“There are women of our skin, who speak our language and are born in our country and cities, who come as recruits from the United Nations and international organisations to spread ideas of what they call women’s empowerment and gender issues.”
– Sheikh Al-Rifai from a sermon during which he attacked women working in the “civil society organisations” in northern Syria.
Al-Rifai added that some organisations operating in northern Syria work under the cover of humanitarian relief and development projects to “spread ideas of moral decay and homosexuality, and all that is contrary to the Islamic moral laws and the values of the Syrian religious society.” Enab Baladi *
“Honestly, no. And the reason is that I used to feel that my rights were always respected within the family. I didn’t have that feeling. But when I grew up and started to step out of the family, I saw injustice against women in our societies. Then I started to get second thoughts. I trust in God, that He is not unjust, and he will not send codes and rules that are unjust towards some people. The problem is in the people who don’t understand His wisdom, yet they interpret His words.”
Were Qubisiyat really keen on preparing strong women who would provide Syrian society with something new? What was that thing?
“Qubisiyat are perhaps among the first to deploy the idea of leadership preparation programmes and neuro-linguistic programming across the Arab world. They dreamed of changing society by changing women and creating a coalition among them. If we categorise them as a political movement, we can say that they managed at some point to build a big and broad base of popularity, and they gained the trust of the people. They also spread to neighbouring countries, even to Europe and America.”
What did they aim for? Simply for society to be religious?
“Religiousness was a stage, so that women would change. When she did, she would change her husband and family, until we reach ultimately the stage where we rebuild the Islamic state. Even if Qubisiyat never said that they are political, and they refuse to be political, their goal is not only to make people go to heaven. Of course, they will need decades to fulfil their goals, but when they have control over numbers, they will be able to effect change. People who lived during the 1990s and the 2000s in Damascus, the Damascus countryside, Hums and Hama must have noticed how far their influence extended and how strongly they impacted women.
“Qubisiyat were among the most active of movements. They always selected women of strong personalities and helped them promote this trait. They gave women leading roles in the movement, made them stronger. Sometimes, full change happens in the character of the members. My leadership, my ability to command, is because of the Qubaisi knowledge I got. I must have originally had some traits that I developed, but this process of learning gave me a great emotional and psychological balance. It also helped me unleash the skills I learned with the Qubisiyat in the service of the Syrian revolution.
“Among the tools Qubisiyats used to empower themselves was to abstain from marriage. The point here is that a husband, kids and a household will take up most of a woman’s time and efforts. A woman wouldn’t be ever able to dedicate herself to her religion. Qubisiyats solved the problem of women’s servitude in the house by cancelling the family and killing desire. I don’t know why I see a resemblance between this solution and what some feminists do after the experiences they undergo, in which the trade-off is between intimate relationships and creativity? Doesn’t this – rather pragmatic – solution have within it a great deal of hopelessness towards the possibility of cooperating with men? Don’t we have middle ground at all here?”
In his book, Social Backwardness, Mustapha Higazy talks about the subjugation of women. He talks in particular about sexual dispossession, which he defined as “reducing the woman to the borders of her body and reducing that body to its sexual aspect.” Against this extremely sexual gaze/reduction, and the reduction of the female body, there is extreme oppression. The rights and wrongs imposed on the female body, of religious and societal nature, are more famous than they need be told. SFJN*
It is just a moment that separates the feeling of some realisation, self-insight and of learning about the world, and the realisation that recognition and mastery are nothing but leaving the realm of desire, that is, being the object of desire. What happened in this moment? In this treacherous flash, it becomes clear to you that the vision is somewhat clear about life, and that, for example, you will not allow anyone to harass you and that you possess all the tools to defend yourself with the experiences you have gained. But you only have these experiences to defend other younger women. You are no longer visible to be harassed, you are a nobody when you were desired and a nobody when you became no longer desired. However, you have gained a lot of experience and knowledge in life, so you seek to impose it as power because you realise something about yourself that the outside world does not realise about you. As such, you turn into a “dominant hysteric” in the eyes of the world. You have no power outside your erotic power, no eroticism and no pleasures that are yours entirely at the same time.
This is what the series invisibility potion tries to engage with from several perspectives, political, social, corporeal and philosophical, through biographies of women who faded before they fully blossomed. The age of menopause, or in Islamic tradition, the age when women become “delimited” – delimited from reproduction and marriage, perhaps delimited away from life itself – being treated to a very short valid (as opposed to being expired) temporal range. Aljumhuriya *
XwhY is a reader of gender and sexuality related-content that represents the problems and challenges faced by women and LGBTQIA+ communities in Syria and the region.
Since they were united in the embrace, they became two no more
A pair they had become
But we cannot say if a woman or a man they were
They appear sexless
But of two sexes each all the same.Visit page
