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Throughout the five novels, the actions of the various characters are governed by forces within their societies. One of the strongest of these is class and appears in several types, including economic and social. Class is also heavily influenced by such cultural norms as honor. Class can be a powerful roadblock to gaining consensus among women in the Arab world. However, there are also numerous ways presented in which class can be overcome within the Arab world.
The most deeply embedded measurement of social status is honor. Maha, for example, is asked by Harb in the beginning of Pillars of Salt to meet him secretly during the night. Despite the fact that she desperately wants to do so, she forces herself to remain behind for the sake of her honor, upon which her social class depends completely. If Maha had gone to meet Harb, she would have been deeply shamed in the eyes of her fellow villagers, and because she refuses to meet him and so upholds this social standard, the next day he asks her father’s permission to marry her as she will not bring dishonor to him and so harm his social class. The honor that makes up so much of a person’s social standing appears to have at its base a women’s virginity, marital status, and the number of children she has.
The previously mentioned incident with Harb seemed to be connected to her virginity—as Maha lies awake, trying to hold on to her decision not to meet him, she repeats to herself, “’I am a virgin—white as a dove—as pure as dew drops—a virgin—honey in its jars.’” The consequences for losing this are shown through Nasra’s pain and rejection by the villagers after being raped by Maha’s brother Daffash. By losing her virginity, even through rape, Nasra is rejected by all the villagers. She was always in a lower social class, but after the incident she is an outcast. During a conversation, Harb remarks that everyone in the village knows about what happened to her, and that now young men harass her. In Maha’s own words, “My friend had lost her virginity, her honor, her life. She was nothing now. No longer a virgin, absolutely nothing.”
Asya, on the other hand, faces a much more lenient version of the same honor system. She, an upper-class woman in Cairo, is also not supposed to meet men alone, but it is not considered terribly shocking among her friends to do so anyway. However it must still be kept secret from family members. Saif seems to expect her to bend this rule as well; they go so far as to kiss intensely as they walk through a park maze. When Saif cannot visit her, she goes to another part of the city entirely to visit him in his home as well, something that, were she in Maha’s situation, would be entirely out of the question. This can be seen as a sign that culture within cities is becoming more lenient with the new generation, because these trysts must still be kept totally secret from her parents and other adults. When Chrissie is discovered walking with a boy to the bus stop after class, her family, especially her father and brother, flies into a rage. Her father goes so far as to threaten to forbid her from completing her studies, and he becomes abusive, throwing an ashtray at her. Yet it is uncertain if this was a result of the loss of social standing to the family because he was a boy or because he was Palestinian—which would create new problems.
After marriage, maintaining this honor for women in all classes economically and socially revolves around preserving one’s marriage. Maha’s first trouble in this area occurs because she cannot become pregnant. She is afraid and ashamed because of this, and the villagers reinforce the point by praying that she will have a son every time they see her. She goes so far as to have a potentially life-threatening procedure done to correct this problem and save her marriage. In all the books, and among all the women from their diverse backgrounds and classes, having many children remains a social requirement. Asya’s family cannot understand her reluctance to have children and Um Saad begins bearing children as soon as she is able to do so in her and her husband’s small apartment by the butcher shop. Nadia too drops out of school and waits in the finery of her home filled with fear lest she be unable to conceive. A marriage without children, therefore, regardless of social or economic class, is not considered to be enough.
Um Saad has less trouble in the area of having children, yet as she grows older and loses her youthful beauty her husband takes a second wife. This destroys Um Saad completely, even causing her to lose her mind for a short time. Asya discovers numerous instances of suicides among women whose husbands took second wives; the women commonly used such violent means as setting themselves on fire. Um Saad loses her social and economic well-being after her husband’s second marriage: she is relegated to the status of a drudge and sleeps on the floor.
This violent reaction was not seen, however, in the Mernissi harem. Part of this may have to do with the time period and the location: in Morocco at this time, a harem would not have been as unusual as in the settings of the other books. However, the women within the harem were decidedly placed in a lower social class than the men. The very definition of class is a division between the powerful and the powerless, and as Fatima discovers that is the very essence of the harem. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that there was resentment among many co-wives about being forced to live within the harem, and even the argument that it is demeaning to be forced to share one’s husband is voiced by several women. Yasmina is good at finding happiness in a situation she cannot change. “‘Don’t spend your time looking for walls to bang your head on.’” Although she has accepted that she herself cannot change the harem system, she still wishes it did not exist and excitedly waits for news of changing laws. As she tells Fatima, “‘Things are getting better. Soon, we will have one man, one wife.’” Her desire to be the only wife of her husband echoes that of Um Saad.
