Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean

Fatima Sadiqi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415642101
• eBook ISBN: 9781135136734
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women in the Mediterranean have helped constitute new meanings of knowledge whilst simultaneously providing a wealth of material that is now part of the knowledge archive of the area. The inception of types of knowledge that differ from the conventional necessitates a re-definition of the concept of 'knowledge,' an issue which is addressed in this volume.

Employing a range of theories and methodologies, this book explores four main domains in which women's knowledge is attested: women and written knowledge; women and oral knowledge; women and legal, religious, and economic knowledge; and women and media knowledge. By presenting untapped women's expressions of knowledge in these domains, this book opens new avenues of research in fields such as sociology, history and literature, amongst others.

This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the Middle East, Women and Gender studies and Mediterranean Studies.

Part I
Women and written knowledge

1 A skeptical cast of mind

Marjorie Lightman

Introduction

Feminist historians have learned to listen for a woman’s voice among the men; developed a skeptical view of the moral values men attribute to women’s nature; and acquired an aversion to literary tropes that exalt women’s delicate nature or need for protection. For feminists who came of age in the academy of the late 1960s and 1970s, these sensitivities have been honed over decades of professional life and study. Time, however, has muted fury. More women enjoy an almost equal place in academe, the canon of learned works has been modified to include women, and women’s studies have thrived. I speak from my own experience as a an active participant in the women’s caucus of the America historical Association in the 1970s and 1980s; the founding executive director of the Institute for Research in History, which emerged from the New York chapter of the women’s caucus and played an important role in the development of women’s history and public history during the 1970s through the 1980s; one of the founders of the National Council for Research on Women, the largest U.S. association of centers for research about women; and as a member of the Taskforce on Women in Higher Education, which published the report Women in Academe: Progress and Prospects (Chamberlain 1991).

Although few would suggest that the field of ancient history is in the forefront of modern feminist thought, it has experienced the more inclusive trend characteristic of academe as a whole. The historiography has come a long way from the 1960s, when respectable scholars such as J.P.V.D. Balsdon could equate the Roman Revolution of the first century BCE with the immorality of women (Balsdon 1963: 54–55, 194, 214). Following the lead of scholars such as Sarah Pomeroy, the accepted truths about a broad range of ancient attitudes toward women have been revised (Pomeroy 1975), and in some areas, such as the study of late antiquity and early Christianity, scholars like Jo Ann McNamara, Elaine Pagels, and Karen Armstrong have created a fundamentally more inclusive scholarship (McNamara 1976, 1983; Pagels 1979, 1989; Armstrong 1986).

Over the past several decades, the fields of Greco-Roman studies have also been rent by another controversy which, not unlike feminist analysis, has posed a challenge to fundamental and unexamined assumptions. In a monumental three-volume study, Martin Bernal has closely examined evidence from the array of fields that inform classical scholarship to delineate the influences of Egypt and Africa on early Greece. In his Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, he challenges both the pervasive Aryan Model, which claimed that classical Greek culture arose through conquest from the North by Indo-European speakers, and the alternative Ancient Model, which argued that civilization was brought to Greece by Egyptians and Phoenicians (Bernal 1987). Proposing a Revised Ancient Model that stresses the Afroasiatic roots of classical Greek civilization, in his first volume Bernal examines the European tradition of classical scholarship that had ignored the historical evidence for African roots. His second volume focuses on the archeological evidence, and in 2006, with his third volume, he addresses the supporting linguistic evidence (Bernal 1995, 2006).

