Alienation in the Lives of Arab Women

Alienation in the lives of Arab Women

Alienation is a concept that is universal to all people of all cultures in the world and throughout all time periods. These feelings of alienation, in some form or another, have affected every human begin that has ever taken a breath and will until the race is extinct. It is these feelings of alienation that influence so many of our activities, our thoughts, and the way we shape our lives and the manner in which we form our societies. It is these reactions to alienation that have played such a large role in the shaping of cultures and societies and for this reason it is important to study the alienation that is being discussed here. It is necessary to choose a group first of all and for our purpose here it will be women in the Arab culture. This is a very diverse culture and therefore we cannot deal with any specific society too in depth and so therefore we will look at examples provided from Arab women’s novels as well as look at the culture as a whole and over a large geographic region. We will be primarily concerned with the sources of alienation that bring these feelings and/or situations of alienation about and focusing on a socio-analytic evaluation of these sources. Also important in this discourse are the situations of the present that we will examine by looking at a few examples from the Arab women’s novels, but also the in-depth analyses of the situations and experiences. Finally, we will look at what these situations and analyses mean for the future of Arab women and the circumstances they may be provided with in years to come and how they might deal with new forms of alienation and at the same time different forms of de-alienation or situations of being able to enter parts of society and the world that they have not been able to for numbers of years, and in some cases parts they have never experienced—historically speaking. In short, the purpose of this discourse is to understand the alienation that is a part of the lives of Arab women. This is not supposed to be a definitive analysis, but rather the introduction of a topic, the opening of a forum, or even the conglomeration of ideas to stimulate further discussion and research of this subject and simply get people interested in why there is so little written and explained about these mysterious and often romanticized women. A more complex purpose may be to categorize these types of alienation as a means to further understanding how the women interact in closed forums and in their private space which may be one day compared to the same or similar circumstanced forums of western and European women or even women of a more closed and remote society (of which parts of the Arab culture may very well be the most restricted, e.g., Saudi Arabia). In the realm of political and social justice this and further studies may be used to examine the place of women in certain Arab cultures on an empirical level and compare them to certain standards of human rights that world organizations use to ensure that people world wide are being given equal opportunity and afforded the freedoms that they should be afforded under proper governance. It has been argued by many scholars, political leaders, and human rights activists that women in some Arab cultures (and not just Arab cultures, but this is mentioned as it is relevant to this topic) have been and are being currently mistreated and abused in regard to their civil and human rights and that the states, societies, and cultural norms under which they live are flawed and must be dismantled and rebuilt to a standard that is adequate to protect women’s rights and place as human beings. I do only mention some of these in passing, as there are many other reasons this study and studies similar to this are valid, but there is not enough time to discuss or even mention them all. Therefore to move into a better understanding of this alienating principle we will first shape a definition of alienation that will be functional and necessary through the examination of Arab women and the alienation they experience in their lives.

Alienation is that feeling or act of isolation, estrangement, or dissociation. This is the basic definition, but is not useful in that it is too vague and can be applied to so many situations that one could say alienation, as a concept, can be applied to every situation everywhere involving any and everything (which is a paradoxical statement in itself, as that implies inclusion, the polar opposite of alienation). Because it is so broad a statement we must limit it so it can be practically applied to the Arab women and their lives that are being examined as the empirical subject of this discussion. Therefore we will note alienation as the estrangement from prior conditions where the individual had been included, be it culture, family, or even the individual him/herself.