Besides being emotionally harmful to the first wives, the taking of second wives is a threat to the stability of married women in their respective classes. Infidelity can lead to a divorce or a sharp decline in living standards for the first wife. Infidelity as described in Pillars of Salt is of a nature that is justified by the culture and, according to one interpretation, by the laws of Islam. “Hamda’s husband had got married to a second wife and left their dwelling. Hamda who used to be full of vigor and zeal looked like a broken stem.” Hamda’s husband, upon taking a second wife had effectively abandoned his first wife and her children; though he may still have supported them to some degree, the ease of her life must have taken a blow, as had her social class within the community. Although Maha and a few of her friends supported her and tried to comfort her, it is clear that she no longer had the same standing in the community as before when, later, Maha mentions that Hamda has been working terribly hard to maintain a decent standard of living for herself.
A common pattern among the affairs is the class of the people who commit them relative to the people they are betraying. Su’ad, Umar’s wife, in a similar situation would be too afraid of losing her husband to have an affair. She would be left without a means to support herself if her husband left her. Asya, on the other hand, has a stable source of income and a social class equal to her husband’s. Nadia as well has resources of her own and would not be left destitute and an outcast.
A corollary to this pattern is that class can either limit or expand the range of responses women can take to learning of either infidelity or a second marriage on the part of their husbands. Um Saad, upon learning that her husband of many years has taken a young wife can is devastated, but she cannot do anything about it. Even after having her belongings thrown out onto the sitting room floor and sleeping in the kitchen for days, her only recourse is to visit a sheikh who gives her charms that he says will drive off the woman. Finally she is driven to madness by the situation and her inability to escape. The inner city middle-to-lower class women have no chance of escaping, but a new situation presents itself when a woman from an upper-class background finds herself in the same place. Fuad, Chrissie’s husband, is working in another city and meets and marries a girl there. When Chrissie learns that something is amiss, she goes to Suez and sees the girl. Unlike Um Saad, who does not have the power to demand resolution to the situation, Chrissie does not hesitate to lay an ultimatum before Fuad: either he will divorce his second wife or he will divorce her. He immediately accepts this and divorces his second wife. Circumstances in which women are given power over men are also few and far between, yet Chrissie manages to seize such power and save her marriage. Her ability to do this is connected to a variety of factors. First, Chrissie has her own resources, not family in this case as her father is dead and her brother is, she declares, “useless” at resolving this kind of thing. Rather, Chrissie has the economic potential and the education necessary to able to survive without her husband. The second reason is that marriages to a second wife in upper-class society seem to be frowned upon in general; however, this may have to do with the degree of Westernization within the society. The characters of In the Eye of the Sun as well as A Woman of Five Seasons are quite westernized and in addition to the situation of Chrissie and Fuad, when Faris marries a second wife, Ihsan and Jalal go to confront him and force him to divorce her. However, the Mernissi family is not very westernized; they still view understanding Western culture as a sort of weapon they must learn, yet must not allow to overcome their own culture. Therefore in Dreams of Trespass multiple marriages are more generally accepted, though even there they are going out of vogue as shown by the increasingly vocalized complaints by the women.
The failure of a marriage, or the lack of a marriage, is sure to place a woman in a lower social class. Aunt Habiba in Dreams of Trespass is in placed in a tragic position because of this social norm. She is one of the wisest women in her niece Fatima’s life, able to guide her with advice about finding a balance between seeking happiness and seeking battles worth fighting. Yet when she comes across one of those battles in her own life, she is unable to fight because of her status as a divorced woman. The battles the married women fought with their husbands over clothing must have hurt her especially, because even though the women won the fight, Aunt Habiba along with the other widowed and divorced women were not permitted to share in the other women’s victory. The battle in question was over the clothing women would be required to wear every time they were permitted to leave the harem, usually to go to the movies. Before the clash began, women were required to wear both a haik and a traditional veil, which encumbered movement and restricted sight and breathing. The fight began with Fatima’s mother’s and Chama’s constant complaints, culminating in long arguments with Fatima’s father. Eventually, the fashion changes and the harem with it; the next time the harem went to the movies the two rebels were dressed in litham, small, thin, black silk veils, and, most shocking of all, men’s djellabas. Yet Aunt Habiba, a revolutionary at heart, is still walking with the other widowed and divorced women, still “walking in total silence and holding tightly onto her white haik.” At this time, the djellaba and the litham were the fashion. No women among the upper and middle classes still wore the stifling traditional long cloaks and veils. However, “the widowed and divorced women, with no husbands to protect them, could not claim the right to wear djellabas. To have done so would have meant immediate and irreversible condemnation as loose women.” This, then, is another example of the necessity of honor to maintain one’s social class, as well as the necessity of having a spouse.
