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the status of women Observers generally treat the status of women in the Arab world as if it were uniform or at least very similar all over the area. Islam’s perceived rulings concerning that status are habitually cited, and generalizations made accordingly . The actual situation, however, is vastly different, as the experience of one Arab country, Yemen, shows. In Yemen, whose two “parts” were reunited in 1990 after two centuries of separation, a new law of personal status was passed in May 1991, driving women of former South Yemen (Aden) to the streets in protest. The new law, while in part a considerable improvement as far as women of the former North Yemen were concerned, robs Adeni women of rights and privileges they had enjoyed under the Marxist regime there since 1974. Changes introduced by the new legislation put Adeni women under obvious disadvantages. Under this law, men are no longer barred from taking a second wife (which they had been allowed to do only in cases in which the wife was terminally ill or barren); divorced women cannot keep the house they had shared with their husbands; and the maximal limit put on dowries—$215—was lifted, with the result that brides will henceforth be given to the highest bidder, as in the North, where a dowry can be as much as $5,000. (The per capita gross domestic product in Yemen in 1990 was approximately $545; data is available at “Yemen Economy—1991,” http://www .theodora.com/wfb1991/yemen/yemen_economy.html.) Other regressive features of the new law include the provision that a girl can be wed “when she reaches maturity”—which can mean that she could be as young as thirteen or fourteen, whereas the existing law in the South put an age limit of sixteen. The legislature eventually adopted an age limit of fifteen for males and females. If anything, the gap separating the respective positions of women in the nine the social scene ar abs in the mirror 102 two parts of this one country shows how risky it is to generalize about the status of “Arab women.” To take another example: whereas women in the former South Yemen functioned as judges and worked in other judicial capacities , and joined the police and the armed forces, all these occupations were strictly out of bounds for women of the North. Among Adeni women there have been also many apprehensions about the future. It is feared, for instance, that when the many ailing state companies decide to lay off workers , the first to go will be their female employees. Again, educated women of the South fear that if the Islamists of the North get the upper hand in government, women will be forced to give up work outside the home and be confined to their kitchens, a course of action that they say is not in keeping with the teachings of Islam. We all know that we live in “a man’s world,” but the term “male morality ” is at once more poignant and less familiar. The Lebanese poet Adonis coined the phrase in Arabic in a book that dealt with the nature of Arab culture and Arabic literature, pointing out that Arab society is governed by “a male morality.” Needless to say, wherever male morality rules, sexual customs and mores tend to perpetuate double standards, generally requiring women to observe the strictest rules of chastity while allowing men unlimited sexual freedom. The phenomenon was commonly known and recognized in nineteenth-century Europe, especially in Victorian England. Things, however, are not as bad as they seem. Colette Khuri, a Syrian novelist who shocked the Arab literary world in 1959 with the publication of her first book, Ayyam Maʿahu (Days with Him), an unusually frank and daring narrative by an emancipated young woman, told a Lebanese reporter that as far as their place in society was concerned, the women of today have very little to complain about. They no longer have to wear the veil; they work in factories and offices side by side with men; they mix more or less freely socially; and they are economically far less dependent than they were even ten years ago. However, Khuri was aware that all these gains have so far failed to affect “the essence of the problem,” which she summed up as “How can woman fulfill her humanity in a stealthy, backward society?” Economic emancipation , she added, is just not enough: it...

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