Arab Women and Education

Arab Women and Education

Whether it was the impoverished desert village, the war torn hills of Beirut, affluent Barqais, the jet set in London and Paris, or the enclosed lives of women in a harem in Morocco, the female characters in these novels all shared five common threads that dealt with the family and the search for identity. In my reading of five novels about Arab women from backgrounds and in situations as diverse as I thought possible, I was surprised to find this common thread running through every piece of literature. In this paper, I will analyze the role the women’s families have in the education of the women, the role of women and families in the literature in political support and times of war, women’s health and family planning, and most of all what these issues do to the emerging identity of the Arab woman. In a society that is so oriented around the extended family, and in which elderly parents are rarely if ever sent to nursing homes, the family’s opinion weighs heavily on what a woman can and cannot do with her life. The examination of the manner in which education is regarded in the families of these women is critical for a better understanding of the decisions they make. In a traditionally patriarchal society where the man is the breadwinner, the assessment of the subject of work outside the home is also interesting. In a region so riddled with almost constant political and military upheaval, there has been bound to have been a change in the roles women in the family play in support of these political and military actions. Finally, the issue of identity is much more prominent in the more modern novels and the issue of the modern family versus the individual and the rise of the individual from the modern family plays very prominently in “In the Eye of the Sun” and Dreams of Trespass”. The Arab family, as Magida Salman writes, is where “the fate of women is being decided and unfolds” (Salman 7). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the huge impact the family has on the identity of Arab women. Identity as a concept is valuable as a center for cross-cultural understandings of human experience because it begins with the individual, and issues of identity in a literary context can act as a mirror for what is happening in the real world.