Class within villages is shown in Maha’s village. Anyone with gypsy blood is considered to be slightly wild and strange: the storyteller gives gypsy blood as a reason for the Sheikh marrying Maliha: she enchanted him. The traditional folklore, represented by the storyteller in Pillars of Salt, prevents these boundaries from being overcome. Maha describes the gypsies as being outsiders wherever they go—they have no connections to any community, and when they try to form these connections they are put at the bottom of the social class structure. Nasra, the orphan, is also placed at a lower level socially, as a result of having no family and being ‘only’ a goatherd.
Maha and Um Saad as women from a village and a city represent the opposite of what the common stereotype would say. In the cities, it is often understood that villagers are ‘backward.’ This underlying assumption is said by Um Saad in a fit of temper: “I am an urban woman from Amman. I refuse to share the room with a grinning bedouin.” Though she was angry at the time and later did form a truce and a friendship of sorts with Maha, the words she said came from a deep social class divide between Arab women of the cities and those from the villages.
The two women who are most transparently at odds over this facet of social class are Yasmina and Lalla Thor. Lalla Thor is always complaining about her co-wife, saying to Grandfather Tazi, "’This woman does not respect hierarchies. She is a troublemaker, like everyone else from the Atlas Mountains, and she is bringing chaos to this decent house.’" Needless to say, the two are constant rivals. To support her arguments against her peasant co-wives, Lalla Thor references Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun was a social historian who called the people living in urban centers the best Muslims, and argued that rural people, mostly peasants, were undermining the faith. Furthermore, he argued that peasants and nomads were unproductive, rebellious, and undisciplined. His views remain influential in Arab culture, and account for at least some of the gulf of social class between urban and rural. Certainly, Lalla Thor believes this interpretation as she insists to Grandfather Tazi that “having so many co-wives from the mountains was bound to lead to disaster.”
The harem in the city is influenced by a similar divide. Though Lalla Mani does not reference Ibn Khaldun directly, she clearly feels that women of the country do not have the restraint and dignity to be good Muslims, or indeed to be worthy to be within her household. When she catches Fatima’s mother jokingly chasing her father, who was running from the smell of the henna she was wearing, Lalla Mani puts a stop to it immediately. “‘In this respected household, husbands are not to be terrorized. Maybe at your father’s farm that’s how things are. But here, in the middle of this very religious city… women behave by the book… Outrageous behavior… is only good for entertaining peasants.’”
Yet for all the rhetoric, significant differences in lifestyles appear when rural woman move to the city, and are forced to bridge the class gap between themselves and the urban women. This phenomenon is addressed in Dreams of Trespass in discussions of the use of the traditional veil in Morocco. After Morocco receives its independence there are marches for women’s rights in which the women throw off their veils. After this, none of the upper- and middle-class women are required to wear the veil to maintain their honor. Yet peasant women upon migrating to the cities would begin to wear veils, though they had never done so before. The women are trying to show clearly to the world that they are no longer ‘peasants’; they are trying to fit into the culture of the city. They change to belong in other ways as well, and nowhere is this more evident than in the different levels of control Maha’s and Um Saad’s families keep over them.
One likely theory to explain this difference is that, while part may simply be a difference in temperament between Maha’s father and Um Saad’s, a large part has to do with the pressure to maintaining culture. Maha’s village is in the country, and basic traditions there are in no real immediate danger. Um Saad’s family, on the other hand, has left a more stable environment for Amman, where their culture and customs are being challenged on every side by different practices and the lifestyles around them. As her parents begin to feel more and more threatened by the culture of the city they live in, they seek to keep their daughter further and further away from that culture.
