[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]
"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever."
(Various attributions)
Arab Child Rearing Practices: Girls
Where boys are favored, idealized, gratified in all wants and needs in their early life, girls learn from an early age that their importance is directly tied to their relationship to the important men in their lives. They have no independent value and exist to serve men. Their sexuality is dangerous and threatening to men and their individuality is directly and overtly denied. The Niqab, the favored form of covering in the most conservative of Islamic societies, exemplified by Saud Arabia, the keeper of all things traditional in Islam, exemplifies the institutionalized, religiously sanctioned assault on women done in the name of Islam.
The Niqab allows for no color, no individual flair, no joi de vivre, to be expressed; it homogenizes all women, rich and poor, young and old, into a faceless, sexless, amorphous mass. It may protect the women from the predations of men (though any women in public by herself is treated as "fair game") but at the cost of her freedom.
Even in the more moderate and modern Muslim nations, where women are treated well, the subtext of their second class status is reinforced constantly. A reader, a Western expatriate living in just such a moderate Arab country wrote in to describe her experience. I am reproducing her note, which came to me via a third party, with her permission, in full, though without identifying details at her request:
Regarding that article you wanted me to look at on Arab child-rearing practices, it is not like that in _____. In _____, women are treated pretty well--I would say in some ways, more respectfully than in (the West) ...
What you describe here sounds very much like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and countries around that area.
Even in _____, however, most girls in the family are taught to be deferential to the boys, serving them, etc. The mother behaves that way, too. In my opinion, this comes from Islam, where boys inherit twice as much as girls, and women are never fully emancipated (can't get married or get a passport without the approval of a male relative, no matter what your age; a woman's word is only worth half a man's in court, etc.). I think if inheritance were made equal, all this deferential behavior would stop. But it never will be made equal, no matter how much Islamic countries modernize, because it's mandated by the Koran.
In the best of cases, Arab girls must develop in an environment, social, cultural, legal, and familial, in which they are inferior. In the worst cases, they are nullified.
Neglect is often even more destructive to character formation than abuse (with the additional caveat that most often, neglect is interspersed with abuse.) When a child's basic needs for nurturance and love are neglected, the result is a damaged sense of self which can form the core of pathological narcissism.
The damaged young girl sees herself as unworthy of status and lives in a milieu that grants her no status for her potential as a human being but merely for her potential as a bearer of children (preferably male children) and a constant, potential source of shame should she rebel against her chains and attempt to self-actualize.
(I will expand on some of these ideas in a later post; for a more developed discussion, Leonard Shengold's Soul Murder remains one of the most insightful explorations of the psychological effects of abuse and neglect.)
By the time the young Arab child is approaching the crucial Oedipal phase of development, their early development has predisposed him or her to be burdened by a damaged self. The Oedipal phase, colloquially thought of as the time when the young boy gives up his primary attachment to his mother for fear of his father's retaliation (castration), is actually a much more complicated time of life. It is that period of life in which the child is beginning the long term process of detaching from his primary emotional attachment to his mother, beginning to work out his relationship to the heretofore less significant father, and preparing himself to leave the protected circle of the home for the larger world outside. Almost all societies recognize the importance of this phase and most societies do not start formal schooling until after age 5 o 6 because of a recognition that prior to that age the child's emotional investment in school is too attenuated for formal education to take place.
The boy, who has inadequate experiences of frustration, defective self-control and self-soothing mechanisms, and a locus of sexual arousal external to himself (see Part III for more on these developmental trends), enters the Oedipal phase with a fragile, yet grandiose, sense of self which is in need of constant affirmation from the environment lest catastrophic despair and humiliation evoke the rage that is always available when frustrations or insults occur.
The young girl enters the Oedipal phase with the overt and constantly reinforced message that her self is of no consequence and no importance except for her usage by dominant males.
There remain two factors that further complicate the young child's ascension to latency and ultimately prepare him/her to enter the adult world.
The first important complication relates to overt child abuse, physical and to a less quantifiable extent, sexual, which remain common experiences for Arab children. Such abuse has powerful impact on development as might be expected and will be explored in a future post.
The second factor, about which little has been written is circumcision, which is universal for male children and only slightly less common for female children (although FGM is slowly becoming less acceptable in many Muslim communities). The complex meanings and the experiential and ceremonial aspects of circumcision deserves further explication, as well.
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