Bernal’s analyses raise disturbing questions, many of which relate to the authority long attributed to European scholarly works produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bernal’s argument that the ancient artifacts and languages, especially Greek and Latin, were viewed and read through a lens of unexamined attitudes, ideas, and values that reflected the scholars’ contemporary European political and social biases is not itself a revolutionary idea. Most scholars would accept the general proposition that historical analysis has often been influenced by the questions and concerns of the period in which the scholar lived and wrote. Without intending to make the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a self-parody, most would also concur that this was the high point of European imperialism and restrictive social norms. Public life during this period was dominated by an expansive extension of empire, including the colonization of Africa, and private life suffered from a prescriptive morality that categorized women according to a narrowly constructed range of sexual behavior (Gardner 1990: 257–66). Bernal’s exploration of the scholarship, however, illuminates the degree to which support for Europe’s expansionist and imperial ambitions, allied with a belief in the innate superiority of Greco-Roman society’s Indo-European origins, shaped the scholarly vision. His critique has challenged the objective integrity incorporated into Latin and Greek dictionaries, grammars, editions of major and minor texts, translations of inscriptions, and historical, archeological, literary, and linguistic analyses that have formed a foundational body of scholarly knowledge never previously so challenged.

Not unexpectedly, Bernal’s work has led to a contentious debate that has split scholars into defenders and detractors (Lefkowitz 1996–97; Bernal 2001; Lefkowitz and Rogers 2001). Detractors have sometimes evidenced a virulence of attack that suggests the degree to which attributing any part of Greco-Roman civilization to a historical path “out of Africa” is anathema. I never anticipated that, as associate editor of pre-Islamic texts from ancient Egypt through the late Greco-Roman period for Women Writing Africa, The Northern Region (Sadiqi et al. 2009), I would find myself at the intersection of the debate over Bernal’s Afroasiatic Model and feminist thought. However, it is but one little step from the analysis of the wide-ranging evidence presented by Bernal about imperial values incorporated into the scholarship to the correlative implication at the heart of feminist analysis, that the prescriptive morality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced scholarly understanding of ancient society’s socio-sexual relationships (Lightman and Zeisel 1977: 19–32). Nor did I expect, despite these two powerful critiques and the revisionist scholarship of the past several decades, how deeply embedded the ideas and assumptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remain in the scholarship about the ancient Mediterranean, and how unyielding they are to reinterpretation.

Background

It was, at first glance, a straightforward assignment. The Northern Region was the fourth and final volume in a unique collection of women’s writings from across the African continent. Longer than a decade in the making, the project rested on a network of more than 200 African scholars who uncovered, translated, and edited texts, many of which had never been published or had appeared only in local publications and local languages. The project’s leadership was formidable. Florence Howe, the renowned founder and chief editor of the Feminist Press in New York, was the driving force. The well regarded scholars Abena P.A. Busia and Tuzyline Jita Allan were the series editors, and Amira Nowaira and Azza El Kholy from the University of Alexandria, Egypt and Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji from the University of Fes, Morocco, were the editors of the fourth volume on the Northern region. The project would have been impossible without major funding from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation among many others.

Although the four-volume series was a feminist project for an American press, only Florence Howe and I were from the United States. Abena Busia, the series editor who worked most closely on the volume, was Ghanaian, but had taught for many years at a U.S. university. The remaining members of the team were Egyptian or from the countries of the Maghreb. With one or two exceptions, all held doctoral degrees, many from European and United States universities, and academic appointments at North African universities in disciplines that included literature, English and Arabic, history, linguistics, classics, Egyptology, sociology, women’s studies, and political science.

As an associate editor I consulted with several scholars from Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia who specialized in ancient Egypt and Greco-Roman civilization. Our task was to choose a suitable group of texts that reached from Egypt to Mauritania and from Egypt’s Old Kingdom to Late Antiquity. Including these ancient texts in the volume recognized women’s roles in the long literate history of coastal North Africa along the Mediterranean coast. Gradually, however, the intellectual complexities of our task became evident. The fault lines of class, identity, and ethnicity that marked the thousand or so years of pre-Islamic culture appeared to be decidedly different from the tensions of national identity, ethnicity, culture, imperialism, and gendered space that concern contemporary North Africa. Moreover, the worldview and sensibilities of the Islamic centuries had no apparent link with ancient belief systems as varied as Isis, the Greek and Roman pantheons, Neo-Platonism, or early Christian monasticism and the Christian churches that flourished inside and outside the orbit of Rome.