In fact, the tight control Um Saad’s father keeps on her has the opposite effect of his original intent. Instead of keeping her within the cultural bounds he expects, it causes her to envy the free lifestyles of the people she sees in the city and yearn still further to throw off the bonds he puts on her.
Um Saad provides the most obvious example of this—she goes to the cinema for the first time and is completely stunned by what she discovers: a way to look into the lives of other people and watch them experience romance in a much more free way than she will ever be allowed to. Rather than responding with shock or embarrassment to seeing people living upper-class Westernized lives and behaving in a way that is contrary to the social norms of her class, she is filled with longing to be able to do the same. “’That night I discovered the shutter and the star-shaped hole. I sat on the cushions and peeped through the holes at the dark city.’”
This longing to experience something other than the accepted norms for a person of her class is familiar to Asya as well. While studying for her Thanawiyya, the successful completion of which is the next step in what is already determined to be her life, Asya finds herself frequently distracted by the woman who lives across the street from her family’s apartment. From the balcony of her mother’s study she can watch the red-haired woman live her life. Her life is dramatically different from Asya’s: she sometimes stands on her balcony in her nightgowns, which were see-through, and Asya discovers that she is involved with many different men. Asya is fascinated, and notes that she “was always laughing.” Like Um Saad, she was peering through the curtains of her home into what seems like another world and wishing she was able to be a part of it. This woman is clearly from a very different social class than Asya. Upon questioning Dada Zeina about the woman, Asya notices that “something about Dada Zeina’s tone had reminded Asya of a feeling she had had once that her mother disliked that woman.” Asya responds as her family does when the woman notices her watching one night and waves at her: “Asya had retreated primly and crossly and closed the blinds.” However, afterward she experiences a feeling similar to Um Saad’s. “Almost immediately, she had hated herself and wished she had smiled and waved right back. She dreamed up scenes in which she was with them; sometimes being introduced to strange and wonderful feelings; other times being subjected to painful yet exhilarating ones.”
Within the harems, too, the women dream of wings to carry them beyond the harem, and thus the powerless social class they are part of. The longing is especially clear in Aunt Habiba. As the women of the Mernissi harem are embroidering during long afternoons, Fatima observes they divide into two camps: the modern rebels and the traditionalists. The first camp is rebelling by embroidering a winged bird, and the second is working on traditional designs. Yet Aunt Habiba is sharing the loom of the traditionalists, “but only because she could not afford to openly declare herself a revolutionary.” The rebels understand that “Aunt Habiba did not really enjoy the repetitive and ornate taqlidi needlework… but they also understood that she could not express her feelings, both because she was powerless and because she did not dare disrupt the equilibrium between the two camps.” The traditional embroidery camp is led by Lalla Mani, who is a generation above all the others and therefore has the highest social standing among the women of the harem. The men side with Lalla Mani as well, and “this preference put divorced and widowed relatives like Aunt Habiba in an awkward position.” Aunt Habiba cannot rebel against the lower social class she has been placed in as a divorced woman, and all the rebels are experiencing a constant stream of abuse for their simple embroidery pattern from Lalla Mani. Yet Aunt Habiba dreams on, enlisting Fatima’s aid as a lookout so she can “embroider a fabulous one-winged green bird” away from everyone’s eyes. Summing up the thoughts of all the women of the five novels from all their diverse backgrounds, social, and economic classes, “The main thing for the powerless is to have a dream. True, a dream alone, without the bargaining power to go with it, does not transform the world or make the walls vanish, but it does help you keep ahold of dignity.”
Maha’s brother Daffash is disliked among many in his village yet his social class remains about the same. This is due to his good relationship with the British colonists near his village. He has rejected the wishes of his father, which everyone considers a terrible deed and is completely against the cultural norms of Arab society. However, only the women express this sentiment, and in fact many of his interactions with other male heads of household seem to involve that person being unable to rebuke him or do anything to offend him because they cannot risk him speaking ill of them to the British. Although it is necessary to be on good terms with the British if one is seeking to increase one’s social class under colonialism, feelings are strong throughout the book among Arabs against the occupying forces. Though the British have all the power, there is still resistance to their control—Harb raids the British, and after he is killed Maha continues to resist in more subtle ways. Yet those who are familiar with the British culture are looked at sometimes as people who do have a great deal of power, regardless of how they got it, as the men of Hamia see Daffash, and other times these people are looked at with hope, as people who may one day lead the country to independence, as the Mernissi family sees Zin.
