they can defy the local norms and accept the consequences.
In either case, women need to recognize and deal with cultural differences.
*Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 38 years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.
Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis.
All rights reserved.
|
|