You are Beautiful :: Middle East Culture Feminism Essays

Standing up for oneself is always a challenge, no matter who you are. In some Arab societies certain traditions and customs seem built to keep women on a lower level than men. The truth, as demonstrated by many books written by Arab women, is that every society has outdated customs, or rules, and those rules are what tend to keep oppressed people in check. If it’s not a gender issue then it is a race issue. If it’s not a race issue then it becomes political or intellectual. Sadly, there have always been rules that oppress one group or another, but time are changing and with them people change. The women in two Arab novels, written by Arab women, express their personal experiences in Arab society. Though the novels are fiction they are based on the real life experiences of the authors and can be taken as facts of what events transpired during the lives of the authors. The changes demonstrated by the main characters in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun exhibit the Arab woman’s ability to become an independent and psychologically powerful member of society. Mernissi’s Fatima grows up in a harem which would seem to imply a lack of independence, however the women surrounding her act as liberal educators, teaching her never to settle for less than she deserves. Soueif’s Asya on the other hand develops into a woman while being raised in an upper class household, with liberal ideas on only certain subjects. The two women evolve, throughout the course of each novel, into stronger and more independent entities, both physically and psychologically. Fatima Mernissi preserves the feeling of an autobiography by keeping the main character named after herself. For the sake of clarity when referring to the author I will use only her last name. Mernissi’s novel begins with Fatima as a child. Throughout the novel she grows to the age of nine, but that is where the story ends. The first few years of Fatima’s life seem to have been the most crucial in determining what kind of person she was destined to become. Fatima’s experiences in her childhood are dramatic and influence her enough that her life changes drastically. Early in the novel Mernissi states, â€Å"when you hurt a woman you are violating Allah’s sacred frontier† (3). This statement helps to set the tone for the novel.