This also shows an important dynamic of class within the villages which carries over to all locations within the Arab world: the relationships between Arabs and Westerners. This relationship is often tense due to the history of colonization in the area, yet occasionally situations arise in which to be considered Westernized is not a slur on one’s character and social class.
Relations between Westernized women and Arab women are also tense. There is a lack of comprehension between the Western women who are present with the English near Maha’s village. The English women do not comprehend or even notice the ways they are offending the culture of the people they are neighbors to. Their mistakes begin as soon as they first step out of the Jeep they took to visit Daffash. In Maha’s words, “One of them was wearing a tight dress with a wide, shamefully short skirt… I didn’t know why they had their plaits cut off and why they tied ribbons with some feathers around their almost bald heads.” The foreign women seem to have the same view of Maha and the others of her village. The fundamental difference here seems to be a difference as to what the definition of a breach of honor is; this agrees with the theory that honor has a central role in the determination of social class among women in the Arab world.
The feeling expressed above by Maha that to be Western is also to be cheap and loose is under some circumstances merely an instance of cultures colliding; however, the interpretation of Western culture as a portal for greater sexual freedom influences the dealings between social classes in the Arab world. First of all, meetings between Western women and the husbands of Arab women have effects on the marriages and therefore on the social status of those women. Umar, Su’ad’s husband, is treated abroad and there he falls in love with his female doctor. During his recovery, has an emotional affair that threatens to turn into a physical affair. He describes it as “love of a strange new kind.” However, Umar never acts on his love; he is committed to his wife Su’ad and his family, and eventually returns to them. Less devoted is Ihsan Natour, the wife of Nadia, who is set up with a woman that he falls head over heels in love with. He is unsure which woman he would choose if he had to. Both men were abroad, in countries other than those their families were living in, when they had these affairs. Asya, too, had affairs in both the countries in which she worked on her education. The first affair does not get very physical and she feels guilt for she cannot tell any of her friends or family about what she is doing. The second time, though, she feels no guilt for what she does and no regrets afterwards. Nadia also unrepentantly considers renewing an old love interest with her husband’s brother, whom she loved before her husband. The common thread in all these affairs is the circumstances under which they took place: foreign settings, with the type of people called “Westernized.”
Maha is treated as a cook or as just another servant when she went at the request of a family friend to prepare some food for his guests. She is in fact laughed at when her actions are not understood by Daffash’s friends. The western women do not bother to conform their behavior to the standards of the people they are visiting, which shows they consider it to be beneath them to do so. This old division of social class, with the colonists having all the power, is still causing repercussions today. This is seen in the distrust and dislike Arabs through all five books have for Israelis, seeing them as Western colonialists taking over Palestine.
Western influence on women’s lives also influences their social class, often by influencing how they are seen in the eyes of the people around them. While being westernized is considered to be acceptable to some degree for Asya and Nadia, and repugnant for Maha and Haniyyeh as society around them feels the effects of being colonized, an interesting situation is observed by Fatima. Fatima’s Morocco is also heavily occupied by the French, and a spirit of nationalism among the Moroccans was high. As a result of this, the men of the Mernissi household do their best to discourage the women from contact with the Bennis household. The reason for this is Mrs. Bennis, who is a very unusual person in that she has the ability to move between the French and the Moroccan cultures, changing her clothing and manner to blend with each. In contrast to the men’s disapproval of this fact the women are fascinated and excited. They want very much to be able to move across the boundaries between the very separate social classes of the colonists and the Moroccans and they scoff at the men’s reasoning for this prohibition. The men believe that if they can master both cultures, one will necessarily become secondary, and so the Moroccan culture would die out. For these reasons, social class was affected by the amount of time a woman spent relating to Western culture.
Zin, on the other hand, represents the common perception that while women could not interact with Western culture without corrupting Moroccan culture, men could do so and yet stay fundamentally Moroccan. Cousin Zin, besides possessing a wide knowledge of Arab culture, speaks excellent French and dresses in a Western manner. He is respected by all as a member of the “new generation of Moroccans who was going to save the country.”
