ShrinkWrapped

The Arab Mind: Part X

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Shame and the Female Body

Child Psychoanalysts have long been familiar with the concept of the female body forming a container.  When children first learn that the Mother carries a baby within her womb, a potential space within her body, they create fantasies about what such a potential space, a container, contains when it is empty.  This representation of the female body as container is primordial and exists and persists within our unconscious minds.  In its most positive forms, it contributes to the womb envy that creates conflicts for many men who are involved in creative pursuits.  After all, the female of the species can be overtly generative and creative; the man can only create pale derivatives of an actual new life.

In the Arab Mind, woman as container takes on much greater significance.  This relates to the important distinction between sharaf, non-sexual honor, and 'ird, the specific kind of honor connected to the female body.  Yotam Feldner, writing in the December 2000 Middle East Quarterly, offers a succinct description:

Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

In contrast, ‘ird relates only to the honor of women and its value can only decrease. [Emphases mine-SW] It translates roughly as the Western concept of "chastity" or "purity." And as with chastity or purity, exemplary moral behavior cannot increase a woman's ‘ird but misconduct reduces it. In addition, ‘ird trumps sharaf: the honor of the Arab family or tribe, the respect accorded it, can be gravely damaged when one of its women's chastity is violated or when her reputation is tainted. Consequently, a violation of a woman's honor requires severe action, as Tarrad Fayiz, a Jordanian tribal leader, explains: "A woman is like an olive tree. When its branch catches woodworm, it has to be chopped off so that society stays clean and pure."

What behavior amounts to a violation of family honor is not precisely codified. Basically it involves an unsupervised contact of a female with a male that may be interpreted by society as intimate. Such contact can be trivial: a 15-year old Jordanian girl was stoned to death by her brother who spotted her "walking toward a house where young boys lived alone." As for rape, society perceives the violated woman not as a victim who needs protection but as someone who debased the family honor, and relatives will opt to undo the shame by taking her life. Failure to do so further dishonors the family.

The concept of 'ird involves an inherent quality with which a woman is born.  It must be preserved at all costs since it can only diminish and can never be replenished (notwithstanding the popularity of hymenoplasty in some Western Muslim populations.)

The Arab Mind: Part IX

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Narcissism and Honor-Shame Dynamics

The intersection of the Arab child rearing practices that I have been describing and Arab culture is nowhere so clear as in the Honor-Shame dynamics which dominate Arab culture today.   Honor-Shame is nothing less than the summation of the pathological narcissism that Arab child rearing engenders. 

Whether discussing sexual play with boys, the instant gratification afforded pre-Oedipal boys, the mirror image deprivation afforded young girls, or the sudden change for the boy to a posture of submission enforced by physical abuse, the consistent underlying pathological feature is a disrupted empathic connection between the parent and child.  The young boy who is always gratified does not develop the necessary ability to tolerate reasonable frustration; at the same time he develops an exaggerated sense of self, a grandiose self.  The young girl who is deprived of gratification develops a deeply impaired and damaged self, what has been called in its extreme form "soul murder" and what in more attenuated forms can evidence as  poor self-esteem.   In the cases of extreme gratification and extreme deprivation, the parent responds to their own designs and needs as opposed to the Western ideal of responding to the child's infantile needs.  Such needs include a deft dosage of deprivation and a reasonable amount of gratification; at the extremes, narcissistic vulnerability is the result.

Deficits in parental empathy are instrumental in developing narcissistic pathology.  Dr. Sanity has described the developmental lines of Narcissism in her excellent series on Narcissism and Society.  She points out the need for the healthy character to integrate the parallel lines of grandiose self and the idealized parental image which originally emerge from the fused self/object symbiosis of the early Mother/infant dyad:

It is because of the slow separation of Self from Other that the two developmental lines come into being. The first line (Heinz) Kohut refers to as the “Grandiose Self”(or idealized self image) and the second is referred to as the “Idealized Parent Image”. Both of these images represent psychological attempts to save the original experience of "perfection" by the infant when the Mother (Other) and the infant (Self) were “one”.

The “Grandiose Self” will develop over time (if not disrupted) into healthy Self-Esteem; and the” Idealized Parent Image” will eventually lead to the development of Ideals that give meaning to the individual’s life; and to healthy interpersonal relationships.