Without the work of Bernal, it would have been quite simple to devote a section of the volume to ancient material and to acknowledge that its only relationship with later centuries was the accident of shared geography. Although artistically and intellectually inelegant, this solution had its appeal. Except for the few scholars on the project who were specialists in the early period, none was proficient in the ancient languages or sufficiently conversant with the pre-Islamic civilizations to hear any of its echoes in more recent times. However, Bernal’s Afro-centric hypothesis, while focused almost exclusively on a single very early period, tickled the imagination and encouraged a closer examination of the possibilities.

The scope of the group’s work was narrowed by a decision to follow the pattern of the three earlier volumes in the series and restrict the texts considered to those written by women, about issues of concern to women, and with some evidence of literary merit. This largely excluded documents that dealt with affairs of state, although there were texts demanding social reform as well as freedom from foreign rule and citizenship, especially among women’s writings about nationalism and independence. With the single exception of the recent revision of family law in Morocco, the editorial group also did not consider any writings from women political party leaders, prime ministers, parliamentarians, scientists, or athletes; and only in the ancient inscriptions were there court cases and land disputes in which a woman was the protagonist and wrote on her own behalf.

Not excluded were texts that had been transcribed from oral materials and texts in local languages. The group routinely worked in French, English, and Arabic, and nearly everyone was conversant in at least two of the three languages. Texts in Berber or transcriptions of oral materials in local languages were translated for the group into one or another of our shared languages by a knowledgeable group member. The combination of multiple languages, time periods, and cultures had the cohesion of our shared feminist prism, even though our understanding of feminism was itself shaped by the variety of our backgrounds. Possibly, the mix of diversity and unity provided an unusual measure of sensitivity to the texts and to one another, which uniquely informed discussions of nuance and meaning as we sought to translate from one tongue and time period into another.

Modern feminism

From the hundreds of texts that I read dating from the ninth through twentieth centuries CE, and the numerous ancient texts read by my colleagues, there emerged themes of continuity and discontinuity which, not surprisingly, portrayed an array of women’s emotions, experiences, and reflections. In every era, women wrote about love, desertion, war, fear, children, lovers, and husbands; the texts expressed loss and fleeting pleasure, natural beauty and manmade destruction, longing for freedom and feeling imprisoned, hope, desire, lust, disappointment, and despair. It was also evident from the collected texts that across North Africa a modern feminist tradition emerged some time between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women demanded basic rights and joined in the rising insurgencies against colonialism. These feminist texts, in the form of newspaper articles, novels, short stories, public speeches, or passionate tracts, often focused on the quest for education, employment, and citizenship. They told tales of courage, determination, and confrontation with restrictive laws and social customs. Some of the period’s feminists, such as the Egyptian Huda Shaarawi, who was born into a harem in Cairo and very publicly removed her veil, gained international renown (Shaarawi 1987).

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists offered a connection with international feminism, especially in the interwar years. Their cultural context, however, was different from that of the West, dominated by a history of polygamous marriage, harems that restricted women’s physical movements, and a patriarchal family law code that rested on Islamic law. The feminist texts also echoed sensibilities that were reminiscent of the ancient texts and not necessarily a part of the modern Western feminist tradition. There was, for example, a persistent thread of fatalism, perhaps even stoicism, in the North African women’s voices that echoed an ancient world vision of life and death. In the poetry of Algerian women resistance fighters in the twentieth century, death was the inevitable consequence of their battle. Death was also the handmaiden of medieval laments (Sadiqi et al. 2009: 95). It wasn’t that there was an absence of joy or joyousness among many of the women’s writings; quite the contrary – wedding songs, for example, especially captured moments of happiness. Rather, in a manner highly reminiscent of ancient wedding songs such as those by the Greek poet Sappho, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Women and written knowledge
• PART II Women and oral knowledge
• PART III Women, legal, religious, and economic knowledge
• PART IV Women and media knowledge
• Index