While the amount of foreign or Western influence a woman’s life holds influences her social class, her country of origin also matters a great deal in her interactions with others. A large part of determining which nationality is ‘acceptable’ socially to another nationality is a matter of national memory. For example, the failure of Egypt to regain Palestine, and their loss of much other territory including the Sinai Peninsula to Israel, caused popular opinion to turn against the Egyptians. Many people in other nations, such as Jordan whose army was likewise destroyed, blamed Egypt for the certain loss of Palestine and this was occasionally reflected in a cold attitude toward Egyptians in general.
The attitude that it is best to keep one’s closest relationships reserved to members of one’s own nationality is extended to marriages as well. Um Saad, then Haniyyeh, meets a man called Mohammed who owns a grocery store near her family’s home. They fall in love almost instantly and he asks her father for her hand. He refuses instantly. Mohammed is not unacceptable to her father for any reason except that he is Jordanian.
When Asya goes abroad to England to study, though she is surrounded at some points by people from the Middle East, she disdains from interacting with any of them. Her reasons for this appear to have a great deal to do with social class. She is invited numerous times to go to parties for all the Arab students and their friends to socialize at, but Asya has refused for the past three years. Her reasoning is that it will be “groupies trying to belly-dance and kids on the rampage and wives huddled suspiciously together in a corner and a few radical Iraqis and Syrians shouting above the music in the middle of the room.” The prejudice Asya shows is also her excuse for staying in her room and interacting with no one for the past three years. Clearly this is a powerful part of bourgeois class if it has been the reason Asya has been miserable for three years and in all of those three years she has been entirely unable to overcome it.
There is also reference to another affair in which international rivalries play a role. The affair is between a teaching assistant and an Egyptian man. The man is promised to another woman in Jordan and is not serious about the affair, much as Asya is not serious about Gerald. When he tries to break it off with her she has an affair with an Iraqi man to make him jealous. Asya, in a letter to her mother, says “she actually spent the night with an Iraqi! Well, of course now the Iraqis are one up on the Egyptians and Hisham won’t have anything to do with her anymore and I’m sure she hasn’t a clue why.” It seems the woman’s attempt to make him jealous was not as shocking to anyone as the fact that the man she used was Iraqi. Furthermore, the way all the Egyptians sided with the first man even though they are described as being of different social classes shows that being in a foreign country creates a unity not present within the country of origin.
However, Asya’s bourgeois class shows through at times: she appears disdainful of her surroundings from the moment she arrives at the university. Her descriptions of the buildings and her dorm room are very negative, and she shows almost a disdain for the people she meets: when a girl in the kitchen says hello to her she responds briefly and does not look at her again, and when a girl tries to be friendly toward her she finds her boring and strange
The clearest example of an entire nationality placed firmly and indiscriminately in a low social class is the position of Palestinians within the Arab world. Politically, they are given full support by all the governments of Arab countries and all citizens of those countries. However, for the politicians the rhetoric commonly heard calling for the liberation of Palestine never becomes more than rhetoric. An exception to this could be the war of 1967. It is unclear if Nasser’s motivation to begin such a war lay in a wish to heed the common cry to free Palestine or whether Egypt simply felt threatened for its own sovereignty. Regardless of which of these positions was the truth, at least some people on the streets of Egypt believed it was out of a responsibility to assist the Palestinians. ’Am Salih, who runs a kiosk near Cairo University, is of this opinion as well. He reacts exuberantly to news of the government’s move: “‘You’re really going to fight! You’re going to fight and be men and get Palestine back after all these years!’”
Within the university, too, there is plenty of support for the Palestinian cause. While Asya is at the university, a group of students begin discussing the problem. Bassam, the lone Palestinian in the group, says “‘It’s been a lousy deal all along and now we’ll be worse off than ever: Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, all gone.’”
The students all voice their support: “‘You guys are right to think you’ve been used, you know.’
‘It’s a game of government—‘
‘It’s a question of participation—‘
‘If this were a true socialist state—‘
‘A true democracy—“
‘June would not have been possible.’”
