By LAURA SECOR
January 12, 2016
"Why are foreigners so interested in the hijab?" a devout young Syrian woman demanded after reading a newspaper article by Katherine Zoepf in which she appeared. "We spent so many months talking to you about what we think, what we believe, what is on our minds."
Zoepf considered the criticism with a characteristic combination of realism and sensitivity. It was true that outsiders often fixated on the hijab, or the Islamic covering of women's hair and body shape, as though this were the most salient aspect of Muslim women's lives, when it was arguably among the more superficial. But the symbolic power of women's dress was not a foreign invention, Zoepf felt. Muslim women, too, devoted inordinate time to debating and assessing their own and one another's veils. Still, she conceded that her interlocutor had voiced an important point: The hijab was meant to obscure a woman's sexuality, not her individuality.
In "Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World," Zoepf notes that she was never more inundated with sources and information as when she published an article that local readers felt was half wrong. Just when she might have expected her subjects to push her away, they pulled her firmly toward them. This conversation was no exception.
"You must write more about us," the young Syrian woman demanded.
Zoepf did. For more than a decade, she reported from the Middle East as a freelancer for publications including The New York Times and The New York Observer, immersing herself above all in the world of its women — from the seemingly banal to the obviously extreme. "Excellent Daughters" spans Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Riyadh and hauntingly, prewar Damascus, where Zoepf lived and studied Arabic from 2004 to 2007. Her subjects include law students and flight attendants; activists for the fall of Mubarak in Egypt and the right to drive in Saudi Arabia; daughters whose families nurture and protect them; and daughters whose families want to see them dead. By Western standards, the lives of the women Zoepf portrays are almost unimaginably constrained. Family members arrange their marriages to men they may have glimpsed only once and never spoken to at all; grown women in Saudi Arabia are assigned male guardians who must approve their every move, including trips to neighboring women's homes for tea; the religious studies of Syrian women meet with suspicion and censure; and across the Arab world, it seems, the status of a woman's virginity is everybody's business but her own.
You might imagine that the "young women who are transforming the Arab world," as Zoepf's subtitle defines them, are rebels calling for wholesale change in the practices she details. For the most part, they are not. Many of them passionately defend their societies' arrangements, including Saudi guardianship. But where they chafe against particular restrictions that frustrate them, they work with quiet determination for improvements that look small, Zoepf observes, but that may in fact have far-reaching implications. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, pressure to allow women to work in lingerie shops, on the grounds that modest Muslim women should not have to discuss their underwear size with men, has led the country to shift to all-female sales staffs in shops specializing in a wide variety of women's products. This in turn has opened tens of thousands of retail jobs to the country's grossly underemployed women.
One of Zoepf's most eye-opening chapters concerns a Syrian secret society for Quranic study, called the Qubaisi sisterhood, reportedly 75,000 members strong before the war. For many years, the pious, well-connected and well-to-do women in the sisterhood held closed-door meetings in private homes, their activities illegal and virtually impossible for outsiders to penetrate. Young women selected for membership found themselves inducted into a powerful network, but the sisterhood offered them still more than that: "It's only ignorant women who are bullied by men in the name of Islam," one Damascene woman told Zoepf. "When girls have the ability to read the Quran and interpret it, they will be able to find their own meanings. Religious education is a great protection for a woman, especially a poor woman."
In 2006, the Syrian government bowed to the force and pervasiveness of the sisterhood, effectively legalizing it by allowing the Qubaisi sisters to teach in mosques. "Syria, virtually alone in the Arab world, has seen the resurrection of a centuries-old tradition of sheikhas, or women who are religious scholars, and a growth of madrasas for girls that has outpaced the growth of similar institutions for boys," Zoepf writes.
Was this Islamic revival or female empowerment? Could it be both? Zoepf traces the influence of a sheikha in the conservative town of Hama. By global standards, the gains are almost comically small, but by local ones, Zoepf suggests, they are not trivial: Over the course of 10 years, the head of the girls' madrasa had increasing success persuading fathers to allow their daughters to go outside. Once, the sheikha even prevailed upon a man to allow his brilliant daughter to attend a university.
The territory Zoepf covers is vast and variable. Chapters on Beirut and Abu Dhabi convey the bewildering impact of Persian Gulf petrodollars on the region's demographics. In Egypt, Zoepf considers the momentary solidarity among male and female protesters in Tahrir Square, followed by the brutal treatment of female activists, which in some cases only redoubled their commitment to their cause. These stories — of a protester tortured and then forced to undergo a humiliating virginity test, and another who lost an eye when beaten with a board with a protruding nail — are among the book's most shocking and moving.
If the lines of the battle Zoepf documents seem fixed, particularly compared with those of the civil war raging around Hama today, that may be because "Excellent Daughters" is one of those rare books reported from a region best known as a crisis zone that are not themselves crisis journalism. What Zoepf chronicles is something subtler: the internal pressures and counterpressures influencing the Arab world toward a form of social change that is by no means inevitable. Zoepf's knowledge of Arabic, her open and inquisitive mind, her combination of lucidity and empathy, and perhaps even her own background as a lapsed Jehovah's Witness allow her to understand these women's lives on their own terms without losing her footing either in their world or in ours.
EXCELLENT DAUGHTERS
The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World
By Katherine Zoepf
258 pp. Penguin Press. $28.