The psychological developmental lines of Narcissism is a difficult concept; I urge you to read her series (Part I, Part II, Part III) as well as my series on Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV) to gain a better understanding of the concept.  For the purposes of this series, suffice to point out that Arab child rearing practices seem ideally suited to the development of Narcissistic pathology.  This has important implications for Arab culture and there are two especially significant features worth emphasizing.   However, one more aspect of Narcissism must be considered before expanding the discussion to include the Honor-Shame dynamic. 

The Arab Mind: Part VIII

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Education

By the time an Arab youngster starts school he is already predisposed to defer to authority.  Taking the initiative, thinking "out of the box", and challenging convention are all forms of learning that are antithetical to the Arab Mind as developed over the first few years of life. Where Western children are subtly, and often overtly, exhorted to challenge authority, the Arab child has learned to be excessively deferential and obedient to (male) authority.  The lessons have been reinforced by beatings and other corporal punishments.  (See Part VI, especially.) 

It should come as no surprise that a similar authoritarian atmosphere is the norm in many Arab schools.  The most extreme examples of such pedagogy occurs in the fundamentalist madrasas but even in more liberal, Westernized schools, the use of rote memorization and unquestioned acceptance of proffered explanations, no matter how fantastical, are primary methods of instruction.  In a personal communication a young Arab man who was educated in a very liberal school in Kuwait (liberal by Kuwaiti standards) described the classroom situation which required students to memorize lessons, regurgitate rote descriptions, and concentrate most energetically on their study of the Koran.  In more traditional schools, this can take on trappings that are absurd to Western eyes.

For example, Elder linked to an article in Foreign Policy that described the education of a young Arab boy in a fundamentalist madrasa in Pakistan.  Pre-9/11, the writer described memorizing verses from the Koran in a language, Arabic, that he did not understand:

Today's madrasahs: "Young minds are not for thinking"

As a 9-year-old boy, I knelt on the bare floor of the neighborhood madrasa (religious school) in Karachi, Pakistan, repeating the Koranic verse, “Of all the communities raised among men you are the best, enjoining the good, forbidding the wrong, and believing in God.”

Hafiz Gul-Mohamed, the Koran teacher, made each of the 13 boys in our class memorize the verse in its original Arabic. Some of us also memorized the translation in our own language, Urdu. “This is the word of God that defines the Muslim umma [community of believers],” he told us repeatedly. “It tells Muslims their mission in life.” He himself bore the title hafiz (the memorizer) because he could recite all 114 chapters and 6,346 verses of the Koran.

Although the changes in education post-9/11 are significant, they are on a continuum:

The Arab Mind: Part VII

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Male genital anxiety is ubiquitous.  Most men typically pass through stages in their childhood where they are overly and consciously anxious about their genitals.  Preoccupations with size and performance are common enough experiences as to offer an endless supply of late night comedic material.  The developmental history of genital anxiety, often referred to by its short hand, castration anxiety, is instructive.  At approximately age 4, the young boy enters the Oedipal phase of his development.  The psychological and developmental conflicts of the period have to do with (partially) surrendering his attachment to his first love, his mother, in preparation for entering the real world.  As the boy undergoes the physical changes that are part of his entry into the Oedipal Phase, his penis becomes the center of his emotional life.  Nascent and inchoate sexual sensations become centered on his penis and it is not uncommon for 4 and 5 year old boys to show off their physical prowess and their penis, both aspects of their body that bring great joy and excitement.   At the same time the knowledge that their mother, for all the love and affection she showers upon him, prefers to sleep with his father, introduces elements of jealousy and rivalry.  In Freud's famous construction, the boy finally gives up his mother to his father for fear of his father's wrath, embodied for the child in terror of being castrated for challenging his father.

Many have criticized various aspects of the Freudian understanding of the Oedipal conflict and its crucial role in castration anxiety, but few critics have questioned the role of genital anxiety in the resolution of the Oedipal phase and its centrality to male psychosexual development.  Events that intensify the already extant castration anxiety of the period are likely to have long lasting repercussions in the development of the boy.  For that reason, understanding the role and nature of circumcision in the Arab culture and for the Arab mind is of great importance.  An aspect of the Arab culture that is clearly related to genital anxiety pertains to the Arab fear of female sexuality.  In Part III of The Arab Mind, I described how the important women in the very young Arab boy's life would stimulate his penis to sooth him or merely to amuse themselves.  This has the effect of establishing from an early age that an Arab boy, to a much greater extent than in the West, has no control over his own sexual excitement.  His excitement arises from external sources out of his control.  Western men may joke about their excitement and lust being forced upon them by a beautiful woman but for Arab men it is much closer to a realistic depiction of their experience.

While it may seem counter-intiuitive, the practice of circumcision in the Arab world exascerbates this trend. 

The Arab Mind: Part VI

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Posts II, III, and IV in this series have dealt with the differences between Arab child rearing of boys versus the treatment of girls.  The disparity is striking and has repercussions on the development of the sense of self and self worth that is a primary developmental aspect of early childhood.  There are two extremely important considerations that require incorporation in the explanation of character development of the Arab Mind.  The first, pervasive corporal punishment often merging into overt physical abuse and overt sexual abuse, I will address today and the second, the meaning, timing, and experience of circumcision, will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Corporal punishment, physical abuse, and sexual abuse of children are impossible to quantify in the Arab world but the culture and religion expressly permit and sanction behavior that in the West would be easily recognized as abuse and the extant evidence suggests the problem is pervasive and deep rooted.  Patai sets the scene: (pp. 35-36)

... about this time (the fourth year, more or less), the father begins to pay more attention to his son and the boy's gradual easing over from the women's to the men's world begins.  This paternal attention is, from the boy's point of view, a mixed blessing.  The father, much as he may love his son, is required by t he folk mores to develop the boy's character, and the methods of fatherly socialization are often harsh.  As long as he was under the exclusive tutelage of his mother, or a female mother-substitute such as an older sister, aunt, or grandmother, the boy could in general have his way. ... The men's world, as represented by the father is very different.  Here, the boy is suddenly confronted by standards.  While his own wishes are disregarded more often than not, he has to learn to fulfill his father's wishes, to obey his commands, to serve him and even to be subservient to him.

This change in status is not an easy one to get used to, and it takes a long time, years in fact, for the new role of a young (for a while the youngest) male child in the men's world to become internalized.  In the meantime clashes occur, and with them comes the bitter taste of the father's heavy hand, the rod, the strap, and, at least among the most tradition-bound Bedouin tribes, the saber and the dagger whose cut or stab is supposed, beyond punishing the disobedient son, to harden him for his future life. [Emphasis mine-SW]

...

The Arab Mind: A Necessary Digression

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Who is an Arab?

I realize I have up until now omitted an important point for the purposes of this discussion.  In part I had finessed the topic because of its complexity but the question is important.

In response to the reasonable question, who is an Arab?  I would like to offer the functional definition that Raphael Patai settled upon for his study of "The Arab Mind." Patai spends several pages in his tome discussing various ways of thinking about and delineating the "Arab" and he concludes: (pp. 13-14)

Numerous scholars, both Arab and Western, have struggled to answer the question, Who is an Arab?  The answers usually include one or more of the following criteria: Arabs are those who speak Arabic, are brought up in Arab culture, live in an Arab country, believe in Muhammad's teachings, cherish the memory of the Arab Empire, are members of any of the Arab nations.  A moment's reflection will suffice to show that of all the criteria, only the linguistic one holds good for all Arabs and for almost nobody else but Arabs.  ...

... for want of a better definition, we go along with the one [definition] suggested by Jabra I. Jabra, a Baghdati critic, novelist, and poet, to the effect that an Arab is "anyone who speaks Arabic as his own language and consequently feels as an Arab."

In addition, Patai points out that Islam attributes legitimacy as highest among those who can trace their lineage back to the Prophet and his closest family and associates and the legitimacy diminishes as one moves outward in concentric circles from Mecca/Medina, to the larger Arab Middle East to the surrounding Muslim non-Arab lands and ultimately to the edges of Islam where it meets the Dar al Harb.

The Arab Mind: Part V

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

I have spent a fair amount of time already describing in some detail Arab child rearing characteristics that are formative for character development.  Before continuing with these ideas, I thought it useful and timely to consider the views of a noted Arab intellectual who inadvertently reinforces many of the implications of this series.

Turki Al-Hamad is a Saudi  author and intellectual described by MEMRI:

Turki Al-Hamad is a former political science professor who has been harassed and arrested several times by the Saudi police. He was included in Osama bin Laden's 2006 list of Arab "freethinkers" who should be killed.

According to MEMRI, Al-Hamad has grown increasingly pessimistic about (the) possibility of real change and explained why in an interview on al-Arabiya TV:

Turki Al-Hamad: "The taboos in Saudi Arabia are different from the taboos in Lebanon, and from the taboos in Egypt, and so on, even though I believe that in all these countries, they tend to view the taboo itself as fundamental. This was not the case in the past. I believe that we've reached the point where everything is ruled by prohibitions. Everything is prohibited unless it is proven to be permitted. This is the problem of Arab society and culture. Instead of making progress, we are regressing – and if only we were regressing in a reasonable manner. Unfortunately, we are regressing in a superstitious and unreasonable manner."

Interviewer: "So in your opinion, this nation is living in myths and superstitions, rather than living reality, as it should."

Turki Al-Hamad: "Absolutely. Today's world is ruled by logic. It operates according to a certain logic, which views the future according to certain criteria and considerations. We, on the other hand, have forsaken this future for the sake of myth. We live in the world of the supernatural, not in the real world, which we have completely neglected."

The question I hope to begin to answer in this series is what aspects of Arab culture support the regressive pull that Turki AL-Hamad describes.  Consider this description of the religious ideology that supports a backwards looking culture that idealizes death, not life:

The Arab Mind: Part IV

[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:

The Arab Mind: Part III

[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: Boys

In Part II I began to describe the early experiences of children in a typical traditional Arab family with an emphasis on the different approach to boys and girls and especially, the effects of late weaning on boys.  This post, and the following in the series, will focus on the development of boys through latency and puberty; a future post (or posts) will discuss the continuing development of girls through latency and puberty.

Throughout the first four years of his life, the boy is almost exclusively involved in his relationship with his mother.  The father is a distant, relatively uninvolved figure.  The mother believes in pampering her son and attending to his every need and desire.  It is worth quoting an extended passage from Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, on one particular aspect of the pampering: (pp. 34)

The prolonged period of lactation also impresses into the mind of the boy child a special image or archetype of the male-female relationship.  For a period of up to three years, the mother was unfailingly at his beck and call.  Her breast, his greatest source of pleasure and gratification, was his for the asking.  This experience cannot fail to become a contributing factor in the general mold to which the boy will eventually expect his relationship to all women to conform. ...

This expectation is further reinforced by another childhood experience of which many male infants participate in the first years of their lives.  In contrast to a girl, whose crying evokes little attention - since one is not supposed to pamper a girl - a male infant who cries is picked up and comforted.  This comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals.  Mother, grandmother, other female relatives and visitors, as well as his older siblings, will play with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but also simply to make him smile.  Among the fellahin of Upper Egypt, the mother may attempt to prepare her son gradually for the circumcision operation "by caressing his organ and playfully endeavoring to separate the foreskin from the glans.  While doing this, she would hum words to the effect that what she is doing will help to make him to become a man amongst men." *  Since circumcision in Upper Egypt is usually performed any time before a boy attains maturity, this motherly caressing of the boy's penis may well go on at an age from which the boy retains distinct memories throughout his adult life. 

(* Quoted from "Growing Up in an Egyptian Village", Hamed Ammar, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.)

With the usual proviso that there is little information I have been able to find to determine how widespread such activity actually is, what evidence there is presents a clear picture in the extant literature that such intimate caressing continues for significant periods of time in the young boy's life.  This has significance for both the boy's psychosexual development and the girl's psychosexual development.

The Arab Mind: Part II

[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

A culture's Child rearing practices transmit the culture from one generation to the next.  Because of the complex interplay of child rearing, character formation, and culture (the sum total, and emergent characteristics, of the character of the members of the culture), child rearing practices and the culture so engendered evolve slowly.  Contact with a new culture often accelerates evolutionary change in cultures that are relatively open to such change; at the same time such contact often provokes significant reactionary movement, but without such encounters, culture is very stable.

Cultural norms and trends reinforce and/or stigmatize various child rearing tendencies, often with surprising results.  In the last 100 years in America, corporal punishment of children has gone from an unquestioned norm ("spare the rod and spoil the child") to a cultural and legal transgression.  While many bemoan the the loss of discipline that has accompanied the changes of which this is emblematic (permissive child rearing has become the norm in much of the American middle class) such changes also have had significant positive effects.  For example, children raised in our permissive environment tend to have more curiosity, are more strongly individualistic, and are less inhibited (mentally, ie more creative, as well as in other ways.)

Arab culture has been static for a very long time.  Arab child rearing practices reinforce those character traits which tend to support stasis.

In this post and a number to follow, I will discuss details of Arab child rearing practices and how such treatment effects character.

Arab boys and girls are treated so differently, from birth, that to describe child rearing requires two completely separate treatises.  I will start with some basics and then go into more detail for both boys and girls.