Rhetoric aside, they are counted socially as outcasts within the Arab world. It is all well and good for Egyptians to praise the Palestinian cause, but when it comes to accepting the displaced nation into their society, they back away quickly, unwilling to shoulder the problems such an action would cause them. Chrissie’s parents’ reaction to the discovery that she walked to the bus stop with a man is severe, but when it is discovered that the man was Palestinian the situation becomes irreparable. In the ensuing confrontation, the sentiments behind this gulf of separation are laid out by Muneera, Chrissie’s mother, as she learns that Bassam has fallen in love with an Egyptian girl, Noora al-Manesterli. “‘Palestinian? Palestinian? And he’s going and falling in love with Noora al-Manesterli? I swear her father will have him jailed. What has he got—‘”
The problem with the suitability of Palestinians as spouses or indeed as fully-integrated members of society is entirely one of social class. The Palestinians’ religion is not an issue for most Egyptians, nor is their economic status. The prospects for many Palestinians are good; most have excellent educations. Bassam, as mentioned, is studying at Cairo University. Many Palestinians have degrees from foreign universities as well, through programs available and designed specifically for them. For example, Yusra’s husband Ahmad has a degree in radiology from an Indian university. Rather, the problem Muneera has with Bassam is that the situation of all Palestinians is unstable. Although Asya points out that he is from a good family with money and land, and his uncle is the governor of Gaza, Muneera responds, “’Are you all mad? Don’t you live in this world? Tomorrow his mother could go out shopping and come back to find she hasn’t got a house to put her shopping in... They should fall in love, yes, fall in love as much as they want to: with their own people. Among themselves. They shouldn’t spread their disasters over other people’s daughters.”
In A Balcony Over the Fakihani the situation of Palestinians echoes Muneera’s words that they are plagued by disaster after disaster. Wherever Yusra and Su’ad go, they face discrimination and the knowledge that they are not wanted by the people of the country they are living in. Yusra is forced to move from Tal-al-Zaatar in Lebanon due to raids, and then from Damour due to Israeli air strikes. In neither place did the government really attempt to protect the Palestinians living there. The fact that they are not protected appears to be generally known as well—Asya and her friends have a conversation about this and agree that no one is going to offer them sanctuary. Asya mentions that the various governments’ spoken reason for this is that resistance should take place “within the occupied territory.” Over the five books, the Palestinians are portrayed as people whose outward social class appears to be good, but in fact are not wanted in any countries and have no homeland.
These class factors come together to create a gulf of misunderstanding that threatens the forces that can create power for women, in particular women’s solidarity.
What is women's solidarity? That phenomenon is debated many times by the Mernissi women in Dreams of Trespass. They have plays about it, argue about it, and define it in a myriad of different ways. Fatima's mother insists that it is a lack of women's solidarity that is holding them within the walls of the harem. Yet most agree that women's solidarity is the key for women both to escape fate, or the oppressive rules of society, and to pursue happiness in their lives. The point is emphasized throughout all five novels that class conflict plays a surprisingly strong role in the success or failure of women's solidarity in achieving these ends.
Fatima illustrates her point through the story of Princess Budur from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Princess Budur is separated from her husband and therefore assumes the role of a man to protect herself. On the verge of exposure, she faces a choice between revealing her deception to a king and placing her trust in his benevolence or in revealing the deception to his daughter and trusting in the mysterious power of women's solidarity. She chooses the latter, and events prove her choice to be wise. Women's solidarity as Princess Budur experienced it is simply women doing what they can to assist each other out of a sense of shared experience or simply out of a shared understanding. However, applying this form of women's solidarity to a modern context is more difficult than Princess Budur's calling on it to save her life in the bridal suite because Princess Budur and Princess Hayat could understand each other very well. They were both princesses, the daughters of kings, and had grown up with similar expectations and in similar circumstances. In modern settings, it becomes difficult for this type of women's solidarity to survive differences in economic and social classes.
