Transforming the Arab world
“Few professions better reward the natural cynic than Middle East reporting,” quips Katherine Zoepf in the nuanced and reflective Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World. Indeed, the phrase “Excellent Daughters” refers to the excessive filial deference of the young upper-class women Zoepf interviews in Saudi Arabia while reporting from the Middle East for the New York Times. Yet Excellent Daughters (the “Secret Lives” of the subtitle is an inaccurate and somewhat prurient description of the book’s contents) demonstrates that, hearteningly, some Arab women have taken to sapping patriarchy’s strength.
Through several journalistic encounters between 2004 and 2011, the author homes in on cultural shifts in Saudi, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. For example, single women from across the Arab world have flocked to the UAE (Dubai and Abu Dhabi) for lucrative work opportunities, achieving socioeconomic independence in the process. Those who’ve become breadwinners for their families back home are gradually redefining gender roles.
On evolving mores in Syria, Zoepf relates the harrowing yet familiar story of Zahra al-Azzo, kidnapped and raped at the age of 15.
To her immediate family, Zahra’s consequent status as a non-virgin robs them of their honour (even though a sympathetic cousin marries her precisely to recover this phantom commodity). Zahra’s brother, with the connivance of their parents, murders her.
This outrages a good number of ordinary Syrians, who begin building public support to condemn “honour killings” and repeal French colonial-era laws that exonerate the perpetrators.
Such incremental change is what Zoepf envisions as the means by which women may improve their lot. “(I)f there’s anything I hope to do with this book,” she explains, “it is to make the case for small gestures: the world changes because of wars and terrorist attacks, but it also changes because a daughter makes slightly different decisions from the ones a mother made.”
Political vicissitudes have left some of Zoepf’s material dated; among other developments, Syria is embroiled in civil war and a popularly backed coup in Egypt repressed the Muslim Brotherhood. One might cite the author’s charitable attitude toward aspects of gender-based discrimination in Saudi as another shortcoming.
Yet just when it looks as though Zoepf is absorbing the biases of her more conservative hosts, she registers criticism of their world view, or offers an arresting profile of a women’s rights activist.
This stirs our faith — in her and in certain of her interlocutors. After all, even some Saudi women aspire to a status greater than that of excellent daughter. And, as Zoepf reveals, they’ve begun to inch toward that goal, and to show their peers how it’s done. Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut.