The Societal Context of the State of Women

Introduction This chapter considers social patterns that contribute to shaping the position of women in Arab societies today. It focuses on the impact of two central sources of influence: cultural and especially religious heritage and Arab intellectual production. Culture plays a pervasive role in composing the social context of women's position in the Arab world, and religious interpretations provide a field for conflict over the position of women in public perception and general behavioural patterns. Religious heritage, above all, is a key determinant of the cultural norms underpinning the position of women in the Arab world. Arab intellectual production, as it arose during the Arab Renaissance, also contributed to creating the prevailing social consciousness in relation to women in Arab societies. The examination of cultural structures that follows also includes how popular culture, the arts and the media, themselves drawing on religious heritage and intellectual production, have altered consciousness and behaviour relating to women. This section considers how human beings and society are perceived from an Islamic religious point of reference and how these perceptions bear on the image of women and gender relations. However, some caveats first: it is important to recall that, in Islamic history, religious culture is not built on sacred texts of indisputable authority but, rather, on differing interpretations of the content, substance, forms and views of multiple writings and sayings in the collective memory of society. It is also based on customs and traditions that have been consolidated to preserve a specific order for the family and society. Furthermore, religious culture reflects the different schools of thought that have emerged at various stages If the message of Islam comprises a number of major rules concerning the order of the universe and of society, it follows that there is more than one facet to these general rules since the recipient's interpretations are subject to the historical evolution of society and to developments in methods of reading and understanding the texts. Because knowledge systems and interpretations do evolve and change, the meaning given to a specific text may not be entirely in keeping with the spirit of its substance: it can be transformed, in the intellectual process of extracting significance, into another aspect of theoretical practice. It thus becomes an interpretation, i.e., an effort to understand that should not be put on the same level as that of the text itself. Also, because interpretation is, in fact, …