Examples of this, also from Dreams of Trespass, are found in Fatima's vivid and often humorous descriptions of life on her grandmother Yasmina's farm. Yasmina has a fiery personality which often causes conflict on the farm where she lives. The majority of these conflicts are with the head co-wife, Lalla Thor. As an example of this, Yasmina causes uproar by naming a duck Lalla Thor. It is interesting to note that Lalla Thor is "the only aristocratic, city-born wife of Grandfather Tazi." Yasmina makes it clear that she does not view Lalla Thor as superior because of her upper-class roots, while Lalla Thor makes it clear that she considers Yasmina and the others barely acceptable society. Lalla Thor expresses prejudices that are seen throughout the five books between upper-class, urban women and women of the country and they stand as a permanent divide between her and the other co-wives. Class therefore provides a barrier to women's solidarity by preventing all the women involved from gaining some form of empathy with one another. Yet the co-wives other than Lalla Thor flock to Yasmina’s pavilion as the center for women’s solidarity in the harem—probably because of Yasmina’s personal philosophy. She tells Fatima that “all human beings are equal, no matter how much money they had [have], where they came [come] from, what place they held [hold] in the hierarchy, or what their religion or language was [is].” The other co-wives were not from equal social classes, in fact some of them were former slaves, one was from the Moroccan resistance movement to the north, and one was African. Furthermore, they were all in competition for the attentions of one husband. This could have created insurmountable barriers, but the women form a tight union with each other, or at least all the women who are able to overcome the social norms. As Yasmina says, “I could even imagine changing my mind about Lalla Thor, if she ever stopped looking down on all of us because we don’t have tiaras.”
Maha and Um Saad manage to overcome these differences through their mutual willingness to look beyond their class differences. A great part of this may be due to the extenuating circumstances they found themselves in: they are sharing the same torment, and are trapped in the mental hospital together.
Class can draw women apart in fundamental ways, but in the past fifty years in particular other movements have begun, these intended to bring women together, restoring solidarity.
Throughout In the Eye of the Sun, and reflected in the opinions expressed by Asya’s friends, the influence of a powerful and far-reaching movement called Nasserism is seen. The effects of this movement are still being felt today, and represent to the people of Egypt and much of the Middle East an attempt to level the playing field for all members of society. Nasserism incorporates elements of socialism such as redistribution of land by the state from the wealthy to the poor, and was seen by many Arabs as the key to uniting Egypt. It reflected a feeling of optimism in Egypt at the time.
Political movements, including Pan-Arabism, communism, and democracy, were also attempts to break down the class borders between Arabs of different nationalities. Many of the youth in Asya’s generation saw these movements as their way into a greater role in the world and the solution to the increasing problems the Arab world was facing from Israel and other Western countries. Conversations among Asya’s friends at the university illustrate this development. “Participation. Life. Students from Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Yemen all sit round the same table. News of unrest comes from the universities of Europe and the United States. Poetry and Politics. Never mind the defeat. Never mind the ‘Setback’ and Sinai and the rest of Palestine gone. The young have a voice and that voice shall be heard.”
Outside the university, too, the movements are gaining momentum. Hamid Mursi was arrested for two years for his work with the Communist Party; most of Asya’s family, in fact, has been involved with political work in the past.
Becoming a nationalist gives one the opportunity to advance beyond one’s former social class throughout the five books. In Egypt, nationalists were looked on with pride by the people and their views promoted by the government, as shown by Nasser’s views and glimpses of radio broadcasts Asya hears during the war of 1967. In Pillars of Salt, the horsemen of Hamia are the pride of the village for the raids they conduct on the English soldiers. Najwa Thabit is a nationalist for the Palestinian cause who is traveling to agitate for support. She is not of a high economic or social class, yet she is invited to a banquet hosted by the most important women in Barqais. Furthermore, while she is attending this banquet she launches into a speech haranguing the women of Barqais for “‘eating lambs, while our people live in camps that are often demolished over their heads.’” If she had not been a nationalist, an outburst of this nature would have caused a much more severe reaction among the women than hers did.
As described in the documentary “Four Women of Egypt,” political movements of all sorts gained momentum among people of all classes at this time. However, the government of Egypt attempted to tighten control on the populace and halt the tide of political movements other than nationalism. It could be argued that the arrests, as much as they stopped people from joining movements brought different classes together under a single cause. This was the case for the women whose stories are told in “Four Women of Egypt”: most of them met in a prison, and the friendships they began under shared suffering carried on to their later lives. Four women could not be more diverse than these. They hail from radically different economic and social classes. One woman is from the former ruling class while Egypt was under the control of the British and one is from a lower economic class, joining in the movement with her husband to protest their status in life. They also belong to different religions, and overcome the societal boundaries to complete their vision of a united Egypt.
In conclusion, Arab women are affected throughout their lives by social and economic class that sometimes empowers and sometimes limits them. They are divided through marital status, whether or not one is a mother, economic class, nationality, and religion. However, throughout the five books evidence was given that it is very possible to move past class differences and, when these differences are overcome women are empowered by solidarity to achieve their dreams.